Random Writing Tips – Keep track of inspirations

 

Last month, I gave the tip of Keep track of everything, in regards to the submission and publications of your stories.  I think that idea of keeping track of things stuck in my mind, and when I had a random memory of something, the two clicked together and I had a tip for this month.

Many years ago, on the Discovery Channel, or Science Channel, or some such channel, they would have these random specials.  They would ask something like, “What if an alien probe showed up at Earth?” and then they would construct a fictional story about this idea where they could sprinkle in some actual scientists to explain some specific idea.  I would watch these specials, but mostly for the science.  The fictional aspects of them I usually found … bland or stupid.  I think I just watched them to see what not to do in my own stories.

For example, there was one where a small black hole was heading towards Earth.  We figured out something was up because there came this huge wave of comets kicked out of the Oort Cloud, and we eventually figured out it had to be a black hole that would enter the solar system in like, fifty years.  Humanity rushes to build an ark for some 10,000 survivors or so to escape to another star system.  They do escape, just as the black hole eats a large chunk of the Earth.

I only roughly remember the plot for this – I believe a subplot is some billionaires didn’t want to risk being left behind in the lottery for the survivors, so they use their money to build an anti-matter drive ship which explodes on the launch pad – but to me it seemed every choice they made was the wrong one.  So for the next few weeks, I tried to work out the “better” way to deal with this random, very specific situation.  And then, like most things, I eventually set it aside and it just became a dim memory rarely remembered.  I could explain what I remember of my idea, but it basically boils down to instead of building one giant ark to escape to another solar system, they should have built hundreds or thousands of smaller ships and start sending them out to the outer parts of our solar system as soon as they were finished.  Then, after the black hole passed through, they could return to the inner solar system to either recolonize it, or to gather the resources to build the ark. 

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up, is that over the years I’ve tried to look up the original show to see how accurate my memory of it is.  But I can’t remember the title of it, what channel it aired on, or even what year it aired.  And even when Google gave you actual results, instead of pointless ads or AI slop, I couldn’t find it, so I have no idea how to find it now.  So my writing tip is, if you ever come across something that sparks an idea for you, maybe make a note of it.  Because there’s a chance twenty years later you’ll want to look it up for some reason, but won’t have any luck.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Keep track of everything

 

I’ve been submitting/self-publishing stories for just over twenty years.  I think at first, I just kept track of things in a notebook, but I eventually decided to make an Excel document to keep track of everything.  I had the story’s title, where I submitted it, when I submitted it, when I heard back, and what the result was.  Later, I started keeping track of the stories that were published.  I did this by numbering them in the order they were published, as well as turning their entry red.  The importance of the numbering is that sometimes I’d submit a story somewhere and not hear back for over a month, during which time I was posting stories each week on my website. 

This worked well for years, but then I had a problem.  I’ve published hundreds of stories on my webpage – most are only a few hundred words – and I don’t remember them all.  One time I remembered writing a story about, I don’t know, aliens landing at Mardi Gras, but I couldn’t remember what the title was.  So I scrolled through story after story, until I finally found … “Party Planet,” or whatever.  Knowing that something similar would eventually happen again, I decided it would be nice to have, not detailed descriptions of every story, but something like “Aliens land at Mardi Gras,” which I could quickly search for and find. 

The easy thing to do would be to just add this on to the existing list, but I figured it would be nice to have a list of just my published stories in the order they were published.  I got to work and soon had a list, and then I had to go to the story, refamiliarize myself with it, then write up a blurb.  And that should have been it.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake somewhere.  Well, a couple of mistakes.  Like, #500 on my Submissions List is #502 on my Publications List.  But, #400 is #399, and #300 is #301.  This isn’t a new problem.  I made my Publications List several years ago, so I’ve known of this mismatch.  Unfortunately, fixing this issue is #439 on my “It would be nice to do this someday list,” and I have a thousand things on my, “I should do list,” not to mention the thousand things on my, “To do list.”

A couple years ago, when I was getting close to publishing my 600th story, I figured I should go through and find my mistakes to know which story it was.  But life happened and I never did.  And now I’m inching closer to Number 700, and I figured I should really get to it, this time.  For sure.  Part of my forcing myself to do this, was to write this post about the importance of keeping track of your stories.  I could explain the issues I have, and then in a few months I can do an update about how I finally sat down and did the work and can finally say exactly how many stories I’d published.   

