Youth!

So apparently while I wasn't paying attention, Amazon switched from the easy to maneuver .azw format into the hair-ripping, gut-busting, rage-inducing .azw3.  You wouldn't think that three could make much of a difference, but oh, how it does.  My whole formatting process was completely thrown off and it took me two days of downtime to figure out how to properly format.

I took a jaunt with Scrivener, finding it very, very painful to work with.  I tried Writeway, which I had a lot more success with, but that I'm still not convinced I want to plunk down 25-50 dollars for.

In the end, I did it by hand.  (And with a little help from Calibre.)

But the good news is: Youth is now for sale!

You can buy it on Amazon

Or Barnes and Noble

Or even Kobo!  (Okay, not Kobo yet, but it's coming!)

"Youth for you, when you can appreciate it most."

A blessing? A curse? One pill can restore the aged, the infirm, the terminally ill to the sprightly, energetic days of their early twenties. One pill reverses cancer, strengthens bones, restores eyesight... makes the user young again.

There is only one side effect: 100% Death within one month.

Louise Smith has been virtually abandoned by her family. Her children have moved away, mostly out of touch. Her husband spends his days in the care of a nursing home, too mentally ill to be safely home. Is her life worth living?

Louise must decide: tough out her days, or one pill for the final hurrah.

The Kobo Experience

I've dallied about, posted my work on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but sort of gave the hairy eyeball to that "Kobo Thing".

In one of my frequent chats with Michael Kingswood we got to discussing the success he's found with Kobo's platform.  My hairy eyeball came creeping out again, and I decided to take another swing around the block to peek for myself.  What was this Kobo Thing?

Plainly put, Kobo is kind of what is Amazon is... where Amazon is not.  Kobo, for instance, has a considerable presence in Japan.  KDP, Amazon's proprietary blah de blah, does not list in Japan.

This is not the only place Kobo is working it, while Amazon is lagging.  In fact, it appears Kobo is quietly becoming a powerhouse... in other parts of the world.

So, hairy eyeball intact, I signed up and took a swing around Kobo's Authors Enter HERE site, weirdly titled (at least for me) Kobo Writing Life.  It just doesn't roll off the tongue.

The site seems clean, easily navigable.  Things are logically placed.  There are notes to help you along.  The unimaginatively entitled Dashboard has very insightful and interest-piquing promises... once you've published a book, that is.  It has features like quick stats, if you just want to eyeball (hairy or no) your income.

It has a graph that shows your daily sales... you know, for you, so you don't have to swim through ugly excel sheets just trying to figure out your monthly numbers coughAmazoncough.

It conveniently lists your top sellers in order, and also has (what promises to be) a cool map showing you world interest by region!

I've been meaning to go back through the IH series with a fine-toothed comb.  I know I have typing errors, weird errors, in there.  I'm sure of it.  In fact, I went through "Cheat", the first episode today.  Oh yeah, best error?

He felt like a fool.  Except, I didn't type fool.  I typed food.  I wonder what type of food he felt like?

But I've been pondering over DWS, and the value of my time, my work, ect.  At 20k, the IH episodes should be sitting pretty at the $2.99 mark.  So that's my goal.  As I update them with the cleanest possible copies, and little teasers like "Look out for episode HARGLE" (where HARGLE = the next number in sequence) I'm going to start prodding the price points up to $2.99.  So if you're somewhere in the middle of the series, here's your warning - they won't stay $1.99 forever!

So back to Kobo.

The update process was remarkably painless, after remembering my early days stumbling through Amazon and B&N's complicated, often slow and annoying systems.

There is even a link, prominently placed and easily visible, for people to provide feedback and "I'd like to see..." suggestions.

I think Kobo's really got their heads on straight when it comes to bringing in the talent.  Honestly, Amazon's site looks like something I'd picture from the DOS age and B&N is kind of all over the place.  And one major point that Amazon just cannot understand, but that B&N at least has down - when a book has been edited, you can easily go back in and change your edits.  Leave out something in the description?  No problem, change it before it goes to review.  Kobo is fatalistically simple to get back into your queued-for-review books.  Amazon locks them down like Fort Knox, often making you wait hours, (days, in the beginning) to be able to worm back in and fix an error.

So, I uploaded "Cheat" to Kobo today.  I'm hoping to get at least 1 IH up a week until they're all up, and then we'll start on the rest.  "Shackled"'s KDPS runs out at the end of this month.  Time to get 'er back out there, and on a new market!

