Current Events > CE Writing topic -- This Time It Won't Purge? Edition

(+) Yeah! (+)

M3sterybumper posted...

I think @SpacialEntropy might be Artisan?

Correct. Haven't really been writing much the last week or so, more interested in drawing for some reason.

on chapter 4 of my fourth rewrite (not really a rewrite but more editing)

Adding italicized thoughts is definitely making it feel closer to the MC

and i almost wish i didn't know how it ended...reading it for the first time in 4 months, I'm realizing its got a decent mix of pacing and mystery.

yeah i think my favorite is juxtaposing the thought with the dialogue that comes right after

let's you know how much of a liar the character is haha

I'm 25% done writing the first draft of the sequel to my last book. :)

It's gonna be a loooot shorter than that doorstopper lol.
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spanky1 posted...

I'm 25% done writing the first draft of the sequel to my last book. :)

It's gonna be a loooot shorter than that doorstopper lol.

damn flying by! End of July will mark the 1 year anniversary of me starting this project.

I am putting my novel on hold.
I have started a new short story but now I'm stuck on that too.

Has anyone ever written to achieve an a e s t h e t i c rather than plot or story?
I found a new muse in RDR the animator/illustrator and want to write to achieve a visual aesthetic and don't really care about some killer story or anything.

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I havent. My mind works better with plot

Mine, too, evidentially.
I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with high-octane, yet slow vaporwave funky jam of a story.

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I've found giving myself the 4 months or so distance is making this edit different

instead nuking the paragraph and rewriting the same thing in a different way, I'm more likely to change what actually happens (usually with smaller details that can be changed without affected entire plot).

Maybe it was burnout....I would write for about 4 hours a day when I was first creating the story

Man I'd kill to be able to make a graphic novel Scott Pilgrim style.

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what is stopping you

I have zero artistic talent.
Zero.

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collaboration time!

Write the story
Find someone who can draw
Build a v1

Maaaybe, but I'd likely have to find an artist that has a lot of faith in my writing vision and that might be pretty hard.

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True

Find someone who wants to do a graphic novel as badly as you, but has zero writing skill

a perfect match

M3sterybumper posted...

That's kind of hard to do. Online at least.

definitely! most things worth doing are hard to do

and if it were easy, everyone would do it!

Maybe I can into a very simple animation style and write the story that way.

In other news I started a new new short story at the suggestion of a friend. Something simple to get me back in the grrove. Can't wait to share with you all, possibly.

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You could likely go to an art site like deviant art or whatever and find a person whose art is to your liking and does similar concepts to the novel. See if they wanna collaborate. Id imagine youd want to have a script to show them or even a few rough rough sketches to show some vision.

artists are a weird bunch...they like to create and if its a passion project, I find the creation tends to be better or at least done with more pride.

if the plan is to sell it, I think there are a whole bunch of guidelines...you could probably write a script, complete, send it to an agent to get representation, and they likely have illustrators or you could shop around using the fact that you have an agent willing to shop it around. Probably easier to get artists to do it without money upfront

I'm participating in a writing swap over on RPFF. we both posted a short story, and now we're going to give commentary and feedback on each other's work

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Yeah that's true. This is all up in the air anyways, I'm not even close to a workable opening for the story yet.
Thanks for the advice though, guys.

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Also let me know if any y'all wanna be tagged as Writing Friend, so I can recognize you outside of this topic!

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DuranOfForcena posted...

whoa, that board is still alive and kickin'? i used to go there all the time and participate in what was dubbed at the time "NRPGs", Novel-RPGs, which looking back at it now was basically collaborative novel writing. i had a strong distaste for the more videogamey structured projects there, and especially the fanfiction ones. that was one of the first real homes i made for myself on this site. maybe i'll give it a gander again now. i had thought that the board had been mostly dead for awhile now.

it's small, but not dead. there are a few projects going on there. some good writers in the bunch.

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i haven't written in a month and a half because i've been so preoccupied with covid on my mind but i'm about to pick it back up

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DuranOfForcena posted...

whoa, that board is still alive and kickin'? i used to go there all the time and participate in what was dubbed at the time "NRPGs", Novel-RPGs, which looking back at it now was basically collaborative novel writing. i had a strong distaste for the more videogamey structured projects there, and especially the fanfiction ones. that was one of the first real homes i made for myself on this site. maybe i'll give it a gander again now. i had thought that the board had been mostly dead for awhile now.

Yep! Me and some others still have "discussion topics" for an old NRPG, Siege, but we talk about anything but RPing now. :P

There really was a magical time in the 2000s where RPing seemed like a legit writing hobby. Now you see it and people just think of wizard hat and robe jokes.
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Welp, she got rejected a second time. Sigh.
I was really hoping this was gonna be it :/

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ApherosyLove posted...

