It takes work to make a book look like that…

So, I had decided that I was done with the editing and re-writing portion of the show, and now it was time to get my printed copy from CreateSpace and enjoy gazing upon it’s beauty.  Wait, what do you mean there’s a print layout to do?  Okay, yes, I knew there was more to it than just hitting save in Word and sending it to be printed, but how hard could it be?  Well, the answer is, harder than I thought.

As I went through this process, I thought, “Gee, every published author should have to do this at least once, just to see what it’s like”.  Actually, maybe I was just being snotty because I had to slog through this stuff and they don’t.  Layouts are not something I’d choose to do with my spare time if I had a choice.  There have got to be better ways to do it than what I did, really I’m sure there have to be, but I was making it up as I went along.  There was also another problem, pure impatience on my part.  I WANTED TO BE DONE…and it cost me.  Overall though, I learned a lot about what goes into “making” a book beyond writing the story, and I think it was a really interesting experience.

I settled in, firing up my trusty word processors and began to go through the process of laying out the book.  I began rearranging my text, making sure that the various sections started on the right-hand side of the book, setting the margins and offsets (Don’t forget kids, on a printed page you loose space to the center where the page is bound to the spine!). MS Word was actually good at this last one, and gave clear options in the format settings to help get it right.  I centered my chapter headings and so forth, and battled to get the page numbering correct.  At first, it didn’t seem too bad, and before long I thought I was ready.  I thought wrong.

I uploaded the text to CreateSpace, along with the great cover that my wife seemingly pulled out of thin air based on the description of what I wanted, and ordered a proof copy.  A week later, I was holding a real, bound, trade paper-back edition of “The Enablers”.  It took me about five seconds to pick out show-stopping errors.  For the most part, I should have caught them before I sent it to print, but like I said, I was impatient, although in my defense, some of them were actually easier to see on the printed page than in the PDF.  Somehow the line spacing was set to different levels in some places, and a few pages just didn’t print the way I expected, with more whitespace at the top than I wanted.  Looking through I also found another dreaded typo or two, so it was back to the drawing board.

I’ve mentioned before how I’m jealous of established writers having editors and layout people and such, and this was another place where that little green monster made himself heard.  Part of this was pure me, things that I could and should have done better, but parts were also a case of just not seeing my own mistakes.  I would repeat this process four more times, each revealing other screw-ups, or new problems created when trying to fix others.  Move one page, and you’ve effectively moved every page after it.  Add some space here, and it moves all the text further down the line.  And I was still impatient (side note; there was another reason for my impatience and hurry, but it’s just not one that I’m prepared to talk about here, not yet at least.  Suffice it to say I was under a lot of stress and feeling rushed).

It became a ritual, open the box from Amazon, flip through the pages, note the things that looked wrong, fix issues, submit, and start again.

Finally, the day came where I flipped through the latest proof, and…nothing jumped out and bit me.  I checked again, looking at my past problem spots…not bad.  I looked a third time, more closely, and…by Jove, I think I’ve got it!  It was time, I was finally ready to release my creation to the world and enjoy the adulation of the masses! w00t!  Oh, well, but what about the ebook?

Yeah, the ebook.  I looked into creating the ePub files, and making them available.  Here’s where I decided that I was tired of going it alone.  After spending weeks fighting with the print formatting, the idea of starting again to make the ebook pretty just didn’t appeal to me at all.  Could I do it?  Yes.  Did I want to do it? No, I was just burned out on formatting from doing the print version.  Add to that the fact that in order to get my book into iBooks, I needed a federal tax id, and I was ready to look for some extra help.  Looking at my options, I settled on “BookBaby”, a company that offered to do the formatting and distribution to the Kindle store, Nook Books, iBooks and the Sony eBook store for around $99.00.  That price struck me as comparable to some of the other ebook designers I had looked into, who didn’t do distribution, so I decided to go with it.  In retrospect, I’m not sure that was a good move as it took some of the control from me, and they also oddly refuse to provide the author with the ebook files (for our own protection, of course, or so they say) so I had to purchase my own book from three different retailers just to see what it looked like.  I have some other issues, which I’ll go into more detail on in a future post dedicated to the BookBaby service.  For now I’ll say they did a very nice job on the formatting, and have done just what they’ve said they would do, I’m just not sure in retrospect that I like the way some of it works out.

So, I had a proof copy, I had a deal with an ebook designer/distributor, and I was ready to go.  I logged into my CreateSpace account, pulled the trigger,  and “The Enablers” was officially on sale!

Next up, “Hey, you over there, buy my book!”

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The Enablers, on sale now!

