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Kelly I. Hitchcock Posts

Hello again, Google Reader

Published by Kelly on November 23, 2011

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, an aspiring author began following blogs of friends, other writers, and publishing people she deemed important. Before long, the author was completely snowed under with unread blog posts, and one day, she got tired of logging into Google Reader and seeing that she had 596 unread posts.

Well, that author is now self-published, and needs to start building relationships with other writers who have successful blogs so she can be taken seriously and get some readership going. So she is giving Google Reader another chance. She logged in today, since it’s the day before Thanksgiving and there’s not much going on at the office, unsubscribed from all the long-since-defunct blogs she used to follow, marked all the old posts from the blogs she wants to keep following as read (so she can start from scratch) and added a few new ones from some of her tweeps:

  • Melissa Ecker @MelissaEcker a romance writer with whom I have twitterpated.
  • Tymothy Longoria @tymothylongoria a writer I have no idea how I met
  • Tonya @tmycann whose blog I just found today, and it’s awesome

And I am hoping to add more. If you have one you think is really really ridiculously good-looking or just mega interesting, drop me a comment and I’ll start following you, but not in real life.

Shit. I switched from 3rd to 1st person. Oh well, you knew the author was me, anyway.

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NaNoWriMo mid-month status report

Published by Kelly on November 16, 2011

I’ve been working on the tattoo story collection I discussed a few posts ago. It’s been going very well, but it appears I am short of the 25,000 word count mark by about 11k. That tends to happen when you get new freelance clients every night for the first couple weeks, then have to go to a 3-day conference for your real job.

The main reason I wanted to do National Novel Writing Month was because I had a project I was crazy excited about, and I wanted to start getting it down before I lost that initial excitement. Perhaps more importantly, though, it took me seven years to write my last book, and I don’t want it to take another seven years to write my second. NaNoWriMo is great for me, because it forces me to find the time – often time I don’t have – to write something, anything, any day. As a result, I’ve written on the city bus, in coffee shops during meetups, on my lunch breaks, while watching college football recaps, you name it.

Part of the problem I’ve had with NaNoWriMo is that the process needs to be fast, and my process is typically much slower. I’m a big edit-as-I-go kind of person; it’s how I’ve always been and why I think my editing phase is a little easier. It’s difficult for me to write something I know I don’t really like, am going to have to change later, and just leave it and move on. It may prove useful though, because when I do come back to this in December to start editing (yes, I am an optimist), I’ll have a little more dramatic distance than I typically have when I edit as I write. No process is ever going to be perfect, though, so I guess I’ll take the productivity in exchange for the rework I’ll inevitably have to do later.

It’s likely that I won’t get to 50,000 on time, but I’m not overly concerned. I’m happy with the progress I am making and I think the prose is really well done so far. I’ve also been getting some great feedback from my meetup group members, which I will feature again soon.

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Financial Times feature

Published by Kelly on November 11, 2011

It’s only tangentially related to my personal writing, but it’s still pretty damned cool. I was interviewed by Emma Jacobs of the Financial Times about my freelance writing job (you know, the one I’m doing when I’m not working my full-time real job or working on my next novel). The article’s pretty sweet, so it’s definitely worth passing on.

You can read it HERE, and possibly have to pass their registration wall by registering for a free account. Or you can Google “The Love Letter Ghostwriter” to read the thing without registering.

P.S. That’s not what I really look like. It’s a God-awful picture of me.

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Answering the question “So what’s your book about?”

Published by Kelly on November 8, 2011

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent years writing your book.  The characters are so real in your imagination that they might as well be walking right beside you, in the flesh.  You’ve added sections, removed sections, rewritten sections so many times you could recite them from memory.  Your book encompasses love, hate, and that which makes us infallible humans…

… and then someone wants to you to simplify all that into a sentence. THE sentence. “What’s your book about?”

You want to scoff at them, tell them you can’t possibly diminish your life’s work to a level they could possibly understand.  But you’re not a pompous asshole, and you want them to actually read it. So what do you do?

You find an answer to life’s great question. You’ll have to answer it the rest of your life after you’re published, so you might as well have a well thought-out, rehearsed (but natural) answer for it. Not sure where to start?  Here are some ideas:

  • Setting. No, you don’t want a Don LaFontaine-esque “In a world where…” statement, but where your story takes place is a pretty big part of the story. If your story’s on a fictional planet incapable of sustaining life, that’s probably something the questioner wants to know about. If it’s just about a small town where escape seems impossible (like mine is), that’s just as crucial to the story.
  • Main character. Bottom line, if they don’t care about the main character, they’re not going to care about your story.
  • The central conflict. If you make your character’s world sound all hunky-dory, then the reader’s not going to see much point in reading a story about everyday life on planet Cilicol or the fun of growing up.

Avoid cliches. Don’t call it a coming of age story (guilty of this myself), a post-apocalyptic survival story, or a sardonic satire. Be unique.  If your elevator answer includes these three elements and steers clear of cliches, then it’ll probably be enough to catch their attention. Here’s one I’ve been kicking around…

It’s a collection of vignettes about a girl who grows up in a small town where everyone wants to get out, but few people actually do. Just as she gets used to life with her younger brother and sister in her father’s custody, her new stepmother comes along and she has to try and figure out how to keep her in her life, even with life around her isn’t so pleasant.

Keep it short. About 30 seconds. After awhile, you’ll get so good at it you’ll forget that it took you years and years to write your epic tome.

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THE REDHEADED STEPCHILD now available on Kindle!

Published by Kelly on November 7, 2011

Remember, remember the 5th of November, because it’s the day I uploaded my first novel to Amazon’s Kindle direct publishing and Smashwords! It’s now available for readers everywhere for just $2.99.

