Nick Bryan

Writing About Writing

Doin’ HTML Till The Break Of Dawn – Technical Self-Publishing Time

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MAXIMUM HTML

I have been locked in my room at my tiny corner desk, working on the process of turning my upcoming self-published book into beautiful HTML. It has taken a long time. I can neither confirm nor deny that I was up at 4AM Thursday morning, listening to the birds tweeting outside (and, for once, not tweeting much myself) working on exciting tasks such as reinserting italics.

As you may gather from this nuts-and-bolts self-pub stuff, the day of the Hobson & Choi release is getting very close now. So close, in fact, that I may put the cover up next week, announce the title, blurb, maybe even a date. I’m 90% sure that will happen.

But for now, here’s a blog post about the experience of processing a book into HTML. This is not a walkthrough, because there are plenty of those and I don’t have sufficient advice to justify bringing another one into the world. The posts I used to guide me was this one by Guido Henkel, it’s pretty comprehensive.

Hyper Tricky

First and foremost: yes, turning a whole book into HTML by hand is very boring and fiddly. To be honest, If I didn’t already have a basic working knowledge of the language from my day job in IT and working on various online projects, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. And if I had, it would have taken an eternity and come out terribly.

Having said that, it is not impossible. Even if I do have an advantage by writing on a comparatively short book (approx 50,000 words), it can be done without giving over weeks of your life. Yes, you will eventually need to trawl through your entire document for something and it will be dull, but the clever use of find/replace gets you a lot of the way. That Henkel walkthrough contains a lot of top tips in that direction.

In my case, my undoing was the em-dash/dash distinction and also the repeated tweaks to how I styled chapter-heads. In fact, you know what was the biggest pain? Persuading the table of contents to work in all formats. I only included it as a bonus anyway, I’m not sure fictional books really need one. C’est la vie, readers.

Still, I’m determined to take a stab at competing with other ebooks, and doubt an automated Word conversion was going to do it. Which meant either paying someone to do a decent conversion or launching into HTML myself.

Those of you with unlimited budgets and a hatred of technical nitpicking should definitely get someone else to do it for you. You’re not any more or less of an author if you can’t do HTML, after all. Much like I didn’t do my own cover design because I’m not a graphic designer.

(My cover design is great, by the way. Excited to blog it up next week.)

Mind-your Language

But for those of us who into this shit, there’s something weirdly fulfilling about building something and seeing it slowly take shape. It’s not dissimilar to the writing process itself, only much quicker and with the added perk of specific instructions and an easy way to determine whether you’ve succeeded.

And I think I’ve done okay, although this is my first time through, alright? So if I end up finding some enormous mistake when I go live and it turns into A Storm Of Stress, I reserve the right to recant this positive tone and start using phrases like “living motherfucking nightmare”.

For now, though, this feels like a moment of calm. A brief pause between the worries of “Oh god, have I done enough editing?” and the later panic of “Oh god, is anyone going to buy it now?”

So that’s nice. I can save loads of money on holidays in the future by just giving myself massive amounts of HTML to edit, can’t I? I’ve already got plans to do the second H&C volume in the not-too-distant future, so don’t worry, I’ve got plenty to do. Please do not send me your HTML parsing tasks – unless you are willing to pay for my time, in which case absolutely get in touch.

I think we’ve covered my emotions about HTML editing in enough detail to keep even the keenest of web-therapists happy. Join me next week for more hard facts about the release. Exciting, eh?

Becoming An Internet Author – Week One

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The slow but determined march towards Hobson & Choi self-publication continues. A few days ago, I blogged a little about receiving professional edits on the text and my feelings on same. I think I reached equilibrium by the end, and I’m relatively okay with the direction it’s going.

However, there is obviously another side to the whole thing. If I’m self-publishing (or author-publishing or hybrid-authoring or whatever), I obviously have to do all my own promotion. Well, I’m hoping some good reviews will do a bit of the work for me, but I still have to get the book to some reviewers.

All of which means doing some tweeting, some blogging, some awkward-for-me self-advertising. Talking about myself. Becoming an Internet Author. Never mind my damn edits, how do I feel about that?