A Slight Detour

I’m going to take a slight break right now from my tale of self-publishing my tale.  This past week had a little Enablers related excitement, and I’m still feeling good about it.  I got my first review that wasn’t on either Amazon or Facebook.  I caught up with “The Exile” (I’ll leave the name at that as I haven’t seen his real name on his blog and I don’t know if he wants it out there) from the blog “ExiledInGeeksville”, and he agreed to take a look at my book.  I got a copy to him, and a few weeks later I was looking at a very nicely done (and positive!) review on his site.  But wait, there’s more.  A few hours after I saw the review, I got a message that it was also picked up at ComicBooked.com, and I gotta say, it was a thrill to see the cover of “The Enablers” splashed around on their front page.

Finding willing reviewers for self-published books is tricky, or at least it is for me.  There are vast numbers of self-published works coming out now, thousands and thousands, and getting your voice heard above the clamoring crowd just ain’t easy.  In my mind I find myself picturing the scene from Titanic where all the passengers are floating in the ocean, all crying out at the same time, but it’s nearly impossible to pick out one voice among them to tell exactly what they’re saying.  Also, there’s the problem that a large number of self-published books really just aren’t that great.  I’m not saying that mine is better than all the others, only time (and reviews and book sales) will tell, but I’ve seen some that, well, they’re rough.  And they taint the entire field of self-published writing with the idea that if there’s no publisher’s imprint on the spine, it’s going to be a bad read.   This is where traditional publishers have the advantage, or at least should.  The days of needing them to provide distribution may be numbered, but if they’re careful, they can still be a sign of quality-control.  Sadly though, it really seems like a number of publishers are far more interested in their A-Listers, and only give the other stuff a cursory glance, leading to some of the same problems that self-published books have.  I’ve read a few from fairly large publishers that looked almost like rough drafts, rife with spelling and grammar errors, so much for quality-assurance.  Perhaps we’re entering an age where a new model is necessary that fuses the two, where an author does the book in a self-publishing style, but a “publisher” provides the editorial, quality control and publicity aspects and works on commission instead of paying the author royalties.  I rather doubt the big publishers would be eager to dive into a model that effectively turns the industry upside-down though, so I won’t hold my breath.

I’d also like to thank my grade-school English teacher Jim Evers for a very nice Facebook post and recommendation.  He was a teacher who really made an impression on me when I was a kid, and it’s still nice, all these years later, to have him read and comment on my work.  Thanks Mr. E!

And again, I offer my thanks to both The Exile, and to ComicBooked.com, and hope that it will be the first of a number of positive reviews for “The Enablers”.  I may not [yet] have the “legitimacy” of being a published author, but I’m happy to see my effort receive some positive recognition!

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The Enablers, on sale now!

Hey, wanna be a proofreader?

I wrote a book!  A whole book!  Done, finished, complete, readable (well, mostly)!  Yay me!  It was all coming together!  Now I just needed to get some people to read it, and give me some feedback, maybe some spelling and grammar corrections and I was good to go, easy street baby!

Quick detour.  I did look at various editing services available, both from CreateSpace and other independent groups.  I would have loved to use one, but editors ain’t cheap.  Not that I think they should be, they provide a valuable service, and if I were to be a hit I’d almost certainly get a good editorial package in the future, but considering the simple fact that most initial, self-published books do NOT sell well, I just couldn’t justify the cost.  I don’t have the budget, and I can’t with a straight face call it an “investment” when I have no idea if I’ll sell more than 5 copies.

First stop, Facebook.  Hell, I have a bunch of friends on there, I just needed a tiny percentage of them to be interested in helping and I was good to go.  I put up my initial plea for help:

“Okay boys and girls, my novel “The Enablers” is just about done as far as the basics go. I’m going to be looking for a few proof-readers soon. The job pays the princely sum of nothing, but includes getting your name on the thank-you page once the book goes to print at Amazon (I expect tens of sales, so no, you probably won’t get famous).”

And then wait and see time.  One response…oh, there’s another, and another.  Yay, help is on the way!  Now, I’m not so naïve that I think everyone who volunteers is going to be able to come through on this, hell, things happen, and people get busy, priorities shift.  I settle on about eight people to read my latest draft, figuring I’ll get about three or four back.  Now it was time to wait again.  Timing worked out such that I was sending my copies out dangerously close to the holidays, so right off the bat, I knew I wouldn’t be seeing many responses back for a while if people chose to read the whole thing, rather than getting back to me in pieces.  Weeks passed, and I tried to contain the urge to pester, which I think I did fairly well.  Then, along came a new distraction to take my mind off of waiting for corrections, a new baby!

The holidays raced by in a haze of newborn craziness, and I can’t say that I spent a lot of time worrying about book editing, and yet, right before Christmas I got my first corrected copy back.  Yay, I got one back, someone to whom I wasn’t married had finally read my book!  I read the message that my first reader left.  Not only did she have corrections for me, but she had some nice things to say about the book itself (and some constructive criticism which she delivered in such a way as to be fairly painless).  She had marked up a physical copy, and I could pick it up at my leisure.

