A Story A Day in May

So I've signed up for the May a story a day challenge. Am I mad? Possibly.

The idea is to commit to writing a finished story every day in May. Which, OK, sounds impossible, but I plan to be pretty lax about the meaning of "finished". And also "story". A "finished" first draft will do. Maybe even a "finished" story plan. They're my rules and I'm sticking to them! But I do like the idea of having to write something each day (over and above what I normally do). It'll be good practice; good discipline. And hopefully at least a couple of pieces will emerge that I want to lavish more attention on.

Also, the stories can be any length, so flash fiction and Twitter fiction are probably going to figure prominently, which is fine as those are things I enjoy doing.

We'll see how it goes! Anyone else considering joining up?

Book Review : On Writing by Stephen King

There's a good chance you'll have read this book already. If you haven't, I'd strongly recommend giving it a try. If you've been put off by the fact that it's by Stephen King and you're not interested in Horror/Dark Fantasy fiction, then fear not. The advice within it works for all genres. I believe this is actually only the second King book I've ever read (is that a terrible admission?) but I certainly took a lot from it.


King's intention is to be brief because, as he puts it, "most books about writing are filled with bullshit". In fact the first half of the books doesn't really provide writing advice at all. Instead he gives us his "CV", his formative experiences as a writer. I didn't learn much from all this but I did enjoy reading it. I suspect King could make a set of furniture assembly instructions engrossing. It reminded me of all the Isaac Asimov short story collections I read as a boy, when Asimov would provide a biographical introduction to each : what was going on in his life, how much he got paid etc. To be fair, King's book is subtitled "A memoir of the craft" and not, say, "How to write".

The actual writing advice on offer is all excellent, although you're probably familiar with a great deal of it. Read and write a lot. Avoid adverbs and the passive voice. Second draft = first draft - 10% etc. I liked King's notion that the story is a fossil needing to be gently, painstakingly unearthed from its hiding place in the ground. That feels a lot like how it works for me. Although King seems to suggest this is literally true : that each story is already "there" and just needs to be uncovered. Surely this is just a useful metaphor. I think a lot of the process of story-creation takes place in the unearthing process.

Still, this is an inspiring read. I loved that he started with "a situation" and then characters and story evolved (or were unearthed) from that. This matches pretty well with how I write. It's always worried me that other writers say they start with a character, as if that's how it should be done. I guess there's no right or wrong way in these matters.

The book does tends to focus on American idiom so US readers will perhaps find it more useful than the rest of us. And he does seem to be completely out of touch when he talks about getting an agent, which he feels should be pretty easy. Hah!

But that all said, I really enjoyed this book - one of the best "writing advice" tomes I've read. I plan to re-read the "writing advice" section again every now and then.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (33/100)

... I ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Static Blogger Pages

Warning. This post contains some technogeekery.

If you maintain your own blog and you use Blogger to do it, you might have heard of the recently-added facility to allow static pages to be added - i.e. pages which are not dated but which are "global" and always just there. Useful for, say, a "Contact Me" page or an "About this Blog" page. Thanks to Ellen over on Pink Tea and Paper for alerting me to this.

I've been experimenting with this feature and added a few static links to the heading section of my blog. It's pretty easy to do (instructions here). But I pretty soon hit a snag in that I wanted to be able to include links to non-blog pages. I maintain a web site for my writing too and I wanted to be able to include links to some of those pages over there. There's no way to do this out of the box but you can do it if you're prepared to edit the HTML of your template directly. If you want to know what's involved, here's what you do :

1. Create your static pages section in the standard way as described here.
2. Go to the Edit HTML bit of Layout in the Blogger dashboard.
3. Back up your template! First! Download a copy to your local machine and, ideally, save it somewhere where it is backed-up along with all your writing and stuff. You do do that, don't you? Sermon over.
4. Enable "Expand Widget Templates".
5. Search for a line starting "<b:widget id="PageList1]]"
6. You should then see a chunk of HTML that looks like this. I just added the lines that appear in bold here for the additional "external" links I wanted.

<b:widget id='PageList1' locked='false' title='' type='PageList'>
<b:includable id='main'>
  <b:if cond='data:title'><h2><data:title/></h2></b:if>
  <div class='widget-content'>
    <ul>
      <b:loop values='data:links' var='link'>
        <b:if cond='data:link.isCurrentPage'>
          <li class='selected'><a expr:href='data:link.href'><data:link.title/></a></li>
        <b:else/>
          <li><a expr:href='data:link.href'><data:link.title/></a></li>
        </b:if>
      </b:loop>

      <li>
      <a href='http://simonkewin.co.uk' target='_new' title='simonkewin.co.uk'>simonkewin.co.uk</a>
      </li>
      <li>
      <a href='http://www.simonkewin.co.uk/ereader.htm' target='_new' title='eReader Downloads'>eReader Downloads</a>
      </li>

     </ul>
    <b:include name='quickedit'/>
  </div>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>


That may look like insane gibberish but it's really pretty easy. Honestly. Just insert your equivalents of my bold lines after the "</b:loop>" and that should do it. If something does go horribly wrong, just restore the back up you took in Step 1 and there's no harm done.

