Month: October 2020

Satisfaction and Frustration

I’ve been doing a lot of painting around the house the last month or so. I redid my kitchen because white cabinets are pretty but they get way too dirty way too easily. And I changed a wall in my bedroom from bright green to bright blue because I had leftover paint from the kitchen and there are more color combinations that go with a bright blue than a bright green and I needed a change.

Painting means thinking for me. I put on some good music and my mind wanders because it’s honestly a pretty mindless activity. (Which is probably why I usually get paint on the ceiling and floor when I paint.)

What I realized as I was doing all this thing was that overall I’m actually very satisfied with my life. I have a nice home, I have a dog I enjoy who actually leaves me to do my thing a large portion of the time, family things are stable at the moment, and I like how I spend my days lost in thought or writing. Even being locked down I really don’t mind. I still see family and most of my friends are out of state or out of country anyway. And I don’t mind being alone. I have books and TV and movies and music and honestly I like those more than most people.

But I had to think about it because I had a friend message me recently and say something about how I’d been on their mind a lot lately. Knowing this particular friend I knew that it was because they look at my life and think I must be miserable. No spouse, no kids, no trade-publishing deal, no “real job”.

(This is the sort of friend who when my trade-published friends announce a new release will automatically share on FB and congratulate them with exclamation marks but when I announce a new release will remain silent. Same friend who did read one of my early books and then informed me of that fact, told me they’d lost it somewhere when I went to visit, but did make sure to inform me that they hadn’t liked it that much. Which reminds me I need to reconsider my definition of friend.)

Anyway.

Their little comment made me stop and assess. Do I miss those things? Am I sorry I didn’t take a different path? If I won the lottery tomorrow would I change this?

Honestly, I wouldn’t. If I won the lottery tomorrow I might sell this house and buy a smaller one because I have two rooms and one bathroom worth of space that I really don’t need that just acquires stuff, and my street is currently festooned with signs that make me refer to it as the gauntlet of hate when I walk my dog.

I’d also probably put all my books out in audio and pay for really snazzy covers for some of them. (Maybe, if I could bring myself to go through the annoyance of doing so and because I wouldn’t care about the lost revenue from not publishing the audio through ACX.)

But when I put it that way I realized that I’m actually where I want to be, doing what I want to be doing.

The way I am in relationships I know that if I were in one right now I’d be the one carrying the emotional burden for my partner through this whole mess. Or my kids. I’d be shouldering 90% of their stress to help them through this. And I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to not have to do that. I have never been more glad to live alone than in this current mess of a year.

The flip side of that realization is that it doesn’t mean that life is perfect or happy or ideal.

Right now I have two new releases that aren’t live on Nook after five days because it’s currently a cluster over there. And I just regenerated about 50 ebook files that I need to upload to Amazon because they’ve now decided they don’t want people uploading .MOBI files anymore but would prefer an .EPUB even though .MOBI is their own damned format.

I’m also thoroughly convinced that Audible’s return policy that they push so heavily to users is just a way for them to take money from audiobook producers and put it in their own pocket.

So the money side of self-publishing is still highly frustrating to me and if I could live my life without those frustrations I’d want to. Each week it’s something. Scammers or dramas or ad issues or distributor issues. There’s always something flaring up or going wrong. And it’s almost always something that is out of my control.

Which most of life is.

So satisfaction and frustration. Doing what I want to be doing in the way I want to be doing it, but in a decidedly imperfect world. Which is much better than doing what I absolute hate in that same imperfect world. 🙂

Do You Engage Your Readers?

I have one writing rule: If it works, it works.

The only thing that should matter is whether what you wrote works for your readers.

Did you convey the story to them? (For fiction) Did they learn what you wanted to teach them? (For non-fiction)

Those are the ideals.

Often readers will read a different story than you tried to convey. And they will learn a different lesson than you tried to teach.

(For the record, I do not ever recommend using the automated keyword setting for a new AMS ad for a new book, as an example.)

But if you want a chance to get to that ideal you need to do one thing first: You need to engage your audience. You need to draw readers into your book and you need to keep them there.

This is where some of the one-size writing advice comes from like: Start with action! Have a clear conflict! Skip the prologue. (I actually agree with that last one 99 times out of 100.)

Those are all tips to help make a story engaging. But they aren’t requirements to make it engaging.

All you need to do (and I say this like it’s easy but it is not) is find a way to grab your target reader, bring them into what you’ve written, and keep them there until the end. How you do that is entirely up to you and who your target readers are.

So when you start to panic about “I write like this and it’s wrong” stop. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s the exact right way to engage your readers.