Writing Prompt Saturday, What’s your Dream?

Have you signed up for the Thirty Days, Thirty Ideas Challenge yet? Here’s a link if you haven’t yet.

I have a dream life. It’s very specific, I have details. Here’s my dream.

I want to live in a city apartment in Pittsburgh. I want there to be a nearby coffee shop where I am known by name. I want to be a novelist that at least flirts with the best seller lists. I want to attend writers conferences and sign copies of my books. I want to go to New York to meet with my agent, and I want to have book signing tours. I want to speak at libraries. I want to have an office, in my Pittsburgh apartment, where I go to work every day. And I do mean every day. I really don’t like taking days off from writing.

What’s your dream? What makes you want to be a full time self published writer? What do you think your days will look like when you achieve this dream?

I want you to go into detail with this exercise. Really picture your dream work day. I imagine a hot cup of coffee over a few hours of my most recent novel in the morning. Then an hour of social media followed by any office work that needs done, balancing the budget or reading contracts. Followed by an afternoon of short fiction work and blog writing. Then an evening playing with the monsters and my husband. I think I could spend the rest of my life just like that and be perfectly happy.

Let me tell you why this exercise helps me. When I’m working hard, when rejection letters start coming fast, when I work ten hours at the day job just to come home and put in two more hours at my desk after the monsters are in bed, it’s not easy. It’s sometimes the hardest thing in the world to drag my fat self out of bed at least an hour before I would need to so that I can get some writing time in before the day job. When it’s too much, when I just don’t want to do it. When I think I could just take one day off even though I know it would turn into another and another. That’s when I think about my dream. A desk at a window that overlooks Pittsburgh, with a days worth of writing to look forward to.

That’s the sort of dream that will get me out of bed every morning, guaranteed. Whats yours?

July 11, 2015 0

Market, Witches, Warlocks, Demons, and other Evil Doers

Have you signed up yet for the Thirty Days, Thirty Ideas Challenge? Don’t worry, you’ve got all month to do it. Here’s a link to sign up.

This market is probably my favorite one this month, because I get to write about a bad guy! In fact, you have to. This anthology is all about writing a story from the point of view of an evil, dark character. Whether your evil protagonist wins or not is up to you. Mine probably will.

Genre- Horror.

Word Count- 4,000 to 8,000

Submission Date- September 1

Wait Time- Two to three months after deadline

Payout- $25.00

Rights- Not specified

Here is your link to the full submission guidelines. Let me know if you have any success with this or any other market, and I’ll include you in the monthly brag board, complete with a link to your site if you’ve got one.

July 10, 2015 0

Thirty Days, Thirty Ideas Challenge.

For the past ten days I’ve counted down to today. Here, on twitter and facebook, I’ve counted down, and now it’s time to tell you why.

Next month is August. It’s Paper Beats World’s birthday. It’s first birthday.

I wanted to do something special, something exciting. Here’s what I came up with.

I love thirty day challenges. Take a month, and see what you can do to better your life in some specific area. No spend months, positive thinking months, tidying for ten minutes a day, I’ve done them all. Now, I want to do one with you.

For thirty days, I want to come up with a different, brand new idea. It can be an idea for a short story, a novel, a character, a plot bunny (I do love my plot bunnies), whatever comes to mind. The point is to make sure you find some time every day to think of something new.

I think that this is a practice that can help every writer, no matter where on the road you are.

For new writers, ideas are valuable and might be thin on the ground. If you’ve written one book, but aren’t sure where you want to go next, you might need a little push. Even if you’ve been at this awhile, sometimes your imagination gets stagnate.

As for me, I’m working on a series. That means that I’ve been living in the same universe through two books now. I love the Woven universe, but even the best toy gets boring if you play with it too much. I depend on short stories to keep my imagination fresh. I am always seeking out new ideas even if I don’t think it will fit into Woven. Either I can write a short story that have nothing to do with Woven. Or, maybe something will click in my brain, and I’ll realize I can use it any way.

So what does signing up for the thirty day challenge mean for you?

