Writer, Edit Thyself: Why You Shouldn't Hire an Editor (Yet)

I've been reading a lot of writers' blogs and posts in writers' communities on G+. One thing I keep seeing is the recommendation (commandment, from some) that all indie writers must hire an editor before (a) sending work to an agent, or (b) self-publishing.

I understand where this advice is coming from, but...I have a big problem with this. And this is from someone who earned her highest salary EVER as a professional editor. (Feel free to laugh at this. My bank account does.) I know a few editors, and most of them are incredibly nice and talented people. I have nothing against them. I do have something against lazy writers who can't learn on their own.

If you ask me, the solution isn't to hire someone to make your writing better. It's to make it better your own damn self.

Suck at editing? Learn.
Suck at grammar? Learn.
Suck at revising? So do lots of people. Guess what? They fucking learn.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well. If you can't commit the time to learn how to use the English language well enough to pass muster with a reader, are you really cut out to be a writer? Or do you just like the cheap thrill of how easy it is to tell a story?  There's nothing wrong with storytelling. But it's only half of your toolkit.  You can't buy the other half.  Okay, maybe you can. But it's lazy and wrong and I'm going to berate you for it.

Objection #1: But as a writer, I'm too close to my story to see its flaws.
Bullshit. Read some books. Is yours like theirs? If so, you're doing it right. Sit down and make a list of the kinds of things that happen in good books. See the story arcs? Diagram your own story arc. Is there an arc? There are all kinds of story arc tools you can use before you write your story to make sure it's plotted and paced well. If you have any analytic capability at all, apply it at this stage in the game. If you don't have any analytic capability at all, you might not be cut out for writing. If you have analytic capability but this sounds like a hell of a lot of work, you're damn right. Stop reading blog posts and go diagram your damn book.

Objection #2: But I've read my manuscript so many times that my eyes glaze over the typos.
Bullshit. Read it out loud. Read it backwards. Print it out and look at it on paper. Put it in a drawer for a month and come back to it. None of these are impossible tasks unless you refuse to devote the necessary time. Are you refusing to devote the necessary time? Are you short-cutting what I hope is the most important thing in the world to you when you're doing it? If you have a nervous feeling in the pit of your stomach, if your cheeks are red, or if you're thinking of other things you should be doing right now, you're who I'm talking to. Don't ignore it. Embrace it, and then get it done. It might lengthen your production schedule to include a cooling-off period and then final proofing, but that's not my problem. It's yours.

Objection #3: But I'm just not good at grammar. I need someone to fix a few commas and things.
Bullshit. If you're not that good at grammar, how are you crafting sentences that shock and awe? How are you being careful when you pick your verbs? How are you playing with language to create the precise effect you want in a reader's mind? Or are you just whizzing through it all, using descriptions you've read in books because it's easier that way? Doing shit like this gets you nowhere. I read the jacket copy for a self-published romance novel where the author actually wrote that the dangerous and intriguing mystery man knocked the heroine's world on its axis. I kid you not. This is the kind of writer I'm talking about.  I saw a second writer who tried to convince me of a character's ability to deploy "feminine whiles." These people need to become better craftsmen. Right now, they're just swinging hammers with a blindfold on and hoping they hit a nail.

Objection #4: But editors need money. I have the money. What's the problem?
This is a slippery slope that often ends in bullshit. Replace "editors" with "prostitutes." Are you really doing this out of the goodness of your heart for your editor? Don't use this as an excuse not to learn to revise or proofread yourself.  Trust me.  We editors are a skilled and wily bunch. We'll survive.

What do you think...would Michael Crichton have appreciated
being immortalized on a purple gingham background?

Objection #5: But I need someone who will push me to do better.
Bullshit. If you want to do better, you can and you will. If you have the desire to become a better writer, don't do it by hiring someone to tell you why you suck.  That's stupid.  Figure it out yourself so you're not dependent on an editor for every book you write. It's like this:  "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."  Teach yourself to fucking fish.  Do it by reading, experimenting, writing more, getting critiques from friends and beta readers, then rewriting again and again until you've produced something that leaves them speechless.  And then you can hire an editor for that extra 10% of effort that gets you to the full 110%.

An editor can be a part of that solution, but only a part, and only after you've exhausted every inner working of your soul that can go into the creation and recreation of your book.

Tip: A really good creative writing professor once told me that the best way to learn how to write good stories is to copy a great story out by hand. As you write the other writer's words, you'll absorb how they flow and how they're put together. You'll be forced to slow down and really read the story.  He suggested doing this with Flannery O'Connor. Have you done this yet? I didn't think so.

Objection #6: Why do you hate people so much?
As Bukowski said, "I don't hate people. I just feel better when they aren't around."

If you love writing, great. So do I. But doing only the fun parts is like what a five-year-old does when she strews toys all across the living room, plays with one or two of them, and then abandons the mess to go play outside. Or when you cook a great meal, eat it, and then leave dirty dishes lying everywhere. No, it's not fun to clean them. But paying someone else to do it because it's a difficult or distasteful task is cheating.

Think of the great writers of history: Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare. They learned their shit and they learned it well. Yes, guys like Hemingway and Fitzgerald received editing from their publishers...only once they had turned in a manuscript that was as honed and polished as they could get it. They didn't slap-dash anything the page, do a Microsoft spellcheck, and hire someone to make sure it wasn't a mess. They agonized and revised and revised again. Your agony level needs to be somewhere north of poison-oak-in-your-nether-region. If you're at lemon-juice-in-hangnail stage, you're not nearly there yet.

