Paperback writer

So it's official, I'm now published in paperback. Again self published but still a brilliant development, will be getting my proof copy later in the week for review before it goes on Amazon but it's currently available on Lulu http://www.lulu.com/shop/holly-webster/blood-born/paperback/product-20973144.html

Desperate to see my book in the flesh :)

All I want is a space somewhere

Everyone needs a space to let loose their creative side, I'm blessed with a converted attic in our rental, but damn was it depressing. The walls were a drab blue grey that had been up there for long enough for it to be grime ingrained and nasty.  Luckily I got the landladies permission to redecorate and finally I've gotten everything fixed up a nice bright yellow (meant to inspire creativity.) Soon to have plot boards and lots of storage. I'm so happy right now :)

Fan Fiction Addiction

In a previous blog on characterisation I mentioned watching TV as an aid to improving your understanding of character and writing about the characters as practice. I am of course referencing an often miss understood phenom, Fan Fiction.

Fan Fiction, or fan fic, is taking an established ‘Universe’ (in this instance Universe is the realm inhabited by particular cast of characters in books or TV with it’s own physical and metaphysical rules) and then creating their own scenarios often times seriously changing the plot and messing with the universe rules. Fan fic is an exercise in make believe for the creative geek, it’s fun it’s engaging and most importantly it’s really good practice.

There’s a tendency among some writers to look down on fan fic that it’s the realm of the obsessive fan, tantamount to plagiarism, and ‘lazy’. To this I say for the most part. Balls. So long as credit is given to the intellectual owners of the characters and world, for which most fan fic has a staple header, there’s no copyright harm and this is not done for profit. Also who among you can say you’ve never obsessed over anything? And lazy, you may want to go out and read some of these fictions, while it’s true there’s some real stinkers out there it’s just as true that there are some amazing pieces of writing from short to truly epic in length.

Fan fic allows us to explore our own writing skills in a comfortable recognisable sandbox. We already know the characters, we’re used to them and how they react to situations so it’s easy to work them into what we’re planning because we automatically adjust the situation to them, which is what needs to happen for a good story. In essence it’s a way of teaching yourself how to write.

I have always been making up stories for as long as I can remember and I spent years trying and failing to write them down, I’d get lost my plot was poor my characters totally un-relatable. I was (and still am) a complete telly addict, and I fell in love with Buffy, this was just before we got internet for the first time and so obviously the first thing I did when looking into the net was look up Buffy, this was where I discovered fan fic for the first time and it was a revelation. I’d always made up little ‘what ifs’ about my fave shows but writing them down never occurred and sharing them with the world… I set up a page and got to work. My first attempts were pretty bad still, but it improved to the point where I got compliments on my work, especially my dialogue which had been my worst point but thanks to the excellent work of one Joss Whedon I learnt this key skill and it’s become one of my strongest.

So long live fan fiction and all those writing for their fave shows, hold your heads high and keep writing!

Who are you and what are you doing here?

Character driven fiction is something I’ve always aspired to and something I value in the books that I read. There’s nothing worse, I find, than reading a book where a character’s actions don’t fit with their personality. It jars so badly it can completely throw my focus and if it happens too often my interest also wanders and before you know it the book is down and I’m done. So what are my personal (and I’m not an expert on the matter) thoughts behind how this happens.

Lack of experience

A lot of writers when starting out (myself included) underestimate the need for a fully developed skill set. After all, writing is easy, you just put your words down on the page and viola – Story. Wrong. Oh so wrong. With the best will in the world you can’t just sit down one day and write the best novel ever written if you don’t practice. So put down that manuscript and grab a pen and just write, not even necessarily full stories just write scenes. You don’t have to worry about getting your story right you’re just learning how to bring realism to your interactions and descriptions. You should also be absorbing as much as you can from other sources. Read other books vary the authors so you don’t get sucked into a particular style that may not suit you and (shock horror) grab a TV remote. Some people may not agree with this but growing up I was a Telly addict and TV is all about characters. You can’t have a good show (especially a series) with inconsistent characters. Watch and learn, and even write about characters you see on TV as practice (I’ll talk about this a bit more in another post).