Well, I have starting redoing both lists.  I’m redoing both to make sure I don’t miss anything.  I’ve barely started, and I’ve already found a couple mistakes.  I have no idea how long this project will take, because I’m also doing something else.  In an early draft of this post, I mentioned that I had published over 600 stories, and while that sounds impressive, probably half of them are under 500 words.  And then I realized it would be nice to know how many of stories are under 500 words, or over 5,000 or whatever category I want to put them in.  So now I’m redoing both lists, and then also hunting down the stories and seeing how long they are.  This is a project I’ll slowly be working on for months.  Will I finish it before #700?  Only time will tell. 

So if you’re a beginning writer, I’d say start keeping track of everything you can, because someday you’ll wish you had.  And going back to do it all later can be super annoying.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Shameless Self Promotion

Back when Twitter was still a thing, I had two accounts.  One was my personal account for everything, and one was just for writing.  After a couple years of trial, I ended up with a way to promote my books.  For each of my books, I worked up fifteen or so tweets with the title and link.  Most were nearly identical, with me just rearranging the order of hashtags.  One day, on my personal account I’d tweet out something for Book X, and the next day on my writing account, I’d tweet out something for Book Y.  And I’d just go back and forth.  The reason I did different books was to try to see which account I got more sales from, but what usually happened is someone would buy Book Z.  I knew what I was doing was just screaming into the void, but it was Twitter, that’s what you did.

When I went to Mastodon, and later Bluesky, I was tempted to just do the same thing.  But I saw a lot of posts going on and on about how these sites didn’t want to just carry over the bad stuff from Twitter.  So I held back, and only occasionally promoted my books.  Was that the reason my sales – not great to begin with – basically disappeared?  Probably, although I will admit there are other real world reasons people aren’t spending money on ebooks from Amazon. 

Lately, I’ve been trying to do more shameless self promotion of my books.  But I don’t want to just go back to my Twitter system.  Occasionally, I’ll get a follow from someone and when I check out their profile it’s just post after post after post for their book, and it’s like, I want to block ads, not follow an account that is nothing but ads.  On Twitter, I did other things so it was more, ad for a book, funny video, ad for a book, thought provoking video, and so on.  But my latest attempts at self promotion have been … barely noticeable.  It’s more like, funny video, link to a story I wrote on my blog a couple years ago, thought provoking video, ad for a book, and so on.  Instead of doing very little, I’m trying to do a little bit of everything to see if anything works for me.  Early results are … nothing’s working, but some of my ideas I’ve only started a week or two ago. 

Promoting myself is like pulling teeth.  Yes, I did stuff on Twitter, but that was basic, simple and ultimately of little value.  Can I find a way that works and that I can actually do?  Only time will tell.  But, for now at least, I’m trying to do something.  Which has to count.  Right?

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How was this a tip?  Oh, ah, don’t limit yourself to what you’ve done before or are comfortable with.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Blog lists

 

The basic reason I write these Random Writing Tips posts, is the idea that the more things I have out on the internet, the more likely someone will stumble upon them, learn that I exist, be interested enough to buy some of my books, and I make a tiny fraction of the money I make from my hated day job.  I guess there’s also the hope of building up a friendly group of fellow creatives.  But instead of just writing posts on random topics, I’m trying to write some that are loosely connected under the topic of Writing Tips. 

That’s nice, but why am I telling you that?  Well, I was trying to think of a tip to write up for this month and I had an idea.  But after thinking about it for a bit, I wasn’t sure if it was a new idea.  When I first started these, I kept a list of the posts I had done, but I’d forget to update it and whenever I remembered I had to add the last four or five posts.  (So, I have a Word doc for Writing Tips.  The first page or two has the tips I’ve started writing, and then there’s like four pages of ideas, and then I have the archive.  But I rarely scroll that far down, which is why I keep forgetting about it.) So to see if I had done the idea before, I had to click the Random Writing Tips label in the blog, and scroll through all the posts.  And while I did find that the new idea was new, it was very similar to an old idea. 

This took a few minutes of my time, which isn’t that bad, but I did wonder if I could do something better.  I also may have just needed a little project I could work on for a few days.  So I made my Random Writing Tips List page.  It’s just a list of all my writing tips, along with the day they were posted and a brief description.  So now when I get an idea, instead of spending a few minutes scrolling through my blog to see if I’d done it before, I can spend a minute scrolling down a page. 