-You’ll get an e-mail every day, reminding and inspiring you to come up with a new idea. Sometimes it will have a prompt or guide, but you don’t have to follow that if you don’t want to. The important thing is to create a new idea.
-I’ll be hosting twitter chats every Thursday at 8:00. We’ll get together and talk about ideas and the amazing things we writers do with them
-After the event is over, you’ll be left with a notebook full of ideas. Think of it as your shield against writers block.
-You might also be left with a good habit. If you spend thirty days thinking of something brand new, maybe you’ll find that on the thirty first day, one comes to you just out of habit.

If you want to join the Thirty Days, Thirty Ideas Challenge, click here.

As a bonus, it will also sign you up to receive the road to full time newsletter once a month.

Your first e-mail will arrive on July 31. And, of course, I’ll be participating in the challenge as well.

July 8, 2015 0

Check This Out, Mail Chimp

When you start selling your books and other products, you’re going to need a mailing list. I started one last month, called the Road to Full Time. I’m really glad I started one.

It allows me to talk at length about my actual step by step process to becoming a full time writer.
People who sign up for newsletters are actively saying, “I like what you have to say, and I would like to see more than you post on your site.” That feels good.
When my books start coming out, I’ll be able to let the people who like me most hear about them, and offer specials.
It’s one of the most cost efficient ways to advertise. Remember, you have to do all of your advertising when you’re a self published author.

The trouble is, I have very little time, and not a lot of money to spend. So, I started using MailChimp for my newsletter.

If you want to sign up for my newsletter, click here.

If you don’t want to sign up for my newsletter, click there anyway to see how easy MailChimp works. Seriously, I just copied some code and attached it to that text. It takes no time.

As for creating the newsletters, it is also easy. That was really important to me. I have worked for a lot of newspapers and newsletters for different organizations I’ve belonged to over the years. You know what the worse thing about those were? Page layout. It sucks a lot. MailChimp is by far the easiest program I’ve used for it. Which is nice because I don’t want to be worrying about page layout. I want to be worried about the content.

This is one of those things that you set up, and forget about it until you’re ready to make a new newsletter. Images are easy to upload, and you can write articles right on the template, same as on WordPress.

So this week, check out MailChimp. And let me know if you make your own newsletter. I’m excited to see them.

July 8, 2015 0

The Writing Life, July 7

One more day until the big announcement. Check us out tomorrow for all the awesome details for something really cool we’ll be doing in August.

So, on Saturday something pretty amazing happened. Yes, our country had its birthday and I blew up fireworks and ate greasy food and all that.

Way more important, to me, is that Paper Beats World reached 1,000 views for the year!

It has been eleven months since I started this little site, and I have had so much fun with it every day. I’ve learned so much, and gotten to meet so many awesome people. I can not thank all of you enough for reading, and sharing your journeys with me.

Honestly, I thought maybe three people would read this thing. So thank you all. I hope you get something out of reading here, and I hope to hear more success stories as the months go by.

What rocked this week-

* I finished my rough draft for Mash. The deadline’s July 15, by the way. Get on it if you haven’t started yet.
* I watched all eight Harry Potter movies with the husband and my monsters. I’m glad we finally did it, but that last movie was such a let down. Really, you span two books and you can’t even mention the whole back story with Dumbledore being friends with the second most evil wizard, or the fact that Harry had all three deathly hollows and got rid of all but one? Really?

What I’m looking forward to this week-

* Tipsy writer twitter chat tonight. That’s always a good time, hope to see you there!
* My super big, terrific announcement is tomorrow! Don’t miss it!
* My favorite show is starting again on Sunday. It’s Ray Donovan, on Showtime. If you follow me on twitter, you already know of my obsession.

What are you excited about this week? Looking forward to anything fun?

Have you signed up for the Road to Full Time newsletter yet? It prints once a month, and it’s all about the journey from part time writer, to full time. You can sign up right here.

July 7, 2015 0

The Super Easy (Not Really) Twelve Step Guide to Self Publishing

Three more days until the big Paper Beats World Announcement!

Welcome to the very simple (not really), quick and easy, (no) super fun (well, yes), and completely stress free (not a freaking chance), twelve step guide to self punishing your book! This is my game plan, my map for the next year or so to publishing my collection of short stories. But it should work equally well for any sort of book you’re writing.

