I don't have a huge following, so I appreciate you the reader all the more. So, if anyone was wondering where I disappeared to for a few weeks, apologies...
The past six months have been a crazy whirlwind.
- In essence, I tore my ACL playing basketball,
- had surgery,
- then found out that my day-job's management team decided to re-locate all of product management to Europe.
- I was laid off,
- went on my own sabbatical to finish writing my first novel that I started in NaNoWriMo,
- and then an extended family member passed away.
That was all before the New Year.
I was all set for the start to something fresh and new, with high hopes on the novel. But two weeks ago, someone burglarized my home, stealing a lot of my wife's jewelry and a lot of electronics.
That sucks. However, we're pretty optimistic about things anyway. I'd like to think we're not particularly materialistic, which is helpful. I'll need to think of something special for Valentine's Day though, that's for sure.
Here's the weird and amazing thing: They didn't take my primary desktop. Probably because it wasn't as easy to disassemble and carry out, like my laptop and iPad. So, I was very fortunate and blessed in that regard. Most of my writing work is there or on DropBox.
Anyway, here I am, at the end of January. I've started looking for new day-job work, now that I'm finally almost walking normal again after ACL surgery. Also, I'm doing what I can with the book edits with hopeful enthusiasm.
I wouldn't say I "got it (writing) out of my system" though. I'm still writing. I actually have two and a half other stories in-progress now, alongside my original manuscript. One of them is more to challenge myself, but seems to be shaping into a story that my wife would tend to read (as opposed to my original, which is in a genre my wife doesn't read at all).
I was lucky in that a relative has another friend in the industry, who has given me some helpful tips.
- One such tip was joining Scribophile, which I only joined recently. It's a helpful place to critique other people's work and have them criticize yours. Definitely could be a handy tool. I've become a paying member for now.
- I've also joined Publisher's Marketplace.
- I would still really like to go to some writer conferences (if I can afford it). If anyone has any suggestions there, please post comments or email me.
In the mean time, thanks for hanging in there, if you are out there and reading this. I've submitted a few more queries, but haven't heard back. I still have much work to do over all. For what it's worth, I was pleased to hear that some initial readers in Scribophile found my work at least partially promising (including a published author). It's good to hear the positives once in a while, after many criticisms and rejections, which I try to take to heart to improve...
I can't believe one month of 2014 has already passed us by. Here's hoping to a great year for everyone!
Oh, boy. The more I put out how horrible some of my work has been and how I have to clean it up, the more people will wonder if I'm putting anything out worth reading.
Today's lesson in humility is removing roadblocks for the reader. Again, so simple and obvious. But I hope other writers and authors can vouch for me that it isn't always as easy as it seems.
Hook
While those who fully read my story gave it relatively high ratings, some lagged behind in the early chapters.
- This tells me I greatly needed to improve the ever-important beginning and speed up the hook.
- One of my favorite parts in the book was almost all "purple prose." That's over flowery language that illustrates something in the story, but can be distracting to the reader.
- Some readers actually liked it, many did not.
- The worst part? I used that as part of my intro hook. Horrible!
Chapter-by-Chapter
I had two main problems that I wanted to mention here.
Problem 1: First at least one of my many chapters in the book were explicitly identified by beta readers as boring and slow. Now that's just not something you want to hear from any reader.
Here's the kicker: those chapters had a ton of exposition about details and facts that were useful for coloring the story and for setting up some of the things that happened. In one of Mr. Wells' list of problems "over-exposure" is a deal-breaker. So what to do?
- When I looked at one of the chapters in question, it was primarily a flashback of information dumped out.
- The beauty was the reader didn't need to know it all at once. In fact, I think the story improved tremendously when they didn't get all of that info. It was only distributed again as the main character learned about those tidbits.
- Just like the character exposition, pacing of background info...
Problem 2: The second was about cliff-hangers. The weirdest thing happened when I reviewed my chapters that were broken into segments (you know how some chapters can have a few breaks and changes of location or perspective).
I found in many cases, I naturally tried to cliff-hang each of those segments. I was reading one of my all-time favorites and realized: why am I even keeping these together? Instead, I broke up those chapters which sped up the pace for readers greatly. A simple chapter separation seemed to do the trick.
Of course none of these things are perfect necessarily. But based on some of the feedback, it seems to have helped. There's still much to do, but I'm happy that it's taking shape.
Just started re-reading some old books in my collection about writing to remind myself of the tips I used to know. That's helped re-invigorate me a little bit too.
Hopefully, my first manuscript will be ready soon!
Really quick (I was going to say brief, but then..) post, but I had to do it.
