When Has Your Book Finished Cooking?

By Suw Charman-Anderson, Contributor at Forbes

One of the hardest decisions faced by any author, and something that is especially tricky for self-publishers, is knowing when your book is finished. For some, the problem is impatience, the urge to just be done with it all and to get the book out as soon as humanly possible. I wrote about this in February last year in a post called Don’t Publish That Book!, much to the disgust of some commenters. For those people, getting your stuff out there as fast as possible, getting feedback and sales, is more important than making sure it is of a high standard.

For others, the problem is knowing when to put the pen down and stop tinkering. “Art is never finished, only abandoned”, as Paul Valery may once have said, and for many writers it can become difficult to reach a point of comfort with that abandonment. There’s always something else to improve, something else to polish. I definitely fall into the latter camp, and I read back past works with a hypercritical eye that spots every tiny mistake and mentally chastise myself for being so thick as to have missed blindingly obvious flaws in my work.

So how do you know when your book is done? What is the literary equivalent of sticking a fork in it? I asked five writers how they know when a story or book is cooked right through.

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Joanna Penn

A thriller writer who self-publishes under the name JF Penn, Joanna’s novels include the Arkane trilogy: Pentecost, Prophecy and Exodus.

“How do you know when a story/book is finished? These are two separate questions.

“The story is finished when the arc is complete, when you have explored the world of the characters and their journey is over. That can happen when the first draft is done, when you know how it all hangs together. There may be further aspects to explore, but you feel a sense of culmination, a weight that just feels right.

“But the book is nowhere near finished at that point. You now have to go through the editing process, refining and polishing until the book, the product, is finished. All writers have their own editing process, but you need to stop eventually. I don’t believe there will ever be a point when you can read a work and not want to change something, but you have to draw the line. I work through two major drafts then I use two editors and a number of beta-readers, plus the rewriting that entails, before I am satisfied that the book is finished.“

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So how do you know when your novel is finished? Let me know in the comments!

Read the rest of the story here.

From Guest Blogger Randall

Tips for Trying to Write When the Kids Are Home

By Bridget Galbreath via WeBlogBetter

Working is one of those necessary evils in life. Nobody really wants to do it, but if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to afford to live.

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It can be quite difficult to try to write quality blog posts while the kids are running around, playing and constantly pulling on your coattails.

If you are a blogger, don’t toss in the towel or get frustrated; instead, use these tips to make the most out of writing while the kids are at home:

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Working from home has its ups and downs, especially when there are children involved. Use these tips to guide you to more effective writing so you can run a successful blog and enjoy your kids, too.

Link to the rest here.

From Guest blogger Randall.

 by Dan Gleibitzon at The Verge

Each year, hundreds of thousands of regular people pledge to write a novel. In a month. And that month is November, which is also known as NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

In the words of the organisers:

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing. On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 p.m. on November 30. Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought fleetingly about writing a novel.

It’s a pretty simple premise. Just write 1,667 words per day, each day, for a month. At the end of the month, you’ll have a novel, or something approximately like one.

NaNoWriMo is also a (totally optional) fundraiser for the purpose of promoting writing around the world.

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2013 will be my fourth NaNoWriMo. The first two went fairly well for me, resulting in manuscripts quite a bit larger than the 50k word goal. Last year I stumbled and ran out of steam before I hit 20k.

My writing is still pretty bad. My plots are pulpy and cliched. But I find the forced productivity very satisfying, and it’s nice to look back at stuff I wrote years ago and find that it’s not all as awful as I thought it was.

So, is anybody else on board? What’s your story this year? Plotter or pantser?

Read the rest here and for more info on NaNoWriMo click here.

From Guest Blogger Randall

Take the Plunge!

From J.W. Manus (who has more commonsense than everyone I know put together):

Being the boss is a lot of responsibility. That’s why you need confidence. I’ll let you in on self-publishing’s Big Secret.

If you screw up, you can do it over.

Mistakes in the text? Fix them and update your listings. The cover’s not working? Redo it and update your listings. Don’t like a distributor? Pull your books. Find a new and exciting distributor? Sign up and list your books.

How’s that for a confidence booster? Mistakes aren’t fatal or expensive.

Read the rest of this inspiring article here!

An extra post for today.  Could not resist.  Julia Barrett

From Media Bistro:

“Want to add a sound track to your self-published book? Check out, Booktrack, a new app that will let you add music or sound effects to your eBook.

“The application is available for iOS devices and as a Chrome app. You can use it to record audio tracks and then insert them into your text. Once you do so, you can export the files to sell the title within the Booktrack community where you can also shop for books with sound effects.”