Oh, and the best part is that Kobo is running a special through the end of November - any titles at the 70% price point... will be bumped up to 80%!  That's not only a sweet deal for authors that just... well... sweet.  You can't help but wonder if Kobo maybe, just maybe, cares about us.

Kobo, you've got yourself a convert.

Year-on-Year (YoY), September 2012

I'll keep this pretty short, as there isn't much to say.  My YoY from September showed pretty bleak numbers... basically this whole year.  I had a nice bit in August, when my IH series was bought in completion.

July was my first 0 sales month in the 17 months I'd been publishing at that point.  (January 2011 doesn't count, I started publishing in February.)

I'm hoping to ramp up with some good offerings this Christmas, pull myself up by my bootstraps as it were.  I'll have my second full novel coming out, tentatively in November ("Youth").  It will be in BOTH digital and print!  I'm considerably excited about that.

Also, the Writer's of the Future entry I submitted in July is up for judging between now and December!  Here's hoping I hear something good from that :)

Okay, so cut the suspense - here's the chart.

The Problem With Moving...

... is that everything you own HAS to go with you.

For people who are not sentimental hoarders, they may find this is no problem.  Old junk?  Throw it away!

For people who ARE sentimental hoarders, like myself, this is a Big, Big Problem.

First off, just because we have all this stuff, doesn't mean we want all this stuff.  It's quite overwhelming, actually.  Memories everywhere, and no fortitude to throw any of it away.  I think, actually, negative desire to get rid of it.

Fortunately, I'm not a shopper-hoarder.  I don't go out and buy a lot of stuff and then never take the tags off any of it, or leave it in the original shopping bag...  No, my stuff is accumulated through a lifetime of interaction with other people, who shove things onto my being, and which I am then incapable of disposing of.

So.

Moving all of that is just about the biggest pain in the rear you can picture.  Not just the packing, the mountain of boxes, of sheer stuff... but the pain inside that goes with parting with any of it.

I did good, real good, packing up my house.  In fact, I threw away twenty trash bags, and donated four boxes, including a giant box of stuffed animals and another of clothes.

I am not going to lie.  When the garbage men took away that first huge load (I did it in a few so they wouldn't get stuck with everything at once and so I could slowly make my way through the house), I had a moment of teary panic.  I had to tell myself, "You can't climb into the back of that dumpster truck, nor would you want to.  It's disgusting.  The stuff was trash.  If it wasn't, it is now.  Let it go."

Contrary to the mantra that, "It gets easier", it doesn't.  It really doesn't.  I think, if anything, you develop a stronger and more impulsive grip on things you still have.  It's like all your mania was spread over all these things, and with half of those things gone, you have twice as much mania for the remaining things.  But I managed to pack, and ship all my stuff away, and leave a lot of it in a landfill (sad face) back where I came from.

The thing about not being a shopper-hoarder, is that at least my stuff hasn't increased since then.  But it's still too much.  We moved from a three bedroom house with a full basement to a two bedroom apartment on the second floor.  We're swimming in boxes, and truthfully, I think most of it's mine.

I probably know, that most of it's mine.

So I made a pledge to myself that went something like this:
"I will throw away one thing, everyday, until I have an acceptable amount of things."

It may sound strange, but I am a minimalist at heart.  When I moved to Japan, I took two suitcases.  The airport stole one.  I survived just fine with one suitcase... for three years.

Now, of course I bought things while I was in Japan.  And a lot of those things ended up shipping back home with me (ugh).  But the point is, I felt free, happy, and unencumbered.  I loved that.  (I missed the half of my stuff that didn't make it... but... hey, whatareyagonnado.)

Today I should have throw away my 24th "thing".  I've "thrown away"... two.  One was a book that molded (BIG SAD FACE) and the other was a wallet that technically I gave to Andy because his fell apart, but I'm counting it anyway.