Fixed Books In Time – Even the Doctor can’t save us!

I do a little promotion for my stuff now, but it helps that I’m generally linking to recently updated items – a new post on this site, a Hobson & Choi update on Jukepop or whatever TV review I’ve recently scribed. The trouble with books – damn them – is that they’re pretty static.

Once the self-published volume goes up into the world, probably some time in July, I will need to keep plugging despite it remaining identical, no matter how self-conscious I feel about repeatedly mentioning a fixed point in time. Think I finally understand why they make Doctor Who so uncomfortable.

Still, there are thousands of authors in the world, self and traditionally published, and at least a few seem to get along without all their friends and internet followers deserting them. It must be possible. Just try and keep the ratio of ramble-to-promo strong. Don’t let the plugs get too dry and generic.

I’ll probably attempt at least some form of giveaway/competition once the book is out, so stay tuned if you want to get involved with winning stuff. It seems a nice way of doing a plug without boringly begging.

#MildyAmusing #Subheading

Aside from that, trying to improve this website. Make it clearer, more visually appealing and buy-my-stuff orientated.

Of course, anyone who has the words “writer” in their Twitter bio has probably been followed by a lot of random authors with a massive amount of followers, suspiciously similar number of people they follow, thousands of tweets about their book and almost nothing else.

To be honest, when I overthink myself to death about becoming an Internet Author, I’m mostly worrying about doing that. But only we can control our own destiny, etc. Most likely going to continue making poo jokes on social media even when I have a book published. I am a human being, not a wares-push-bot, and I’m pretty sure not everyone who follows me on Twitter is even that bothered whether I have a book out or not. Hopefully my fellow human people respect that I genuinely like what I’ve produced and am just trying to get along without being a pain in the arse.

Oh, and I might resist the urge to use ten million #hashtags as well. I kinda feel talking about your #book on the #kindle #ereader in the #crime genre might be too vague to get any traction? Correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

But if anyone wants to try and get #HobsonVsWolf trending, that’d help me a great deal. (Little injoke for Hobson & Choi readers there…)

Receiving my first set of edits – A Psychological Journey

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So, the ongoing plunge towards Hobson & Choi self-publication continues. I sent my manuscript of Book One off to an editor, because if my trip to London Book Fair taught me one thing, it’s that you gotta let someone else loose on it.
After all, I’m competing with an array of authors who have editors, I’m bothering to get a decent cover done, so I might as well make sure the insides are up to scratch.

With that goal in mind, I got my book back from the editor about a week ago, and have just blasted through the whole lot of edits once, making changes accordingly. It’s a strange experience, getting edited for the first time, and even after chatting to other people beforehand, it’s still… interesting.

Denial

A lot of writers say that when they first get professional feedback on their work from a professional editor or agent (or perhaps other professionals such as doctors, lawyers and accountants), they hear the bad parts and their first response is to admit: “Yes… yes, I knew all along, I was just hoping I was wrong.”

Are they telling the truth, or do they want to sound like they know what they’re doing?

I don’t know about others, but I can tell you that I totally knew everything all along, and the feedback from my editor served only to echo my own genius back at me.

Ahem.

Acceptance

To be honest, as edits go, I probably had a fairly easy ride. Lots of good feedback about my actual story, characters, pace, etc, but quite a lot of language stuff. To be precise: I sometimes over-narrate, which is something I’m aware of, but apparently need to chop more thoroughly.

Long story short, a fair chunk of over-elaborate narration to be cut, got a few new additions to compensate. The main problem, to be honest, is that a lot of fun observations or witty jokes tend to be buried in internal narration, and in removing that to avoid over-telling things, I also lose some good turns of phrase.

All comes back to that whole Killing Your Darlings thing again, doesn’t it? I love these words, and some can be salvaged with a move to dialogue, but many will simply need to die.

Bargaining

I struggled with it for a bit, to be honest. Even wondered whether me and the editor were well matched – all the time aware that I was probably just being precious. Part of me feels that the very close third person narrative, including inner thoughts and fun character theorising, is a big part of the style, and by chopping it back, I lose a bit of the fun.