Cool.  But does this really warrant a blog on writing tips?  Well, if you write a blog where you review movies, it makes sense to have a list of what movies you’ve reviewed somewhere, either sorted by release date, genre, however you score them, whatever.  But if you’re doing something as nebulous as Random Writing Tips, you may not think to keep a list.  And a list makes it easier for people to check out whatever tips sound interesting without having to scroll through my blog.  Will this list increase the chance someone will buy one of my books?  There’s no way to tell, but it can’t hurt.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Maybe write bad stories

 

I’ve easily read over a thousand short stories.  I have numerous short story collections, and I used to subscribe to a couple magazines that published 10-12 stories each issue and I read all of them.  Now I am terrible with titles or names of authors, but if you had me describe the plot of a story, I probably remember … fifty or so.  But if you handed me a story I read a decade ago but couldn’t remember, there’s a fifty-fifty chance I’d remember something as I was reading it.

This all came up recently, because there is a short story I really enjoyed and I wanted to find it.  Partly just to reread it, but also to see if it was online anywhere so I could share it, since it has some relevance to everything going on in the world now.  But I can’t remember what it was called, or who wrote it, or what magazine it was in.  And when I searched for it using basic terms that fit the story, it turned out there is a novel with that basic term as a title, which were all the results.  So I’m still searching for that story.  If I ever find it, I’ll come back and leave a note.

Now what does all that have to do with the title of this post?  Well, of the hundreds of stories I read in those magazines, that one story is the only one I remember truly enjoying.  The dozen or so other stories I remember I … disliked to hated.  Which means, most of the stories I read I don’t remember because they were just okay.  Maybe okay good, or okay bad, but ultimately forgettable.  The vast majority of the stories I remember, I remember because I did not like them.  Like, there’s a story about this futuristic sports doping scandal that falls apart because the people that spent time and money on this doping technology forgot to tell the athlete they needed to train differently.  Or the group that built a time machine and are sending someone back to study this lost civilization decide on the loose cannon with no training over anyone better qualified.  Or the President who hints multiple times they have a secret plan for world peace, but when they have to reveal it, it’s just we’re going to bomb people who disagree with us.  And they weren’t a “How the hell did this asshole become President?” type, but someone up until then shown to be diplomatic and understanding of the power of their position. 

I was thinking about all of this, and I realized that maybe writers should write a bad story, just in case it gets published and someone remembers it because they disliked it.  I mean, being remember that way is probably easier than being remembered for writing a good story.  Something to think about.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Repost your stories

 

Ten or fifteen years ago, I came across a site where you would post a blog/story/whatever, and for every view it got you would get a penny.  So I started posting whatever I could thing of to get some money.  In the following few years, I found a dozen or so such sites.  Some I actually did get money from, but others would have like a $5 payout minimum, and I’d be at $4.50 and they’d go belly-up.  All the sites I knew of eventually died, and I don’t know if such sites still exist.  I imagine they’d be quickly overrun by AI crap. 

Anyway, besides all the general posts about movies and society and whatnot, I also posted some of my stories.  For the simple reason that if someone read one and liked it, maybe they’d go and buy some of my books.  I don’t know how successful that was, but it did lead to some issues.  For one, most publishers won’t take previously published works.  Even stories posted on little known sites that died after three months, count as previously published. 

So what to do with a bunch of stories I can’t submit to publishers?  Some I republished myself as part of a collection.  But that still leaves a bunch of stories.  These may not be the very best of my writing – since those stories I put in collections – but they’re not garbage.  Well, most of them aren’t garbage, hopefully.  But instead of letting them gather dust in a forgotten corner of my hard drive, I’ve started reposting them, mostly on my blogs.  Because the main reason I still post stories is to give a free taste of my writing so maybe someone will check out and buy one my books.  And while writing a new story each month for my blog would be fantastic, there is this thing called life that often gets in the way.  So these okay stories that I can’t really do much else with, are prefect to fill in the busy months.  I spent who knows how much time working on them, I might as well get as much use from them as I can.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Some quick tips

 

The way I usually come up with these tips is I’ll think of something – usually while at work or while driving to work – make a note of it, and then forget about it for a few weeks or months until I need to write a post.  Then I’ll go through the notes to see what I can do.  But sometimes what I figure is a good idea, can’t really be stretched to more than a paragraph or two.  So here are some of these quick tips.