Rigid storyline

So you have an Awesome plot, it’s got everything a story could want and your characters WILL stick to it. With exactly the right characters this can work, but more often than not it will end up with a ‘train track’ story. i.e you’ll feel like you’re on rails being dragged along inexorably and it may lack for connection. For gamers out there if any of you have ever played Res Evils the Umbrella Chronicles on Wii you’ll know what I mean. It was a point and shoot where you didn’t direct the character you just moved along like you were on some ghost train ride shooting things as they went past. It was dull and frustrating. If you have to break your characters to suit the story the way you want it then you’ll loose your audience. Example from my own work. If your character is habitually drawn into poor abusive relationships and has come to expect that level of treatment, why would you expect her to gather up her things and walk out of a flat in the middle of the night when a new boyfriend starts acting a little off? She wouldn’t she’d stay and try to work out what she’d done wrong. I laboured over that niggle for about a year before I stopped making her leave and it worked out so much better. This brings me onto my last point.

Not understanding your characters.

Characters, or at least main characters, are not just puppets. They’re people, imaginary and invisible but still people with their own thoughts and motivations, and they will surprise you. As stated above stick them in a rigid storyline that doesn’t fit them and you’ve got problems. You need to get to know your characters. It’s best if at all possible to stop even calling them characters but refer to them by their names. Think about them wherever you are put them in all sorts of outlandish situations and see how they react. Some people talk to their characters but I prefer to remain an unobtrusive presence in their world and watch them talking to one another. A well nurtured character will develop a rich back story and their reactions will flow naturally lending your story a far more realistic quality. 

The Ebook publishing wonder world (or: Percentages that shouldn't matter, but do)

Okay, so I'm new to the whole self publishing via ebook process, and no, I don't expect it to be the easiest thing in the world otherwise we'd have an incredible amount of junk to wade through on the ebook racks (not that this isn't still the case, but whatever). I can't help thinking that there is, for starters, a serious USA bias to run up against and then there's the individual methods of distribution themselves, and then there's the larger issue of having to just say goodbye to so much of the profit and smile like it's fair. Suffice to say I've had a VERY annoying couple of days.

So let me get some of this off my chest.

One, I live in the UK, much of my marketing is UK based, and I'm imagining that a fair to large proportion of any of the money I make will come from UK sales. So why is it that I have to PAY THE IRS IN AMERICA??? This is the Smashwords issue that had me saying WTF yesterday. Unless I can provide several pieces of written evidence that I live in the UK and pay tax in the UK, 30% of my profits will go to the US Government! and then I'll still have to pay tax here if I ever earn enough. The Smashwords site itself says that it's not worth bothering to try and stop them taking the 30% unless I start making huge sales, enough to make the pennies add up. This is a mind set I have problems with. I may not be in this for the money, anything that does hit my coffers is earmarked for my children (when they start turning up) but I'm certainly not interested in giving anything to the government of another country, one who can't manage the money they do have, no matter how small the amount. Despite having advertised that I'll be available on Smashwords this had made me think twice about publishing with them, its looking doubtful that I will.

On the continuing subject of smashwords, and their MeatGrinder software as they call it. I have no real problem with the software, I actually think it's quite clever. It took me a few goes to get the format to work out okay but its a fast and efficient piece of kit. With one exception. It tries to manage too many conversions from one file. I can get the formatting PERFECT for kindle, but ibooks doesn't like it, I try to fix the ibooks bugs and kindle goes funny. I have to get it right for both in one file but based on the smashwords style guide (which is not a very well written article, but admittedly beats the hell out of Amazons online guidance for Kindle).

Yet another thing that has me thinking, why bother with smashwords? It doesn't even seem to be a particularly effective direct to reader distribution site even if it does send out to so many other groups. Strike 3 for smashwords. I'm going to wait and see what the non automated response is from them but it's not hopeful.

So then there's Amazon. Giant of the internet. Huge selling tool and instantly recognisable house hold name. You also insist on trying to make us sell based on US dollars, although you do offer the option of going our own way with prices for each of the sites (.com .co.uk .de and .fr) Something smashwords does not offer and probably a main reason for the whole IRS issue. You set the option that I can have all prices reflect the US price but there's no option to set the UK price and have other currency options reflect this. Then there is your thresholds. 70 or 35 % profits. You know that by setting the price low we'll make better sales, but you get the lions share of the profits by saying we can't have 70% until we hit the £1.45 mark in the uk or $2.99 in the US (incidentally these two numbers DO NOT tally if you set the price to $2.99 and say 'reflect in other currencies' the UK price becomes £1.93 by current exchange rates, just one of those niggling annoyances with me).

