Author Archives: kingmidget

Over on Twitter (yes, it is still Twitter), I “met” another writer last year. Saffron Asteria, who is launching a website intended to support indie writers. It is called Indiosyncrasy.

Saffron has done a huge amount of work in the last few months to get the website up and running. Each author who has signed up has a page dedicated to their published work. Each week, a author is featured on the landing page with more information about their writing and themselves. She also posts a weekly podcast in which she talks about writing with the authors who have signed up. A weekly newsletter to subscribers.

She has much more in store. Writing exercises. Maybe writing competitions with prizes. At some point, she will also have sections for other professionals who contribute to publishing success — editors, cover artists, etc.

Check the website out. Saffron is doing a huge amount of work on the site and supports indie authors like nobody I’ve ever seen (except maybe for Berthold).

When you’re writing, what do you see in your mind’s eye?

I think I have two perspectives while I write. When I’m writing a scene, it’s like a helicopter view. I’m above the scene and seeing things from an elevated position. But what I’m seeing is what the characters are doing. I’m not necessarily seeing other things that are there or nearby. My attention is focused entirely on the characters.

When I’m writing dialogue, I’m standing in the middle of the people talking. But the weird thing is that I don’t actually see their faces. I’m looking at their chests or torsos. And I’m pretty close up. Again, this means that I’m not really seeing the environment they are in while they talk.

I wonder if this is why I struggle so much with description and providing details of the environment when I write.

For a few years, I attended a monthly writing workshop led by Zoe Kiethley. A lot of her exercises were designed to get the writer outside of that narrowly-focused perspective and see and hear and smell and touch other elements of the scenes in which our stories take place.

Unfortunately, she is no longer offering those workshops and I feel like that has significantly and adversely affected my story telling. I really need to get back to seeing the big picture as I write a story. To take the time to focus on the details that may not be apparent, but can help establish the context and environment the characters are in.

So … what do you see when you’re writing?

— Mark Paxson

Audrey Driscoll just posted to her blog about the differences between “writer brain” and “editor brain.” It prompted me to write this post, which I’ve been pondering for a couple of weeks.

Awhile back, somebody tweeted something about writers who don’t think they’re good writers. I replied that has pretty much been my constant mental battle. I’ll never consider myself a good writer.

I’m just a writer. Because I just write.

Here are some things I see other writers talk about that I don’t do, or don’t think about while I’m writing. But first, a reminder. I’m a pantser of the truest sort. I come up with an idea, typically a scene, or a situation for a character, and then start writing. Which leads to a few things.

I don’t outline. I don’t do character sketches or character interviews. I don’t have a board on my wall where I keep track of things, or what some may do in terms of a mood board. I don’t come up with playlists to listen to while I write. I do nothing to create a physical environment to write a specific story. I just write.

While I write, I don’t consciously think about character development. Or plot development. I start with the idea and go from scene to scene. I don’t think about a three act structure or that a precipitating incident must occur by a certain point in the story. (Which is actually concerning me in my current effort because I spend thousands of words getting the main character to the setting at which all of the drama will occur.). I just write.

A co-worker asked me this week to review a draft brochure she had written. She wanted me to help her identify where she could convert passive sentences to active. I had to tell her that I really don’t know the difference between the two. That concept doesn’t even register while I’m writing. To help her, I had to Google ‘active v. passive’ and learn what the difference is. Same too with show, don’t tell. I think I know this a little bit better, but it still is something that I simply don’t think about while I’m writing. I just write.

Nor do I really think of either of those things while editing. Which is another thing I don’t really do. I don’t do any developmental editing on my writing. I don’t do line editing (I’m not even sure what that is, except what it sounds like … reading a story line by painful line.) What I do is edit as I go, but it’s mostly just finding typos, fixing some word choices, and that type of thing. And also, finding inconsistencies that have to be fixed. Beyond that, however, I don’t do much. And after I type ‘The End,’ I do a read through and tweak a few things here and there and that’s it.

The local writers group I belong to is putting on a workshop in a few months. The title is Crafting Compelling Characters. Based on my approach to writing, I can’t imagine how this works. I add details about characters as I go, without any real forethought or planning. Oh, Hannah and Alexander have finally arrived at the lighthouse, 17,000 words into the story. Let’s show a little more about how they are each reacting to arriving on the rock, and let’s reveal a little more about Solomon Thrice, who will be the bad guy. But none of it is really done consciously in my mind as “character development.” It’s just a part of the story and how to get from Point A to Point B to Point C. As I said, I just write.

