Recently, I was cleaning out my email in-box and ran across contest entries, emails, and queries that I sent, way back when the world was good and pure, and the possibilities for becoming an author were endless. One thing became super clear: I didn’t have a single clue what I was doing.
Now? Still learning, but I do have a better grasp on what I am supposed to be doing and what seems to work in my little nook of the universe. #1) Time management = everything. Especially for those of us working full-time jobs. A day or a week off is GOLD. Give me a few post-it sheets for my to-do list and I will set the world on fire. (Not literally. That would be super bad.) #2) Let editors know your time frames. Because of my weird work schedule, I am on call for 7-10 days at a time. During that time, my writing brain pretty much shuts down and I live in on-call doctor mode. It’s not in anyone’s best interest for me to have deadlines or interviews or projects due during that period. I do my best to let folks know this information in advance, or will try to pre-emptively complete projects early when I know these blocks are coming. I’ve been caught out a few times where I didn’t give enough lead-time on my time limitations. Like many professional areas, I need to work more on time transparency. #3) Marketing still kind of stinks. There’s no magic bullet. There’s no one thing to do that will make a book visible. And social media will eat up all of my time, if I’m not careful. Over time, I’ve cultivated some marketing sites that seem to work for me. For right now. Things change constantly. It’s been 12 years since I wrote that first (awful) manuscript. Wow. Looking back, it’s clear I had no clue about publishing, and very little clue about writing. That’s not to say I didn’t >think< I knew a lot! Ugh. Here’s a mishmash of what I’ve learned. Maybe it will help other writers or writers-to-be. Hopefully it will keep others from making the same mistakes that I’ve made. Image via despair.com
#1) Overnight success isn’t overnight. Marketing/social media makes it appear like it’s overnight. Rarely is this true. I don’t know if I can claim the robust definition of “success” yet, but I wrote my first book in 2005. My first published book (which was NOT my first book written, BTW), was printed in 2015. That was a goal achieved, even if a small one. #2) If you’re going to be clueless, at least be pleasant. I didn’t know beans about publishing and etiquette, and thus I kind of Mr. Magoo’d into asking for something. And got it. (Stars and planets had to have aligned that day. No other explanation.) That conversation could have gone either way, and frankly, I got lucky.
Okay, roll up the sleeves, it’s year two of the judging adventures for RWA’s 2017 RITA awards! Cannot wait for my packet of books to arrive. It’s really like Christmas! I talked about my first experience of judging RWA around this time last year and how, well, not super duper qualified I was to judge the contest.
So, from that basement, there's nowhere to go but up this year! How am I going to up my scoring game for this year’s RITA’s? As I described in the March 2016 post, there’s really no consensus explanation of how to score or what the numbers really mean. What does a 6 mean? What does an 8 mean? Is Judge A's 9 the same thing as Judge B's? I don't know. I haven’t even tried to figure out decimals, and therefore, we will work on that later when I arbitrarily award decimal bonuses. Yeah. I said it. Decimal. Bonuses.
Every so often, I talk about how my writing life needs to remain separate from my professional/personal life. It’s not that I don’t want readers to know more about me. Quite the opposite. It’s that, well, for one thing, Big Brother in the workplace is kind of a thing these days. The particular Big Brother corporation I work with is a benevolent yet capricious and sometimes draconian organization, and I cannot be confident that the company would recognize the separation between work and writing.
Along those same lines, I’m not quite ready to share the writing work with all of my friends, family members, coworkers, and patients. The topics/scenes I delve into are quite dark and can be painful and graphic. Readers seem to dig it, and it’s cathartic for me to write this way. And frankly, I don’t know how to water stuff down. As one reviewer wrote, “(Jillian) sure knows how to write torture scenes.” And I’m proud of that fact that the words can make someone feel everything that’s happening to the characters. Announcing a new series coming in 11/16 from Crimson Romance! (If you got my newsletter, you'd know all about this series already...) :)
Hell's Valley is a planned four book Western Paranormal Romance series. That's right, folks, it's like Bonanza meets X-Men ... or Big Valley meets Alphas. If you like your ranchers hot, your nights chilly, the passion steamy, and Hell-driven evil forces closing in on all sides, then you're going to love Hell's Legacy! Meet the Taggart family of western Wyoming. Four siblings, each possessing a strange, secret power. Each sibling fights their personal demons and deals with their disturbing neighbors, the Brand family. Each Taggart must risk revealing their darkest secrets to save the family ranch, fight the Hell-fueled Brand family, and protect the ones they love. So, it was my first year scoring RITA’s for the RWA yearly contest. On the RWA website, there’s not a lot of explanation as far as what a 1, 5, or 10 means. Is it bad to get a 6? I don’t know. Can you only give out one 10 because that means “best book in the universe”? I don’t know. Is it only people with an average above 8 who make it to the finals? No idea.