Yes, beta readers can be helpful. As the book's writer, you cannot approximate a first-time reader's experience (unless you become psychic or telepathic). But fixing commas and quotation marks and hyphens and holes in your plot an elephant could fit through simply because you can't learn how to do it yourself?

Give me a break.  You can do better.  (Have I mentioned I love memes?)

Reasons to Be Cheerful

I'm amazed by how hard it is for me to write a happy post. I am naturally inclined to think the sky is falling if I don't have everything on my worry bird list checked off. And I don't....NOT EVEN CLOSE. Stressing out is sort of a natural state of being for me as an indie writer. 

At the same time, I realize that you guys probably don't want to read dark and bitchy posts all the time. Sometimes we (and I mean me) have to take a step back and look at the things that are going right to keep from freaking out over the things that aren't going at all. So queue up the player below, which contains the official soundtrack for this post: Ian Drury's Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3.

How to Be Happy (When You Still Have 8 Damn Million Things to Do)

Now with more sparkle!

1.  Look at that sky. It's not actually falling. Heck, it's not even raining. 

2.  Your shoes are cute. 

3.  Hey, your necklace is cute, too. 

4.  All of your fingernails are intact. 

5.  You submitted to 10 literary journals over the weekend. That's 10 chances to kick ass.

6.  You entered your first-ever YA novel in a contest to win a publishing contract. That takes balls.  Whether you win or lose or just make it through to the second round and then lose, you still have a brand-spankin' new book done and ready to go.  If you want to read it (and vote for it!), click here. 

7.  You are planning your first-ever urban fantasy novel. You've always wanted to write something that combines your favorite writing subjects: hicks and the supernatural. Don't stress about how long the planning and research is taking. Be happy that you'll get to fulfill a goal by writing this book. Use it as an excuse to say "y'all" even more often. Plus, it means you get to watch Justified and Duck Dynasty and this and call it research. 

8.  You're working now. So what if 3 out of 4 of your eBook covers still suck? Set aside some money and pay to get new ones. Then market with confidence.  In the land of eBooks, nothing is permanent. It can always be fixed or upgraded. It's just money. Why do you have it if not to use on on something that's really, vitally important to you?

9.  Your husband loves you.  And he wants you to spend your money on book covers if that's what will make you happy.  And he is going to tile the kitchen floor. And he will come all way across the house when you yell, "Spider!" 

10. There are lots of cute puppies in the world. You don't have one, and probably never will, but that doesn't mean the world is a lesser place.  

11. You have learned so much about marketing as a writer in the past few months. It makes you feel like you're eight hundred years behind schedule, but that's only because you're comparing yourself to others. You are you. You know what you need to do. That's all that matters.  

12. Have you seen the view from your deck?

Not a painting, no sirree. This is genuine Pilot Hill awesomeness.

Book Review: Angelopolis by Danielle Trussoni

The characters I know and loathe
are at it again in Angelopolis.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that the first book in this series, Angelology, earned my undying loathing for its failure to capitalize on a near-brilliant premise. Well, that and some of the worst writing I've ever read in a book praised by everyone from the New York Times to USA Today. Clearly there was some Kool-Aid going around and everyone became insane for a brief period of time in 2010.  

Well, this time I was much smarter about things. I didn't spend my own money--I patronized my local library. There's one more sliver of good news here: I didn't loathe it quite as much as the first one. If the first book received a grade of F from me, this one's a D.  It might just be because instead of 450 mind-numbing anger-inducing pages, this one's a scant 300. Let's see how it shakes down, shall we?

Spoiler-free summary:

The heroine of the last book, Evangeline, is an angel (we learned this at the very end of Angelology). Verlaine, her love interest, has become an angel hunter and spent the last 10 years looking for her. Yes, we have jumped 10 years forward in time. Why? God knows. Two or three years would probably have sufficed. Verlaine and Evangeline have a brief run-in that convinces Verlaine he is in love with her. Evangeline is kidnapped by another angel, working for the Grigori family (angel bad guys), but not before she slips Verlaine a Faberge egg. Verlaine and Bruno, his angel hunting mentor, must figure out what the egg means and where Evangeline has been taken.

WTF spoiler-filled summary:

Grad school asshats
always mention the Panopticon
when they want to seem smart.

The angels are trying to build themselves a city and take over the planet. Apparently, some Nephilim descendants used to give birth by laying eggs. People came out of these eggs, I shit you not.  Egg births have become quite rare, although they are desirable for the higher-quality angelic offspring they produce.  Queen Victoria is a Nephilim descendant and, by extension, Empress Alexandra of Russia. Alexandra had an egg birth that occurred during what history has recorded as a phantom pregnancy. Alexandra was actually impregnated by the archangel Gabriel and so the resulting egg-child (Lucien) is of a purer angelic strain than ordinary Nephilim. There is some huge angel prison in Siberia, modeled after the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham. It blows up in the end. Oh, and there's an angel vaccination of sorts, which could turn an angel or a Nephilim human again.  It can only be made once due to the rarity of one of its ingredients. The angel hunters made it, and Verlaine hands it over to Evangeline, thinking she will quaff it, but no, she steals it and leaves to hang out with Lucien, who is actually her father. Verlaine gets pissed and instantly wants to kill her (again). He gets voted as the leader of the next round of angel/Nephilim resistance fighters. The end. My head hurts.

Things that Didn't Suck

1. Angelopolis was shorter than the first book.  This represents an attempt on the author's part to keep the plot more tightly controlled. It also meant the whole thing gets over with faster.   