Be careful with slang

This started when I got a notice that someone had replied to a YouTube comment.  I read the reply and didn’t know what they were talking about.  Turns out, it was a reply to a comment I made a year or so earlier.  I went back to that video, read my comment and I think a couple earlier replies, then the new reply, but still didn’t know what they were talking about.  Part of it was they used a term I had heard the kids use but only had a vague idea of the meaning.  I looked it up, got the official definition, but still didn’t know what they were talking about.  Either there is some other meaning to this word, or they didn’t make their case that clearly.  So if you use the hip new slang all the kids are using, just know there’s a chance some of us old fogies won’t know what you’re saying.  But old fogies aren’t the target audience, so what does it matter?  On one hand, you can’t write something that will be of interest to everyone, but on the other hand, the more people that can understand your writing means the more people likely to read it.  There is a balance one needs to find.

A Something File can be useful

This began with a microfiction story I wrote.  At some point I had started a “To Do” file, where if I had an idea – for a story or general thing to do – I could just open it and type out my idea.  And then every few months I’d clean it out and find better places for the story ideas.  Sometimes, when I wasn’t feeling well, I’d open this file to just write “something” so that I could say that I had written something that day.  I was thinking about it one day and decided that I’d keep the “To Do” file for non-writing ideas but I should start a new “Something File” just for my writing ideas.

Sexbots

Years ago, there was this site – which is still up but the pages are corrupted – where you could post stories of a few hundred words.  One day, I wrote a story with “Sexbot” in the title, and in about a day it had more views than some of my stories got in a week.  Sometimes, it can be useful to jazz a title up a bit, to get more notice.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – DEI

 

Twenty-some years ago, when I really started writing, one of the hot-button topics was gay marriage.  I wanted to do my part and show support with my writing, but most of the stories I wrote then were only a few hundred words and covered like a five-minute event.  So what I usually did was have a character meet someone at a company Christmas party who would introduce themselves as, “Beth, Jill’s wife,” and then they’d have a normal, pleasant conversation for a minute or so, and then the aliens would show up.  Did my “groundbreaking” stories change the culture of the country?  No.  The best I could hope for was that at some point a gay person read one of these stories and knew that there were people out there who didn’t hate them and just thought of them as … people.

When I create a main character, my default state is thinking of them as me, so most of my main characters start as a white, heterosexual cis male.  It’s what I know.  But something I started doing early on in my writing, was trying to have more women characters.  And when I say characters, I don’t mean damsels in distress.  When women show up in my stories, there’s a good chance they will be bosses, or starship captains, or Presidents.  Still, what I usually do is have a main character named Amy out walking her dog, and when she turns the corner there’s an alien.  When your stories are only a few hundred words, there’s not much depth you can go into.  Not to mention, I’m not the person who should be writing stories about the struggles women go through in the early 21st century. 

I would like to say that about half of my characters are women, but I don’t think the numbers would support that.  A few years ago, I was putting together a collection of short stories – some I’d published years before and new ones written for the collection – and I noticed that most of the stories had men as the main character.  So I gender swapped the main characters in a few of the stories, and it went from only having about 20% of the stories with women main characters to about 40%.  Not great, but better.

Another not great part of my writing would be covering race or ethnicity.  And there’s two big reasons for this.  One, years ago I read a novel and every time a character was introduced, we got a paragraph giving detail descriptions of them.  Like, this guy was 5 foot 9, 147 pounds, deeply tanned, very near-sighted but fixed by thick glasses, left-handed, enjoyed jazz, parents were from Greece….  What irked me was that none of these details were relevant to the story.  I’m sure the author wanted readers to have a vivid image of the character, but for me, my eyes just glaze over whenever exposition is just vomited like that.  The second reason, probably related a bit to the first, is that I don’t really care who the reader pictures when they read my characters.  If I have a character named Dave, unless there is an important reason, the story doesn’t care if he’s white, or black, or whatever.  I’ll let the reader picture him however they want.  I might put in that he took off his glasses, or scratched his beard to add some detail, but skin color is rarely important enough in most of the stories I write to be mentioned. 

And in the last few years, the hot button topic has been transgender people.  Which is a topic I haven’t figured out how to write about.  Even in my longer, thousands of words stories, I can’t think of a way to have transgendered characters without a character just vomiting exposition that they are trans.  The one, tiny positive of this though, is that if I ever become famous and my stories are turned into movies or shows, it will be perfectly fine to cast trans actors for any part, because I’ve never explicitly stated that they weren’t. 

Anyway, as a white guy, I knew that there were assholes out there who hated gays, women, blacks, trans, whatever, but I assumed that they were ever so sloooowly being pushed to the irrelevant fringe, where they belong.  But then, to steal a phrase, the Fire Nation attacked.  Jesus Christ are there a lot of assholes out there.  My privileges shield me from the worst, but I’ve been shocked at how casual some people are about being assholes. 