On the other hand… it does read better now. A lot smoother. I’ve saved a decent percentage of the jokes I really liked, and the ones that are still in narration are a lot less buried in blocks of text. We’ll see how it goes, I suppose.

So, long story short, Hobson & Choi Book One is getting alarmingly close to happening now – hopefully late July or early August. I may even get my new title and cover up here on the blog in the nearish future, and won’t that be fun?

Is comedy dead? Or just not a great selling point in publishing?

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LOL?

Yesterday, I attended the final day of The Literary Conference 2014, an event thrown by The Literary People at The Literary Consultancy. I attended a few things, drank some nice coffee, and heard a thought that stuck with me: a brief answer uttered by a literary agent during the Pen Factor (literary X Factor) event.

One author read from a work which seemed to place itself as a humour story. Said agent commented that novels which identify heavily as comedy versions of existing genres tend to be a hard sell. After all, comedy is pretty subjective and “parody novels” are rarely amazing, so if possible, it’s better to market your comedy thriller (for example) as a thriller, and let people decide whether they like the book on those terms. If they happen to find you funny, bonus.

As someone who writes “funny” stories and mentions that attribute when describing them, this obviously gave me pause. So… time to reconsider?

Me and Jokes

When my weekly detective serial  Hobson & Choi began, I marketed it as a detective comedy and generally played it up as a LOL destination. By the second storyline, I’d realised I was taking the characters seriously, even if they said funny things, and shifted the blurb to “comedy-drama”.

Across everything I’m currently attempting, there’s self-aware humour, but the story isn’t shooting for farce. There’s even heavy emotional torment at times. So maybe I can get away with not labelling it as comedy at all if it helps me get a sale? Even though, yes, some of the surrounding concepts are a bit silly and self-aware?

On the other hand, I feel like I’d be missing a trick if I didn’t somehow communicate “Hey, this is pretty funny!” Among the other tips distributed on the day was the need to play up what makes your work unique and, well, that’s a big petal on my special little flower. (A weird expression I’ve just made up.)

Everyone Else and Jokes

Reaching outside my own inner world, a lot of my favourite stories and series mix comedy and drama, and although some of it self-identifies as comedy, a fair bit doesn’t. Political drama The West Wing is often funnier than most sitcoms. House isn’t technically a comedy, even though it constantly stabs for jokes.

Devil Deal Novel Draft #3 Word Count – By The Numbers

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All on target this week, as I sailed through the final stages of Novel Draft The Third. This will be a familiar tone to regular readers of this blog, most writing updates in the last month or two have broken down to: “Today I reached another book milestone!”

But just to reiterate what it all means: I am now at the point where I will show my book to some other humans. I’ve recruited a few volunteers from my writing group and personal life, now just gotta email it over to them. Once I’ve plucked up the courage to tackle Scrivener’s sometimes-horrific ebook compiling options.

Anyway. In a bid to keep the blogs interesting, I’m going to run some actual stats for the whole project, to see how much I cut, where it went, what it all means, etc. Will the numbers tell me anything of worth?

I don’t know, as I haven’t generated any of them at the time of writing this intro. Better go do that now.

THE BIG ONE: Total Word Count

First up, and most tedious to calculate as Scrivener clunks and struggles when putting a whole novel of scenes together: the total word counts of the three drafts.

  • First draft: 99,165 words.
  • Second draft: 94,923 words. (4,242 words shorter.)
  • Third draft: 90,605 words. (4,318 words shorter.)
  • Total cuts: 8,560 words. (8.63% of first draft total.)

The good news: I almost cut out ten percent of the novel, which I’m sure someone said was a good baseline amount to chop. It’s a good bit shorter anyway – a relief, as there were times I thought I wasn’t making much difference in length terms.

Much more surprising is the news that I removed more (just) with my second big pass than I did the first. During that draft, I chopped out, rewrote and condensed whole scenes, whereas the one I just finished was merely me picking through it line by line, improving flabby prose, reading it out to myself – generally beautifying the fucker before I let beta readers have it. Because if the main beta feedback is “You used the word actually too much, actually,” it won’t be hugely useful.