2. The Romanovs were peripheral characters. Ideas that link real people and historical events to mythological events are cool.

3. It created some interesting mythology about the Biblical flood, Noah, the Ark's location, and what exactly got preserved on that Ark. Those are all the nice things I can think of to say.

Things that Sucked

1. The author still seems to believe that long-winded explanations and backstory and plot setup can take up 70% of a book without the reader getting bored. It is DISASTROUS. In the quote below, a co-worker of Dr. Azov, an angelologist, asks a visiting angelologist named Vera if she needs a refresher on the kind of work Azov does before meeting the good doctor:  

"No need," Vera said. "I know that Azov has occupied the center on St. Ivan Island for over three decades--since before I was born. His outpost was created in the early eighties, when a body of research pointed to the presence of well-preserved artifacts under the Black Sea. Before this, angelologists stationed in Bulgaria worked near the Devil's Throat in the Rhodope mountain chain, where they monitored the buildup of nephilim and, of course, acted as a barrier should the Watchers escape." (p 136)

Holy mother of God, if the answer to someone's question is a simple "no," just say "no."  

2. The dialogue is tragic. It's artificial at best, and often used to deliver complicated history lessons. This makes the characters themselves seem even more wooden than they actually are. Here's one stellar example of tragic dialogue:

"Absolutely certain," he said. "And I'm not the only one--an angelologist is hunting her at this very moment. An angel hunter." 

How could we fail to be aware of the fact that an ANGELOLOGIST who is HUNTING her is an angel hunter?  At what point in the second sentence is this unclear enough to need a third?

3. The tone and sentence structure never change. A five-page digression into angelology and a motorcycle action scene are treated exactly the same way, and this does a disservice to the few action scenes. It gives the book a plodding feel. 

4. There is no humor whatsoever. This series takes it itself so goddamn seriously.  Even books and shows that deal with the end of the world need a little humor. Supernatural does this amazingly well.  You can't have DANGER DANGER BIBLICAL WEIRDNESS RASPUTIN DANGER LECTURE ON BIBLICAL WEIRDNESS OMG WORLD ENDING PANOPTICON THE END without a moment or two of levity. People are not robots. I found myself seeking an escape from this book, which is theoretically entertainment, and thus supposed to be an escape. Epic fail.   

5. The characters are flat. They aren't allowed to do or say anything except spout Trussoni's "big ideas" about history and angelology. They don't have favorite foods or favorite colors or get bitten by bugs or hate their shoes or express real-life opinions about anything non plot-related. They don't have thoughts about past loves or wives or girlfriends or boyfriends or past experiences that reveal who they are. They are plot devices, not people. This is the closest to characterization you get:

He would be forty-three years old in less than a week and he was in the best condition of his life, able to run for miles without breaking a sweat.  (p 35)

6.  The writing is flat.  Everything is told, never shown. We are simply told what characters feel. They do not express it or show it. It gets boring. So very boring. Apparently, Trussoni graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Coulda fooled me.

"You want to re-create paradise," Angela said, astonished.

Someone who's good at writing wouldn't have needed to explain the bad guy's shtick, and could have used a gesture or body language to convey said astonishment. Here's another awesome example:

There was a rusty Zid motorcycle parked nearby, its wires hanging loose. The engine was vastly different from his Ducati, but in a matter of seconds, he'd hot-wired the bike, thrown his leg over the leather seat, and was speeding after Eno. (p 125)

Hmm. In addition to the multiple "was" verb forms making this theoretically exciting chase scene boring, this passage begs several logistical questions. If Verlaine has a Ducati, how is he intimately familiar with the workings of a Zid engine? What the hell are the wires doing hanging loose in the first place?  Wouldn't the owner, like, I don't know, fix that shit?  And how, pray tell, does one hot-wire a motorcycle? A bit of authenticity here would have helped. At least YouTube it and try and find out how it's done.

As Verlaine followed Angela's movements, he realized that his entire body had gone rigid. (p 82)

In the above, why wouldn't you simply say, "Verlane's body went rigid"? All of the "following" and "realizing" dilute the power of the physical effect Trussoni is trying to create. This is bush league, people.

From the way she looked at him, he could feel her rage. (p 178)

And again, we have the bush league version of telling, not showing.  How did she look up at him? What was in her eyes, in her body language?

7.  Some of the facts are not right. Could have been a simple typo, but the book gives 1917 as the Romanov execution year. Nope.  Also, when mentioning the Romanov execution, she talks about them going out "into the cold."  Um, it was July. And hot as Hades. Not sure anything would have been cold. Minor quibbles, I know, but they exist.

I give up. I fucking give up.

8. The sheer ridiculosity of the egg birth thing. I just don't buy it.  Nephilim lay eggs?  Like, an egg actually grows in the woman and she gives birth to it?  Does it then hatch immediately?  Or does it friggin' incubate in a bassinet? And I'm supposed to believe Peter the Great came out of an egg?  All Trussoni says is, "...how such a birth had come to pass was never documented" (p 221). Wow, convenient, huh? But if the ranks of European royalty are littered with Nephilim, what happened in the days when many royal births were public? Did the woman know in advance whether she'd give birth to an egg or a baby?  How could all the ladies-in-waiting and midwives who were present at egg births throughout history have been silenced? This just has too many logistical weirdnesses to it.  I can't suspend my disbelief that far. And who said angels have egg babies? They aren't birds.  Birds evolved from dinosaurs. Did angels evolve from dinosaurs, too? Again, I am confused.  If the author has thought through the answers to these questions, they need to be shared.  In a way that doesn't involve eight pages of lecturing dialogue. But this is what we get:

Verlaine stole a look at Vera, wondering how all of this was striking her. It seemed that her dubious theories about Easter eggs and royal egg births could be supported by the tsarina's collection. (p 104) 

WTF? Because the Romanovs had Faberge eggs, they MUST be nephilim?  I have a carving of an elephant on my bookshelf.  Does that mean I'm half pachyderm?