Which brings me finally to the point of this post.  Basically, if you are a writer, I’d recommend doing everything you can to have more characters who aren’t white, heterosexual, cis males.  Because there are many different types of people in the world, so why shouldn’t your stories reflect that.  But also, we need to redouble our efforts to push the assholes to the fringe.  Part of that will be having stories about black lesbian starship captains or even trans Presidents.  And if you’re worried that having such characters may harm your sales, it’s probably a safe bet that the assholes aren’t the biggest readers.  But imagine the loyal fan base you’d have if your stories are full of strong gay, women, black, trans, whatever characters.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Rewriting the same story

 

Twenty some years ago, I bought a book – probably at a library book sale – of the collected short stories of this author.  I can’t remember which author it was, but I’m pretty sure he had been active back in the 50’s and 60’s, and I think I’d read a few of his novels, so he wasn’t a complete unknown to me. 

About halfway through the book, I’m reading a story and thinking, I’ve read this before.  At first I figured it had been in some other collection, but then I realized that no, it was this collection like ten stories ago.  I forget exactly what the stories were, but it was something like these aliens arrive on Earth and there’s some misunderstanding with the first humans they meet.  All the names were different, and like one was set in Iowa with these blue-skinned humanoids aliens while the other was set in Florida with these purple dog aliens.  But the basic story was the same.  And then, another ten stories or so later, there was a third version of the story.  I believe, the book had a listing of where all these stories had been published, and I’m pretty sure the three appeared in different magazines over a period of five or six years.

I don’t know how frequently this happens to other writers, but often I’ll have an idea and the plot comes to a fork.  Sometimes, after some thought it is obvious that one fork is better than the other, but sometimes both options are equally good.  So I’ve written two, or more, stories from the same initial idea, but I always made them different stories.  Like someone could read them and see similarities, but they’d never be confused thinking they had already read one of them. 

At first, when I saw this well-known author doing something that seemed a bit shady, I felt a little betrayed.  I don’t know if the guy was desperate for money and needed to make a sale so he just quickly rewrote something, or if there was some aspect of the story that really spoke to him so he wrote new versions of it every few years as his skill improved.  It’s hard to say. 

I bring all this up because the constant jumbling of stuff in my head randomly brought back this memory.  And I realized that painters often paint the same thing multiple times to get the best version.  The same for photographers, and film makers, and artists of all kinds.  So why not writers?  Why shouldn’t we write the same story over and over again, honing our craft and getting the best version? 

It’s something I hadn’t really thought about before.  But now I think I might look up some of my earliest stories and rewrite them.  Just to see what my, hopefully, better skill can make of them.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Using common words for weird things

Over a year ago, I wrote a post on why writers should Chill on the weird words.  The basic idea, is if you jump right into a story and have characters drinking regilum and eating roasted glarthen all in celebration of Clathenmas Eve, you’ll end up with a lot of readers who are more confused than engrossed in the story.  Using weird words isn’t bad, it’s pretty standard in fantasy and science fiction after all, but if you use too many of them too quickly, you run the risk of the readers not knowing what is going on in the story, which is generally a bad thing.  You can use glossaries so you don’t have characters explaining the meaning of words they should likely already know, but there is a difference between learning a few weird words and learning a weird language.  Like most things in writing and life, there are balances that need to be found.

Anyway, I was thinking about this the other day and realized you can have the opposite issue: using common words for weird things.  I was able to think of an example, but it wasn’t that great of an example.  So instead, I came up with this extreme, hypothetical example to show what I mean.

Imagine a book where in Chapter 1 we’re introduced to Queen Whoever.  You would naturally assume that Whoever was the ruler of some kingdom.  But in Chapter 2, the Queen receives an order from some Emperor.  Well, maybe this empire conquered the kingdom, and in return for bending the knee the royal family was allowed to remain in charge of this area of the empire.  Then in Chapter 3 we learn that Queen is just the title of the head of the Emperor’s Dragon Guard.  Okay, so maybe this conquered kingdom was known for their dragon riders, and the royal bloodline was allowed to remain as the head.  But in Chapter 4 we learn anyone can work their way up through the ranks of the Dragon Guard to become Queen.  At this point we wonder why didn’t the author come up with some other word, maybe Clethex or something, to be the title for the head of the Dragon Guard in honor of Clethex the Brave, the first Dragon Rider. 

