My sister, consummate reader, gets angry at Penguin

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My sister is a voracious reader and book-aholic. I have her and my mother to thank for the reading–and, later, the writing–bug that bit me early.

Reading, along with horses and dogs, is an absolute passion for her. She routinely buys whole series of authors she likes, often multiple times (her dogs think of them as chew toys), often in hard cover, often in the Kindle edition.

One of the authors she would follow anywhere on the planet, if asked, is Charlaine Harris. She specifically loves the Sookie Stackhouse series and would trade pints of blood for them if that were the going currency.

But not this time. When the latest Sookie Stackhouse book came out in Kindle format just 16 cents less than the hard cover, she lost it.

I’ll let her tell the story in her blog post, Hey Penguin, Bite Me.

How Writing is Like Getting Lost on the Way to Work

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Friends of mine recently asked me how I felt about my writing. I found myself describing how and why I thought I was getting better, why I felt I was able to sit down and write with little hesitation, and how this was profoundly different than the way I approached my writing just a few years ago. I cast about for a good analogy to describe the feeling and this is what I came up with.

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A Novel’s Journey: A Reason to Live

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Almost four years ago, an idea for a crime fiction series wriggled its way into my subconscious. Although I’ve always enjoyed reading Parker, Child, and Crais, I was hankering to write about someone who wasn’t always right, wasn’t indestructible, and had flaws and problems that weren’t of his own making…but had to be solved anyway.

The protagonist I started noodling with became retired Washington DC homicide detective Marty Singer and his first novel, A Reason to Live, is so close to done I can taste it. Final edits are done and only the formatting and launch remain.

I thought this might be a good time to recount where it all started.

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Self-publishing as Meaningful Work

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There is a passage in Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing book Outliers that, at its heart, speaks volumes about why writers should self-publish.

[T]hree things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our works fulfills us. …Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.

Over and over again on websites and in personal correspondence, I hear writers who have chosen to self-publish talk about how energized (or re-energized) they are. While there’s the inevitable grousing about low-sales numbers or promotions gone haywire, rarely are there complaints about the work itself. I know I find myself ready to write every day, eager to get to the page and get my latest words down.

That’s because, according to Gladwell’s definition, self-publishing is meaningful work.

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Correcting Mistakes with Errnet

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One of the challenges facing indie writers is how to recreate the editorial support that a traditionally published author receives (or is supposed to receive). If you take your writing seriously, having a handful of volunteer readers isn’t enough; you need true editorial help.

There are many types of editors, however: substantive editing, line editing, copy-editing, proofreading. All of these steps and stages are important, but in my own case, I felt that there was no substitute for substantive editing since it requires a high degree of experience, knowledge of the genre I was writing in (crime fiction), and a kind of understanding of the whole project, not just individual pieces. Consequently, I hired my own at considerable cost and it was worth it.

Since I don’t live under a money-tree, however, I hoped to cut a few corners by looking for proofreading alternatives. This is still an important step, but one I hoped I could look for a more automated solution.

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