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Category: writing

What’s In A (Pen) Name?

Published by Kelly on October 22, 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about names lately. For one thing, I recently got engaged, and my fiance isn’t super keen on the idea of me keeping my maiden name. As Kelly Hitchcock, I’ve published one novel (and hopefully one more), a few short stories, and several poems. Still, he maintains that he wants me to take his last name, which is four syllables… not exactly hyphen-friendly. And anyone who has read my work knows I am a big fan of the hyphen; almost as much as I would be a semicolon superfan if it didn’t make me look like a pretentious a-hole.

It also came up in my writer’s group the other day – when is it appropriate to use a pen name? I imagine that if your given name at birth is Brad Pitt or James Cameron and you plan on making a serious living as an author, you might want to use a pen name to distance yourself from the celebrity namesakes (then again, you might want to invite the connection). Then there’s the case of writers who cross over into writing in another genre – like erotica – and use a pen name to maintain the separation between the two genre’s writings.  Or maybe your name just sucks, like Dentenia Zickafoose.

What I wonder is:

  • It’s common practice for doctors and lawyers to keep their maiden names based on public professional accomplishments. Income disparity notwithstanding, does the same expectation exist for authors?
  • Is it icky to take on a pen name for no apparent reason? No evidence of genre-switching, crappy namesake, or celebrity doppelhood?

What do you think?

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The End. No wait… The End. No wait…

Published by Kelly on June 4, 2012

For my money, the hardest part of writing a book is figuring out where to end it. With my first book, The Redheaded Stepchild, it took me nearly two years to figure out an ending. The book was chiefly about the complicated relationship I had with my ex-stepmother, and even when that relationship was over, it wasn’t really over in my mind, so pinning down an ending was difficult. Even though I could pinpoint our last interaction, it still didn’t feel like “the end” in my mind. So I did what any writer does when they don’t know how to end a story: I picked an ending, and I went with it.

I’m working diligently on the last chapter of my current work in progress, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to end it. Why? Because this last chapter is the chapter about me, and I don’t know this particular story of my life ends. For those of us who write autobiographically, or semi-autobiographically, as my case may be, endings are unbelievably hard to write. What’s keeping from finishing my book is the decision to either wait to see how my story shakes out, or just make something up.

What do you think? Is making up an ending cheating? Or do I pick an ending and go with it?

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You Don’t Know Everything: Manuscript Strength in Numbers

Published by Kelly on February 13, 2012

If you’re a writer, and you’re not a part of a writer’s workshop group, I want you to go ahead and kick yourself in the gut. And if you’re capable of this feat, maybe you should consider a new line of work. Those of you who are regular followers of my mostly mundane author news know that I am the de facto leader of a writer’s group (via Meetup) here in town (on Twitter at @WeirdATXWriters), and I have to say, their feedback is priceless. Typically, I bring my first drafts of short stories, chapters, and poems to my workshop meetups, and my first drafts are usually pretty clean. But if it weren’t for my writer’s group, I wouldn’t have known the following about my next novel (which now has a title, btw… PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN IN INK: A TATTOO STORYBOOK).

  • One of my stories takes place on Thanksgiving, and there’s a reference to football playing on the television. If not for my writer’s group, I wouldn’t have known that the teams that play on Turkey Day are Detroit and Dallas, every year. And I LOVE football. (Yes, it was a Texan who corrected me.)
  • The correct height and weight of a 4-year-old boy. Also, the age at which boys are fully potty-trained. Sure, I can guess, but my guesses proved inaccurate.
  • That not everyone remembers 1984 (the book, not the year – I was two) with the same level of recall as me, and the term “proles” is lost on most.

Bottom line? I’m a pretty smart cookie, but I don’t know everything. No one’s life experiences can make them an expert on everything, and it’s only by having a few fresh sets of eyes on a manuscript that you can resolve little misgivings in the prose that hurt your credibility with the reader.

If you’re not part of a group, there is no excuse for that. There’s Meetup, where you can probably find about 5 writers groups in your area. If there isn’t one, you can start one, and it’ll cost you about $100 a year. I joined one when I moved to Austin, and ended up running the same group when the organizer moved out of town, and we typically have about 5 or 6 people in a workshop meetup. That’s 5 different people with different life experiences (parent, engineer, sports fan, etc.) reading my manuscripts and pointing out these little issues that never would have crossed my mind. Is that worth the $100 a year I’m spending on meetup dues (that I could be getting from sponsors or my group members if I were that concerned about the cash)? You bet your sweet ass it is.

