So you think you lost NaNoWriMo?

Didn't make 50,000 words? That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. I swear to you it does not matter one iota. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t make you a loser. It doesn’t make you a hopeless writer.

One NaNo win is not the end point of your journey--not nearly so. The month of NaNo is one tool of a million tools that might help you become a selling writer one day. Just that. Nothing more. One tool.

So what if you skip it one year? So what if you “only” wrote 37000 words this year? That’s a great total! Keep writing. NaNo, remember, is just a game. You don’t want to be a game winner more than you want to be a writer, do you? So ...  go be a writer, including on December 1 and 10 and January 14.

At its best, NaNoWriMo helps people learn for the first time that it’s possible to draft a novel in a month. And then they go on and do that again, independently of any game, on months other than November, over and over again. If you wrote over 1000 words a day on average, you still learned the lesson, whether or not you hit the arbitrary 50,000 word total or not. If you wrote six days out of seven despite having a job and kids, you still did well. Keep up those good habits--write at least 1,000 or revise at least 2,000 every day--and you’ll be able to write at least two books per year. Keep doing it, year after year, and your writing will improve over the years. Keep improving, and one day strangers will be anxious to read the next book you’ve written.

If NaNo makes you feel bad, if it doesn’t match your personal production habits, don’t do it again. You’ll get beat up enough over a lifetime of writing, and a lifetime is what a writing career entails; don’t beat yourself up by adding another burden or sense of failure that you can avoid.

If you won, hey, great! Congratulations! But if you didn’t win but learned something, or wrote a third of a novel that didn’t exist in October, congratulations to you, too. You have every reason to feel proud.

Inventing characters

I thought I’d talk a little about craft, about two of the ways I develop characters.

My novels are realistic books about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. (Time travel is not so realistic, I admit, but the rest of what I write is.) And so most of my characters come from watching and listening to ordinary people.

Here’s an excerpt from my journal:

“As I left the grocery store this morning, a white couple, obviously working poor folks, walked up to the door. I had emptied my cart and left it just in front of the jammed-together stack, and the guy was going to yank one of the entangled carts out instead. His girlfriend said, “Hon, there’s one right there that person just left.” And the guy says, petulant, “I don’t want that one.”

And in a moment, I knew how awful that relationship was, how abusive he likely is--perhaps not physically, but a moral, spiritual drain, a critical jerk, like a black hole in her life that drains out all her happiness and peace. Her tone of voice and cringing posture told me that too. And I wondered ... why be with him? What sex, no matter how great, what help with the chores, what brief comfort of waking up next to a breathing body is worth that cost? It’s a puzzle.”

And it is, in the working out of that puzzle over some time, that I might come up with a character. Or, I might challenge myself about my assumptions, and turn that guy into a nice guy who is having a bad morning because _________ (brainstorm a list of why). Or maybe they weren’t a couple, maybe they were brother and sister, tending to a dying parent, and his refusal to accept the easier and available cart that didn’t require a wrestling match to free was a sort of symbolic act of frustration at the vagaries of disease, a rail against the inevitable march of the parent toward death. Maybe I'd focus on her and try to sincerely answer my why question. Give her a rational reason to stay with a draining man.

As I think about them today, I can see the woman--who I caught but a glimpse of--literally wringing her hands, not a thing done often in real life, but I think she might. I wonder if I can get away with that gesture in a book set today, and think, possibly, if I lampshade it.

I make up stories about strangers all the time, and a moment like that might spin off a dozen characters. They might fade from my conscious mind, or I might be in the midst of plotting a novel in two years, and there is that character, right when I need her. I don’t describe the person I saw that started the thinking--any looks will do, I probably don't remember the trigger person's looks, and I seldom describe my story people in detail anyway, trusting that my readers are smart enough to imagine characters on their own.

In other situations, I sit down and quiz people. People love to talk about themselves. Example: I was sitting with a group of a half-dozen elderly women, and they had all been happily (or at least contentedly) married for decades, and it struck me to ask this question. “Was he the first real love you had, or was there one who got away?” And they all had one who got away, and the stories they told were fascinating, and filled with nostalgia, bittersweet longing, and humor.

Few of the stories people tell me get used exactly as told to me. They all go onto the character compost heap, fertilizing my fiction. The more I ask people about themselves, the more I learn about people in their infinite variety.

So those are two of the ways I invent and develop characters: by outright quizzing people, and by inventing imaginary lives for the folks I see in passing.