Let’s dive right in, though. There is so much you’ve got to consider when you’re self publishing. You don’t have an editor, a publicist, a design department or any of the other things that you have with traditional publishing. That means that everything, every single little thing, is in your hands. Good news, you are in total control. Bad news, nothing will get done if you don’t do it. So, here’s where you start.

Step one, write the book

This will probably take the longest time. I know it does for me. I’ve gone over my whole process of going from rough draft to polished draft a ton, most recently when participating in the IC Blog tour, so I’ll not bore you with that again.

Step Two, Edit the hell out of the book

Make it shine like the top of the Chrysler Building!

Step Three, hire someone to edit it for you

Or, get someone you trust to edit it. I’ll be hiring someone for my book, and let me tell you why; I will not go out into the world with my shirt un-tucked and my fly down. I want someone else to red pen my book, and give me an honest opinion of it before I invest a lot of money in it.

And by the way, this is something every traditionally published book goes through.

Step Four, Cover art

Unless you’re a really lovely artist, or graphic designer, or photographer, hire someone to do this right for you. This is likely where a lot of my self publishing budget is going to, because people will judge your book by it’s cover, no matter how many times we are told not to.

Step Five, copy write your book

And any other legal things you have to do. You don’t need to be paranoid about intellectual theft, but you do need to be aware of it. While we’re at it, if you’re going to be taking people’s money, and keeping important files on your home computer, get a good firewall and virus protection.

Step Five, Research publication options

Now, this is the step that has worried me the most. I’d like to offer my book as an e-book, but also have the option of print. But print books are a whole different beast. Sure, some people love them, but they are going to be more expensive to create. They also have to be shipped, which takes time and money. To justify it, I might end up having to charge more for a print copy than an e-book.

My current solution is that I’ll sign every print copy, so the reader’s getting a little more for their money. I also think I’ll take a leaf out of the awesome DeliaWrite’s book, and go ask my local book stores if they’ll stock it. It can’t hurt to ask, and it might just pay off.

Step Six, decide how people can pay you

I like cash, but I also like PayPal. I like whatever gets that part done and out of my mind fast enough, honestly. When it comes to money, I’d like buying my book to be as self served as possible, so I’ve got time to order prints, ship stuff and eventually get back to actually writing more books.

Step Seven, decide where your book will be available

I’m not getting into the Amazon fight here. Every time I turn around it’s in the news again, so I’ll just say that I haven’t made up my mind about whether my book will be there or not. Just be aware that while there are other options, they don’t all have the same popularity.

However, I will say that wherever my book is, it will not just be there. I intend to set up on as many different platforms as I can, to guarantee that if one shop goes down, I’m not out of commission entirely.

Step Eight, start talking about your book on social media

As soon as possible. If possible, put of excerpts from your book on your blog. Get people excited about it.

Step Nine, set a release date

It should be far away enough to gain anticipation, but not so far away that people get bored. (No, this is not what my current count down is about. That’s something totally different and really awesome, but my book’s not done yet.)

Step Ten, sell your book!

Stick to your launch date. Plan for technical things to go wrong. Make sure that if you use a seller like Amazon that you know when they will have it available. Read your contracts. And celebrate!

Step Eleven, keep selling your book.

Don’t stop talking about your book! Mention it when relevant, talk it up during holiday gift buying times. Participate in Cyber Monday. Maybe even do a mini relaunch down the road.

Step Twelve, write another one!

It’s an old saying, but it’s a good one. Nothing sells a book like a sequel. Besides, no one wants to be a one hit wonder. Even Harper Lee finally got around to writing another book.

So that’s it. Easy, right?

July 5, 2015 3

Writing Prompt Saturday, Write an Ghazal Poem

Four days until a really awesome announcement

Yet another really obscure poetry form, ghazal poetry is going to be my new favorite thing for awhile. For one thing, it’s all about couplets, which means that it is twitter friendly.

So, a ghazal poem is at least five couplets, traditionally no more than fifteen. The first couplet should end with a refrain that will finish each couplet.

Traditionally, ghazal poetry was very melancholic. So if you’ve been getting the stupid amount of rain I have, it’s great.

Here is a example of ghazal poetry.

“Even the Rain” By Agha Shahid Ali

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.

“our glosses / wanting in this world” “Can you remember?”
Anyone! “when we thought / the poets taught” even the
rain?