OK, so earlier I posted about how crazy it is that I don't know any big-name Asian-Am authors other than Amy Tan (not that there's anything wrong with her work by any means).
As an aspiring author who hasn't specifically sought out Asian-Am clubs yet, there seemed like a gap.
- First, know that I might totally be out of touch there. There ARE indeed groups for Asian-American Writers.
- But without joining them, would I know them by name?
- Unfortunately, at least for me, the answer is no.
Hopefully, that will change as I devour more books. As I said before in an earlier post, I wanted to write my books so they didn't appeal just to the Asian-Am crowd. I can be proud to be Asian-American, without shoving it down every person's throat. (That said, full disclosure, I did mention some Asian-Am stuff in a pitch query once or twice, before I revised it... separate story)
In the same way, I want to get the full gamut of experience in reading and not necessarily seek out writing just because someone of a specific ethnicity wrote it. I did want to see hope in modern Asian-Am writers though.
The other day, my sister-in-law sent me an article to inspire my writing. It's a pretty awesome read about one rising star in the Asian-Am world. I feel obligated to share it and pass it on.
Chang-rae Lee is the man of the hour.
I haven't read his stuff yet, but I definitely intend to as soon as I wrap up this first novel of mine. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has read his novels yet and what they think!
Incidentally, I started three other stories besides my original manuscript now. However, I realized I needed to take a break from them to finish up my first (yikes). Focus is the name of the game.
Had some great help from beta readers, who provided constructive criticism on my first manuscript.
As so many writers and authors tell me, tough criticism and rejection are the hardest part of their work. My Twitter Friend, Mike Wells, has a great post on why books are often rejected. Definitely a good read, if you haven't seen it. I'm going to try to give some of my own thoughts as to addressing these (again, total layman here).
For me, as a new writer, I suffer from many similar elements and keep working to improve! I'm attempting to rectify these and can vouch that it is extremely painful to do. But it is rewarding too. I feel much better about the flow and the reader experience, each time I make an alteration.
My first issue was about the fundamental component: Characters:
- Readers were getting confused by characters
- One particular character needed a ton of improvement to be more relatable
Now, when I first wrote the story in question, I tried to get a lot of thoughts down on paper. But now that the story was down, big-time clean-up was still needed to focus those thoughts. Now I see why it takes so long to write a book (and we're not even talking about publishing)
A lot of this is probably common sense. It does speak to how beta readers can help identify things, separate from your writer "cloud/fog" and hopefully will stir up some ideas for improving your own stuff. If not, sit back and laugh at me while I go through the rough ride!
To address the above
- Merged characters: Some characters really weren't that needed and were almost interchangeable to the beta readers. Those that were identified as such got the ax!
- Merging their activities with other existing characters helped simplify everything. The last thing I wanted to do is confuse the reader.
- Investigate names: I also re-named many people, since some people got confused with similar sounding names (some that rhymed with other people unintentionally, some started with the same letter, etc.)
- Re-visit how characters unfold: I used my aforementioned (in another blog post) "chapter log" to list when characters were introduced. What were the key things I wanted people to learn about those characters? Then, I tried to re-identify when bits of their character would be exposed in either dialogue or circumstances.
- The point, as Mike said in his blog, is to see how the readers learn about the characters throughout the book.
- Personality Touch-up: Ironically, I made one of the characters fairly depressing. Some readers commented he was so depressing that they hated him. Ouch!
- Back to work revising elements of his personality (if only it were so easy for myself and people in real life?)
There were certainly other issues that I have tried to clean-up (or am in the process of..), but figured I'd share this set first.
I have a few other issues in mind and info on what I tried to do to clean it up, but will post about them later. I've not posted in a while, as I've been working on my own clean-up as you can see! I'm keeping track though. :)
This was my first year in NaNoWriMo -- the odd shortening of "National Novel Writing Month," which apparently happens November of every year.
The quick blurb on it is that it's a nice, trackable way to set goals for writing and build a story. The target for NaNo is only 50,000 words, which is a short novella, compared to the median word count for a novel of 65,000.
- Most novels that I read are probably more in the 75,000-100,000 range. Consider that there are approximately 250 words/page, so 75,000 is roughly a 300 page book.
- By comparison, 50,000 is small and a seemingly attainable goal.
- I will cut the (lack of) suspense and say I made the goal, which qualified me as a NaNo "Winner."
With the above in mind, I will say a few things about NaNo:
- Writing in word counts certainly doesn't measure quality or substance.
- I was very skeptical about the whole process and what the end results would be.
- In retrospect though, there were tons of positives to help would-be-writers:
- NaNo really helped push me to "do something" instead of just thinking about what to write
- It has a built-in community of people to support and cheer on that endeavor and
- It provided short advice on generic writing tools and tidbits that were extremely useful in getting me to my goal.