9.  The sheer ridiculosity of the idea that Empress Alexandra and her daughters had wings. That she taught them to fly on lazy afternoons in the Crimea. I mean, really.  If anyone had wings, it would have been Felix Yussupov, right?  And isn't it extremely likely that some one in the Romanov entourage would have seen crap like this?  Again, how were these witnesses silenced? Even when on "vacation" at Livadia in the Crimea, there was still an enormous household of servants, tutors, cooks, ladies in waiting, and friends.  It strains credulity that this could have happened. And let's think a little harder about this...if they did have wings, how likely is it that they would have been held prisoner for so long?  Especially toward the end, after the rescue attempt failed?  Couldn't they have flown away from the Ipatiev house?  It boggles the mind. But, no, in the author's world, this is legit:

She spent hours grooming her great pink wings. She would use her leisure time teaching her daughters to fly in the private garden of their country estate in the Crimea. (p 112)

10. I'm still not clear on *why* the archangel Gabriel chose to impregnate Alexandra. What was so important about that time, that situation? It's important for the world-building and mythology, but it was glossed over.  I mean, why not impregnate Anne Boleyn?  Surely she prayed just as hard for a son as Alexandra. What was so important about Alexandra and Russia and that moment in time?  We are never told. 

11.  Trussoni is incredibly bad at building a believable relationship. Verlaine and Evangline are cardboard characters, so it's impossible to take them seriously when they try to feel things.  Like love.  Verlaine runs the gamut from "I hate her, I want to kill her" to "Maybe she's not so bad" to "I freakin' love her" to "I hate that bitch."  The words fly out of his mouth and it feels random because there is no establishment of his emotional history.  Here's the big moment when Evangeline and Verlaine have some Jedi mind-meld moment of togetherness as they escape from danger:

He was sure that all of the thoughts and all of the desires that he'd ever felt had collected in his heart at that moment. (p 290)

So glad he's sure.  Wouldn't want any of those stray, unnamed thoughts or desires getting away from him now.

12. The number of times she uses the phrase "as if" to describe things that are happening is staggering.  Witness the following examples: 

The entire structure had the appearance of a ruin, the light fixtures crude, as if the building had been wired for only the most basic functionality." (p 151)

 It was as if they all felt that a solution was possible, that once they made it to Valko they would overcome the seemingly impossible odds. (p 175)

 ...a second blast of searing heat seized her, this one more intensely painful than the first, as if her skin had been peeled away in one clean sweep. (p 258)

ONE PARAGRAPH LATER 

...the moment Vera woke it seemed to her that she had died and emerged on the other side of existence, as if Charon had in fact taken her across the deathly river Styx to the banks of hell. (p 258)

 ONE SENTENCE LATER

Her body felt stiff and hot, as if she had been dipped in wax. (p 258)

The Takeaway
This book is a flop. There is no deft or beautiful language, no metaphor, nothing of note linguistically. It's just a weird-ass confusing story, told with little grace or charm and absolutely no hint of humor or spark or real life.

8 Signs You Are Not the Chuck Norris of Writing

As a writer, you're a target. You're putting yourself out into the world and asking both readers and ubiquitous Internet heroes to comment on your work.

Some of these folks are looking to take you down, to give you a bad review, to tell you you don't know what you're doing. They are the Kim Jong-uns of the Internet: puffy, whiny, self-important, and probably in need of a kick in the pants. As a writer, the last thing on earth you want to do is give these people ammunition. You want to be the Chuck Norris of writing, the one-man-army capable of telling a legion of disbelievers to go straight to hell: Vaya con Chee-Tos, mothertruckers.

One of the best ways to do this is to make sure your fundamentals--your phrasing and grammar--are correct. Many writers skip this step, preferring to rely on their storytelling ability to carry them through the process. But this would be like Chuck Norris skipping all the other color belts that lead up to a black belt. Did Chuck Norris skip out on the yellow belt or the purple belt? I think not. He mastered that shit because he's Chuck Norris.  You can do the same.

One more note, before we dive in: Chuck Norris would never use Microsoft's grammar check. He knows it's wrong half the time. He ignores it, and you should, too. Chuck Norris learned how to write by reading.  A lot. And more than just kung-fu how-to manuals. Chuck Norris reads classics, sci-fi, historicals, biographies, and oh yes, even a vampire book or two.  If you want to learn to write like Chuck Norris, you need to read out of your pay grade. 

In any case, Chuck and I offer this starter kit of 8 stupid mistakes never to make with your writing. Some of these are actual mistakes I've seen in books, many self-published. Go forth and conquer.   

1. You use turns of phrase without actually knowing what they mean. 

• "...the change knocked her world on its axis..."  This is not correct. An axis is an imaginary line around which an object (presumably a planet) rotates. When something incredible happens to your character, her world cannot be knocked ON its axis. It was there to begin with. Her world may, however, be knocked OFF its axis.  
• "...step foot in..."  This is everywhere. People say it, but it IS NOT RIGHT. The phrase is "set foot in." It might make sense at first because "step" is a logical word to combine with "foot." But the sense in which it is used is totally wrong. To "step" automatically implies you are using your foot, which makes the use of the word "foot" stupid and redundant. To "set" does not automatically imply you are performing this action with a foot; therefore, it is reasonable that you then specify "foot" after the verb.  
• "...she thought to herself..."  Unless your character is telepathic, there is no way she could "think" to anyone else.