Welp, she got rejected a second time. Sigh.
I was really hoping this was gonna be it :/

keep going! You need at least 99 rejections before youre considered an author

or so they say. Keep pushing

The problem is that my girlfriend is, and I hate saying this but it's true, used to getting everything she wants. Life just sorta works out for her.
So when something doesn't go to plan, say getting a book rejected, she becomes all depressed and disillusioned.
She's considering giving up already.

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https://imgur.com/uuOlUKu

some motivation

Romes187 posted...

https://imgur.com/uuOlUKu

some motivation

Idk what this means.

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It shows the difference between doing just a little bit each day, and slacking just a little bit the other way for a year

I'm at 27K words on my sequel. :P

The goal is 80K. So far I'm on track for that.
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Well yeah I still told her, but it isn't doing any good right now. She's very stubborn and irrational.

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Hi all. Back to writing now (this is Artisan). Still haven't written in the hospital book the publishers wanted, but I know where to pick up when I do. Gave up writing in that vignette book because I read it non-depressed and with some more objective detachment from not writing in it for a while and I decided it wasn't nearly as good as I thought lol.

Have two projects I'm working on right now: a novel with some elements of mystery, intrigue and secret government operations to it that I'm writing the more "Gardener" style and so don't have everything plotted out, and a short story that I'm pretty excited about. I really enjoy "pull the rug out from under you" type of stories and I think I've got a good one. I don't think a lot of people will be happy with the ending, but that's a bit of the point. Not to be edgy or spiteful, but because it's a plausible though incredibly depressing scenario and no happy ending was ever really possible from the start.

Nice!

I'm chugging through my edit/revision. Chapter 12....actually digging the story since I forgot some details so its almost feeling new again.

Romes187 posted...

Nice!

I'm chugging through my edit/revision. Chapter 12....actually digging the story since I forgot some details so its almost feeling new again.

It's always nice to go back to something and find it just as enjoyable or better than you remember.

DuranOfForcena posted...

welcome back! good luck on your new projects. that's too bad about having to abandon the other one, but sometimes it's best to know that you just gotta cut your losses and move on.

Thanks! And yeah, I was in a very, very dark place when I was heavily writing in that book, and reading it through a clearer head I think there are some really great sentences in there, and some good ideas, but mostly it's a self-pitying journal of my thoughts and feelings, and that's okay, really. It was therapeutic to write in it each day. But as a commercial work or even as something to be read by others for anything other than just curiosity I don't think there's much potential there.

I'm very much taken with this new short story though (title is "The Gardens We Grow"), and it's something familiar yet different for me. It started off as one of my usual Twilight Zone inspired stories and then I decided to make it completely real and not connected to anything fantastical. Just a straight story with a pretty dark and upsetting ending. Not really the kind of thing I think is going to win me any awards, but certainly something I don't think anyone will see coming. I'm kind of disappointed that the idea only lends itself to a short story instead of a full book (would be way too tedious as a novel/novella) though. Don't want to be done writing it so quickly.

Wondering what the best play is to sell ebooks

seems like you give away a few chapters then charge which is fine as it gives the folks a chance to see if its for them.

anyone have experience with that? Id imagine its just a setting when you create the ebook but Im not quite there yet.

probably setup a landing page with the kindle link and blast it out to a Facebook audience or something. I wonder how many book ads people see though and how often they convert

also saw there are amazon options which is nice but I think one of them is a give all the rights away to amazon thing and I thought the point here was to keep your IP

Well amazon has the "look inside" feature, which shows off the first several pages, so it's kinda built in.

You dont have to give all rights to amazon. To enroll in the kindle unlimited program or whatever it's called, it has to be exclusive to amazon for that time period, but they're still your rights, it still belongs to you. When you take it off kindle unlimited, you could put it up on other platforms.

But I mean, it's not like you can traditionally publish after you've self published a work online anyway, so you might as well go balls to the wall with amazon if you go that route. My experience is you do want to go full kindle unlimited, as that's where most of my income comes from on amazon. More people are willing to read your book if it's free than if they gotta pay money. The cut you get is about half a penny per page read. Get a thousand pages read to make 4 or 5 bucks!

I havent advertised in earnest yet because it's not worth it until you get up a bigger collection of books, but from what I hear, simply advertising through the amazon ad program itself is the best way to do it.

They also say you should utilize advance reader services to get reviews right at release. That's kinda terrifying to me. What if you through all that trouble and these guys leave 1 start reviews. :/
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