"Why aren't my indie books selling?"

We're nearing the end of NaNoWriMo month, when I write about writing (craft and business) rather than about science, emergency preparation, and disasters.

My bad first cover for my give-away story. Don't do this in public!

I see this question asked often around the web. I'm speaking to fiction writers here, as I'm no expert on non-fiction books. None of the following answers is original to me, and most selling indie writers would offer you a list in answer that I suspect would 90% match this one.

• you don’t have enough books out yet. Get six out there before you worry. Bonus: you’ll be a better writer by the time you’ve written your sixth
• you’ve picked a genre that almost no one reads. Traditional publishing, with its higher profile, can afford to try to break out a new genre or promote a cross-genre book. Indies do better by sticking to established winning genres
• you’ve picked the right genre but failed to meet its conventions. Romance, for instance, requires a happily every after; if you fail to deliver that, your books won’t sell. Or perhaps you’re trying to sell short stories in a genre that expects 100,000-word novels
• you’re writing stand-alone books. In most genres, series sell more copies
• your cover looks amateur (though I admit this didn’t stop me from selling books at first). Buy a pre-made cover to begin with. You can find them on sale for $15. I like goonwrite.com because he’s prolific and reasonably priced. 41 Days' cover I got from 10dollarcovers.com.When you've made your first few thousand dollars, put that back into better covers if you wish
• your product description isn't a good, grabby selling tool
• your “read inside” section is full of editing errors
• you can’t write very well (yet)
• you can write well enough, but your books are slow and bogged down with description. I know your eleventh grade teacher praised your description of a sunset, but novel readers already know what a sunset is. Type “Night fell,” and move on to action or dialog
• you overpriced your books. No one knows who you are, so they will not pay 6.99 for your novel. Try .99 for a while
• you aren’t releasing books quickly enough to develop a following
• you are doing all that above right but are having rotten luck (but this is only true for 1-5% of you, so look earlier in the list for the real answer before you cling to this thought). Hang in there, keep writing, and your luck should eventually turn

In order to fix whatever is wrong, you need time and effort and a willingness to learn better. A significant percentage of people slapping books up on Amazon are doing just that--slapping up a half-baked book. That won’t result in success. First, learn to write well. (Hint: if it’s your first book ever, you probably haven’t yet.) Second, pay or barter for proofreading.

Third, look at the best sellers in your subgenre and see what those authors are doing with covers and product descriptions. Then buy a similar pre-made cover and write your blurb in a similar style.

Fourth, now that the problem is fixed, ignore that book and write your next book and your next. A writing career spans a lifetime, so get on with yours.

I guarantee you that here is NOT what’s wrong: you don’t have enough reviews/you haven’t run enough ads. Forget about that stuff until you have a completed series out or your first six books. By then, reviews will have likely taken care of themselves anyway. And by then, you’ll have likely read sufficient articles and forum posts by successful indies to know the very few sites where it’s worth advertising.

I wish you the best in your journey as an author-publisher.

Dawn of Mammals 4 available for pre-order!

Time-travel adventure series Dawn of Mammals continues with Killer Pack. CLICK HERE to order for December 9 delivery to your Kindle or other device.

A time gate...
A team of teen scientists...
A desperate fight to survive....

A rock slide at a fossil site uncovers a portal through time. Park Ranger Hannah and a team of fossil hunters are caught in it and whisked back to an era when giant predator mammals roamed the earth. Before they can find their way home, they must survive the Dawn of Mammals.

In book 4's adventure, The Miocene epoch places them nearer to home, but can they make it back home without a lost team member's knowledge about the timegate? After Hannah abdicates as leader, relationships shift. Ancient canids hunting in a pack bring down another human. Who will survive this epoch, and who will fall?

Gray 1, post apocalyptic e-book, on sale for .99 in US

The exciting post-apocalyptic novel series begins.

A dense black cloud boiled up in the southeastern sky. It rose high and fast, like a time-lapse movie of the birth of a thunderhead. But it was no rain cloud. Wholly black, it reached up and loomed over her, blocking out the sun. Somehow she knew it was Death coming at her.

Pre-med student Coral is on a vacation in Idaho when something terrible happens. The black cloud is followed by a wildfire and searing heat that lasts for days. She survives deep in a cave but emerges days later to find the world transformed, a world of blackened trees, an ash-filled sky, and no living creatures except her.

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