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Help me pick a title for my next masterpiece!

Published by Kelly on January 31, 2012

Greetings, loyal fanbase of fans! Today I sent the drafts of the short stories that are going in my newest collection to the people they were about. If you’re unfamiliar, I’m working on a collection of short stories about women and their tattoos. The stories are chained, meaning you meet characters in a previous story and learn more about them in the next.

I’ve been struggling to come up with a title, but I have a few ideas I’ve been throwing arond, so I want to crowdsource this one… tell me in the comments: which one do you like best?

  1. Vodka Chicken Soup for the Tattooed Soul
  2. Written in Ink
  3. The Girls with the Draggin’ Tattoos

Or, choose your own!

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2011 in Writer Review

Published by Kelly on January 1, 2012

I just got done reading my 2010 review, and now I’m ready to do the same for 2011. It’s been quite a year, and was way different from 2010.

  • I had two manuscripts published in 2011. It was less than 2010, but I’ll still call it a win because I spent more energy on getting The Redheaded Stepchild published and writing my next novel. I also spent more time writing new manuscripts in general than I did in 2010.
  • 2011 came and went, and the two poems that were accepted for publication in February 2010 are still waiting to go to print. And people wonder why print is dead…
  • I forwent the book deal and decided to publish The Redheaded Stepchild myself. I’m still experimenting to figure out what works as far as sales and marketing go, but I’m not in this for the money. I’m in it because I love it and I want to try new things.
  • I tripled my Twitter followers.
  • I once again pimped my writing at South by Southwest. I also submitted a panel proposal for SXSW 2012 which is still under review. Fingers crossed!
  • I used my Kindle to check out works by other Kindle authors. I’m hoping that it’ll be great for you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours kind of sales.
  • I joined a writer’s group, and I’m now leading that group. I look forward to Weird Austin Writers meetings every single time.
  • I began volunteering at my local library. I’m hoping this will help me reach out to readers once I get more established.

Goals for 2012

  • Sell 1,000 copies of The Redheaded Stepchild. I’ll have to figure out what works marketing-wise to make that happen, but it’d be nice to know that my book is in 1,000 new hands!
  • Publish my next novel. I’ve got a lot of rewriting and editing to do, but I’m really excited about the project and I think it’ll be my best work yet. Now if I can just think of a title…
  • Build relationships with readers and other authors. This means I need to keep up with my other author blogs all year round. (Compound goal.)
  • Publish The Other Dentenia Zickafoose. I’ve been shopping this guy around for almost 2 years now. It’s time.
  • Become a contributor on other author blogs. Guest posting, book reviews, whatever I can do. I need to put myself out there.
  • Write 15 new manuscripts. I’ll have the new novel, but I also want to write 10 poems and 5 short stories to add to my repertiore. Can’t be myopic with my manuscripts.

On the whole, I’ll call 2011 a win. I think 2012 is gonna rock.

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The Art of Reviewing as Learned from Charles Dickens

Published by Kelly on December 4, 2011

This past week, I received my first reviews for The Redheaded Stepchild since I finished publishing it. (You can read the reviews here.) As part of my advertising strategy to be as non-invasive and un-icky as possible, I am using reviews heavily. What does that mean? Everything I read, I review. On Goodreads, or on the site of purchase (Amazon or Goodreads for me, usually). I try to keep my reviews as positive as possible, and when giving criticism, being as matter-of-fact as possible, offering something that could actually be helpful to the author.

I also make it a point to go through the other reviews posted and Like, Mark Helpful, or whatever the site has available. I find it gratifying for two reasons:

  1. Some of these reviews are just plain hilarious. I just finished Oliver Twist and one of the Goodreads reviews was “Please, sir, may I have less?” Yeah, it’s pretty gorram wordy book. Thank you, pay-by-the word olde English publishers.
  2. It makes me feel like I am in good company. If the great Charles Dickens, a household name known by everyone who’s ever read a book, ever, can get a bjillion negative reviews, I can get my first bad one and not feel like a total failure.

Luckily, my reviews thus far have been very positive, but they were both from friends, so they kinda have to be nice to me. When strangers who aren’t so keen on my writing style start buying it by the bushel (positive thinking, people… positive thinking), I’m sure I’ll get a scathing review or two. And that’s okay. I don’t expect everyone on the planet to dig my writing style, just as there are plenty of people out there who didn’t, and still don’t, like Charles Dickens’ writing style, the wordy bastard. Not to compare myself to Charles Dickens, but hey…

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NaNoWriMo, how’d I do?