(Edited to add: Also, I didn’t start writing as I left the womb. Nor did I start writing as a child, a teenager, or a young adult. In fact, I hated writing for much of that time. I only started writing fiction when I was almost 40 years old. I wonder if the lack of writing at an earlier age helped or hindered me now.)

I have absolutely no doubt there are many other things good writers do that I don’t do, or think about. I’m curious … what are the things you do to try to improve your writing to achieve th level of being a good writer? What are the things you don’t do that you think could help?

— Mark Paxson

Audrey Driscoll writes some great stuff about writing. Her latest is about rules and an experiment she ran. Go read her post to see what it was.

One of the things that bothers me about all of these social media “conversations” about the rules of writing is that I wonder if anybody actually reads a story with the “rules” in mind. I don’t. Of course, that may be because I don’t believe in the “rules,” but still I read a story for the enjoyment of it, for the escape it provides. While I’m reading something, I’m not paying attention to sentence structure or word choice or the use of adverbs. I’m just reading the story.

Isn’t that what a writer’s objective should be? Isn’t that also a reader’s objective? To fall into the story and stay there until the end. I don’t know of any rule I’ve heard of that would necessarily help me with that as a reader.

Yes, there are certain things that can cause me to lose interest in a story. I think my two biggest pet peeves are (a) too much description; and (b) too many characters introduced too quickly. Either of those two things can pull me out of a story pretty quickly. The first because I get bored by description and the second because it just gets too confusing too quickly. But for the rest of it … I want to read the story the way the writer wanted to tell it.

Meanwhile, a while back I saw list of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (My note: the old, avoid cliches nonsense.)
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

After I saw this list, I came across a completely different list that purported to be Vonnegut’s rules for writing. So, who knows? Maybe this is all BS and Vonnegut never said any of these.

Here’ is my question … do any of you think about things like this while you’re writing? I’ll be honest. I almost never do. Yes, occasionally, I decide something is too cliched, but frequently decide not to change it because if something is commonplace than it can connect to a reader more easily. Not everything in every story has to be creative and uniquely yours.

And yes, particularly when I’m editing something, I may look for words that can be cut out to make my sentences less wordy.

But I just don’t see how I could ever keep all of these things, rules, in my mind while I’m writing or even while I’m editing. The whole process would take even longer than it already does if I had to think about all of these things.

At the end of the day, what I do is … just write. I’m curious though to hear what the process looks like for people who are more concerned with these types of issues.

Which leads me to another rule, but one for publishing rather than writing. Trigger warnings. I feel like we’ve discussed this before here, but I saw this post on the topic and found it as spot on as possible on this topic.

I worked on putting together an anthology recently. One of the writers wanted a trigger warning for her story because it involved a suicide. The only problem is that the suicide was essentially the end of story reveal. I talked her out of it for that reason and suggested that, if the anthology got published, we could have a generic trigger warning for the entire anthology. Due to the theme for the collection, most stories, if not all, were going to be a bit dark.

Other writers involved in the project were dead set against any kind trigger warning. I side with them. Part of reading is the discovery and it is fiction, so none of it is real. I don’t want to discount the very real trauma people experience and can experience in reading a story, but I’m with the author of that blog post. The genre of a story, the blurb of the story, and other aspects of the book will give, or should give, enough of a clue about the content for most readers, and as writers our job isn’t to hold a reader’s hand as they read. It is to tell them a story, that at times can be unsettling.

— Mark Paxson

People who follow me in other parts of the internet likely know that I am a huge fan of Hozier, an Irish musician whose very first single was Take Me To Church. The song was a huge hit becoming one of the first songs to hit one billion streams on Spotify. He followed I up with one of my favorite albums — Wasteland, Baby.

I’ve rarely heard him talk about his art, but listening to his music, I can tell he takes this stuff seriously. He touches on a lot of themes in his music and sings with an appealing passion. I saw him live in September 2019 at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento. The auditorium is a historic place that only seats a few thousand people. Hozier is now performing in much larger arenas.

