Friday, April 15, 2011

What I Did This Week - April 15

As usual, hit the blogs.



Found out that Photoshop is hard, yo. There is a learning curve. But luckily my daughter Cadia is both brilliant and well-schooled, so she is giving me a crash course in what I need to know.

Susan and I finished the final edit on the second Maddie Pryce novel, Director's Cut, so it moves onto proofreading. We are so happy with Director's Cut that we realize the previous novel, Darker By Degree, needs to be spruced up to be just as good. This realization if followed by brainstorming, which washes away some of our previous conventions and necessitates the need for a new character, the dropping of a whole wishy-washy chapter, and lots of new action. Great, but time-consuming. Which brings us to the editorial part of the post.

Writers always have to grapple with a time crunch. So many ideas, so little time. When you add the burdens of learning self-publishing, it sometimes feels like a cinderblock or three has been carelessly balanced on your head. Between home life, work life, writing life, now you've got more? Take blogging, for instance, it's not just the transfer of ideas or the sharing of information, it's self-marketing and research. Reading other people's blogs and commenting, writing one of your own, it's an important step is increasing the public's awareness that you exist. It a channel for showcasing your books when they're published. Blogging is not going to make or break you in itself, but when nobody knows who you are or what you write, you need to take every opportunity to put yourself out there. And to make blogging count, you've got to cross-promote it just as hard as you're cross-promoting your writing.

My goal is to post on both my blogs daily (or at least every weekday), but it's hard. Not only do I have to find the time to write a post, but I have to come up with something cool or interesting or worthwhile to say. Aye, there's the rub. I feel like I've been channeling all my cool/interesting/worthwhile into the new outline for the rewrite, and there's precious little left over. But next week is another week and I'll keep plugging away. This weekend the peeps go camping, and in the relative quite I'm going to finish the the 7-chapter-arc rewrite that I spent 12 hours yesterday ironing out. If anything else cool or interesting or worthwhile comes to my attention in the meantime, you'll be the first to know.

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