Sometimes, misleading terms can be used to set up a joke, or as a red herring, or whatever.  Like, if you’re writing a post-apocalypse story, I’m sure there will be plenty of current terms and slang that will have their meanings warp in their world.  Like, maybe they use netflix to mean die, because they found something about “Netflix and chill,” and they know that after you die, your body grows cold.  That may seem convoluted, but explain how “Netflix and chill” came about.  In other types of stories, if you use a common word for something weird, the readers will either be confused wondering what they’re missing, or waiting for a punchline.  And if you don’t deliver on either, it can leave a bad taste. 

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – You’re allowed “sick” days

 

It was probably over twenty years ago I read the advice that if you wanted to be a capital W Writer, you needed to write every day.  I thought that was a great idea, and so I started keeping track of how many days in a row I wrote.  At first, hitting a milestone, like 30 days, or 100 days, or 365 days, was great.  But after a while, there aren’t that many milestones.  The day this is posted, we be the 2853rd day I’ve written.  (That’s 7.8 years.)  

Writing every day for over seven years sounds impressive, and if I had been writing a thousand words a day, it would be.  But several hundred of those days my “writing” consisted of opening a document, reading a couple of sentences, changing a word, and calling it a day. 

There are plenty of reasons why one would not feel up to writing.  Maybe there was a death in the family, or you broke a rib and can’t get comfortable so you basically haven’t slept in a week, or maybe half your country voted for an authoritarian asswipe.  If you hold yourself to the “I must write every day,” mindset you’ll end up with many bleh days of writing.  And yes, bleh writing can always be edited into good writing, but after years of following it, I think Write Every Day should be seen as a guide, not a rule.  So if you want to try writing every day, just remember that writing is like any other job, and you can take sick days. 

Will I be taking any sick days?  Well, maybe after mid-April when I hit 3,000 days.  We’ll see.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Accept the numbers game

 

For the first six or seven years I was on Twitter, I was rather hit or miss on trying to get followers.  I posted whenever, and followed people I though seemed interesting and just hoped they might follow me back.  But then I decided to be more active.  I started to regularly post stuff, and I started to build up my followers.  What I would do, is I would check out who was following someone interesting or somebody I was following.  I would then start following people with interesting bios.  But since there was a limit on how many people you could follow, I started keeping track of who I followed and if they followed me back.  I think every Friday I’d note the last person I followed, and if they didn’t follow me back within a week or so, I’d unfollow them.  Unless they were really interesting.

It took me a couple of years, but I eventually had just over 7000 followers on my writing account.  (I think I had just over 5000 followers on my personal account.)  How many of them were actually people, who were interested in what I posted (often links to my books), and who actually saw my tweets, I’ll never know.  But things were looking up.  Then came Musk.  For various reasons, I stopped posting on Twitter, stating that if an adult took over I’d be back.  But I think too much damage has been done and all my work to build up a following there is gone.

At some point, I had started a profile on Mastodon.  At first, it was just to be another site to reach a different audience, but when I left Twitter, it became my main social media and marketing platform.  I do regularly post stuff, although I’ve drastically cut down on posting links to my books.  Screaming into the Twitter void “Buy my book!” was perfectly normal, but constantly marketing – especially on my instance – isn’t the Mastodon thing, so I’ve been reduced to posting stuff that people will find interesting and maybe check out my books.  I haven’t tried too hard for followers, but I did recently break 300.

Marketing on Twitter was always weird.  I’d tweet about Book A, and then someone would buy Book B, but I never knew how they ended up on Book B.  I had started keeping track of what books I tweeted about and which books were bought, but the results were inconclusive.  But one thing that seems pretty clear is my books sales have dropped dramatically since I left Twitter.  Apparently, having thousands of followers did help. 

All of that was to get to my tip: accept that to really have any success selling books, you need to play the numbers game.  You could be your generation’s greatest writer, but if nobody knows about you, you won’t sell anything.  So between writing and revising and living your life and probably a day job, you also need to find a social media site – or better yet two or three – and put in the time to build up a following.  To that end, check out Mastodon, and maybe give me a follow.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – You need to write

 

Your reaction to the title was probably along the lines of, “No shit.” So let me explain my point.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a previous Random Writing Tips about Schedules.  In that I talked about how if people know every third Tuesday there will be a new Random Writing Tips post on your blog, they’ll be more likely to check it out.  And I figured having schedules for posts on social media would work as well.  I had a schedule of posts I did on Twitter, which I modified when I moved over to Mastodon.  And over the past year, I’ve added new things to post.  For example, every Tuesday there’s a writing quote, I pose a question every Thursday, and I have a poll every other Sunday.  To keep track of all of this, I have an Excel document where I can check off everything once I schedule or post it.  The system is a bit cumbersome, but I’ve used it for so long I know how to work through its problems.