Anyway, that’s the back story to why I’m sharing this video. A friend shared this with me a few days ago and I listened to it while I weeded the front yard yesterday. There are a lot of things in here that I think creative people deal with, but that a lot of us don’t necessarily talk about.

I share it here … just because. I found it interesting and refreshing to hear that a man who has achieved such monumental success in such a short time struggles with many of the same things I do.

— Mark Paxson

I’ve been pondering writing a post about a negative experience I had with an agent on Twitter, but decided to let it go and write about something more positive. A few weeks ago, Maddie Cochere wrote about her “habit tracker.”

The idea intrigued me and seemed to along with my theme for 2024 — Turning Bad Habits Into Good Habits. I spend a lot of time doing not much of anything, looking at my phone more than I should, and just not getting enough things done. Not just the things I have to do, but the things I want to do, that I claim that I enjoy doing. Like writing.

After reading Maddie’s post, I decided I would try something similar to see if it could help me turn bad habits into good habits. As usual with these things, I’m taking a little bit of a different spproach. Some of the good habits aren’t necessarily daily in nature. For instance, one of them is just a reduction in screen time on my phone (which my phone only tells me about once a week). And another is to get outside for a bike ride. Again, not something I can do every day, but that I want to get to once or twice a week once the winter weather is over.

I’m also not committing do do the “daily” activities every single day, or a certain number of days a week. Instead, I have five “daily” things on my habit tracker. I plan on adding more, modifying what I already have, and trying to keep the list fresh.

For purposes of this blog, one of the habits on the tracker is to write at least one hour. If I do, I get to check the box. And this is where the reward comes in. Much like children in kindergarten who have a sticker chart, or a card system where the color of the card in their slot indicates what kind of day they had, there is an intrinsic reward in being able to check the box (or get the sticker or the green card).

After a few months of struggling with getting started on my current WIP, I started this habit tracker about three weeks ago. In that time, I’ve added 5,000 words to that WIP. That may not sound huge to you, but for me … I had written less than 2,000 in the previous few months, so those 5,000 words are huge.

As stated above, my goal isn’t to write every single day because I know that’s not possible. But instead, of the five things I have on the tracker, I want to be able to check three of them off each day. I don’t manage that every day, but the tracker helps me keep these habits in mind and motivates me to do them in the quiet moments when I would normally just stare at my phone. In the three weeks I’ve been doing this, my phone screen time has gone down by 5%, 10%, and 8%. I’ve been exercising more, napping less, and writing more.

So … if you find yourself stuck in a rut and want to turn things around, give kindergarten a try and reward yourself when you so good.

— Mark Paxson

Last year, I started going to craft fairs to sell my books and photography. I also did one book fair. So far, I’ve done three events with plans for more this year. All told, I’ve probably sold around 25 books via those three events.

But they have exposed me to a brand new question. I offer six books. A couple of novels, two novellas, and two short story collections. The question is … which one is your favorite?

I’m about to write a blog post for my personal blog where I attempt to answer that question in detail. (I won’t do so here because when we started this blog, one of my conditions was that this is not a place for any of us to promote our own works. We may mention them at times when discussing various aspects of our writing life, but I feel like a post where I talk about why I like or don’t like my books would cross the line.)

It’s like being asked which of your children is your favorite. The honest answer is that none of your children are. That you love each of them and likely for different reasons for each child. And, if you’re really honest, there are also times when you can’t stand each of your children, likely also for different reasons for each.

I’m curious though, for those of you with multiple books or stories published, if any of you deal with this question and how you answer it.

— Mark Paxson

Yes. I’m full of questions today…

I see this everywhere these days. In published books I read. In manuscripts I read for other writers. Typically when I tell a writer about this, the reaction is more or less a shrug of their shoulders. But …

What I see a lot of are books written in third person past tense that include words that shift briefly to present tense. Here’s an example from The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah:

You will be the adult now, her father had said to Vianne as they walked up to this very house for the first time. She’d been fourteen years old, her eyes swollen from crying, her grief unbearable. In an instant, this house had gone from being the family’s summer house to a prison of sorts. Maman had been dead less than two weeks when Papa gave up on being a father. Upon their arrival here, he’d not held her hand or rested a hand on her shoulder or even offered a hand kerchief to dry her tears.

