I am putting together the preliminary information and notes for a story I will write this week, because Mr Publisher and Mr Editor are waiting for it, and we do not want to keep them waiting, do we?
The story is an adventure thriller with some urban fantasy elements (proper urban fantasy, not vampires shagging werewolves), and it’s planned to develop across a fair portion of Europe as the main character keeps one step ahead of her antagonists.
A pursuit story, in other words.
And then you wake up and find your blog color palette has been changed.
Not that I had anything to do about it – apparently during the night WordPress changed its “website identity” settings, and changed my dark brown accents to pale blue, as you probably can see.
I find it ugly and, also, irritating.
An off-handed reminder that by hosting Karavansara on their free servers I am not, after all, the owner of this place, nor do I really have any control of this blog.
Now I’ll have to throw away some time trying to work out a way to bring back the look of “my” blog.
I have checked out the new tools and options – now WordPress comes with a series of pre-set color palettes that are, in general, uniformly ugly.
And I mean eye-bleeding ugly.
But hey, now you can set your look-and-feel with a single click, like a good chimp.
I am quite obviously turning into an old man, rambling about the good old days, when we could set our own blog colors and fonts…
Ennio Morricone wrote the soundtrack for dozens of movies and basically provided musical accompaniment for the dreams of a lot of people out there.
He is gone now, but his music remains.
Music like this…
Yes, that’s Harpo Marx.
Yes, that’s Amelia Earhart.
A few days ago I was told (once again) that I should find me an alias (as if…) to “differentiate my offer” and “avoid confusing my readers” – the poor creatures being of the sort, apparently, that might be shocked and confused to find I write historical fantasy, science fiction, occasionally horror, thrillers and adventure.
And confused readers apparently stop buying your stories.
Now, I usually assume my readers are strong-willed enough not to be scared off by the fact that a story of mine does not fall in the same genre as the previous. And indeed, I usually point out a number of excellent writers that wrote across all the spectrum of fiction without changing their names.
I usually mention C.J. Cherryh as a good example, or Tanith Lee, or Poul Anderson, or Jack Vance.
And let’s admit it, it is fitting that a post about the endless reworking / rewriting / tweaking / revising we do to our work in order to push the finish line as far as possible should have a second part.
I mean, the first was not quite finished, right?
Well, here is where I talk about academia, roleplaying games, and “the funny incidents that happen when you try and make your living as a writer” (remember? this was the topic of the comic book I was told to start posting instead of these useless words I am putting on my blog and nobody reads anyway).
Continue readingI’ve got another bunch of revisions from my current client, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the gentleman is a victim to something we (meaning, we that write regularly, to a market, for a living) should know quite well: it’s the fear of finishing.
I’ve seen people crash and burn because of that.
I do not know what the psychological mechanism actually is, but there is this increasing sense of anxiety bordering on panic that sometimes settles in when you approach the end of a story you are writing. You suddenly feel the need to re-read, revise, re-write, start it all over. What up to yesterday was quite fine, now is not that good anymore.
Because you are so close to sending it off to the editor, or to the publisher, or to the Amazon KDP oompa-loompas, and you can’t do that unless this is absolutely perfect and right now quite clearly it is not.
I believe that becoming a professional writer means also being able to overcome this fear, being able to say “his is enough, this is as good as it will ever be, let’s put it out there and see if it can cope.”
Considering my client is availing himself of the services of a ghostwriter, he should trust me enough to live through this last phase easily.
But this whole project has been based on a hard core of mistrust in my abilities, and as a consequence, right now, my client is panicking, and there is nothing I can do but let him exhaust himself.
I could try and explain it to him again, but he would not listen anyway.
On to writing my own stories to fill the vacuum while I wait.
Karavansara 