I mentioned the new baby, right?  Somehow, I found time to pick up the marked-up copy and…oh dear god, it looked like it’d been caught in an explosion at the post-it note factory.  Little tiny bits of paper stuck out from all sides, each warning of a spelling, grammar or other glitch that I’d missed.  Here is a lesson; proofreading is NOT a job for the author, at least not this one.  I thought I’d done a pretty damn good job of fixing things up, but, and I mentioned this before, the brain has a great autocorrect feature built in.  Now that the errors were pointed out to me, they were obvious, but until that moment, I was reading what I INTENDED to write, not what I’d actually written.  It also probably didn’t help me that the original copy was written in a text editor with no spell-checker (it was NaNo, wordcount, not accuracy!).  I’d almost certainly do it that way again, but I now saw what an absolute mess I’d have to deal with.  I still think it was worth it though as a way of not breaking my concentration when I was on a good roll.  Next time, I’ll be more aware of the amount of correction to be done before I pass it off to anyone else, maybe (hopefully) I’ll have a cleaner draft ready that way. Still, once I’d recovered from the shock of how much I still had to do passed; I was ready to go back to work.  This was not a setback, this was a step forward, and I still had more reader copies coming back to compare this to, right?

I dove into my changes, using any spare moment I could find.  New baby, toddler wandering the house, work, all these things make it tough to find time to work on a book.  Honestly, I found it a lot harder to motivate myself to go back and do “housecleaning” on a book I’d now read at least a dozen times, as opposed to writing something fun and new, but I was determined to see this damn thing printed, whether I found a publisher for it or did it myself.  Little by little, I scanned the pages and made corrections to my master copy, and found other updates that I could make along the way, little tweaks here and there.  As I got further along, I started wondering where other proof-copies were.  The holidays were done, winter was slowly making its way towards spring, and I was hoping to see this whole thing finished before summer.

I broke my “no pestering the readers” rule and sent out a “how ya doing?” message and got back to work.  I finished the batch of changes, and went back and re-read it again, making a few more changes along the way.  I sent out another “how ya doing?”, and…nothing.  Like I said, people get busy, things come up, and even though I didn’t get the expected number of copies back, I got one that was absolutely outstanding in its level of detail and got me to where I thought I needed to be.  Lesson learned, if you can’t afford editors, get your book into as many hands as possible if you can find volunteer proof-readers, because people WILL get busy, and you can’t really know how many will make it back to you!  Next time around, I’ll do the proofreading phase differently, although I’m not sure how quite yet.

Finally, I was sitting in my basement lair, reading though things again, and I realized that I was up to decision time.  When you’re self-publishing, there is no bright line that says “Finished”, you’re done when you think you’re done.  I thought it over, I scanned a few parts again, checked my notes and hit save.  I was done.

Yeah right.

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The Enablers, on sale now!

Must be nice to have an editor…

There are a lot of things to be jealous of that big-time established authors have.  Notoriety, a dream job, fans, all sorts of things.  There’s one thing in particular that I was jealous of when I’d finally bashed the complete first draft into submission, and that was an editor.  When you’re working on a book entirely on your own, you’re largely working in a vacuum.  You’re the writer, copy-editor, proof-reader and coffee-getter.  You’re pretty much your only critic, and your only cheer-leader, because in those early days, getting pages filled is your main priority.  Some people I know give their work out in chunks as it’s completed, but I don’t know how they deal with the distraction.  I wanted to finish what I was doing, even if it was just coated in primer and had lots of jagged edges; I’d worry about that later.  The problem is though, once you’re done with that first part, without an editor you’re still on your own.  You have to hope that you can get someone else to help you out, someone who can read what you’ve written and start pointing out the more subtle snags.  Part of the problem is, the human brain has a great autocorrect feature built into it.  You can read your own work ten times, and miss some glaring problems only because you literally just don’t see them, your brain fills in the things that you expect to be there.  Then there’s the problem of things that sound great to you might hit a seriously sour note to other people.  You’ll probably have a hard time seeing these things as well, if only because if it made sense to you before, it’ll probably continue to make sense to you, but not to other people.  You may need more details or explanations in places where you just glossed over something because you know intimately how everything works but someone else may simply not have enough details to read something the way you intended.  Then there’s spelling and grammar.  Spellcheckers help here, but they’re not even close to being a replacement for a good proof-reader.  Continuity is also tricky.  After writing, tweaking, re-writing and adjusting things, it can be hard to keep track of what you’d done.  My example is always that I don’t want to read the final copy and find that Bill had jumped into his red sports car, and proceeded to race down the road in his blue pickup truck.  No, I’m not likely to have that big of a glitch, but it’s a good “big” example of what kinds of small things to look for.