2. You use adverbs when the verb you use already implies that adjective. 

• "...tripped clumsily."  Can you trip in a way that's not clumsy? Even if you can, is that what your character is doing?
• "...shouted loudly."  Is it even possible to shout quietly? If it is, "shouted" is the wrong damn verb.
• "...jumped quickly."  Let's see you jump slowly. I dare you to try. I dare Chuck Norris to try.

3.  You use adverbs too much in general. We all know adverbs are to be used sparingly. But occasionally, they creep in and that can be okay. But it's not okay when you're using an adverb because it's easier and faster than describing how a character does something. You're a writer. You're supposed to be describing how characters do things. That's your job. So do better at it. Here are some examples of lazy adverb use:

• "You murdered my nephew," he said angrily. Really? Because I always thought proclamations of murder were issued joyfully. Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if the punctuation could somehow reveal the character's emotion? If only someone had invented a single punctuation mark that conveys strong feeling.
• "Constantly stepping from foot to foot, Joe looked nervous." In this case, the adverb is unnecessary. Stepping from foot to foot already implies the motion is constant. 
• "Moving slowly through the graveyard..." If your verb requires an adverb for the reader to get the picture, you picked a shitty verb. 

4.  You misuse prepositions.  Oh God, the prepositions. They are under attack. I don't know how this happened. It's like waking up one day to find out that all the streets have been renamed and now you have no idea what people are saying when they're trying to give you directions on how to get to the grocery store. And you're like, "Man, all I wanted is some mac and cheese. Why are you making it so hard?" Don't make it hard on your reader. Prepositions are the street signs that tell your reader where your sentence is going. If you don't use the right street sign, your reader is lost.  And lost people get angry. Sometimes they get murdered by drifters. Do you want your readers to get murdered by drifters? Don't answer that. Like Blair Waldorf, I rely on plausible deniability.

• "...ponder on..."  You ponder something. You don't ponder on it. If you tell me you're pondering on a Corvette, I will imagine you perched upon a car, thinking about a subject you failed to specify.
• "She was ignorant to the fact that he was an ex-con."  She ain't the only one. You can be ignorant of a fact, but not ignorant to it. There's no easy way to learn this stuff. You just have to read good books and absorb these idioms.
• "...disappointed from..."  You can be disappointed by the fact that you died from dysentery, but you cannot be disappointed from the fact that you died by dysentery.
• "She glanced on her watch."  A glance is not a tangible thing, so it cannot actually be on the watch. She may, however, glance at her watch.
• "You can never go wrong on fruits and vegetables."  I BEG TO DIFFER. You can go very, very wrong. In order not to go so wrong, try going with them instead of on them.

5.  You use descriptive dialogue tags. You've probably seen Elmore Leonard's advice for writers, one point of which states that you should never use anything other than "said." 98% of the time, he's right. There is rarely a case when you need to use a dialogue tag. If you use one, you're following the same lazy pattern of writing indicated by adverb use. Your dialogue, in combination with the motion of the character in the scene, should tell the reader how that line is spoken. If you have to specify with a dialogue tag, you haven't effectively conveyed the feeling of the scene, the emotion of the character, or his or her mindset. 

• "Eww! I hate spiders!" she shrieked. The problem with dialogue tags is that they are often unnecessary. The exclamation points tell you this character has strong feelings about spiders. She is probably angry or afraid, and you as the writer should provide the context to tell us which it is. Using both exclamation points and a tag such as cried/shrieked/wailed/exclaimed is overkill.
• "And the best part is...I never pressed play!" he cackled.  I call C+C Music Factory on this one. A cackle is a laugh, right? Can you actually speak all these words while cackling? Or is the laugh coming between the words? Or did the cackle come after, in which case the words themselves were not "cackled"? Or is the laugh really even a cackle to begin with? Do you see what kind of problems a poorly thought out dialogue tag can get you into? 

6.  You get subject-object agreement wrong. This is a tricky one, but once you know what to look for, you'll see it everywhere. Remember, no one's asking you to speak properly. You don't have to obey this rule when you're talking to your mom or your wife, but you do have to obey it on the page. Because if you don't, someone who does know the rule is going to put down your book and think, "Amateur." And by someone, I mean Chuck Norris.

• "Americans who love The Fast and the Furious live their life a quarter mile at a time." What's wrong here? The subject of the sentence is "Americans." You're making a statement about a large group of people. But you used the word "life," which is not plural. Do all Americans live one life?  Apparently not, since "One Life to Live" was canceled. See? Even ABC figured this shit out. Now it's your turn. You want to say that Americans live their lives a quarter mile at a time. Now you're cooking with gas.
• "One cannot have their cake and eat it, too." You would think that a word like "one" is enough to tell you that it means "one."  As in singular. As in not plural. So who are all these other folks you've invited into your sentence by using "their"? Is your "one" a schizophrenic? Are you a schizophrenic? If not, shape this shit up by keeping this a party of one: One cannot have one's cake and eat it, too.  