Published by Kelly on December 2, 2011

National Novel Writing Month is now over. Those of you following my Twitter feed know that I didn’t “win” according to the NaNoWriMo rules, but I did exceed my personal goal. As I enter this NaNoWriMo refractory period after banging away at it hard and fast, I am definitely not going to get down on myself for not making 50,000 words, especially since it took me 3 years to write my first novel, and 4 more years of querying and editing to get it published.

So, I thought I would analyze my executive-friendly burndown chart and assess my performance…

This first week, I had a new client to write dating profiles for every single day. I guess no one likes being single during the holidays. Still, I got a good, steady start and got plenty of research done, too. Oh yeah, and I also was finishing editing and publishing The Redheaded Stepchild this week. That was kind of a priority…

This scary series of flatness was the long weekend that we had a houseguest so that we could tailgate and watch my Kansas State Wildcats beat the 4th Texas team in the Big 12 (why can’t they make NaNoWriMo not fall in the middle of college football season?) so I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done. As you can see, there was a nice spike the day I drove our guest to the airport.

I sprinted pretty fiercely this last week. It helped that we didn’t have to go to three different Thanksgiving dinners this year. These lines should actually be a little smoother, but since I logged a lot of my word counts after midnight, they’re a bit choppy.

So, why was NaNoWriMo good for me?

This writing project (which you can read about in this previous post) required that I actually talk to people to research a little bit. Like a lot of writers, I despise talking on the phone, and typically put off phone calls as long as I can. But because I was on a timeline, I didn’t have the luxury of putting it off. I had to pick up the phone, shoot off an email, or (for certain people) send a Facebook message (seriously folks? this is your primary form of communication now?). And keep in mind, I was asking some of them to tell me deeply personal stories of theirs and then getting their permission, as it were, to mass produce and bastardize these memories.

It did exactly what it’s designed to do – got me to just sit down and write. My typical day is writing tech manuals for 8 hours, doing my freelance writing job for a few more hours, so often the last thing I want to do after all that is write more. Not to mention I have to ship my ass to the gym so I don’t degrade into a complete slob and I have to take care of my family (okay, so it’s just my boyfriend and my dog, but this sounds more like an actual task). So having the looming deadline staring me in the face kicked me in the ass enough to just sit down and write, which is what I need.

Why was NaNoWriMo bad for me?

I’m guilty of edit-as-I-go writing. That’s not to say I don’t typically have an extended editing period once the draft is done (I’m not a complete idiot), but NaNoWriMo doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for polishing. Writing that first paragraph and moving on to the next without re-reading the first one twelve times – that’s a challenge for me. It took me out of my comfort zone a bit and forced me to limit the amount of polishing I could do on what I had already written.

Because life got in the way. I know, me and everyone else who signed up. Boo fucking hoo.

All in all, I’m glad I did it and will probably do it again. The stuff that I’ve managed to punch out in this month is pretty kick-ass, even if it’s not as polished as I’d like it to be. It just means my drafts are really just that – drafts.

I still need to actually fill out my NaNoWriMo page, but was too busy actually writing to do it. As a last note, The Redheaded Stepchild is featured in the Women’s Literary Cafe December promotion this week, so please give this a share to help me get more exposure. Gotta pay down those student loans…

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Why you should write about Thanksgiving

Published by Kelly on November 26, 2011

I’ve been working on my second novel for a couple months now – a short story collection about women and their tattoos. The first chapter I wrote was about a tattoo done on Thanksgiving. I think it’s one of my stronger chapters, and it was also one of the easiest to write. Last night while I was trying (and failing) to fall back asleep, it occurred to me that the reason for that is because Thanksgiving is such a rich topic to write about. If you’re a writer looking for something to get the creative juices flowing, I suggest writing something about Thanksgiving. Why?

  • Great material for sensory images. You’ve got the visual, the gustatory, the olfactory, even the auditory and the tactile. I can’t even begin to think about Thanksgiving without smelling deep fried turkey.
  • Built-in conflict. Sometimes as writers we struggle to create conflict out of nothing. When it comes to Thanksgiving, there isn’t a single one I’ve had where there wasn’t some kind of drama floating about.
  • Opportunity for dialogue. People will talk about just about anything at Thanksgiving, to just about anybody.

So if you’ve never written about a Thanksgiving event, I challenge you to crank out a little flash fiction piece to get the juices flowing. Mmm… that makes me think of turkey.

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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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