Ultimately, if you’re not planning on writing checks to hire your own editors, you have to rely on the kindness of friends, family and anyone else you can con into helping you.  In my case, the first stop was with my wife.  I wasn’t sure how that’d work out really at first, as The Enablers really just isn’t in a genre that she normally likes.  Before long though, I found out two things; the first being that my book was apparently pretty readable as she was tearing through it as fast as I could provide her printouts.  The second; that there were still a number of those rough-edges to smooth over.  The feedback was great, really useful stuff and almost always examples of things I’d probably never have noticed myself.  Her help was instrumental in getting me to the point of letting other people read what I’d done, both in terms of cleaning up what I had, and in giving me a little more confidence that my gigantic pile of papers might actually be something that other people would enjoy.

I took note of all the things that she found jarring, unclear or confusing, and I went back to my laptop, fired up Scrivener (my trusty word-processing app of choice), and dove back into the world of The Enablers.  I think up to that point I’d done a fair job of keeping the stories coherent and readable, so while I had plenty of changes to make, there were no massive rewrites at this point.  I patched things up in the places she’d pointed out and…found myself still staring at a big pile of papers that I was sure still wasn’t ready for prime-time.

I re-read what I had a few more times, and then a few more after that, and finally realized that I had come to a major crossroads.  This was the first major decision point where I had to choose between keeping The Enablers in a drawer and keeping the accomplishment of writing that many pages to myself, or <shudder> letting other people actually read what I’d written.  Was I really comfortable with putting this all out for people to read, and possibly hate?  Was I ready for them to possibly determine that I’m not only not a talented writer, but a complete idiot?  Oh, I had self-doubt oozing from every pore.  And that little bastard of an internal adversary was back with a vengeance.  “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.  Great, the sonofabitch had discovered Wikiquote.  I agonized, I stalled, I watched a lot of episodes of Battlestar Galactica.  Finally though, I realized that unless I kept going, I might as well have never started.  My goal was to see The Enablers in print, and if I was going to do that, I would do the best I could to make it a “real” book.

It was time to go to my soapbox, to stand in the town square, and to ask for volunteers to read my rough second draft.  It was time to visit Facebook.

Next, please please please please read my book!

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The Enablers, on sale now!

The “evil story”, and the pain of finishing

You want to know what’s harder than writing a novel?  EDITING a novel.  When you’re in the middle of an intense round of writing, which is what NaNoWriMo is, you really fly through things if you get a good rhythm going.  The words just pour out onto the screen (or paper for you traditionalists/luddites), and inside your head you can see the whole thing unfolding.  It’s almost like reading a novel at times, once you’re deeply enough into it.  At least for me it was.  I felt more like I was just writing down things that were happening that I had little control over, I was chronicling things that never happened, recording events that never took place, but I rarely felt like I was creating those things, those events.  Until I hit “The Ramsey Incident”.

On my first time through, I felt like I needed a big culmination, something huge that happened that would really make the story pop.  I had it in my head that a group made up of Enablers, who were seeking revenge, would take control of a small town during the course of a kidnapping.  This was the story that turned my fun sprint into a marathon through a swamp.  I wrote a version of it, and hated it.  I tried again.  This time, the group of revenge-seeking Enablers would steal a plane, just snatch it out of the sky and…well, do something with it.  This too died a horrible death after making me insane for a while.  Back to the idea of taking the town.  Why?  I have no idea, since it didn’t work out any better the second time than it did the first time.  The weather turned warmer, and I found more and more things to occupy my rare free-time that didn’t involve writing.  Those things were perfectly good things to do.  New baby in the house, a wife that enjoys doing things that don’t involve watching me sit at a laptop, barbeques, walks, all sorts of things that make up a life.  The Enablers took up residence at the back of my head for a while, and I sometimes wondered if I’d ever get to see it in print after all.  A pessimistic little voice started whispering to me when I’d actually have a little extra time.  “It was a fun diversion for a while, move on”, it’d say, “You have plenty of things to do that aren’t a complete waste of time”.  That little voice was an asshole.  I tried to ignore it, but at times, it made so much sense.  “Thousands of people try every day to get published, and never get anywhere with it, why would I be different?”  “Everyone who writes a book thinks that theirs is great, when in reality so very many are awful, what makes you think you’re not just like them?”  Oh, that voice really just sucks.  I don’t think I’m the only one who hears the pessimistic little bastard though.  The trick is, while it’s impossible to ignore it, see it as an adversary, not just an anti-cheerleader in your head.  That’s what I ended up doing.  Self-doubt is very easy to have when you’re doing any kind of creative project, and the truth is, you’ll never know whether it’s justified until you finish what you’re doing, put it out there, and hope that the slings and arrows don’t hurt too much.