7. You use semicolons. Badly. You do not know how to use them, yet they appear throughout your book. Why is this? Do you randomly sprinkle mathematical formulas throughout your book just because they look intellectual and important? That's what lots of people do with semicolons. They look fancy, and probably imply that your sentence is multi-layered and complicated....right? No. Just...no.  If you can't tell me the rule for semicolons, right now, don't use them. Ever. Until you learn the rule, which is this:

• One rule to rule all the rules: Semicolons are used to separate TWO COMPLETE THOUGHTS. If either part cannot stand on its own as a grammatically correct entity, DO NOT USE A SEMICOLON. Chuck Norris will hurt you if you do this. If there's one thing Chuck Norris hates, it's bad semicolon usage. Don't believe me? Try it, and then go to sleep. See if you wake up.
• "One time at band camp; I did things my mom wouldn't approve of." A semicolon is not a comma. These two thoughts are clearly connected, but they cannot stand on their own.  "One time at band camp" is not a sentence...it is the beginning of a sentence.  And yes, I know that sentence ended with a preposition. Some rules were meant to be broken. Deal with it.
• "Rochelle had more to do that Saturday night; more than get wasted." Again, the second half of this sentence is placed for emphasis--it is not a sentence in and of itself. Only the cheese stands alone. Sentence fragments are not cheese.

8.  You confuse the most basic contractions you learned in first flippin' grade. I'm serious. Now you've got Chuck Norris *and* your first grade teacher really pissed at you. Is that what you want? He'll hold you down and punch you while your first grade teacher spits in your face. Or just drags her nails along the chalkboard. That's no one's good time. So do the world a favor and just learn what six-year-olds in good schools already have.

• For the last time: the apostrophe means it's a contraction. Contraction means two words are smashed together tighter than Kim Kardashian's boobs in a bustier. Some of the letters got kicked out because they couldn't breathe. The apostrophe tells us those letters are missing and someone might want to find them someday. Or not. It's up to you. 
• You're/your.  You're going to get your ass kicked by Chuck Norris for fucking this up. If you cannot replace the word with "you are," you should use "your."
• It's/its. It's a damn shame the snake left its home and decided to sleep in your bed instead. If you cannot replace the word with "it is," you should use "its."
• Their/they're/there. They're late for their own funeral because Chuck Norris got there first. 

If you're seeing some of your own mistakes listed here, now you have the power to fix them. This is progress! If you're not seeing any of these mistakes in your writing, look harder. Look even harder still. And then, if you still don't see these mistakes, congratulations on possibly being the Chuck Norris of writing. I salute you.

Book Review: A Secret Alchemy by Emma Darwin

Based on the jacket copy, this book is right up my alley: it combines the historical mystery of the Princes in the Tower with two historical narrators involved in the drama (Elizabeth and Anthony Woodville) and a modern narrator, a historian named Una.  The jacket copy promises the book is "a brilliant feat of historical daring."  Suffice to say it falls short both of brilliance and daring.

The narrator would NEVER HAVE WORN
A COAT THIS CUTE. I feel misled.
Also, this cover has nothing to do with the book.

All three narrators' stories are interwoven, presumably to illuminate each other. The modern narrator, Una Pryor, belongs to a large family that owns and operates a press housed in a medieval chantry.

(Digression alert.  Chantry is a weird word, isn't it? A former friend once told me a terrible story about a dentist named Chantry.  Something about mold growing in someone's head?  Gross, n'est-ce pas?  I still like the word, though.)  

This part of the story follows Una and her repressed, noncommunicative family as they struggle to figure out how to keep their small press in business despite aging family members, scattered younger family members, and financial concerns.  You'd think they were Swedish the way they refuse to ask questions or say a single thing they're thinking.

The two medieval narrators, Anthony and Elizabeth, tell the story of the Woodville family from their precipitous rise to power when Elizabeth married Edward IV to the rise of Richard III and the murder of two of Elizabeth's sons in the Tower as a part of Richard's power-grab. These historical narratives are done relatively well, except for the gimmick of spelling the names differently in the medieval narrative and spelling them in modernized fashion in the modern narrative (Antony/Anthony; Elysabeth; Elizabeth). Despite the spelling issues, Anthony and Elizabeth are sympathetic and layered.  They need a lot more room to play.  They might have been able to save the book had they been the only ones telling the tale.

The Worst Part
The modern narrator is a disaster.  She is passive, weak, scattered, and stupendously uninteresting.  Unfortunately, she carries most of the book.  She is a hand-wringing sort, the kind who sighs with unhappiness and bemoans her state when a simple question, spoken out loud, would solve everything.  She makes a big deal about being exhausted and tired when she hasn't done very much but sit in a car as a passenger and worry about things.

I wanted to steal things from her just to watch her DO something as she hunted for them.

An Also Pretty Bad Part
But the weird structure and shifts in tone and tense are what killed the book for me. The whole purpose of interspersing modern and medieval perspectives should theoretically be to illuminate similarities in us despite the hundreds of years in between. But the two time periods are only loosely connected, and Darwin makes little effort to provide any sort of illumination.  The modern characters fluff around in self-indulgent heaps, while the medieval characters get less page time despite the fact that the cosmos basically hands their collective ass to them, which is much more interesting.

Elizabeth Woodville: hot or not?

Una, the modern narrator, is theoretically writing a book about the books of the Woodvilles.  You'd think the character might actually try to find out what they are, or read them, and think about them.  Nope.  She mentions one or two titles, but doesn't do more than go visit a couple of the locations the Woodvilles found themselves in, and then whine about how she can't "find" them in these places.  Really, she just pines over a guy who worked in her family's chantry and then shows up again to help them save it.  And pining makes her so tired, so then she just has to rest.  It was almost halfway through the book before I realized Una might be, like, 50?  60?  Not really sure.  Never confirmed.