Then last week, I had an idea for a new system.  And I probably spent several hours setting this new system up.  The over simplified explanation, is that I went from each row representing a week, to each row representing a day.  And with some functions I just learned how to use, it should be easier for me to see what I still need to do to keep to my schedule. 

And if you’re wondering what does all that have to do with writing, as I said, I spent several hours preparing the system for the next two months.  I’ll see how it works, and if there are any little improvements I can make before spending a few more hours setting it up for the rest of the year.  But at several points while working on this, I thought to myself, I could be using this time writing a story.  Will this new system make me more productive with my scheduling resulting in more people finding me and learning about my books?  Probably not.  I did have a system, a clunky system I admit, but I knew how to work through the clunks.  But I wasn’t just cleaning the house, or whatever because I didn’t want to write, I was setting up a new system that was “writing related” which, is close enough.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Prewrite your bio

 

I recently did something for the first time in a couple of years: I submitted a story.  As of the posting of this, I’m still waiting to hear back.  But the submission process brought back the scourge of many writers: the cover letter.  I don’t care for cover letters.  I prefer sites that just have a form you fill out with your name, story title, word count, etc. and they either take your story or they don’t, and that’s it.  For me, cover letters are like the About Me section on dating sites.  How do I make myself sound interesting without outright lying, and the feeling that no matter what I do, it’s wrong. 

Fortunately, the place I submitted to only wanted a brief bio, which, couldn’t that wait until after they buy a story?  Anyway, some years ago I wrote a couple brief bios so I could pick the best one for the situation.  Which is great, except I couldn’t remember which folder I put them in, so I had to rewrite a bio. 

So my tip is to prewrite a couple bios which you can just copy and paste into cover letters, maybe with some slight adjustments, and to keep them in a place you will remember.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Am I just writing gibberish?

 

There is a project I’d like to finish in the next few months.  The idea of the project isn’t that difficult, it’s some essays on a subject I have a great interest in.  So I don’t have to deal with foreshadowing, or coming up with interesting characters, or any of the complexities of fiction writing.  I just have to coherently describe my thoughts on this subject.

Of course, since I first started this project, I’ve shifted the focus three or four times.  That’s not a bad thing, since it was rather unfocused to begin with, but I have now figured out a framework for it.  But that means writing, and reading, and rewriting, and rereading, and rerewriting, and rerereading, etc., the same paragraphs over and over again.  Each paragraph is fine, but with each refocus I need to massage them to fit the new framework. 

So one night, I’m tired, and I’m reading this paragraph for the twentieth time trying to make sure it fits, and it felt like it wasn’t even written in English.  Just words mixed together like some kind of vocabulary stew.  That was an obvious sign to take a break.  I went back to it a few days later, and while there was a bit of clunkiness, it’s nothing a good polish wouldn’t fix. 

And I wondered how many tired, overworked writers saw the “gibberish” on the page and gave up, thinking they weren’t “real” writers?

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Try new things

 

About a week ago, I was driving to work and I wasn’t in a good mood.  I hadn’t slept that well, I had a bit of a toothache, and I’d done something to my elbow.  Not to mention I was thinking about all the writing stuff I needed to do.  I needed to write up some blogs, I needed to come up with an idea for my Monthly Stories, I needed stories for the various collections I’m working on, I needed to critique stories from the writing group I’m in, I needed a story to share for the group, and I needed someway to boost my nearly non-existent ebook sales.  And then, as I pulled into work, I found out I had an issue with my power steering.  So the next few hours I was rather miserable.

Then I remembered an idea for a story I had while I was in bed wishing I would fall back asleep.  The idea behind my Monthly Stories is to come up with an idea and finish it before the end of the month.  Often, these stories deal with something about that month, but that rule isn’t carved in stone.  But, this idea I had did fit in with a news story I’d seen, so I had my story for the month.  And this story also would fit in my next story collection. 

As my shift went on, I thought more and more about how to better market my books.  Basically, all the things you’d probably say to do to market my books are things I struggle with.  There are some things I’ve tried to do that are … marketing adjacent, but I haven’t had much luck sticking to them.  But I started thinking that instead of trying to do what I originally wanted to do, I could try variations.