One day, I finally had had enough of daydreaming about holding my book in my hand while doing precious little to actually make it happen.  I brought my laptop outside (it was a beautiful warm day), poured a cold drink, and got comfortable.  I re-read everything I had done for the “evil story”, and finally realized what the problem was.  In all the other parts of the book, I had chosen the characters, the overall idea of what was going on with them, and then settled back and let them run.  I did it off the top of my head, simply seeing where things went, watching how everyone reacted, and I was always surprised to see where things ended up.  In the case of “the evil story”, I had changed that formula.  I had decided beforehand what would happen and where they would end up.  The problem with the story was that it felt contrived to me, because it was completely contrived.  Finally, I tossed everything I had for that final part, with the exception of a few characters that I liked (The Geldoffs and Slater), and started over.  I let them tell me their story, rather than dictate to them what should happen.  It was exactly what I needed to have happen.  Before long, pages were filling up as I watched the story of  “Monsters Made” unfold.  It wasn’t the big, sweeping story that I’d originally envisioned, not at all.  It was a much smaller, more human story, and what it lost in scope it made up for in tone, or at least I think it did.  I’d finally found the story, largely because I’d finally decided to look for it, rather than to dictate it.

Now that I had my final piece, I could make an honest run at the overall second draft, then third draft, and then, and then, and then…

Next, must be nice to have an editor.

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The Enablers, on sale now!

Blame it on the rain…..

And here my poor blog sits, feeling lonely and abandoned.  After a good start, I vanished, but not because I’m giving up on it though, I’m going to go ahead and blame Irene.  Yeah, the stupid hurricane.  So why would a hurricane a few weeks ago chase me away from my blog?  Because I live in Pompton Lakes, NJ, and we got hit good and hard.  Sure, the storm itself was really not all that impressive here as hurricanes go, we got some gusty wind that took down some trees (including one that was deposited on my roof), but it was the rain that got us.  It was relentless, and Pompton Lakes is a town that sees more than it’s fair share of flooding.  This time, I think all the records were broken for us.  It used to be that when people talked about “The Bad One”, it was hurricane Floyd, but I think it’s safe to say that Irene took that title.

I’m happy to say that I do not live in a part of town that sees flooding.  I got a little water in my basement, but it was a nuisance at best.  I’m a member of Pompton Lakes CERT though, and working with the team brought me to the places that really saw devastation.  Yes, devastation is the right word.  I don’t know the exact statistics, but I believe there were around 25 homes in town that were condemned, and long lines of houses that saw terrible damage from water flooding into them, often bringing water nearly to the ceiling of the ground floor.

My time with CERT’s hurricane response began on Saturday, before the storm really started for us.  I spent the evening at the police station, manning the Office of Emergency Management’s phones.  Honestly, I was surprised by how quiet that was, but as I mentioned, Pompton Lakes is a town that knows flooding all too well, so in retrospect it’s probably not that surprising that we didn’t get all that many calls in advance of the storm.  People know how this works, and, even though we’re available to give information, they often know (or at least think they know) what to expect.  In this case, the flooding was unprecedented, and many people were caught off guard by the magnitude of it all – that happened later though.  Once my time with the phones was done, it was off to the flood shelter, also staffed by CERT to see if my fellow team members needed any extra help getting set up.  Again, the scene there was fairly quiet, which was to be expected as the rain was only really starting and the waters hadn’t yet come raging down the rivers.   The shelter itself was ready to go, CERT members ready to receive residents who needed help.

The bulk of the next two days for me involved a lot of time with a shop-vac, an eight gallon bucket, and a flight of stairs.  Like I said, compared to the folks in the south end of town, what I had was a nuisance to clean up, but after a few hours of carrying eight gallons of water up a flight of stairs to dump it in the yard, that nuisance becomes seriously grating.  I’d get a reminder of how good I had it before long, but for those couple of days I was pretty well isolated in my own little corner of the storm.  To break up the monotony of carrying water, I went up on my roof with my father-in-law, and armed with a pair of chain-saws, we cut up the tree that had landed up there and, happily, found no damage.  I lucked out and the tree landed perfectly (as perfectly as a tree can land on a roof that is), and managed to cushion the impact by touching down on the leaf-covered, springy branches.

That done, it was time to take a ride back over to the flood shelter and check in with the folks at CERT.  Now I was getting a look, although from a distance, of what had happened across town.  The shelter was busy, more than it had ever been I think.  Once the storm had settled for most of us, the waters began to really rise as the rivers brought even more water to us that had been left in the north.  Houses were filling up, power was long gone, and travel in that area was impossible except by boat.  I’m not going to go into great detail here, as the stories I heard belong other people, the ones who actually suffered losses in the storm and they can tell them however they like.  For my part, I ran out and picked up some extra supplies for the shelter and then back to my own cleanup.  I would spend the next several nights at that shelter, working from 8 to midnight, and as the days passed the number of people who needed us there dwindled as they found more permanent places to stay.  I’m happy to say that everyone was able to find other accommodations, mostly on their own.  Another thing that should be mentioned here is the generosity of the people in Pompton Lakes, the businesses located there, and the strength of those who live in the South End.  People in this town really come through, donating food, clothing and anything else they can come up with, including space in their homes for people to stay after a disaster like this, and that’s something to make you proud to be from here.  The businesses came together, helping to provide supplies to keep the shelter running, local restaurants provided great food for those who were displaced, and other shops helped as well.  I’m reluctant to name particular businesses here only because I don’t want to leave anyone out, but it’s one of the things that makes Pompton Lakes feel different to me than other Jersey towns I’ve lived in, there’s such a strong sense of community, and that extends to the businesses in town.  As for the displaced residents, I can only hope I could react with such grace under pressure that these people were able to.  Sure, there were times where tempers flared, and that’s understandable, but I met people who took this in such stride, and made the best of their situation so well that I was truly awe-struck.