The Weakest Link
Una is the weak link that destroys any real, lasting, emotional connection between our time and the Woodvilles.  She's the weak link full stop, as the Brits say.  Does she bother to make connections about her family losing their press and chantry as the Woodvilles lost their father, brother, and nephews during the upheavals of the War of the Roses?  Nope.  Does the widowed Una bother to connect herself to Elizabeth, widow of Edward IV?  Maybe once.  In a sentence.  Does she bother to think for even a moment about Anthony Woodville (here, in love with a man) and her uncle Gareth (a closeted gay man)?  What they might have shared in their experience?  Nope.  Too much trouble, apparently.  Takes away from valuable time spent pining and whining and wringing her hands.

The cheater tree.

In the end, Una thinks she might write a biography instead of a scholarly work on the Woodvilles' books.  But what on earth has she learned about them?  She finds a letter written by one of them that purports to clear up that whole what-happened-to-the-Princes-in-the-Tower thing, touted as the focus of the book on the jacket.  It gets a couple of sentences.  That's it.  And then the annoying-ass narrator thinks she's awesome for being in the right place at the right time to have someone hand her the letter, and decides to write a biography when she never really tried to write the scholarly book in the first place.  UGH.  It's like watching a kid think about trying to build a house out of Legos and then give up and stick the Lego tree on the green Lego base board instead.  Because it's easier.  And because they found the tree in the box.  DONE, MAN.  I NAILED THAT SHIT.  LOOK AT MY LEGO TREE ON THIS NICE LEGO BASEBOARD.  I DOUBT YOU COULD HAVE DONE BETTER.

Oh, God, There's More?
The book also has another one of my pet peeves--present tense.  Una's story is told in present tense, but it has so many friggin' flashbacks in the first half of the book, that half of the present tense ends up being in past tense anyway.  JUST USE PAST TENSE.  Present tense adds nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  All it does is confuse the living hell out of the bored reader who suddenly finds that Una has slipped yet again into a reverie.  This woman should never be allowed to drive a car or operate heavy machinery.  It's like narcolepsy of the soul.  Surely there is a medication to deal with this.

But How's the Writing?
The prose is stilted and hard to read for its sheer lack of fluidity.  To wit:

"As I eat, I can't help but watch Mark. His plate's on the ground in front of him. Even with his knees bent up, his legs cross more of the rug than any Pryor's ever would. He looks up, our eyes meet.  Even if he'd reached out his hand--his beautiful, long-fingered hand--and actually touched my cheek I couldn't be more shaken.  What is this heat? Memory's powerful. But this, is this about the past?  I was grown up by then and talking to Mark, working with Mark, referring to Mark, had all become easy enough, because the paths for that were well laid. The longer what I knew--thought--felt--went unspoken, the more manageable it was, and even the despair became a settled thing, a known quantity, a thick, stable layer at my core. I even sometimes thought he'd forgotten what I'd said, and sometimes thinking so hurt more, and sometimes it hurt less."

Oh, holy crap. This is just too much.  We have present tense.  We have past tense.  We have the ridiculous contraction of "memory's powerful."  We have some amorphous shift into the days when she dreamed about Mark. We have the a question asked of no one in particular.  It's like a twelve-year-old girl trying to use a fifty-year-old woman's language.  It just doesn't work.

They Don't All Talk Like That, Do They?
It's not just Una who talks like this.  It's her would-be beloved, Mark, too.  Here's what he says during their great love scene:

"I know. You wouldn't.  But--but...I'm sorry, tell me if it's none of my business.  I've been thinking about Sunday night.  It's all I've thought about since...And Gareth said he wondered...Did you...I understand that for you--it's...Was it about ending for you? About the Chantry? About leaving England? About Adam, above all? I know that...But I hope you'll forgive me if I say...And ending, like you said. For you."

Oh, dude, just SPIT IT OUT.  In real life, people might talk like this, but it is terrible on the page.  Stilted and awkward and juvenile.  This is the hero (?)'s big moment, and it's like a first-time hurdler stutter-stepping right out of the gate.  Linguistically, these are so not the people you want to spend 400 pages with.

Ugh.  I could go on.  But there's no point.  Just read the parts with Anthony and Elizabeth and skip all the modern parts because they will suck the patience and life out of you until you look the Cryptkeeper.

This book earned Darwin a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College.  This makes me want to bang my head against the wall until it's bloody and then write something better IN MY OWN BLOOD.  Maybe in 10 years.  Once I've finished paying for my Master's.

Cover Me: Why I Finally Paid for a Work of Art

I may have been wrong about some stuff. Hey, it happens.

The Romanov Legacy: Kindle Edition

If you're self-publishing and seek out any advice at all on the subject, you'll run into two ironclad recommendations in a hurry: pay for a professional cover and pay for professional editing.  

I never took either of these seriously, for several reasons:

1.  I have no money.  For three years, I lived on $800/month.  BEFORE TAX.  I went back to work full-time six months ago, largely because now I have $30K of student loans to pay back.  Money is tighter than the space between my back molar and my wisdom tooth.  (Another thing that might be able to be fixed, had I some money.)

2.  I disdained the idea of paying for something I could theoretically do myself. After all, I have a brain and two college degrees.  I've read books and judged them by their covers all my life.  How hard could it be to design one, right?  Software is the great democratizer, putting tools into the hands of people with time and a willingness to learn.  I could be the living, breathing representation of this principle.  

