Writing

Posts about writing.

The Third Novella: a horror story about writing a Horror story

/ Scott Nagele / Leave a comment

Writing a book is a solitary sport. Publishing a book is anything but solitary. You need a lot of people to help you. Even when you are lucky to have diligent people helping you, everything takes time, which means you will wait through various periods for them to do their work before you can get the thing published.

About 18 months ago, while I was waiting for some beta readers to go through A Housefly in Autumn, I decided that starting a new book would be more productive of my time than twiddling my thumbs.

I envisioned a book consisting of three novellas of a genre very different from A Housefly in Autumn. These stories would be contemporary and not suited to young adults. They are my nightmares, the ground where parenthood meets horror.

Though not horror in a gory sense, they are dark enough to put them into a genre in which I have not written since high school. Back then, I was completing creative writing assignments, not contemplating an eventual published book.

I finished the first two novellas in accordance with the vague plan in my head. The third came third because it was less well-developed in my mind, so I let it marinate while I finished drafts of the other two. When the third’s turn came, I had sat on it long enough to know that it would not develop further until I started to write it.

As I waited to get the cover art for Housefly, I began the third novella. Little by little, it picked its way through the forest of words until it found its trail of plot. It began to come together, the story itself inspiring new elements to fill in its missing pieces.

The ending still floated on the mist, but as I got closer, I began to see outlines of solid shapes in that mist. I was fitting it all together in my mind.

Then I got some really fantastic artwork for Housefly. It was time to start laying out the actual book that had always just been a manuscript. The new project got pushed to the back burner. When you have three little boys at home and a full-time day job, the back burner is off.

The third novella stopped cold. What time I could muster was applied to getting Housefly through the next steps.

I don’t outline. This works for me, except when it doesn’t.

Waiting for help on the last proofing of Housefly, I went back to that third novella. After six months, I didn’t recall which i was undotted and which t uncrossed.

I’d have to go back and read it. I didn’t like to because I prefer to get through the first draft before I read, and I was afraid of what I would find in my first mature attempt to write horror, even watered-down horror.

So far, I’ve read through about one-third of it. It’s not as bad as I feared. Now if I can only re-figure out how it ends, I might actually start to like it. Horror doesn’t scare me so much anymore.

the third novella

The Third Novella. That could be the title of a horror story. Anyway, this third novella is waiting to be finished.

Nothing lasts forever – even when it’s sponsored by Amazon.com

/ Scott Nagele / 2 Comments

I discovered today that the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) competition has been discontinued. This is disappointing, but judging from the comments in the ABNA forum, I’m not as heartbroken over it as some other would-be contestants are.

I have participated in ABNA since its inaugural year, which I believe was 2008. It was an annual event, allowing 10,000 novelists from around the world to compete for a healthy royalty advance and a publishing contract from Amazon, with all the marketing advantages that we 10,000 imagined that entailed. Based on the quiet death of the event, perhaps we were imagining too much.

I experienced varying degrees of success in my seven attempts at ABNA. I never won, but I never expected to. It was a great opportunity to get feedback from total strangers who were avid readers and reviewers. That was enough to make it worthwhile, especially since it was free to enter.

Sure, it was exciting to scan the list of entries moving ahead to the next round. It felt good to advance, and it was always deflating to be booted from the competition. Some took it hard, but most recovered fairly quickly. Just as for Cubs fans, there was always next year.

Except there is no next year now, because there’s no this year now. The announcement came just as people were expecting the new submission period to be announced. The unfortunate timing left many sorely disappointed.

Bad news coming

“What’s that? You’ve discontinued the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award? How delightful!”

My disappointment is mild by comparison. Over the years, the ABNA highs got less high and the lows not as low for me. It became more of a yearly routine than a special event. It was a nice routine, like a free lottery ticket, and I’d take it when offered, but I had my chances so I can’t complain.

I do feel for the folks who discovered ABNA in the last year or two – those who learned from the experiences of their rookie seasons and were ready to come back at it with renewed vigor – those who toiled to rework their manuscripts specifically for this chance, only to discover at the final hour that the chance was no more. I wish they had time to come to see ABNA as just one of many opportunities before it got yanked away from them.

Amazon has replaced ABNA with its Kindle Scout program. I haven’t read many details about Scout because it only accepts three genres, in which I have no manuscripts ready. From the little I have read, it seems like a social media popularity contest more than anything else. I admit, there is some value in knowing which authors can rock social media, but it doesn’t seem to account for the quality of their work very much.

Bad news here

“And you’ve replaced it with a program that relies on social media? I’m absolutely giddy over it!”

Scout may turn out to be a good program. I don’t know enough about it, and it hasn’t had time to prove itself. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I bid a fond farewell to ABNA. I won’t cry, but right around this time every year, I will miss you, if only just a little bit.