The days passed and the waters receded, and it was time to save what could be saved, and clean up what Irene damaged and destroyed.  My first trip into the flooded area was to help with the cleanup at a fellow CERT member’s home.  This man and his family had suffered a great deal of damage, and still I saw him again and again at various CERT locations, giving his time to help other people after spending hours cleaning up damage to his own home.  Not knowing that part of town well, I promptly got lost and got an unexpected look at some of the damage.  It was breathtaking.  I had driven through some of these streets before, lined with neat little houses and nicely mowed lawns, but now mud was everywhere, debris was beginning to pile up, and the people had a haunted look to them that can only come from searching through your home and finding over and over that what you have left is unsalvageable.  Before long, I found a police officer who knew exactly where I was trying to go.   A u-turn and a few streets later, I arrived at the address I was looking for.  The water in this area, which is not considered a flood zone, had been around 4 – 5 feet deep.  I helped with the cleanup there for a couple of hours, and then headed back home with a new appreciation for how lucky I was.  Just because you’re not in a flood zone, and have never had a flood before does not make you immune to being flooded.

My final posting for CERT was to work the command center, which was centered on the OEM mobile command center truck, and located deep within the damaged area.  Once again, I was struck by the amount of damage done.  I helped pump water out of one resident’s basement, and then spent a few hours at the command center, handing out cleaning supplies in the hopes that it would give people at least a little bit of a leg up as they cleaned mud and river-water from their homes.  The Salvation Army also was present here, bringing food to the community as there was still no power, and many people had no working kitchen.  That time is a blur to me now, a steady stream of people passed through, and we offered what supplies and help that was ours to give.

All of this, and of course my job has kept me running pretty much at capacity lately, with little time to think about blogging.  Now that things have calmed, at least for me, I hope to resume talking about writing, my book, and the process of self-publishing.  Thanks for bearing with me, and come back soon!

EDIT: I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but I’ve been asked, sooo:  CERT stands for “Community Emergency Response Team”.  CERT is a program that offers training in things like first-aid, light search/rescue, fire suppression, and other handy things to know in an emergency.  The point of CERT is to teach people how to help themselves and others while waiting for emergency services, such as the fire department or ambulance corps to arrive, and to supplement those emergency services when something has happened that leaves them overwhelmed and in need of extra help.  You can visit Pompton Lakes CERT on Facebook, and learn more about the program itself in a number of places (I leave that to you to Google around for).  Many towns have their own CERT, so check around, there may be one in your town if you’re interested in joining.

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The Enablers, on sale now!

So now that I’m done, it’s time to get started.

So, there I was with my spiffy NaNo winner’s certificate (printed on very fancy paper by my wife), and a coupon for a discount on a copy of Scrivener (which is a really nice editing suite that I’ll talk about some other time), so now what?  I put it all down for a while.  We were coming into December, and my then-youngest daughter’s first Christmas, and I was taking what I felt was a well deserved break.  Between work and writing, I needed some family time.  December passed in a sparkly red and green flash, and a new month, and a new year began.  I then proceeded to find plenty of reasons not to touch my book again.  Some were valid, time with the baby and my wife, work, home repair projects, the list went on.  Some were a little less solid, Netflix, video games, alphabetizing my DVD collection.   At some point, I realized I was stalling, and it was time to open that first draft again.

I picked a day, and after taking a deep breath, I fired up Scrivener, and imported my first draft.  I spent a little time breaking it up into smaller, more manageable pieces, and began looking over what I’d written.  For the most part, much to my relief, I was still happy with the basics.  I realized that the “culmination” of the story was complete garbage, and had to be completely redone which didn’t really surprise me, as it’s the one part of the book that really just didn’t feel “good” when I was writing the first draft.  There were also plenty of other, smaller changes that I knew I’d have to make, but I really still felt pretty good about it.  I also got my first look at what I’d done through the lens of a spellchecker, and, ouch, apparently when I’m in a hurry I spell like an eight year-old.  Okay, not quite that bad, but there was an awful lot of red on the screen.  Little by little, I started working up more enthusiasm for the next phase of work.  The one thing that became obvious to me was, although the first draft only took twenty-something days, the next one was going to take quite a bit longer.

