GENREALITY

I wrote my first draft of The Novel Writer’s Toolkit in 1994 after four books published.  It was all of 11 pages long.  That was the extent of what I consciously knew about writing a novel.  In 2009, I wrote my first draft of Warrior Writer, a book designed to teach writers how to succeed as authors after my frustration over the lack of education for writers and all my experiences—it evolved into Write It Forward.  I still have not had a single response from an editor or agent showing me what their formal training program is for an author they sign or contract with.  In today’s fast moving marketplace, writers can’t afford to learn like I did—the hard way.

Over the years, I rewrote the Toolkit every six months, adding all I was learning about writing.  The Toolkit ended up being 80,000 words long and was published by Writer’s Digest in 2001.  It earned out in less than six months and had a great run.

Last year I updated both books extensively, partly because I’ve grown as a writer and now an independent author. But also because today’s publishing environment has changed and with that change has come the ability to update books to meet the changing needs of today’s successful writers.  The Novel Writers Toolkit now focuses 100% on the craft of writing.  I removed the business section because that belongs in the other book, formerly Warrior Writer, which I renamed Write It Forward: From Writer To Successful Author.

One key thing I added in the Toolkit was a section on Conflict, especially the Conflict Box.  I put in all I’ve learned in the past several years.  I have to say I believe I’ve learned more about writing in the past two years than in my first twenty.

In the Toolkit, I teach how to answer key questions about your book including:

Can you state what your book is about in one sentence?

Do you clearly have conflict lock between protagonist and antagonist?

Do you know where your ‘camera’ is when you write each scene?  i.e. Point of View?  Do you know when you’ve done a cut?

Do you know all your characters’ primary motivations, their motivation leveles, and their blind spot?

Write It Forward is the sum of what I’ve learned in 20 years of traditional publishing and two years as an indie author and publisher.  I made many mistakes over the years and I wrote this book to keep others from making the same mistakes.  I’ve included where I believe publishing is now and where it’s going.  I also focus on helping writers sort out their own path to Oz, given that each of us are starting from a different place and our vision of Oz is unique to each of us.

For example, can you answer these questions, which Write It Forward poses as exercises and then teaches you how to answer:

What is my strategic goal as a writer?  Where do you want to be in five years?

I’ll do anything to succeed as a writer, except don’t ask me to do . . . . ?

My greatest fear as a writer is?

How high is your ‘imposter syndrome’ as a writer?

Are you in command of your writing career or are you counting on an agent or editor?

Do you know where you stand on the three P’s: Platform, product and promotion?

Both books focus on building the complete writer:  one who masters the craft of writing into being an artist, and one who develops their work into being a career writer.

Reference the Novel Writers Toolkit

“A book to inspire, instruct and challenge the writer in everyone.”
#1 NY Times Best-Selling Author Susan Wiggs

“An invaluable resource for beginning and seasoned writers alike. Don’t miss out.”
#1 NY Times Best-Selling Author Terry Brooks

“Something for every writer, from neophyte to old hand. My hat is off to Bob.” Best-Selling Myster Writer Elizabeth George

Reference Write It Forward

“I have always loved how your programs delved deeply into the psychological models you need to develop characters. No you are using that to develop people.” Co-Creator of the Chicken Soup Books Jack Canfield

One of the things that I love the most about being part of the writing industry is the way authors can band together for a good cause. It’s not a rare thing to see links to auctions where authors, editors, and even reviewers are giving away things to raise money for something. Sometimes it’s auctions for a disaster survivors, and sometimes it’s for someone who needs help with medical bills.

The Brenda Novak Auction for Diabetes is probably the largest one I’ve seen, and it’s done every year with some fantastic prizes and packages.

I always try to help promote when someone is trying to raise money for a cause. Like Blogger Laurie who’s trying raise money with a cancer walk. (You can pledge her here…c’mon even $5? ). Now I know Laurie, so I knew about her fundraising efforts a while ago, but last night I saw a link on twitter from Independant bookstore owner Rosemary Potter that made me want to shout out all over the internet.

Rosemary’s Romance in australia has been a huge supporter of all sub-genres of romantic fiction for along time. Rosemary herself is a warm and wonderful woman who I was lucky enough to meet at a Romantic Times Conference a couple years ago, and I’m eager to help her out in any way I can.

