It’s been a few weeks mostly because I’ve been swamped by edits. I’m still swamped by edits. Probably the less said about editing the better. Sometimes you get an editor who really gets what you’re trying to do and makes you feel great. Sometimes you get one you’re pretty sure wishes they were somewhere else and makes you feel like you shouldn’t be allowed to touch a keyboard. Sometimes you edit your own stuff and wonder ‘was I high when I wrote this crap?’ Regardless editing definitely deepens my depression much of the time.

So edits aside, what else have I been up to? Well okay editing Blood Red Roulette round two which is what is burning up most of my time. I edited and sent my SF novella off to the betas. I’m pretty happy with it. I didn’t go through too much ‘I hate this’ with this story. I hope that means it’s halfway decent. I was afraid it wouldn’t end up long enough but it did top out at 31K just long enough. I didn’t want to pad it The ending might still need work but I have a few weeks yet.

I also finished and sent in my flash fic for Queer Sci-Fi’s contest. The theme is Impact. I did a lesbian paranormal. I’m not sure about it in terms of the contest but I like it. I will tell you 300 words as the limit is brutal. It definitely teaches you how to pick what is absolutely necessary.

Last night I had beautiful snow. This morning it was melting so hard it sounded like rains and floods. I didn’t even get a picture of it. Sigh.

I wanted to talk a little bit about how being a ‘hobbyist’ has become something of a dirty word, like those authors are somehow lesser. I suppose by strict definition maybe but in reality, bullshit. I was speaking of this with a friend the other day. Sometime last year, coming out of a very long and dark depression in which I wrote very little (I’ve written as much in the first 7 weeks of 2018 as I had by April of last year, maybe even June), I realized something. I could be considered a hobbyist and I needed to come to peace with that.

And mostly I have. A little background for those who don’t know me, I was a medical doctor who was injured and can not longer practice (podiatry, diabetic care). I’m now a college professor. I have student loans that if I didn’t have income based repayment plans in place would total over 2,600 a month (my plan is about 1500 less than that). The realities of me living on my writing are unless I’m J K Rowling or James Patterson, I’m NOT going to live on my writing.

Even as a decent midlist author I couldn’t fund my life on my writing (at least not alone. Maybe if I had a well off significant other but I do not). Even before last year I had notice some very unsettling things. Thanks to blogs and the rest of social media, we all have a window into the lives of our favorite authors (or as much as they feel like sharing). I stumbled across Barbara Hambly’s blog. She was my hero in the 80s and 90s. She wrote cross genre (urban fantasy, fantasy, sci-fi and mystery) when everyone said you couldn’t but I knew I wanted to. I adored her James Asher series and yet here she was, just like me, teaching at a university and struggling to make ends meet. An author with dozens of books to her name and still with a day job.

THis week I saw Diane Duane nearly lost her house (her fans came through). Another author with dozens of books to her name, well known series like the Young Wizards and countless Star Trek credits almost failing to survive living on her writing.

Of course I don’t know their full stories or struggles but the point is it’s SO much easier said than done to living on your writing. So if having a day job makes me a ‘hobbyist’ then so be it but that doesn’t mean I’m NOT a real author because damn it, I am and so is every last one of us who write and have another job.

Just look around my Facebook friends’ list, I see doctors like me, vets, lawyers, professors, all jobs that took years of sacrifice and hard work to get there and why should we give that up when we can do both. And there are so many others out there working jobs they love and want to do both.

We are not lesser authors. We are simply authors like any other.

I’ve been struggling all weekend with the feeling of exhaustion coupled with the anxiety of coming up with character descriptions, blurb drafts and cover spec materials that make sense and are helpful. I have to admit it, this stuff stresses me out. It was pointed out to me that I overthink these things. Guilty. I’m good at that.

But what I do know is you’ll never get authors to be unanimous about anything but if you want to get close to that, let’s talk synopsis and blurb writing. I’ve yet to meet any of us who like it (Oh I’m sure they’re out there but I’m also pretty sure they’re the minority). Since it’s blurb writing I’m doing, let’s chat about this grindylow.

You can find lots of help out there like this one which seems more helpful than most How to write a blurb but in many ways it’s still not that helpful. Go ahead, look through Goodreads and Amazon, I’ll wait for you.

See what I mean? Bet you found a ton of really bad blurbs. You’ll get the ones that go one for like 8 paragraphs. Those are the ones where someone has confused synopsis with blurb. Generally if I see one that long, I tend to hop on over to the next book because I’m leery that if the author didn’t know you don’t write a 1000 word blurb, they probably don’t know a lot of other things that should happen before a book is published.

Others are too short, more like the elevator pitch. That’s not very helpful either. You want to hook a reader into buying your book. Two sentences might get our attention but it probably doesn’t give us enough to make an informed decision.