Now since I've written the book, edited the book, formatted the book, done the cover art, paid for advertising, and with the exception of my wonderful proof readers who I love and adore, done ALL the work myself up until the point when it arrived on the Amazon server where you ran it through an automated program and after a quick review it'll appear on a web page which is just as automated in construction and which requires me to input any significant info to improve sales. Do I seriously think that amazon deserves to pocket 65%?

So here I am, standing on the edge of the precipice. A head of me lies the world in which my book is published and out there for all to see and I have two roads to take. On one path I throw my arms in the air and say 'free love to all' give my book to the people in the 99c bracket (for god forbid I should want to charge in sterling) Let the american government use my money to buy staples for the white house typists, let billion dollar profit making power house Amazon absorb 65% of my profits in a process so devoid of human involvement I wonder if organic eyes will ever even see the figures.

Or I go the other way, I step out onto the road and say to all those around me 'Look. It's taken me five years to write this book. I love it like my own child, and I want you to love it too, but I don't see why the powerful should profit so disproportionally over the individual.' I hope when I wander down that road with my prices set at $2.99 and £1.45 people will understand that the extra 50p I've added to the book isn't because I'm greedy, I fully expect to sell less and probably make less because of it. That 50p is me making a very small stand and saying my hard work isn't something for others to exploit. Some of you may well disagree, and that's fine, like I say, I'm new to this. However I think I won't be alone in my view, and I'm happy to market what I think (considering some of the things out there I've read, or tried to read) is a damn decent book, for a very reasonable £1.45.

About Writing…

Out with the old and in with the new, it’s nice to set yourself out a clean slate every once in a while especially when the old slate had holes and a tendency to act irrationally. So I should say welcome to the new blog which goes along nicely with the new website, www.hollywebsteronline.co.uk the new Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/WebsterHolly and the new Facebook http://www.facebook.com/UnnaturalKingdom . All this newness is of course geared up to promote the new book, Blood Born, which is finally hitting the e-reader shelves on Halloween. Yes, I am that corny.

In order to kick off the new blog, I though I’d come at you with a theory (not the only or the all defining theory, just one among many) about writing, specifically creative writing, where the ideas come from and why sometimes writing the story out is the only thing that keeps you from going completely bonkers (I like the word bonkers, for some reason it makes me think of cats).

It’s often hard to really define where an idea comes from, since in my experience at least, it seems to happen without really any warning. Blood Born, for example, the initial catalyst for that idea was a singular line from a movie (‘there’s no such thing as safe sex with a werewolf’ - Cursed, 2005) within a few seconds of hearing the line two distinct if fairly basic characters and several scenes had popped into my head. I knew WHY they’d appeared but it was impossible to really say WHERE they’d appeared from since there was no conscious thought that went into their creation.

In an attempt to explain the process I took a little break from reality. Nothing new for me. I realised there must be something preceding the conscious imagination that picks the ideas out of the memory and feeds them to the imagination in chunks it can handle. I called this the Process of Uncensored Creativity (PUC). This odd little mind filter is, to my slightly twisted imagination, actually a little character all of its own. A strange hovering mechanical drone like creature inexplicably possessed of some level of independent consciousness. Looking like a cross between a Star Wars probe and something designed by HR Geiger, PUC hovers above the pit of my consciousness, its long jelly fish tentacles siphoning through the depths of my brain scavenging bits from every random sci-fi, fantasy, horror, book film TV show and documentary I’ve spent my whole life absorbing. PUC pulls out interesting strands here and there knits together outlandish characters and plotlines into a demented Frankenstein tapestry before waving it relentlessly in front of my imagination, matador style.

Now PUC isn’t exactly subtle, once it finds an idea it likes the taste of it will keep stitching on new bits to the end until it’s something like a magicians scarf, it just keeps going and going. I must take a moment to state that PUC mustn’t be ignored when it starts doing this, to do so risks being hounded night and day until you just can’t take it anymore. The only thing to really do is start writing, taking what PUC has handed out and moulding it, making it at least slightly believable (PUC doesn’t feel the need to make things believable). Only once an idea is written out will PUC back off and start working on something else.

Unfortunately by that point I’ve started seeing the potential, and I no longer need PUC to keep bugging me about it, I can do that fine by myself. Soon the story starts to take on a life of it’s own, and it seems mean to neglect it. PUC is happy enough to keep supplying extra little bits of information to keep the story ticking along, but the really hard work of fitting everything in, covering all the bases and making it flow isn’t something it’s concerned with.

In the end you’ve got a great little piece of fiction, and maybe a few weeks to recover before PUC starts up again. If you’re lucky.