Now, I'm going to tell you why I think I had some success with my experience, in the way that I judge it. But before I do that, I will also first repeat the simple facts that emphasize you should take it with a grain of salt:
- I'm not a published novelist or published author
- A writer does not make an author necessarily
- Having written a story doesn't really mean a thing to the writing world until it gets published and/or has readers
- I've always enjoyed writing, but never committed to writing a full novel before. Prior to this year's NaNo event, I have had some limited poetry (gasp) published and have written short stories in the range of 5-25 pages in length at most, just for myself.
- Not really a lot to grasp at for my initial foray into the deep end of novel writing.
OK. Now that that's out of the way...
This year, I had an idea for a story and wanted to flesh it out. I even had some key parts of the story worked out and a rough plan for it. I intended from the get-go to build a story that I wanted to share.
In some fortuitous chain of events, I had more free time this year to write and I saw an advertisement for NaNo just days before it was to start. So, I went for it!
My results were charted by the NaNo website (screenshots below). Ultimately, I ended up with about 58,000 words. Not too shabby for a first try. In effect, it actually ballooned well past that after severe edits, additions and deletions. Basically, clean-up throughout the following month.
You can see that I was decent at keeping and surpassing the target average and finished over a week early.
From the NaNo site, this year had over 300,000 participants. Over 40,000 of them reached their goal -- better than any previous year.
Reaching 50,000's modest goal actually did feel exhilarating in all the right ways.
When I reached 25,000, there was a point where I felt like I couldn't possibly write any more for the story. But somehow, NaNo encouraged me and I made it over that hump.
Looking at my chart here, you can see that it was fairly consistent in keeping to target.
There were, however, a few days where I was completely stagnant. I used those days as burning embers for me on any day that followed to get my butt in gear. My biggest jumps were on the days after those falters.
I'm glad I finished and that I could meet a lot of writers along the way. It encouraged me to start blogging again and to re-start my Twitter account to meet other like-minded individuals. Or just people who enjoy the spice of life and all that it brings.
Anyway, I think if you enjoy writing and want to give it a shot, I would definitely encourage signing up later this year. Or to give a visit to CampWriMo.org.
After delving into the publishing industry and learning the barebones basics, part of me finds that the industry is flooded with stuff: both good and bad works. But even if you're unsure of yourself and want to voice your story, you need to start somewhere.
I can't objectively categorize my own work yet, and may never be able to. My 80,000+ words could be meaningless in the long-term. I know I have a long way to go in learning how to improve my writing, and in understanding the industry as a whole.
Still, I can't help but feel greater for the experience. It's like a good venting session, when you bring ideas into creative fiction. The insanity is out there! I hope you get out there too with your brand of insanity. Good luck.
Happy belated New Year to everyone!
I'm going to post some nonsense about my 2013, just so I remember it. It's been a different year for me all around. In a lot of ways, that's a good thing, but it has created some tough moments too.
On the personal side:
- One of my brothers had a new baby boy.
- I celebrated my tenth wedding anniversary with multiple food-oriented celebrations at several restaurants, including the illustrious French Laundry.
- For vacation, my family and I took a cruise from Boston through New England and up through parts of Canada, ending in Montreal.
- My toddler started pre-school for the first time, last Summer.
- Health-wise:
- I tore my ACL during basketball, one of my favorite past times. Almost all my physical injuries seem to come from the sport (torn pinky ligament, previous ankle and knee sprains).
- The ACL tear created a chain of events. For example, I purchased my first bike since I was twelve, in order to continue exercising up until my surgery date.
- I ended up having surgery in mid-September.
In my day job...
- I spent most of this year as a product manager for a technology firm. That included some travel and a lot of heavy hours of work, trying to strategize the direction of the products and tackling tactical issues for the same. A few minor speaking events with the company, etc., and much time consumed, trying to shape the organization and the world.
- The biggest news there is that a month after having ACL reconstruction surgery, I was laid off by the company, after working there for many, many years.
- Since then, I have only been doing some independent consulting in that industry and helping two friends' with their business ideas (alongside my side-aspirations for writing)
Speaking of writing...
My year ended with a furious writing extravaganza as part of the NaNoWriMo project (more on that later in a separate post).
I ended the year with a nice Disney trip and spent time with the family, while trying to also concurrently clean-up my manuscript and enjoy the late-year holidays.
It's been a crazy year, but I'm hopeful that 2014 brings new and exciting things. It certainly can't be the "same old," given the late changes of last year.
Wish you all the best!
