All one needs

All one needs to write is a story and a will to tell it.

That is it. Everything else is just noise. I purchased a monitor, a table, a series of  chairs, and God knows what else, but nothing helped me write. Now that I write everyday, I sit at the dining table, on a cheap chair with decent back support, and use a three year old laptop. I write because I want to write. I find time for it, I study it, I enjoy it, it makes me feel good, so I write. I don't worry about publishing, or agents, or twitter, or anything else. I don't even think about whether it's good or not, or will anyone ever read it. That is not for me to decide. I just need to get the words on paper, or in this case, a docx file.

By the way, I participated in Nanowrimo this November- that's National November Writing Month for all the noobs. One has to write 50000 words in a month. I didn't quite manage that, but I wrote close to 32000 words, that's 32000 more than I had in October. The best part is, the habit of writing more than a 1000 words a day seems to have rubbed off. I wrote another 3500 words in 2 days of December. If this continues, I might actually finish off the book by mid-Jan, as I had earlier hoped.

And no posts over the last few months, because I haven't had time for anything else.

Book number 2, here I come

I officially finished my first novel in the first week of June. Then took a nice long break, went to Hawaii, fell sick, watched the world cup, generally had a good time. Now it's back to work.

I spent so much time on actually writing the first novel that I forgot the best part about writing a book: starting it. You get to build a world, come up with new characters, new settings. You are not worried about finishing it yet, you are anticipating getting into it. And for the second book, because I finished book 1, I have well defined steps about how I want to proceed.

1. Come up with the whole story- the cast, the settings, the world, everything. Do not start writing a chapter till you know how the entire book begins and ends. This may seem extreme to some, but it worked really well for me. I knew the direction I was going to take and I stuck to it. The end may not have been exactly what I envisioned, but it was close enough. At least there was an end.

2. Not only would I finish a short writeup, but also I would write what I would expect each chapter to contain. No, I don't expect to stay entirely true to this. I will swing wildly apart from this, like someone hanging behind a formula 1 car with a bungee cord, but again this keeps the direction true. I may miss a few chapters, but at the end, I will get back in the general vicinity of where I want to be.

3. Not make the same mistakes I made with book 1. Frankly, between you and me, book 1 sucked. It was really really nothing to write home about. The best thing seems to be that there weren't too many grammatical snafus. Well, one lives and learns.

It's off to book number two. I hope it will turn out better than book number 1. Something I could actually look to publish.

That may or may not happen, but one thing's for sure. The fun I will have writing it is going to be legen..... wait for it......

Writing- the aftereffects

Now that I have officially finished a book and I am looking beyond that process, I have come across a couple of unfortunate aftereffects of writing. The first is that writing has spoiled reading for me. I cannot read a book without comparing it to my book. I judge the writing style, the grammar, the voice, the illogical jumps in the story, everything. Adverbs stick out like sore thumbs. If a character does something inexplicable, I shut the book and don't open it again. Reading is not a process of taking me away to a different place anymore, it is a comparative and competitive exercise. I am pretty sure that's not the right thing to do, but i don't know how to undo it.

The second thing is my feelings towards my own book. Sometimes I feel like i have written a masterpiece, and at other times I feel like it's trash. I am pretty sure the reality is somewhere in between, but I don't know towards which side it leans. I am not even sure whether I should publish it anymore.

Hopefully, I will get a few beta readers who will tell me what to think. I should at least join a critique group. That might give me a neutral feedback.

Rambling apart, I have printed the second draft of the book and will go through it over the next week. Hopefully I don't feel too bad about it later.

Publicity stunts

Now that the first draft of my book is done and I am almost halfway through the second one, I am thinking of other things that I need to do. The first and foremost seems to be to create a buzz for my book and me. And the most obvious way to go about that is twitter. Almost everybody who has published their book say that twitter is the way to go. But man, is twitter hard!

I am following less than a hundred people and still the sheer noise is terrific. Since starting to write this blog about five minutes ago, there have been seventeen new tweets by the ones I follow. I think there is some sort of service that most fellow authors are using. The service most likely retweets certain people's tweets and sends out their own at preset times. No one can spend the amount of time reading and tweeting this much and still have enough to do anything else. This means that if I get a few thousand followers, my feed will have anywhere from a thousand to infinite tweets a day. I am pretty sure I am never going to look at even one. But then neither will anyone else look at mine. It is chaos and standing out in it is going to be bloody tough.

Adding to that is my general personality. I am not particularly witty or clever, nor do I have much to say. Most of what I do is either too mundane or too important to talk about. I prefer to shut up and listen, unless I am in the company of close friends.

This will take some doing. I will have to go through this in the same way I go about everything else I need to do- analyze, understand, conquer. Analyze what the hell is going on, understand what I need to do and then go ahead and do it.