Anyway, my point, and what I wanted to shout out is for everyone to click on THIS LINK and vote for Rosemary’s Romance This bank is giving away $40,000 in small business grants, and your vote could help this independent bookstore get some of that!

So… this post today is to both to say how proud I am to be part of a community that always tries to help each other out whenever possible, and to share the link and urge everyone to take a minute out of their day and vote to help support a bookstore that has always been a huge supporter of my favorite genre of fiction-romance.

*** In case you missed it… CLICK THIS LINK TO GO VOTE ***

Just a quick note on one of my favorite things about being a working writer:  A week or so ago, a good writer friend of mine was in town for a stop on his current book tour.  He had a few hours to kill before the event, so I took the day off and went to hang out with him, drinking coffee, eating dinner, and talking about everything.  What we’ve been up to, the business, how crazy things are, how crazy we are, and so on.  And how far we’ve come since we met, and how grateful we are that we’ve had people to share the journey with, who are right there with us and to whom we can bitch and moan about problems that don’t actually look like problems to anyone else.

I didn’t get a lick of work done that day, but you know what?  I still felt super-productive at the end of it.

Howdy folks and Happy Saturday!

The second week of every month is theme week here at Genreality.Net and this month’s theme is blogging.

I have a blog that I used to use over at www.livejournal.com called Discombobulated Pensivity in the Doublewide of Life.  I’m sure to resurrect it once I’ve gotten a blog built into the website (which I’ve had an offer to help build here in WordPress and just haven’t finished sorting out the details) but it was getting hard to keep up with.  So I started relying heavily on Facebook as my primary tool for frequently connecting with readers online — along with my friends and family.  I like the way it works, though I’m not sure I’ll keep feeling that way once I’m pulled into the vortex that is Timeline.  Still, I’m a technophobe and FB is really user friendly.  But it has limitations — like a cap on friends — and I find myself every-so-often unexcited about their approach to privacy and the constant sense of having to police after my settings.

On Facebook, I try to post three to five status updates per day — some are links, some are photos, some are updates on book progress or what I’m doing.  And then I post longer “notes” sporadically.

And of course I blog here weekly on writing or the writer’s life.  That gives me a set day — Saturdays — and I found early on that it was far more manageable to have a weekly blog in the madness and pandemonium that is my life.

But there is so much more that I could do.  And I’m hoping as life settles down a bit and I move into the land of being full time, I can have a more impactful social media presence and strategy.  For now, I’m doing pretty bare-minimum work.

That’s the blogging I’m up to.   As for the blogs that I read:  Well, I scan my agent’s and editor’s blogs periodically.  And I scan most of my friends’ blogs even less than that unless there’s something specific going on that I want to check on — I’m just too busy.  My life BARELY lets me leverage the words I need, let alone read everything I’d like to read.  But I manage to read Jay Lake’s blog every day.  And I rob his link salad nearly daily for my own updates because he and I frequently land on the same side of most issues and he always, always finds interesting, cool stuff out there.

And that’s Trailer Boy on blogging.  Have a good Saturday.  Play nicely.

I have been “blogging” since July of 2004, when I was an unemployed aspiring writer trying to save up enough money to move out of my parents’ house. Before that, I didn’t know what a blog was, but had been keeping regular “news” updates on my nascent website of what I’d accomplished that month in writing, etc. In the past eight years, my blog has gone through a lot of changes.

I find I’m much more circumspect than I used to be. Part of it is I’ve just run out of topics. It turns out there is a limit to how many cute pics you can post of your puppy before you feel like you’re just exploiting her. And though I have many Thoughts on Craft and Industry, I’m sure no one wants to hear me extolling the virtues of the synopsis yet again. Book reviews are right out, book recommendations can start getting sticky, and book giveaways become exhausting (Man, I hate the post office.) It’s difficult even to discuss writing pet peeves, as your readers will invariably decide that you’re picking on a particular book (even if it’s one you aren’t familiar with at all).

I used to talk about my manuscript progress. I don’t do that anymore; because if and when (mostly when) things get thorny, I have an unfortunate tendency to sound melodramatic about it — “the book is broken, the sky is falling, I’m a terrible writer, why would anyone ever want to read me?” My readers, who I am attempting to induce to read my next book, probably don’t want to hear me whining about how awful it is, and me whining about how awful it all is is apparently an Official Part of my Process.