Does this mean I have more to do in terms of second-draft plot refining stuff? Possibly. But I’m in such a love-hate spin with the whole book after four months of intensive editing, I’d rather like to get some other opinions to bat against before doing any more sweeping changes.

Scale of Offcuts – The Butchery Index

And now, a stat I find compelling, but others may not. Let’s find out together.I have a Scrivener directory called Offcuts where I collect any scene I’m removing, rewriting, substantially changing or any other degree of alterations beyond minor text-picking. I don’t want to delete them, in case they’re one day called into service (in this project or another), but it’s possible they will never see the light of day.

The size of this directory at the various stages was…

  • First draft: 3,906 words.
  • Second draft: 43,924 words. (3,906 more.)
  • Third draft: 43,924 words. (Yes, it’s the same.)

Wow. That is a lot of unused flesh. Nearly a whole NaNoWriMo novel,  approaching half of the current book length. A lot of it isn’t material that was necessarily deleted, just heavily rewritten, but still. I enjoy looking at this number, it makes me feel like I must have obeyed the editing commandments and killed at least a couple of darlings.

It makes fair sense this wouldn’t change much in the third draft – after all, chopping and changing whole scenes is the preserve of the second. The third was line-by-line stuff, and I have full copies of the first and second draft saved if I desperately need to resurrect them. Constantly resaving the same thing gets silly after a while.

Break it down, down down down…

I have three parts to my novel, because there’s nothing I enjoy more than a rigid beginning, middle and end. So, in the interests of science, how did those change over the three drafts?

PART ONE

  • First draft: 29,071 words.
  • Second draft: 29,742 words. (671 words longer.)
  • Third draft: 28,510 words. (1,232 words shorter.)
  • Total change: 561 words shorter.

PART TWO

  • First draft: 35,782 words.
  • Second draft: 31,817 words. (3,965 words shorter.)
  • Third draft: 30,394 words. (1,423 words shorter.)
  • Total change: 5,388 words shorter.

PART THREE

  • First draft: 34,287 words.
  • Second draft: 33,339 words. (948 words shorter.)
  • Third draft: 31,676 words. (1,663 words shorter.)
  • Total cuts: 2,611 words shorter.

To my not-particular-surprise, the middle part took it hardest. I did a lot of work tightening that up, because it was flabby and because that’s where there’s always the most waste, in my experience of stories. I rewrote a couple of whole chapters, pulled a few bits in and out. Interestingly, the first part grew slightly longer in the second draft, I guess I did expand a plot point.

Most impressive, though: I took a similar amount of words from each part during the third draft, which demonstrates I have roughly the same amount of useless bibble in any given bit of writing.

Dates to celebrate in later years

Just out of interest, based mostly on Scrivener folder creation dates…

  • First draft started: 11th April 2013
  • First draft finished: 24th November 2013 (Draft time: 7 months and 13 days.)
  • Second draft started: 3rd January 2014
  • Second draft finished: 30th April 2014 (Draft time: 3 months and 27 days.)
  • Third draft started: 1st May 2014
  • Third draft finished: 28th May 2014 (Draft time: 27 days.)
  • Three-draft time: 1 year, 1 month and 17 days.

And that’s with December and February basically off the job, working on other projects and/or Christmas. I was editor of a TV website for the whole of 2013 too. I have this dream of hammering out another whole first draft before the end of this year, but we’ll get back to that in later blogs.

For now, considering it was once a hundred thousand words long, I’m considering this an okay effort. Good head of speed towards the end there.

Okay, did I miss anything?

That’s probably numbers aplenty for today, considering this is a novel draft only a small percentage of you will ever read. But if this tells you anything about my writing achievements and helps you compare/contrast/feel good about your own, that is excellent.

If there are any obscure stats I haven’t run which you would be interested in (or think I would be), give me a shout in the comments. Make sure to show your full working, I’m a simple soul using Windows Calculator.

My Writing Music – Songs to mash the keyboard to

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Some writers don’t listen to music while they work, needing constant silence to produce their genius. However, I require an endless rolling soundtrack to drown out the screaming choirs of my own insanity (10 points for knowing where I stole that last phrase from), so I get through a lot of tracks.