Read the rest here:  APPNEWSER

Julia Barrett

From The New America Foundation

When I started writing my first book in 2003, I’d been blogging for more than three years. I’d learned the value of a conversation with my readers. Most importantly, I’d absorbed the obvious truth that they knew more than I did. So, with the permission of my publisher, I posted chapter drafts of We the Media on my blog. The result was a variety of comments and suggestions, some small and some major, that in the end helped me produce a much better book.

That experiment was an early stab at bringing the Internet’s widely collaborative potential to a process that had always been collaborative in its own way: authors working with editors. The notion of adding the audience to the process was, and remains, deeply appealing.

Why so? It wasn’t only the fantastic prepublication feedback that appealed to me. It was also the potential for thinking about a book as something that might evolve.

* * *

The most famous Internet collaboration is the one almost everyone uses, at least as a reader: Wikipedia. Editing isn’t terribly difficult, though not nearly simple enough for true newbies. Even if it were, Wikipedia isn’t a book with an author’s voice—and isn’t meant to be. Yet it shows many of the ways forward, including the robust discussions in the background of the articles. Wikipedia articles are also living documents, changing and evolving over time. Could books be like that?

* * *

The book world has already gone through major shifts in recent years, even if the biggest traditional publishers have tried to hold back the tide. We’re still early in this transition, perhaps the third inning if it’s a baseball game. When books can truly become living documents, it won’t be game over—it never is—but we’ll be in a much more interesting, and valuable, publishing ecosystem.

See the rest here.

Randall

Thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From Mail Online:

A pair of German inventors have created a digital pen that can check for spelling mistakes in handwriting.

The Lernstift, which is German for learning pen, has a built-in sensor that recognises writing movements and tracks the shape of the letters to recognise words. It then vibrates when a mistake is made.

Lernstift also has Wi-Fi built-in and the pen can be connected a smartphone or PC to upload written texts online, share them on social networks or take part in writing training.

Link to the rest at Mail Online and thanks to Jeanne for the tip.

From A.J. Abbiati via Joe Konrath’s blog:

For those who don’t know me, I have a background in science. Twice now I’ve used that background to solve particularly gnawing artistic problems. The first time came at the start of my MFA program when I found out that, apparently, no university, no workshop, and no how-to book teaches writers how to actually write. Really? Yup. Sad but true. No one teaches a logical, step-by-step process for learning how to construct professional quality prose. As such, I had to figure it out for myself (using a scientific approach), and I wrote The NORTAV Method for Writers: The Secret to Constructing Prose Like the Pros so I could teach the process to others (using a non-scientific approach). In fact, some very well-known, well-respected authors, authors who frequent this site, offered me their prose for use as examples in The NORTAV Method, and I want to thank them again for their generosity!

Anyway, the second time science bailed me out of an artistic problem, and the point of this post, came during the writing of my episodic novel Fell’s Hollow. Fell’s is a dark fantasy, and I needed to come up with three new languages to support certain aspects of the story. I didn’t want to make up fictitious words on the fly. That’s a rather hack way to go about it, in my view, and experienced readers will pick up on a shortcut in an instant. I also didn’t want to pull a Tolkien: I didn’t have ten years to build three new languages from the ground up. So I decided to do a little research into linguistics, and I ended up creating a tool that, in a matter of minutes, can define a “new language” from scratch. I call the tool “The Transliterator.”

You can download the Excel or PDF version of The Transliterator here. My gift to you.

. . . .

Basically, The Transliterator will help you transpose the phonetic sounds of an English word or sentence into a non-English representation, using a different set of consonants and vowels, thus recreating the English word in a “new language.” (This is not a letter-for-letter transposition from English to something else. That approach introduces WAY too many technical problems, which I won’t get into here.) For example, you could set up The Transliterator to map the English vowel sound “i as in fine, line, behind” to a new vowel representation aa. Thus, whenever you encounter the long vowel sound “i” in an English word, you represent it physically and phonetically as aa in the new language. The rest of the transliteration process simply involves tailoring the new language to taste.

Link to the rest at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing and thanks to Colleen for the tip.

From BookRiot:

[W]e asked you to share your favorite tips and tools for getting things done. Tons of what we can only assume are super-organized, task-master Riot readers chimed in.

. . . .

Do the worst item on your list first. Everything else is easier from there.

. . . .

Turn off the wi-fi on your computer when you’re working on a task that doesn’t require connectivity.

. . . .

Self-Restraint and Mac Freedom–programs to shut off social media

Evernote app for collecting lists, notes, reminder photos

Link to the rest at BookRiot

PG has been a giant fan of Evernote since it first released. It’s one of the few freemium programs he subscribes to, not because he needs the premium features, but just to support it.