Links to buy the book are here. You can also lend it or download a free sample that includes the first chapter.

The process was really easy. I had already formatted a short story for epub format before, so I knew what and what not to do, and of course the longest part of the process was writing and editing. All I really had to do was add a product description, create some tags, upload a cover image, and upload the formatted book file. The Kindle Help is very well written and walked me through the process almost perfectly.

The real question I keep asking myself is why I waited so long to do it in the first place.

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Remember Remember the 5th of November

Published by Kelly on November 4, 2011

So, I’m a little drunk as I write this, so bear with me. I’m celebrating, because I just finished editing The Redheaded Stepchild. I began writing the book about 7 years ago, and tomorrow (and by tomorrow, I mean today, after a night’s sleep), I will be publishing it on Kindle Direct and Smashwords. It’s been a long journey, but I’m ready to publish my first novel and get it under my belt.

More to come tomorrow…

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The best laid plans…

Published by Kelly on October 31, 2011

My original intention was to spend the month of October polishing my novel so that I could have it ready to publish on Amazon and Goodreads by November 1 (just in time for #NaNoWriMo), but unfortunately life had other plans. I finished 2 rounds of editing, and was getting ready to start a final read-through just before the last week in October before this perfect storm happened:

  • I was assigned a new client’s dating profile to write every. single. night. Not to mention, I usually had to squeeze in editing based on feedback for the one I had done the night before, so my evenings were destroyed.
  • We had friends come into town for the weekend of Halloween, and they had a very erratic schedule, so the time I planned on working on formatting my manuscripts for e-reader was completely booked.

Not to mention, I have a pesky full-time day job and all that noise. So, the book’s not going to come out when I hoped, but I’d rather have it done right than done on time.

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The Joy of Editing

Published by Kelly on October 19, 2011

fter years of pimping my first novel to agents and publishers, I’ve decided to quit stalling and self-publish the thing as an e-book. Why? Well, there are lots of reasons, in no particular order:

  • Indie ebook authoring is the way the market is going. Every time I read something from an author who has gone independent and e-book only, it only reinforces that I’m making the right decision.
  • I know my book’s good enough to be on shelves. I got one offer for a book deal from a publisher (it was a really shitty deal, and I was right not to take it), and got requests for a full manuscript from two agents.
  • It will keep me from being lazy and making excuses about why the book hasn’t been published yet. I can’t blame anyone but myself.
  • Every day I don’t self-publish my book is a day I’m not making money (thanks J.A. Konrath), and I could use it.
  • The Redheaded Stepchild is not my greatest work. I have better stories to write and it’s time to get this one under my belt and move on.

So, what are the main functions today’s publisher offers, since I can get my books in the hands of readers without a publisher getting them on pages and on a shelf in a bookstore? Primarily, editing and cover art. I’m doing both of these myself, which may be a cardinal sin, but hey, if I’m going to be a starving independent author, I need to play the part.

In addition, it’s been more than 5 years (seriously? seriously.) since I wrote The Redheaded Stepchild, so I felt like I had the level of dramatic distance needed to be more objective than I would have been right after I wrote it. And I think I do, for the most part. I’ve taken a lot of measures to make my main character a little stronger (she was a lot whinier than I remembered) and I’ve caught a lot of technical errors I am both embarrassed by and know I would have missed years ago.

The first pass of editing is now complete, and I’m moving on to phase 2. In phase 1, I was mostly cutting – deleting details that didn’t add to the plot development, took away from the character’s persona, or were just weird. Now I am adding – adding details that will help make my character stronger and my plot more believable. I think after phase 2, I will be done editing, because I am getting to a point where I think “gee, that’d be a great detail to add,” only to add the detail then find the exact same thing a few sentences later.

Editing is a necessary but thankless task, and the biggest part of every writer’s life. I can’t wait to hire someone to do it for me next time 😛

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New poem: Occupy Rural Route Two

Published by Kelly on October 11, 2011

The whole Occupy Wall Street mess has been all over the news lately. I won’t tell you my opinion, except that I agree with some of their demands (though I think calling them demands is a really bad idea) but I think they’re blaming the wrong people and doing something that will likely prove ineffectual.

I also find it interesting because I grew up in a town whose idea of a traffic jam was 20 cars behind a tractor and corporate greed was the local furniture store not offering to sponsor the baseball team.  A guy I went to high school with is now an economist in DC, and we were talking on twitter about what the demands of “Occupy Buffalo, Missouri” would be if there were one. I had so much fun with it that I decided to write a little poem to demonstrate how far removed rural America is from corporate America, no matter how much politicians want to say we’re all the same.

It’s called Occupy Rural Route Two. Enjoy.

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New fiction project underway – call for help!

Published by Kelly on October 2, 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my next tattoo. Coincidentally, today is the 4th anniversary of my divorce, and I always said that when my marriage was over, I would get a new tattoo to cover up the one that I got just a few days after our wedding. I wanted to get this tattoo four years ago, but I was left with a house that couldn’t sell and he couldn’t pay for. Things are just now starting to look up in the market, and I’m anxiously waiting for the last tie to be severed.

That, of course, is the Reader’s Digest version, but it’s a story that is anything but uncommon. A physical change that represents a significant event or belief that someone has. Sure, there are plenty of people out there who get tattoos for no reason whatsoever (I’m looking at you, University of Texas hipster), but I think that for the most part, people get tattoos to commemorate something special.

That’s where you come in. I want to know the story behind your tattoo, whether it’s your first or your 20th, so you can be part of this collection of stories. If you’re game, e-mail me the Reader’s Digest version of your tattoo story (or more, depending on how many creative liberties you’ll allow me to take).

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