After we died—That was it!—God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you’d poured—what?—even the rain.

For all of us in the states, hope you’re having a great fourth. We are blowing things up and grilling greasy meat here. How about you?

July 4, 2015 1

Market, Grave Markers

Five more days until the exciting announcement.

This isn’t an anthology or a short story collection. It’s something different, and I think really cool. Have you ever written an in between story, lengthwise? I mean a story that was too long to be short fiction, but not long enough to be a novella? I have, and it’s irritating. I can’t cut it down or I risk losing important parts of the story. I can’t add anything to it without making it feel… puffy.

Well, if you write horror, Grave Markers are the answer to this. Fair warning, the publisher has said they only intend to take up to six a year. But this is totally worth it.

Genre- Horror
Word Count- 10,000 to 20,000
Sub Date- Any time
Wait Time- Standard, about two months
Payout- Not listed

As always, here is a link to full submission guidelines. Let me know if you have luck with this or any other market so that I can include you in the monthly brag board.

July 3, 2015 0

Check This Out, Toggl

Seven Days Until An Exciting Announcement!

This is not an affiliate post. I am getting no money for this at all.

I just happen to like Toggl. Do you remember back in May when I talked to you about Time Sheet? Don’t get me wrong, I still like that one. But Toggl is something different.

See, when you’re self publishing, time is not your friend, and it’s your most precious tool. You don’t have enough hours, especially if you’re doing this around a day job, family time, writing a different book and running a blog. I thought I was devoting a lot of time to my creative writing, until I started actually tracking my time with Toggl.

Because that’s what it’s for. I spent a whole week tracking my time, and how I spent it. There’s a pie chart on the reports page, which is nice because I am a visual person.

To say it was an eye opening experience is an understatement. I spend way too much time playing Tapped Out.

I’m going to track all of my writing time for at least the next year as an experiment. Here’s why.

I have a rough idea of how long certain projects take me, but I’d like something more detailed. That way, the next time I’m trying to figure out how long it will take me to finish a specific draft, I can know.
This is super important for my yearly goals, because I want them to be as realistic as possible.
It’s going to be important later, when I have an agent who would like an estimated time frame of when my next book just might be done. I want to be able to say, within a week, when they can expect something from me.
I try to keep my social media pimping to a certain level. That level’s going to change when I’ve got something to sell, but I still want to keep track.
Research is another thing that needs a timer for me. Otherwise I’ll intend to spend half an hour researching Middle Eastern dogs, and find myself still on Wikipedia five hours later, reading about Egyptian clothing designers. (True story.)

So this week, check out Toggl. See what patterns it helps you find in your habits.

July 1, 2015 0

Plans for July, Self Publishing

Full disclosure, I have not yet self published a book. I am currently in the process, though, and basically eating up information like a cat eating ice cream when she thinks I don’t see her, Harper.

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s a scary process. I’m looking at a lot of money and a lot of time, and it might all come to nothing! I’m not looking to self publish my series, Woven, just yet. I have often said it’s because I feel it’s marketable in traditional press, but that’s not true. Well, it is true, but it’s not the only reason for wanting to self publish a short story collection first. I want something to practice on, so that what I learn can be used to better my process if I decide later to self publish Woven.

So, let’s not call this self published month. Let’s call it, what we know going in, about the market in general before actually diving in. Later, once the book’s in print, I’ll probably do another month about what I learned during the process.

By the way, I know for a fact that some of you awesome people reading me are actually self published authors. If you are, and I say something stupid that reveals the depths of my ignorance, please feel free to tell me. I’d rather be called out than be wrong and think I’m right.

So, here’s a sample of what we’re going to be talking about this month.

The actual step by step path I’m taking with my self published book, and why I think it’s the most sensible way to go. This is going to come with a nifty printable to help you out.
I compare blogs like mine and maybe yours to open mike nights for singers and comedians. I’ll tell you why.
Self publishing hours, what sort of time is this really going to take?
Balancing marketing and writing time.

And of course, self publishing is part of my path to full time writing. If you want to follow along with me on the path, make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter, Road to Full Time. You can sign up right here.

Any opening thoughts about self publishing? Do you intend to self publish? Let us know in the comment section below.