That’s when I started feeling better.  Well, except for my toothache and having to deal with my car.  Whenever you hit a dead end, with a plot, marketing strategy, whatever, you can always try something new.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Chill on the weird words

 

I know, you don’t want the epic heroes in your fantasy story just drinking mead and eating roast boar.  You want to show the reader that this isn’t just people at a Renaissance Faire, so they drink regilum, the drink of the gods, while eating roasted glarthen.  Of course, the servants bring the roast glarthen out on a large silver platter, that they set on the table before the heroes who have spent the day swinging swords from horseback.

Years ago, I started a novel that was set a century or so after a nuclear war plunged the world into a nuclear winter.  And I figured that in that time, the language would change.  Survival was more important than spelling, after all.  One of the things I came up with, was that “parka” became “paka.” I thought I was pretty smart.  The critique group I showed this to kept marking it as a typo, or left comments like, “Are we supposed to know what this is?”

I was reminded of all this recently when I watched a show that, in like the first five minutes had introduced six random weird words.  It was based on a book series and I’m sure all these words and their meanings were worked into the story, but for someone who had never heard of the books and was just checking out this show, those first few minutes were rather confusing.  Which can be very bad.  Instead of focusing on who the characters were and how they interacted, I’m just wondering, What are they even talking about?  Fortunately, for this show those six were basically the only weird words of the series.  And for some reason, they decided to introduce them all right at the beginning.

Now, I’m not against weird words.  I remember one time a writing group was going over one of my short stories, and this lady – who didn’t read science fiction – was confused by my use of the term “blaster,” and when it was explained to her it was like, a “ray gun,” asked, “Couldn’t you just call it a gun?”

Weird words in fantasy or science fiction show the reader that the story isn’t set in the world we live in.  That can be a powerful element in a story.  But like all powerful elements, if you overuse, or misuse them, they can blow up your story.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Have a fun project

Writing can be a chore.  Maybe you’re working on a difficult chapter, or you’re so annoyed with some of the characters you just want to strangle them, or maybe you’re a bit under the weather but you still want to do some writing that day.  My suggestion is to have a fun project.  This is just something you can do for a day or two as a break from your more serious project.  These could be anything from “The Continuing Adventures of Queasy-Man,” or maybe you try to write a sentence where every word begins with the same letter.

Now some people – for one reason or another – feel that all their writing activity needs to build to a story or a book that they can sell.  At first, they may feel that a day not working on their big project is a day wasted, but these fun projects can easily be turned into blog posts, or bonuses for people who preorder your book, or even an ebook you could publish under a pen name.  Or they could just be used as a writing exercise to spark or explore new ideas.  A fun fact about writing is that putting words to page or screen is writing. 

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Cliché timing

 

Imagine this story.  One of the main characters is traveling to some castle and comes across a woman.  We the audience know that she is the other main character, the Queen who was travelling amongst her people and got lost, or something.  They start heading to the castle, and have some adventures on the way, and the Queen falls for the other character.  She finally works up the courage to tell them who she is, just as they crest a hill and see a dragon rampaging over her castle.  Interrupting someone just before they can tell a big secret is dramatic, but it has been done so often it’s now cliché.  You can probably think of a couple examples from movies or TV shows without straining too much. 

Another example of cliché timing is how someone will be explaining their backstory, or some key aspect of world building, and just as they finish – sometimes within seconds – an alien will burst out of the wall for an action scene.  On one hand, having action scenes in between all the exposition dumps is an efficient way to give all the necessary information without it being too much, but on the other hand we’ve also seen that a thousand times before. 

Cliché timing is an efficient way to give the readers needed information and to keep some tension for the sake of drama, but it also makes it easy for the reader to see the scaffolding the story is hung from.  And when the reader can see the structure of the story, it becomes harder for them to get lost in it.  Some cliché timing can help the story, but too much can leave the reader rolling their eyes.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Take a challenge

 

The way to get better at writing is to write.  But just writing “I will be a better writer” a million times won’t make you a better writer.  You need to try new things.  And since this will be posted in late December, why not start the new year with some challenge.  (Of course, if you come across this post in March, you don’t have to wait until the following January to try something new.)  If you’ve only written stories, write a poem.  If you’ve only written romances, write a horror story.  The way to get better at writing is to stretch your writing muscles and write something you’ve never written before.

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Image from Pixabay.