A lot of the choices go in phases – new records come out, or I fancy immersing myself in the music of one artist, so I load my phone up with their albums. Then I listen to this person exclusively for a while, until I’m sick of them and don’t want to hear anything they’ve done for months.

A few songs/sounds do survive the gap though – elevate themselves above the flighty phases and become evergreen presences. Here, then, are my perpetual audio companions. Apologies if a few of them turn out to be part of temporary phases and I’m just blinded by momentary love.

Warren Ellis – SPEKTRMODULE

SPEKTRMODULE - by Warren Ellis

SPEKTRMODULE is an irregular ambient music podcast by British comics/novels writer Warren Ellis and is rarely far from my writing playlist. It helps that there’s loads of it and new ones sometimes slip out, but even with that, it’s a good soundtrack. A nice combination of atmospheric and relaxing, and always my first go-to when I don’t feel like listening to music with lyrics.

You can see all the episodes in their category on his blog, or subscribe to the iTunes feed here. Well worth a look.

In other beepy/electronic music, I sometimes listen to the Social Network and Girl With The Dragon Tattoo soundtracks by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, but they’re a little too scary to relax into.

Gorillaz – The Fall

This is the lesser-known fourth Gorillaz album, the one with less budget, very few famous guest artists and sparse/instrumental songs recorded on an iPad about Damon Albarn’s loneliness while touring America.

It didn’t top the charts like other cartoon monkey records, but it is great writing soundtrack material. Haunting and driving in equal measure. And just in general, if you like a good Blur/Albarn song, there are some nice ones on here, especially Little Pink Plastic Bags, The Parish of Space Dust and Amarillo.

The new Damon Albarn solo album Everyday Robots is pretty too, though a bit too languid for work-motivating purposes – in my opinion, at least.And to complete this segment, here’s the excellent song Amarillo in YouTube form.

R.E.M. – Up

I really like R.E.M., for which I blame their total ubiquity on my parents’ stereo when I was younger. Although considering they and Blur/Gorillaz are two of my favourite artists, it’s also possible I like music where the focus is just as much on the clever lyrics as the songs – this might be a writer trait? I don’t know. Someone tell me I’m normal, for god’s sake.

Putting self-analysis aside, a lot of R.E.M.’s stuff is hooky, attention-seeking indie-rock and not always ideal background work music. The album Up, however, shifted towards whispering, downbeat stuff or, even on the less grim songs, a swirl of noise rather than louder, more straightforward indie.

A music-minded person might say this is the album where R.E.M. most tried to replicate their good friends in Radiohead, but either way, this album really works for me as writing music. More so than most Radiohead stuff, actually, although Kid A does come out when I’m hitting the misery juice hard.And now, for a sample, the song Suspicion which I’ve always found pretty lovely.

Honourable Mentions

At this point, there is a risk of hitting some stuff that’s just a phase. For example, the new Elbow album The Take-Off And Landing Of Everything has lasted well, but I imagine it won’t be with me forever. Their classic The Seldom Seen Kid is a bit of an evergreen though.

Every year for a while now, around the time the sun comes out, I pull out The Duckworth Lewis Method album, and their 2013 release Sticky Wickets has joined it this time. Good times, very seasonal, if sometimes a bit loud and jangly for heavy work deadlines.

At the opposite end of the spectrum to most things we’ve talked about so far, I sometimes like a little higher-energy pop music, especially when crashing out first drafts. I’ve got the three-disc Genesis Platinum Collection for a lot of this, for better or worse. Also: the second Little Boots album Nocturnes, which really deserved more attention, and The Bones Of What You Believe by CHVRCHES.

That’s probably enough music to be getting on with – what can I say, after following Kieron Gillen on Tumblr for long enough, you start to think about the role of music in your writing. If you have any recommendations in a similar vein, feel free to leave them in the comments below. Ambient stuff in the style of SPEKTRMODULE would be particularly interesting to me – need a precise level of atmospheric but not too attention-grabbing.