Winter Musings

Weather

This has been a long, cold, icy winter. While my suffering pales in comparison to what those in Boston have gone through, the winter has still been quite miserable. My commute to work has been like I'm on an Arctic expedition, with tug boats pulling my ferry through the endless ice.

The weather often makes it into my stories.  Volume 1 of the Stewards of Reed (the version that included an opening chapter describing the Village of Reed, anyway) recounted how the village was often shrouded in fog, rendering the summer months dreary and cool. This was a nod to all the cold summers I had spent in San Francisco. "It is snowing again" became a repetitive theme in Volume 2 (more than 60 inches of snow fell upon the Jersey Shore last winter).  Volume 3 currently includes a description of being stuck in the ice, with the imagery described courtesy of my recent commuting adventures.

No ABNA

Usually this time of year is busy with excitement surrounding the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA), a contest in which 10,000 people compete for the chance of having their book published by Amazon. I entered the contest in 2013 and 2014. The first year I was full of naive hope that someone would discover my book, fall in love, and propel my writing career forward. I was cut in the very first round.  The second year, I entered the contest with little expectation of success, but enjoyed participating the the forum where I could lurk and commiserate and laugh with fellow authors struggling to get their stories noticed.  Again, I was cut in the very first round. This year, Amazon canceled ABNA, and it is not clear if they have any plans to bring it back. Such a shame...

Pursuit of Perfection

I think I might have blogged about this before, but one of the things I learned from the ABNA forums was how driven some authors were for perfection.  They would spend YEARS writing and rewriting their books, just to get things "perfect". That is not my style (as anyone who has read my books can attest).  I'm sure there are plenty of things I could have done to make the story better ... but there reaches a point when the effort is not worth the return on investment.  This is especially true for subjective things like writing. What is perfection to one is boring and bland to another. Once I make the decision that my book is good enough to publish (and I only make this decision after my work has been reviewed by a professional editor), I don't look back. Usually...

 My very first edition of Volume 1: The Rise of Fallon, included an opening chapter that set the stage on the Village of Reed.  I tend to fall into the camp of readers who don't mind having a little background at the start of the story. Apparently, I am in the minority.  I had two motivating factors for ultimately removing that chapter:  (1) Several people had complained that the opening chapter was "boring"; and (2) for those lucky enough to advance to the second round of the ABNA contest, the first 5000 words of your manuscript is read, and in order to advance to the third round, it is important that those first 5000 words are compelling.  So, I ended up deleting the first chapter and paring down the text in the early part of the book so that the first 5000 words reached a more interesting point in the plot line.

Anyone who purchases Volume 1 now will read a slightly different book than those who happened to purchase the first edition.  And so it goes...