Next, the pile of papers begins to change into a book.

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The Enablers, on sale now!

And the bulk of the first draft raced by…

The days flew by, and I filled page after page with text. Richard the “reporter”, Nina the small town girl with a big secret, Debbie and Dee and their tragic loss, Mitch and Danielle and their symbiotic relationship, and the tale of petty criminal Donovan Slater and his ill-fated friendship with the naive suburban Geldoffs.  Before long, the world was populated with people who had strange abilities, those that hated them, those that loved them and more. Experts took shape, adding their voices to the story in interviews with the narrator, and I was having a great time.

I wrote every single day, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours, and the whole time I was rewarded with the word count indicator on my NaNo page rising steadily and images of a printed novel sitting on my shelf dancing in my head.

There was more to it though.  I became aware of other NaNo writers in my area, and I regularly checked in on their progress as we all raced along.  When I could, I cheered them on in forum posts, and commiserated when someone would hit a snag. Then Tom introduced me to the concept of a write-in.  Well, I’d actually heard about them, but he was the one who got them started in our area.

A write-in is basically a social get together where a number of people meet up at a cafe/coffee shop/wherever to meet other WriMo’s and work on their entries.  Most of the time it’s just a group of people staring intently at their laptops and seemingly ignoring each other, but that last part isn’t really the case. I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I was very aware of the other people I was writing alongside of, and even when I was deep into what I was doing, I enjoyed their company and liked seeing other people sitting around me pursuing the same crazy little challenge I was.  We met at the Borders Bookstore in Riverdale (may it rest in peace) and took over a big corner of the cafe, sucking down copious amounts of coffee, hot chocolate and Internet bandwidth.

Tangent time.  I said before that I didn’t know why I had never written a book before, and that’s mostly true, but only mostly.  The Internet was a huge boon to me in writing this book (hey, I’m an old guy, my initial attempts were pre-Internet).  One thing that always contributed to killing my earlier attempts was not being able to flesh out parts of a story when I was on uncertain ground.  I would go to the library and look things up, or make notes on things to research later, but what a massive momentum killer that was! While I tried not to get too bogged down looking things up this time around, being able to do it in convenient bite-sized pieces from the comfort of wherever I was made a world of difference. End tangent.

I can’t say I got particularly close to the other people I met at the write-ins, things just didn’t work out that way, but I did enjoy meeting them. Sadly though, as the days passed, their numbers dwindled. Many people attempt NaNo, but most don’t make the target. No surprise there, it’s a pretty tall order. Fifty-thousand original words, good or otherwise, is not easy to begin with.  Fifty-thousand words in a month is even worse.  The thing I hated the most though was seeing people get frustrated and drop out.  I think I really got lucky, hitting on just the right idea that often it felt like it was writing itself, but not everyone had the same kind of run I was having. I tried to mention when I could that “winning” wasn’t real the point, writing was, but people dropped out and although I hope they kept working on their stories, chances are many if not most of them didn’t.  That’s an important thing to remember though if you do NaNo; sure, aim for the target and try to make it, but the point is to write, and to the challenge is only the beginning. Don’t give up just because you’re not going to “win”, you can still finish your book and see it in print later, it doesn’t matter how long it takes.  After that month is over, there’s still a mountain of work left to do, so if the first draft takes three months, or six, or a year, it doesn’t matter because in the grand scheme of things that first month is always really only about starting, not finishing, regardless of whether you get the “Winner” certificate or not.

In my case though, I did hit my target.  After a little over three weeks, I wrote my fifty-thousandth word and…..I still didn’t have a book.  It was a little anti-climactic, kind of like cresting the top of a mountain only to find that there’s another, bigger mountain on top of it.  Yep, the initial challenge was over, but the real challenge was still to come.

Next, So I’ve got a big pile of badly spelled pages, now what?

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The Enablers, on sale now!

And So I Began Writing.

The days leading up to NaNo slid past, and I was raring to go.  I read about NaNo, their website, blogs, articles, strategy guides, everything.  The whole time though, I saw one thing standing above it, and that was a book, printed with my name on the cover. I wanted to see that, and I wanted it badly. Years of daydreaming about being an author had finally hit critical mass, ignited by that one short conversation with Tom.

So, how was I going to do this? A lot of people ramp up before November by laying out story lines, writing character notes, all sorts of reasonable preparations.  Did I mention that I only heard about the challenge a few days before it was set to start? No time for any of that, I was going to have to wing it.  As the book follows fairly well self contained groups of characters, I would sketch out my characters as I went along, flesh them out as I continued, and clean up the inevitable mess later (oh how I both dreaded and hoped for that “later”).