Besides, who am I to be judging anyone, anyway? And don’t even get me started on decimals…which is like the ultimate splitting-hairs hedge option. An hour of my life disappeared as I grappled with “is it 9.4 or 9.3”? Yeah. In my day-job, the rule is to always give patients the benefit of the doubt. Easy enough. Sounds like a good rule to use for the RITA’s. Therefore, in all transparency, I present to you – how to score RITA entries – Dr. Jill style. #1) The scale starts at 5 and stops at 10. We’re going to call this the “RITA gonad” scale. You have to have serious writerly balls to simply enter this contest. If you have the guts to write, edit, publish, and enter an entire book, the contents of which are still glowing with the pieces of your soul that you ripped out and laid down on the page – that’s automatically worth a minimum score of 5. Just for making the massive effort and taking a risk. Sometimes writers are just too tired to write. Sometimes we have day jobs or families or general insanity that sucks up every last minute of the day. Well, now what? During this week's call block, I started thinking about everything I get done besides writing when I'm on call. Here goes... #1) Blogs. Ta-dash. Case in point. #2) Research. This activity fits well into small, interrupt-able attention packets, which is nice when the ICU + med-surg floor + Ob unit + ER + 5 nursing homes all have my number on speed dial. You know it’s been a bad weekend when the switchboard operator at the hospital begins her spiel with an apology. Sometimes a few minutes of research is nice. Like thinking about really hot men and how they might fit into a novel, hypothetically-speaking of course. Yum! In the last post, we talked about what IS fastdrafting. Now I'm going to share how I tried it. Yes, everyone is different, but maybe this will give other folks good ideas for writing to work for them.
What are the rules? As far as I can tell, there’s nothing set in stone, but here’s what I needed to pull this off:
Here’s what happened (times are approximate) Friday 7-9am – Shiny object! Day off work! Surf Internet and read other folks’ blogs and writing articles. Polish up website. Check electronic medical records (EMR) at work to sign off orders and put out fires. There have been lots of great articles on fastdrafting, but I wasn’t a believer…
Until this last week. You see, I had a four-day weekend earmarked to write. I had a deadline for a developmental editor pass in two weeks. And before this last weekend started, I had…no book. So I figured, why not? Let’s try fastdrafting. And I mean really fast. Could I crank out my usual first draft of a novel in four days? (Usual first draft for me = 35-40K words FYI) What is fastdrafting? Basically, it’s writing the first draft of the book without stopping (editing) and just getting the ideas and words down on paper. Some websites shoot for getting a book done in one, two, or four weeks with this method. I think it must also depend on the length of the book. In between books2/10/2016 As the first book of a new, top-secret project departs for initial developmental edits, I feel kind of lost. There’s been so much writing and editing and creation going on for the past few months -- now that there’s a break, I feel weird. Like the brain still has ideas bouncing around, but it’s too tired to process them right this minute. Could also be because I’m 10/10 exhausted from this call week, too, but that’s beside the point. Nowadays, I can’t not have a project to work on in front of me. Like, it feels…wrong…not to write. At nighttime, after sending off that last project, my head switch gears. Like I wanted nothing more than to start outlining the next book, but simply couldn’t do it. Too tired. But then the scenes for the next story started lining up, on their own! Couldn’t stop if I wanted to. Maybe there’s some truth to what more seasoned authors say: These stories rolling around in the head must be let out! Only, it would be nice if those stories gave me a break every once in a while. So what if I don’t write this day or this week? Good news! There’s always something for a writer to do. Always. If it’s not writing, its editing. If it’s not editing, it’s sending queries. If it’s not queries, it’s marketing current books. The work doesn’t end, and I love all of it. Even the times when there’s waiting. Only…it’s never waiting. Not really. It’s just time to write more! |
Jillian DavidAuthor, daydreamer, and practitioner of trying very hard to duct tape folks together and help when I can. Archives
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