If you want to see how it looks with the template I happen to use and you're reading this from the RSS feed, just browse on over to the blog.

Now to think about what links I want to include ...

Flash Fiction : Light Years (32/100)

... gone. ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Book Review : Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon

Ooh, I loved this. It's an urban fantasy novel, set in London and the intersecting world of the fey. As I believe they say in the USA, what's not to love?

These are not the fey as in Tinkerbell. These are the malicious, capricious creatures of the other world, beings of nightmare as much as dream. Where I grew up, on the misty Isle of Man, these are the creatures traditionally referred to simply as Themselves. I won't go too deeply into the plot, but essentially, the protagonist, Niall Petersen, starts out utterly unaware of the fey and their realms. And that, as you might imagine, soon changes. There is a desperate quest to undertake and there is terrible danger to face, all firmly set in the real world. It did take me a little time to like the protagonist - he starts out as this world-weary commuter and divorcee - but I soon warmed to him. And I did worry that he accepted everything that happens to him just a little too readily. But overall I was hooked and I'm very much looking forward to reading the next volume in the sequence when it appears.

If you're a fan of UF - or even if you're not - I'd recommend this book.

Sixty-One Nails

Flash Fiction : Light Years (31/100)

... there, ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Publishing on the iPhone, iPad etc.

I've blogged previously about electronic publishing on the Kindle. You might be interested in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of that series of posts. But they only cover Amazon's machine and there are, of course, numerous other eReaders out there. Not the least of which are the Apple products : the iPhone, the iPod Touch and, soon, the iPad. These, of course, are so popular it's possible they'll become the de facto standard for eBooks (or, as I think we'll eventually call them, books).

So how easy is it to get your fiction onto all these other devices? Publishing to the Kindle via Amazon's DTP web site turned out to be pretty easy. How involved is it to publish on the iPhone/iPad, the Sony Reader etc?

In fact, it turns out to be pretty easy too. There are various ways of going about it, but I've been experimenting with the Smashwords service, which makes it a breeze to publish to a wide variety of platforms all at the same time. As they themselves put it :

Our ebooks are available for sale in the Smashwords.com bookstore, and are also distributed via multiple online channels, including major online retailers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo (formerly Shortcovers) and Sony, and the native catalogs of top mobile e-reading apps (Stanza on the iPhone used by 2.5 million+ people; eReader on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile Smartphone, Palm Treo and Centro, Symbian Mobile Phones; Aldiko and Word-Player on Android phones).

So that seems to cover all the bases. Smashwords seem to be developing pretty actively, too, so I imagine they'll cover new devices and services as they emerge. For instance, they support Apple's just-opened iBookstore, the service that might become an iTunes for books. The neat thing is, you just upload your manuscript once and Smashwords convert it to all formats.

As with Amazon, the service is free to use, although you don't get 100% of any sales you make. You do, however, get 85%, far in excess of that offered by Amazon.



Using Smashwords is straightforward. After creating an account you just need to format your work in the required style (in Microsoft Word) and upload it along with your cover artwork. Smashword's formatting requirements are rather more comprehensive than Amazon's but they do publish a very clear Style Guide that you can download. I found it only took me a couple of attempts to get my story properly uploaded and formatted. You can easily test things out as you go by selecting the online, browser version of your story. When you're ready, you instruct Smashwords to publish and your work is out there.

Of course, that's only the beginning. Because the process of publishing is so straightforward, and because there is no editorial control, you'll be competing with a vast amount of other writers. As on the Kindle, your success will depend on how much effort you put into self-promotion and platform-building (and, obviously, how good a writer you are). There are many things you can do to promote your work but, again, Smashwords offer a guide full of advice. There's quite a lot you can do from their own site, e.g. generating voucher codes you can offer to your readers so they get discounted or even free downloads. For the record, I found it rather harder work to generate sales through Smashwords than it was through Amazon.

So there we are. Whatever the arguments for and against self-publishing/indie publishing for eReaders, it seems to me that, if you do want to try, using Amazon DTP and Smashwords together gives you just about everything you need right now.

Things will undoubtedly continue to evolve in this area. I, for one, still think it's preferable to aim for publication with a conventional publisher for something like a novel, even though there are undoubtedly people out there making some sort of a living via indie publishing. Perhaps the best approach is to publish some pieces electronically, with the hope of building up a readership that you can then carry with you into more conventional publishing. In this sense, ePublishing becomes just a part of the "platform building" that writers are so often encouraged to undertake. Not really very much different from, say, writing a blog ...

In any case, this is a rapidly-evolving area and one that it certainly makes sense for writers to keep an eye on.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (30/100)

... by, ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.