Publisher Edits Done: What Next?

June 19, 2014 By 2 Comments

My journey towards publishing took another step this past weekend. I took advantage of being childfree to delve deep and finish the edits my publisher had sent me for my novel OZCILLATION. After working on them for weeks, I could hardly believe when I made the final change and hit Save.

I sent them off to my editor with much jubilation.

So what now? There will be at least one more round of edits. As my editor explained, the first round is for the “lumps”—the bigger picture things that need to be smoothed out. Such as extending the ending, tweaking the voice, adding more depth to the world. The next round will be a “polish” edit, focusing more on the nit-picky details of grammar and word choice and things like that. I suppose, if necessary, we would do a third, but hopefully that won’t be needed.

We are also starting to move into the marketing side of things. Most importantly, do we keep the title or change it? I personally like OZCILLATION for a number of reasons, but if we can come up with a more market-friendly title that resonates with me, I am not opposed to changing it. I am terrible at coming up with titles, so I hope the publishers have more ideas!

I am starting to work behind the scenes for when we need to start the book buzz process. I am getting my website and blog revamped. I want to work on a Teacher’s Guide and Book Club questions. I am trying to network with librarians, teachers, parents, and kids to see how I can fulfill some need for them while getting word out about my book.

There’s so much to do! The journey continues into uncharted territory.

Any published authors out there who can suggest other things I should be thinking about/working on?

GoosesQuill FB

Post-poning

August 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I am in the middle of moving frenzy. The big day is Saturday, and I still have a whole lot to pack! Kitchen is the current project.

I’m also waiting until the last minute to move baby girl’s toys, aniimals, and wall decorations from her room, because I want her to remain as stable and secure as possible throughout the move. She is already a little confused as to where other things in the house have gone (like the piano).

So this week’s blog will simply be a blog explaining why there is no real blog!

Next week will hopefully bring regularly scheduled programming. Except that Verizon is on strike so we have been unable to get phone or internet at the new house yet. I may have to hit a Starbuck’s to post – and I don’t even drink coffee!

Internet Down, Productivity Up

January 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

My Internet was down for three days. Now, I use the Internet for communicating for work, but also just to stay connected with the outside world. Any of you who have been stay-at-home parents will understand the need to reach outside the house every now and then. The need to communicate with someone who can actually speak in complete sentences! So it has been something of a lifeline in that way.

That said, I had an extremely productive three days. Got lots of projects done, things I’ve not gotten to because I didn’t have the time. And so I started wondering, “Do I really spend THAT much time online?”

Although I do check in with Facebook, and check emails when they come in, and have certain blogs I follow daily, I am pretty good at not getting sucked into the time warp that can happen online. It is so easy to follow an interesting link that leads to another and another…addictive. But I’m fairly adept at avoiding that (unless it’s during genealogy research – which is why I don’t do that during work hours!). So probably my actual amount of time spent READING what I get online is between 1-2 hours a day – not a workday, but a full 15-hour day. That’s not bad.

So why was I so much more productive without the Internet? I think it was a combination of two factors: information and fragmentation.

Everything I read – blogs, status updates, and emails – contains information. And if I could just read the info and walk away, that would be fine. But a certain percentage of that information demands a response. I may want to comment on a blog, or a friend’s Facebook post. And emails, whether for work or pleasure, often demand a reply, if only a short one. All of which eats into my time, but in such small increments that I don’t notice how much it’s taking.

Those increments are insidious because they are fragmented – I don’t notice them in bits here and there, yet at the end of the day they have added up to a larger number than I expected. But the other killer is a different kind of fragmentation – the fragmentation of concentration.

When the Internet is functioning, there is the pressure to deal with things as they come in. Someone responded to my Facebook status? Gotta see what it says, keep the dialogue going. A new email in the Inbox? Hafta see who needs what from me now. The Internet is wonderful in facilitating fast communication – but it also brings the pressure of instant communication. Like I have to respond now, at once. And this constant checking to see what’s going on out there breaks up the large chunks of uninterrupted concentration I often need to get projects, both work and home related, done efficiently.

So what to do about it? Self-discipline. I have to devise a strategy to somehow avoid the pressure to check frequently. It may be as simple as actually closing my browser except at certain times of day, so that I don’t see those updates popping up, demanding my attention. We’ll see how it goes.

How do you avoid the lure of the Internet?

The Princess Blogs?

October 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Not long ago, I read Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries. I enjoyed the use of the diary format—it brought immediacy to the action and intimacy to the character. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, if the diary format could be as successful today as it was then. 

The Princess Diaries was written in 2000—not ancient times, certainly, but before everybody and their mother had a blog/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Kids today are highly comfortable posting their lives on the Internet, and their “diaries” are their blogs. In The Princess Diaries, Mia says that she wanted to write everything in the diary because she didn’t want anyone to know that she was a princess. That sort of secrecy would be impossible with an online journal or blog.

So, would a diary format book become a bestseller in today’s market? Possibly—kids still know what a diary is, and some may even still keep a “paper” diary. I suspect, however, that as the kids of today become the writers of tomorrow, the diary format will turn into a blog format. Will this lose some of the intimacy of the form? Kids writing on a public blog (even a fictitious one) are unlikely to be as forthcoming and honest with their thoughts and emotions. Although kids today are more willing to put themselves “out there” than most adults, they are aware that it is a public forum, and I think that will inevitably lead to some self-censorship. This could lead to some constraint of the form, some limitations to how far it can be pushed. 

A cousin to the diary format, the epistolary novel is also looking at a sea change. With letters dying out, replaced by emails, chats, text messages and the like, will epistolary novels go the way of the rotary phone? 

In her blog, Tracy Marchini notes that one of the defining characteristics of an epistolary novels is that time elapses between each letter—and a lot can happen in that time. With emails, the elapsed time between communications dwindles from several days or weeks to several minutes or hours. Granted that it only takes a moment for someone’s life to be irrevocably changed, it still brings a different cadence to the communication. 

Like the diary novel, I think we will see the epistolary novel morph into a new form—a “communication” novel involving email, chat and text. I also think this will be a smoother transition than the diary novel, because so many of the basics will remain the same. An email is, after all, often just a letter in digital clothing. 

Do you think these forms will evolve into something new, or die out altogether? Are there other formats that technology will make obsolete or change substantially?

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