The story itself? I cast around for a way to write the story that would be both practical, given the timeline, and would produce something that would be a good read.  I settled on a format that I’ve enjoyed in the past, most recently in “World War Z”, which was to collect accounts that were noteworthy in the context of The Enablers. This meant setting the timeline so that a narrator, Michael McDermott would present four “Enabler Accounts”‘ with transcripts of interviews from various commentators between them. I figured this would allow me to explore the idea more broadly, and introduce the setting in a fun way, setting myself up for follow-up works (which hopefully I’ll be starting on soon).  How did it turn out? I liked the end product, now it’s up to my readers to tell me if I was right.

Next, tools. I had my trusty MacBook, and a variety of word processors with all sorts of fancy features.  I chose VIM, which for those of you who don’t know (probably nearly everyone), is a bare-bones UNIX text editor that’s been around longer than I have.  Think of notepad, but less pretty.  No spellcheck, no grammar correction, no automatic formatting, pretty much nothing.  Type and go, that’s it.  Why would I do this to myself? Simple, no distractions. To “win” at NaNo, word count is everything. Seeing all those red squiggly lines as the spellchecker has a nervous breakdown is a big distraction.  Write now, fix later.  Honestly, I think I made the right choice there.  Back in the olden days, when people hand-wrote or typed a manuscript, they didn’t have any spell or grammar checkers to annoy them.  They would focus on the story and nothing else.  If you ask me, I say turn all that stuff off on your first draft, cleaning it up later is no fun but. I have no doubt that the distractions would have slowed me down and, worse yet, broken my momentum when I had a good piece of the story going.

So, I had the absolute basics figured out, and finally the first day of NaNo came.  I disappeared into the basement, and the story just began to rush through my mind, my fingers flying across the keys.  Pages magically seemed to fill as I laid out the story of Richard DiLorenzo, tabloid reporter and first man to cover the story of The Enablers.

Next, NaNoWriMo continues…

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The Enablers, on sale now!

So I decided to write a novel…

“Well, I’m gonna do it too, but in mine the people with powers can’t do a damn thing, it’s everyone else that has special abilities”.

That’s pretty much where it started, in a phone conversation with my friend Tom.  He’d just told me about something called NaNoWriMo 2009, short for National Novel Writing Month, where people take on the bizarre task of writing the first draft of a novel in one month.  I didn’t realize it at that moment, but Tom had just set me on the course of writing my first novel.

He’d just told me about the challenge, and his first thought on what the concept he was going to work on was.  Being me, I threw out the first thing that sprang into my head, a weird attempt at being a smartass, only….had anyone done that twist before?  In moments I had gone from complete skepticism about the concept of writing a book in a month to…well, I won’t say I was all in yet, but the seed was planted.

A few days passed, and I found myself thinking more and more about writing.  I’d always wanted to write a novel, to see my name on the cover of a book.  Why hadn’t I done it before? I don’t know actually.  For some reason, the task seemed too daunting.  You always hear about people spending years on a novel that goes nowhere and never gets finished, and I guess I just thought that writing a book was too big, too many pages to expect my poor brain to populate with too many words.  Whatever the reason, I felt like now was the time.  I got excited about the idea, and told my wife that I wanted to not only write a novel, but I wanted to do a first draft in a month.

“I think you should go for it”.  No hesitation, not even after I pointed out the fact that she and our new daughter probably wouldn’t be seeing much of me as I’d be hiding in our basement pounding on my laptop during most of my waking hours when not at work.

The concept for The Enablers started taking shape in my mind. What if you had the ability to touch someone and give them some kind of super-power? How would it work? What kinds of powers could there be?  Sure, the idea of people having super-human abilities had been done, and done often, but the mechanism for gaining these abilities grabbed me.  What would it be like for the people who granted the powers, the Enablers, giving powers but never being able to have them themselves? Yes, early on I’d decided that an Enabler was immune to the touch of another Enabler, their powers were not only completely passive, but they would never have any power that they could use themselves.

What about the way they were viewed? What would people make of them? Some would hate the very idea of their existence, either out of jealousy, fear of change, religious opinion or superstition.  Others would want an Enabler for themselves, an employee, slave or captive to give them the power to do whatever they liked. Still others would find themselves already in a relationship with someone who could grant these abilities, changing their relationship in a decidedly strange way.

And what about how it worked? I just went with things, and I found that powers were passed by touch, but faded to nothing as the enabled person got further from their Enabler.  Distance was imperative, separate them by a few hundred feet and the person who was enabled reverts to normal. Then there’s “the connection”.  As long as an Enabler is supplying someone with an ability, everyone involved feels somehow connected, an almost electrical feeling, which also fades with distance, giving everyone a rough idea of how far apart they can go.

Like I said, the world of The Enablers began to come together in my head, and I watched the days tick off to the beginning of November, and the first day of NaNoWriMo. Fifty-thousand words in one month. I didn’t know if I could do it, but I was eager to take my shot at it.

Next, NaNoWriMo and the month without rest…..

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The Enablers, on sale now!