(In passing, don’t you hate the term “My Process?” It sounds so pretentious. “I’m an artiste. This is My Process!” Blecch.)

It’s also so easy to miscommunicate things — the informality of a blog post combined with the “official” nature of an author’s website appear to make the perfect storm of potential misunderstanding. Offhand comments can be taken as The Word From On High. Jokes are taken seriously. People skim, or alternately, people read Deeper Meanings into whatever you say. A short and by no means exhaustive list of things I have inadvertently misled readers about over the course of my blog:

1. That a badly photoshopped, clearly jokey “fake” cover stealing images from The Last Unicorn cartoon was an actual bookcover of mine.
2.  That a badly photoshopped, clearly jokey “fake” cover that was an 80s style bodice ripper (complete with tattered edges) was an actual bookcover of my YA.
3. That a badly photoshopped — well, let’s just say my whole “fake Rampant cover” series did not go over well — irony does not always read on a blog. Even my mother in law got tripped up by one of them.
4. That my husband was actually my gay roommate, Will & Grace style. (this particular reader was shocked when I blogged about getting married).
5. That I was pregnant. (When I wasn’t and a few times when I was and being sneaky about it — my MIL again.)
6. That I was not pregnant. (Given the aforementioned sneakies.)
7. That I was having a movie made from my book.
8. That I was writing a sequel to The Hunger Games. (?!?!)
9. An announcement that I’d be speaking in the “Hong Kong” room in a hotel at a conference made someone think I was going to be speaking at a Hong Kong location of that hotel chain.
10. An attempt to be as transparent as possible to other aspiring authors about what the revision process looks like got an editor in trouble about the format of her revision letters.
11. An attempt to be as transparent as possible about the plans for continuing an ongoing series led to rampant (pun intended) speculation about completely fictional fights, threats, and disappointments between myself and my publisher.
12. That the aforementioned cute puppy had died.

And that doesn’t even cover the arguments I’ve waded into!

On the other hand, my blog is to account for some of my greatest joys in my career. It was through a blog post that I first met my good friend and critique partner Justine Larbalestier. Regular readers of my blog have become virtual friends. One came to the launch party of my first book and then, years later, with the wisdom of a fellow new mom, somehow read between the lines of my blog when I was pregnant and sent me a handmade baby blanket. Another keeps me in book and Canadian television recommendations, and we hang out on Pinterest talking about wedding decor. A third cajoled me into joining SFWA.

My blog readers have helped me when my garden was in trouble, when my dog has been sick, and when I needed to geek out with someone about my latest book release and my husband (who was a good sport about the whole “gay roommate” thing) got tired of hearing me speculate on what my secondary characters’ favorite foods were. My blog has been a place where I’ve experimented with form, invited other writers to experiment with voice, and given out freebies and extras to my readers. And that whole “fake cover” thing may have been confusing to some, but I had a blast with it and those readers who got the joke enjoyed it too.

Nowadays, my blog is just one part of a big web of social networking. I love Twitter — I Twitter daily, even when I don’t have time for a whole blog post. Twitter conversations can spark blogs and vice versa. I recently discovered Tumblr, which fulfills a different need entirely and which I often use to post on the fly inspirational photos and such of my works in progress. Because it’s on tumblr instead of my official blog, I feel like I can be a little more open with my works in progress (I’m usually excessively circumspect on my blog). However, I recently learned I’m not in the clear there, either. I was contacted by a reader who was super confused about the pictures I was posting of the heroine of the manuscript I’m writing now and how different they were from the descriptions of the heroine in the book I’ve got coming out next month. Gah. Informality strikes again.

For me, blogging is a fun outlet. When it stops being fun, I take breaks. I honestly don’t know what the solution to pitfalls like these are. A lot of writers I know who get frustrated by these setbacks and mishaps just cut off all social media completely. I enjoy blogging, though. I like giving back to the writing community in the form of industry and craft posts, and I like giving back to my readers in the form of Easter eggs, extras, and giveaways. It’s not a perfect system, I suppose, but until I see a better one…