So today, I made the heart-string-pully decision to catch myself up and I started going through boxes.  A few of the things were easy, but when I could open a box and just go, "Nope, nothing in here" and close it... I'm in for a rough time.  So here's the things I threw away:

1. Kinex Big Ball Factory Instruction Manual
2. Kohl's Internship Lanyard with attached bracelets, nametag and pin.
3. Stuffed cow doll.  Present from high school friends.
4. Marching band saxaphone lanyard (to hold up sax while playing and marching).
5. Tiny stuffed dog with elongated velcro arms.
6. Gameboy Advance Pokemon Ruby instruction manual.
7. Waitress money collection/book thingy.
8. Starcraft Strategy Guide.
9. Brood Wars Strategy Guide.
10. Guard's Uniform shirt.
11. WoW Burning Crusade instruction manual.
12. City of Heroes quick start guide (they closed it down!!)
13 - 15. Gargoyle statues
16. Stuffed claw machine dog.
17 - 18. 2 Portal MTG decks.
19. The figurine from the top of my graduation cake.
20. Toy skeletal dragon.
21. Lipton bottle I was using as a pen holder
22. Old Starter ballcap with the Chinese symbol "star" from an ex when I was in high school and that will never fit my fat head again.

So with the moldy book and wallet, that makes twenty-four and I am all caught up :P

A 5k of a Different Color

I sure hope the title doesn't make you think I'm running, because hoo-boy, am I not doing that.

However, I set myself a personal goal today.  I wanted to write 5,000 words.  I wanted to make some sort of significant dent in my 500,000 word goal that I will probably not reach, but hey if they stars weren't so far away, we'd never stretch to grasp them.

It took me six sessions, and a marathon hour at the end, which I finished at 11:53 pm...

But I did it!

My final word count for the day was 5,456 words.  I worked on two stories, Tick and Youth.  I love Youth, but sometimes you need to do something different for awhile.  So about 1,200 words are for Tick and all the rest are for Youth.

Good writing day for me!

Youth sessions:

Tick sessions:

7.5k

Wow, I haven't been here in just over two months.  I am terrible at keeping up, haha!

Well, some good news for any Medrick fans out there.  I've finally kicked my own derriere hard enough and got myself moving.  I didn't do any writing yesterday, but I wrote the 23rd, 24th, 25th and 27th and I wrote 7.5k new words for my next brainchild in the pipeline, Youth.

7,531 to be exact.

This is a novel, not a short story, and I'd say it's about half done word-count wise.  As in, I'm expecting it to clock in around 50k, and if you look at my handy little word count meter down there, you'll see it shows 48.88% completion.  So yaysies for that :)

I have to throw a good thanks out to Michael Kingswood.  Awhile back he posted on his blog about this handy little chart he made for himself that helped him track the actual costs of his book.  (I'd post the link if I had it handy, but I don't remember even what month he posted it in.)  Basically you put in your start time for writing, and your end time, and how many words you wrote in that time, and (at $50/hr, which I think is reasonable for a writer) it tells you how many copies of your book you have to sell at your desired price (that you set, it figures your royalty).

Wow, looking over that sentence it sounds confusing!  But it is really, really, cool.  And on top of that, it's deeply motivational to someone who thinks like me.  I'm pretty creative, but I also have a hard science side.  I like to see things happen, know results.  When I write, yeah, my word count goes up, and I know some hours here and there, but how much time am I actually spending?

What is the cost of my time?

As writers take the dropped ball from agents and publishers and have to look more at the business side of their craft, things like this become really important.

Say it took me a year to write a book.  (I know, I know.  A year?  What the hell am I doing?!?  Haha.)  As a business person, I'd have to ask myself: why?  When I take typing tests, I always clear 90+ wpm.

Say my novel is 50,000 words long.  Now say I type a flat 90wpm.  With that math, it takes me a little over 555 minutes to complete a novel.  Or, in another sense - less then 9 1/2 hours.

Now, why did a 9 1/2 hour project take me ONE YEAR to complete?

Okay, okay, I'll give a little slack.  I don't thunder-type for an hour straight at 90wpm when I'm writing a manuscript.  Sometimes I have to stop, and think.  Are my characters behaving realistically?  Do I have enough setting?  Can you see this scene, or is it vague?  Those questions take time to answer.  Also, sometimes I misspell words and backspace doesn't count toward your keystrokes, ha ha ha.

Here's another fun fact: The longer I sit at my computer, the less work I'm going to get done.

It sounds like baloney, but I think a lot of people will agree to being the same way.  If I were at a cubicle job, doing the same general tasks over and over, that's different - I constantly have something to do, with little variation.

But when I'm writing, worlds are flowering under my fingertips, through the imperfect filter of my own brain and vocabulary.

