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