Lately I’ve been seeing a ton of them telling me how many 5 star reviews on Amazon the book has (since reviews do drive sales). That’s nice. No, really it is but that still doesn’t tell me much of what I need to know. If that’s all the blurb is about, all I know is some random stranger liked this book (and I assume it had a different blurb back then so they knew what the heck they were buying).

Others have been so confusing I’m still left with the feeling of what the hell is this? That is not what you want a potential reader feeling because that potential is probably going to be lost.

In working with Dreamspinner and Nine Star Presses they have us shooting for around 250 words. That seems right. You have some information but not too much. So at least now I have a goal. I know about how long it should be. Now what?

You need to use the few words to clue in the readers as to what they’re getting plot and genre wise. Recently I read a mystery that nowhere in the blurb did it hint at it being paranormal. Fine I like paranormal but a lot of people don’t. There were a ton of one star reviews from people who hadn’t been warned about that and you can almost see their point. Are you trying to lure in the cozy mystery market? Want the Christian fiction sales? Want the people who are looking for romance along with their science fiction? The blurb is one way to tell the potential reader that this is what they want or conversely what they don’t want (For example, I’m not terribly religious or political and if I see a blurb that mentions faith five times I can probably guess the book isn’t for me).

In writing M/M fiction you see a lot of people railing against those who also write het romance under the same name. ‘I can’t stand het romance and what if I buy one by accident?’ Really if the blurb is written correctly there should be zero chance of that happening. But I have seen it that you literally don’t know. One anthology I was in someone was disappointed that it was LGBT and sure enough the blurb didn’t in any way hint that it would be so unless you knew the publisher you had no clue. Now you have a disappointed reader and a lousy review.

I could probably go on and on about what I don’t and do want to see in a blurb (seriously if I see one more YA blurb that includes the words ‘super hot guy’ or ‘hunky bad boy’ I could probably cry) but that sort of thing is individual and no one will agree. But we all can probably agree a blurb needs to hint at the plot and genre, introduce you to the characters and the conflict they’re going to face without giving away everything.

And I still hate them.

As for my writing otherwise, it’s been a slow week but I’ve plodded along with my Lost Novella. I’ve come up with one more scene but now I’m in the high grass trying to figure out how to cut up the original short story and flesh it out without overdoing it. Wish me luck.

January turned out to be a better month than I could have hoped for. I’ve written over 12K between three projects. Last year that would have represented about three months worth of work. So what’s different? Part of it is I’m doing a little better depression wise. Not great, but better.

But before I get into how I’ve been handling 2018 so far let me share the best news which is Dreamspinner Publications has picked up Blood Red Roulette, my vampires in Vegas novel. I may have squealed a little. Might have done the happy hippo from Fantastia dance around the room. My friends know how much this story meant to me and how hard I worked to revamp it, no pun intended. It’s been years in the making and I don’t want to get into too much detail now (saving that for the blog tours to come). Just know that Arrigo and Luc are very near and dear to my heart and I’m so happy they’re seeing publication. Oh, I’m sure I’ll be whining later when the edits come for this beast but in the end it’ll be worth it.

Now back to how I’ve been tackling this month. I’ve given myself some accountability. I’m sticking with the ‘write every day’ challenge a little better than before and joined Inking It Out on dreamwidth, a weekly accountability group. I don’t care that I go to them with 100 words for the week, at least it’s 100 words more than the week before.

Also setting some deadlines has helped. I set my own deadlines for finishing These Haunted Hills and Nine Star Press’s deadline for the Lost anthology is helping with my Sacred Kin story (which is SO desperately in need of a title I can’t begin to express it). And I’ve been chatting and sprinting with Lex Chase several times a week and believe me having someone there to talk to helps. That’s how I work best and my usual partner for this over the last decade as a radically different work schedule than I do these days and we can’t sync up like we used to.

Finding a place in some social media groups has helped too. Some groups are very helpful. Others, of course, are not. All of them have their little (or not so little) dramas but I’m getting better at navigating those waters. I’ve been part of both Queer SciFi and Rainbow Snippets for a couple of years now. They’ve been a haven and a source of encouragement and a fountain of inspiration. We all need that and I’m thankful I’ve found them. Lately Nine Star Press’s author FB page has been all of that too and I’m still so glad they picked up my steampunk Christmas story.

Speaking of them, the expansion (yeah I know I said I wouldn’t do this again but we all knew I lied) of Modified and Sacred (see, definitely needs a better title!) into a novella for their lost open call is going better than I thought it would. I’m up to 22K and it’s looking like I could potentially pull this off. These Haunted Hills is going slower but it doesn’t have the firm deadline that the Lost story does so I’m fine with that. And somehow, somewhere I started a lesbian paranormal for another of Nine Star’s ongoing calls. We’ll see what happens with that.

Here’s hoping February goes as well as January.