There's going to be hitches.

So I find, in the end, I write fantastically in small spurts.  Then - I walk away.  Yes, WALK AWAY!  I go play video games for an hour, or frisbee with the dog, or watch an episode of some random television show. I do something that clears the filter, and then I come back later.  Sometimes an hour, sometimes a day later.

Okay, so 7.5k of a 50k novel is 15%.  If it were a 9 1/2 hour project, I should have completed it in a mere 85 minutes!

Truth time?  It took me 4.06 hours.  (Another fun metric this spreadsheet tracks!)  BUT, those were a very productive 4 hours.  They weren't all at once, they were over 4 days.  Huh, that sounds suspiciously like the, "Write at least an hour a day" mantra I hear going around :P

Aaaaand, I don't manage to write 90wpm while writing.  My best day of those four, I wrote at a speed of (thank you, spreadsheet!) 2324.52 words/hr, or (haha) 38.7wpm.  I blame the thinking time variable!  (At that pace it would take me 21.5 hours to complete the first draft manuscript... still considerably more reasonable than the YEAR it supposedly took.)

But I guess the most important things to take away from this post are:
1. Write at a comfortable pace.
2. "Thinking" time can eat into your hours.
3. A novel shouldn't take a year to write.
4. If you wrote 1,000 words a day, every day for a year, you'd write 365,000 words, or more than 7, 50k novels.
5. Know your business!  Writing has a cost all its own!

And for anyone with a geeky maths and science side like me, have a gander!

And, now that you can all see it, I can't hide.  This is the truth about writing, for me.  I often don't spend more than a half hour at a time sitting still, and yes, each one of those sessions represents a complete chapter.

NERVES

Hallo there all.  I just wanted to take a moment to talk about submissions.  Of the writing kind.

Today I submitted a story to Writer's of the Future.  Now, when I was deciding I wanted to put my writing out in the great big world, the query-go-round was the first huge obstacle.  It didn't take me very long to decide that wasn't the type of career I wanted to have.  I wanted something that would seriously reward me as an author, not just my pride in being "in print".

Then along came these fancy e-reader things, and I knew I wanted one the day they were announced.  I lived in Japan and I begged and begged and begged my parents, "If you get me anything for Christmas - just get me this, and I will be THRILLED."  And, that's all I got that Christmas, and I was THRILLED.  (See how that works?)  The best part was that I could get English-language books to read while in Japan.  I have to say, there is a shortage of English texts in the land of the rising sun ;)

But somehow it didn't occur to me that I could get MY works on that fancy digital book.  And then, one day, like magic, it did.  I was busy working on another story that sits forlornly in the "Whoops, I abandoned you!" pile and I came across KDP.  Incidentally, I came across it on the internet because sometimes while writing, I go on brief research spurts to make sure I'm not talking out of my hat, and that I actually know what I am saying is true.

So anyway, then I started doing lots of investigating into KDP.  But the problem was - I hadn't written a novel.  I had come close a couple of times, lengthy, sometimes rambling manuscripts, but never anything concrete.

I moved home.  Stuff happened, and then I wrote a novel.  A complete one, my first one, "Shackled".  And let me tell you, by the end of it, I was thinking, "Why would anyone ever want to write one of these?"  Because I was brutal on myself and I forced my arse into the computer chair to write and write and write the freaking story until I was done.  It took me about three months total and looking back more effort was spent getting over myself than actually writing.  That's not to say it's not good - I think it's an awesome story - but I was quite melodramatic about it, to myself.

I got it all ready, and I put it up on Kindle and crossed my fingers and toes and eyes and... well, not much happened.  I sold a few copies and I got a couple 5 star reviews.  Luckily, that's more than some (so I've heard.)

Well now I've turned this into kind of a rambly backstory, sorry.  But the short of it is, I don't have a lot of experience with submissions.  I haven't received a hobojillion rejections like Konrath or others.  I actually haven't even received one.

Mostly because I haven't submitted anything :P

But I mean to be serious about this writing thing.  Remember the whole 52 Shades of Short Stories I want to participate in?  Well, I seem to do short stories well, and if I'm not writing novels, then they need to be submitted somewhere.  Today started my submissions journey - a 1,250 word short entitled "Moebied" and cast to the great dark waters of Writer's of the Future.  May they treat it gently.

And again, sorry for the rambly but... NERVES.