PS: Number of unread tweets by now is 46

Writing and SDLC

I have been interested in merging the writing cycle into the Software Development Life Cycle for quite some time now. I started this post in 2009, but never got to finish it. But now, I think I should give it another whirl. One of the most important things of SDLC is to catch problems earlier; the earlier, the better. If you see something wrong in the first phase and correct it there, it will cost way less then correcting it a phase or even a couple of phases away. Same logic should also apply for book writing. If the plan you have is error-free, you will have lesser problems later.

So how does the SDLC run. It has various stages which are bidirectional. You can move from any phase to a phase before or after it. Lets start with the first stage.

1. Requirements: For an actual software company, this is the craziest phase. One has to make sure everything is covered and there are no loopholes. It requires making sense of a whole buttload of non-sense. However, for book writing, this is going to be the simplest thing ever. At the end of the phase, you need to have an idea and a setting. If you write fantasy, a basic structure of the magic of your world, what kind of a story would it be, who would be the target audience. Basically, the kernel around which your whole book will reside. If that idea is not good enough to work with, don't even move to phase 2.

2. Planning: This is important. In this phase, you will sketch out everything: your characters, the working of your world, the rules that every entity in the book will follow, and most importantly, a start and an end. Make sure everything gels together, because once you are past this, changing even a little thing might require massive changes in the latter phases. You cant mess this up, or be prepared to rewrite chapter after chapter after chapter.

3. Development: This is the actual writing part and the longest part. You will pick up the basic blocks that you had from planning and meld them together. You could write in as much detail as you want, or keep tags for work that will come later. You will make sure that whatever start and end you had in mind seems correct when you put it on paper. Once done, you have the first draft.

4. Testing: This would be the first revision of the document. You could put in a few more chapters to make things right, patch up all the missing descriptions, remove the unnecessary fluff and have a book that seems complete. This is the second draft. Then you go back and run grammar and spelling checks to make sure things are correct. You print out and read the book, marking errors and inconsistencies to ensure that they get corrected later after you are done reading. You will know how your book feels when read as a whole rather than part by part. You do whatever you feel necessary, as at the end of this phase, your book should be as ready as it will ever be for publishing.

5. Maintenance: A book is never quite done. Nor is software. There will be constant maintenance cycles where you will remember a stupid thing you did and go back to either phase 2 or phase 3 and continue on from there. This is an endless process, or at least it will last till you get tired of your book.

If you make sure to achieve the objective of each phase before moving to the next, you might have to do a lot less rework. I know, I wrote almost a whole book which I cant use, before I got to a draft I was satisfied with.

Publishing and other stories

Now that my book is on its way to completion, publishing it becomes a concern. Do I self publish, or do I go the traditional route?

Going the traditional route has some advantages. It is definitely the more respected and well traveled one. I will probably get some rejections and maybe some reasons for that. So I would know the obvious shortcomings in my writing. If I do get published, the publication might take care of the sales and take that load off my already injured shoulders.

But the more I read about it, self publishing seems the new "in" thing. It's easy, it's free (at least for the e-book variety), and it gets your words out the fastest. Though I am undecided, I happened upon an interesting little experience about self-publishing.

http://www.jasonkomito.com/#!articles/c6jx

It's a good link to go through as it gives you specific resources and steps. A good one to keep in the favorites tab.

How to publicize a self published book? Well, that is a headache I would rather not think about. It's another story altogether.

4 years!!!

It has been four years since I last posted here- four long, eventful years. I could give a lot of reasons for not writing a book, but in truth there's only one: I got lazy.

Over the years, I keep getting mails from time to time when anyone visits this blog. I wont lie. The thought of taking it down occurred to me more than once. But I never got to it. Maybe because this was like a photo album of a journey I took. I aborted the trip halfway through many a times, but the post brought back bittersweet memories of exploring uncharted roads and getting lost.

I often returned to the pages of this blog, reading my own posts, enjoying them for what it was worth, sometimes just for my naivety. I wanted to post a last goodbye, but I could not bring myself to post anything. Only someone who was writing a book could post here. Not someone who kept making false starts. Maybe the blog could remain just as unfinished as that book of mine.

But now I can revive this old journal of mine with no sense of shame. I am writing again. I havent given up after a false start. I have continued on till the next one and the one after that. For the past eighteen months, I have written almost every morning. Now I have 60000 words of a novel that is well on its way to completion. I have hit obstacles, but I have kept fighting them. For eighteen months, I have gotten up at 6:00 every morning and put down at least 500 words every day. Most of them unusable. But over the days, I have 60000 words of a usable first draft. A draft with a story where characters have motivation, and shit gets f*cked up for them, again and again and again.

Is it a good story? I don't know. Would people like it? I don't know. But at this point I don't care. I have a book. I finally have a book that I can complete. And if I can do one, I can do one more. And one more after that. Now I know how. The gist of the message is this: I am back, and I am here to stay!