 

Blurred lines: Stuck in limbo between Young Adult and General Fiction

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

When you are preparing to release a new novel to the public, it’s easy to become plagued by doubts.

Is the action exciting enough? Is there enough action? Is the dialogue compelling? Are the characters well-developed? Are they relatable? Will anybody care what happens to them?

This list goes on . . .

These transient type worries tend to replace each other day by day until you resign yourself to the fact that there is no ironclad way to dispel them. You will only get your answers once the book is in the hands of readers. Until then, you have to work largely on faith.

If you are extra fortunate, your book will also give you one good underlying concern that haunts the back of your mind throughout the process, even as your transient worries jockey for position at the front of your mind.

With A Housefly in Autumn, my super-duper awesome underlying concern has been hitting the right target audience.

I always envisioned A Housefly in Autumn as a Young Adult novel. It’s themes and tone were tailored to younger readers from the beginning, and from the beginning this categorization had the potential to be problematic.

There is a large cohort of literary-minded people who adhere to a rule about Young Adult fiction, mandating that the main character in such works must be no older than 18 throughout the story. I broke this law half way through the first draft. My main character ages out of this statute at about the 60% mark. Then, he does something even more illegal: he continues to age.

Accidents of youth

My main character, before he joined AARP and applied for a reverse mortgage. (Art by Jessie O’Brien)

I decided early on I would have to take my chances by breaking this popular maxim. I sailed full speed ahead.

Then, something else began to happen. As I started getting feedback on the manuscript, I realized that the things I was attempting with the narrative style and word choices were distracting readers from the story. I needed to adjust the tone.

In making the tone more conventional, I have sacrificed what to me is some of the youthful flavor of the narrative. This change was necessary but it was not done without some regret. The novel reads more like General Fiction than I intended.

Still, I could not see marketing it as General Fiction. The themes are too youth-oriented for that. Hence, my nagging concern: is this novel stuck in limbo between youth and adult fiction?

Maybe. But in this age of crossover and overlap, maybe limbo isn’t a land of the lost anymore. Maybe “youthful flavor” is a relic of a simpler time. Maybe youthful theme, coupled with a not overly youthful tone, is a budding sweet spot.

Pigeon-holing is still a useful concept in marketing, and leaning toward Young Adult is not exactly a clear-cut niche. Yet, it is just the spot where this book rests.

In the end, this dilemma will be resolved in the same way the “Will people like my characters?” question is. Readers will decide.

I’ll live with that.

Addition by subtraction: ditching the unhelpful words

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

I’m working my way through the third proof copy of A Housefly in Autumn and it’s making me remember why it took me four or five proof copies to get my other books ready.

I’m always searching for a tweak to make it a little better.

I haven’t noticed any embarrassing mistakes so far on this copy. I haven’t even come across anything that I feel is definitely an error. In spite of this, I have plenty of red pen marks on this third copy already, and I’m not half way through.

What am I marking up then?

Mostly, I’m striking words that seemed necessary at one time, but now just seem like extra words. They are not extra words of the James Fenimore Cooper magnitude. They don’t lead down dead end paths into inescapable thickets. At least in my opinion, they don’t. But they don’t add anything to the potential reader’s understanding of the story either.

An extra wordsmith

James Fenimore Cooper, a man of abundant imagination and even more abundant verbiage.

It’s amazing how many of these words pop up in a novel. And it’s amazing how many edits it takes to get most of them out.

I added a very short scene to beginning of the story prior to this proof. It didn’t change the themes of the tale, but it did slightly alter the tone in which it is narrated. This is the other major category of cross-outs this time around. There are some residual statements sprinkled throughout the book that reflect the previous tone too much. These need to be changed or removed. They are pretty easy to spot, but not always simple to fix.

At the end of this proof, I hope to have an efficient story with a smooth, consistent narrative tone from start to finish. Then I can move on to the really nit-picky stuff on proof number four. Maybe I’ll even have the luxury of revisiting issues I previously vacillated over before deciding. You have to flip a lot of coins in self-publishing. Sometimes you want to go back and flip them over again, not because that gives you a better decision, but it might make you feel like you put enough thought into it.

Meanwhile, I’m not giving up on finding errors. By now, I am the least qualified person to find any errors that remain. My jaded eyes have skipped them before, and they’ll skip them again. I’m counting on other pairs of eyes to bring me errors. I hope they do better than I could do right now, because the consequences of hard decisions I can live with; glaring mistakes are harder to stomach.

The saga goes on. It pains me that it takes so long. I’m disappointed to have missed a Christmas release. But if it makes the book a cleaner, better reading experience it will have been worth every dragged-out day of it.