Another example from the same book:

Vianne had been in so much pain it was impossible to think of anyone else, especially a child as willful and impatient and loud as Isabelle. Vianne still remembered those first days here: Isabelle shrieking and Madame spanking her.

When I searched for the word “here” in the book on my kindle I found numerous examples of this. But it’s not just “here” that to me sounds like present tense inserted into a past tense narrative. For example, in the middle of a paragraph like above, the line might be something like, “she felt upset now” even though the paragraph is about an event that happened in the past. And it’s not told in first person. It’s third person.

To me, words like here in the above and the occasional use of other words like now are present tense words. They don’t belong in a narrative that is told in past tense.

Am I missing something? Because I really do see this everywhere. I don’t know if when I read for pleasure, I’m just catching things that I never saw before or if this is a new development. Or … am I just imaging that this is a problem and it really isn’t?

— Mark Paxson

In my ocassional, but neverending, quest to find some promotion efforts that will succeed, A writer friend we talk about occasionally in our video chat has told me that she has success with Facebook ads. After months and months of delay, I finally tried two ads over the last couple of weeks.

My cover artist charged me $25 to design each ad and I spent about $50 to run each ad on Facebook. I won’t claim to be an expert at this point, but here’s my experience.

You have to have a business page on FB to be able to run ads. You can’t run ads if all you have is a personal page.

There appear to be two different ways to create ads on FB. There is the “Create Ads” option and the “Ads Manager” option. As near as I can tell, they create two different types of ads. What the differences are I have absolutely no idea, but the Create Ads option isn’t as advanced or complicated as the Ads Manager option.

I made my first ad with te Create Ads option and that led to a rookie mistake. I believe, without any evidence of course, that the best ad is one that is clickable so the viewer can click on it and go straight to where the product can be purchased. I did not do that with this first ad and when I went back and looked throughout the Create Ads option, I couldn’t see anywhere to make it clickable in that fashion.

No, instead, it appears that viewers clicking on my first ad were given an option to send me a message or to view my business page on FB. The result was that I got messages from several people begging me for free copies of my book and several others who wanted to sell me their promotion “expertise.”

I set my budget for the ad at $8 a day for a week. I have no idea in the Create Ads option how that money is spent. Unlike in the Ads Manager, where it describes it as an auction, the Create Ads option doesn’t say anything about what happens with that $8 a day. (To be honest, I have no idea how an “auction” works when running ads.)

After realizing that I screwed up the clickable nature of the first ad, I burrowed a little deeper into the FB ad mechanism and decided to use the Ads Manager option for my second ad. I found where to make the ad clickable to take the viewer to where the book is available and added the link from Draft2Digital that shows all of the stores where the ebook is available.

I didn’t get any messages for the second ad like I did for the first ad, so I think I got the clickable function right. But here’s where one of the biggest problems is. While FB allows you to preview your ad, all that does is give you the chance to see what the ad looks like. It doesn’t actually allow you to see how the ad works … as in clicking it to see where the click takes you. As a result, I simply don’t know for sure how the ads function.

The end result of this is that the first ad reached 2,205 viewers. The second ad reached almost 13,000 viewers. What those viewers did when they saw the ad is mostly a mystery. I’m assuming that the vast, vast, vast majority just scrolled right on by.

Since the ads ran, after several weeks without any sales of any of my books, I got four sales for the book covered by the first ad and three sales for the book covered by the second ad. I believe there may be a few more that wander in as sales from the different channels get reported to Draft2Digital (not all channels report them immediately). But it won’t be enough to cover my expenses.

Ad design costs of $50 plus ad distribution costs of $100 versus about $10 in revenue. Well, again, the math on this just doesn’t work out.

I know that there are those who can make these ads work. There are secrets buried in the process of making and running these ads. The Ads Manager has different “objectives” for the ads. Maybe if I had chosen a different objective, I would have done better. Maybe if I understood the auction method better I could have tailored the ads better. There are all sorts of tricks to this. Tricks that I’m completely clueless about. I found a lot of the “helpful” parts of the Facebook ad info, to be either completely devoid of any actual help or to be like reading Greek.

So … I guess the thing is that doing something like an ad is for those who really get into the details and learn the ins and outs of how ads work.