So that's what I did for four books.  Then something changed.   

I just paid for my first-ever professionally designed cover, and I'm over the moon about it.  It's an updated cover for my spy thriller, the one that sells best out of my four. What on earth led to this epiphany?  

The credit is entirely due to the blog The Book Designer. Well, let's be honest...one post on the blog The Book Designer.  

When I found this post, where he evaluates covers uploaded by self-pubbed authors, I had my Eureka! moment.  It was actually a Eureka! moment combined with the mental equivalent of a walk of shame.

Okay, so I suck at covers. But the
lower left photo is my great-grandma!
That's cool, right?

Reading through the brutally honest comments ("unmistakably amateur," "confused and indecipherable," "visually weak"), all I could imagine was what he'd say about mine:

• Beginner's font.  
• Terrible colors.  
• Poor spatial arrangement.  
• Can't see a frickin' thing...it's all too dense.

All this time, I'd been thinking I could be Superwoman and do it all.  Politely worded suggestions (nay, commandments) weren't strong enough to reach me; I could still brush them off.  But specific examples of constructive criticism aimed at efforts clearly on my level were things I couldn't ignore. 

So I scanned my Google+ writers' communities, looking for recommendations and availability. I worked with a writer/artist whose covers I'd seen and liked. One weekend later, the top image is the result. One weekend. 

Now, this huge chore is now lifted off my shoulders. I'd been wondering...do I fork out for a month of Adobe Cloud service to get access to Photoshop and Illustrator and try to learn that shit in one month during the free trial? But that would mean one month of constant trial and error, with no time for writing. What if I couldn't get something usable in that month? I'd have to pay for another month ($50-$75) or abandon everything I'd already done. Argh.  

Now it's all solved. I love this cover. It's simple, beautiful, and effective in conveying to the reader the main points of the book:

• The angel image symbolizes Belial, the heroine's schizophrenic hallucination.  
• St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square symbolizes Russia, which is not only a setting, but a cultural flashpoint.  Ivan the Terrible, Bolsheviks, Communists, New Russia...these are all facets of the book, and the simple cathedral image conveys all this at a glance.  
• The fonts are also legible at a glance, with words big enough to read when browsing Kindle listings.  The fonts convey a sense of urgency, with the scrawl of "legacy" beneath the majestic presence of "Romanov."  

Some people just get how to do cover art.  Now that I've realized I'm not one of them, I feel free.  Yes, I have to cough up money to have this done.  But when I thought of it as a cost per hour, I would have been working for about $1 an hour if I tried to do it myself.  Is that the best use of my time?  Hell, no.  I need to write.  

So in terms of a time investment, paying for a cover is a huge savings.  Plus, now I have something I can be proud of to display in my marketing materials.  I'm building a Facebook fan page and a Google+ page for this book, all featuring this cover.  It's inspired me to do more and do it better.  Talk about money well spent.  

But I'm still not paying for editing.  The reasons for that are for another post entirely.

Worry Birds: 73 Things that Keep Self-Published Writers (Me) up at Night

In the past few weeks, as I adapt to life without Gram, I've been overdosing on writing blogs, social media, and general marketing tips.  I paste everything interesting into Evernote, in notebooks titled "Social Media" and "Website Creation" and "To Do" and "Book Promotion."  

I have 135 "To Do" notes and it makes me feel like I'm going to explode.

Instead of being energized, I'm paralyzed.

I feel like I'm back in 6th grade. There we were, scared and afraid we'd forget our locker combinations.  The first thing my new school had us do is write down all our worries about being very grown-up middle-schoolers on a construction paper bird.  Then we attached our birds to balloons and released them in a big welcome-to-middle-school ceremony.  They were called "worry birds," and by releasing them, we were supposed to let go of our worries, too.  As environmentally unsound as the process is, I feel like I need to do it again.

I'm worried that I will fuck up. I'm worried that I will never, ever be a better or more successful writer.  I'm

worried I'll miss something, fail to do something, and watch my cohorts pass me by.

These are my worry birds:

1. Do I need an author website?

2. If so, where do I host it?  Everyone has an opinion, and as soon as I read a good one about Bluehost, then I read a horror story about them, too. HostGator? LinkSky?  

3. Once I figure out where to host it and buy a domain name, what platform do I use?  The ubiqutous WordPress? Joomla? Impress CMS? Drupal? Does Drupal rhyme with RuPaul, and if so, isn't that kind of a silly name? 

4. Or should I just use Weebly? Are Weebly sites real sites, or are they for non-web people who can't be bothered?  Can I be bothered?  Should I be bothered?  I mean, I'm bothered, but should I bother?

5. How do I organize and design a site that doesn't look cheap, crappy, and templated? I am not a designer nor a programmer. I do not have the money to hire either one.  It's a one-woman show around here, and I work 8 hours a day and do laundry and cook dinner. The hubby would also appreciate it if I worked out more than once a month.  I am not in a good place with love handles right now. 

6. Where will I find the time to produce original content for a website? I don't have enough time to blog and write new stories, let alone put stuff up on yet another site.

7. Don't get me started on a newsletter. People say this is what you need: direct email marketing, hence the  website, hence MailChimp, hence a beautifully formatted, wonderfully written newsletter that I DO NOT HAVE.

8. Do I need WordPress multi-site? As in, an easy way to produce and control multiple websites? Like, one for each book?  Would these each need different looks, themes, content?  Oh, God, content.  

9. "Here are the 248 essential blogs that teach you how to use WordPress." "Here are the 823 plug-ins you CANNOT be without." Are you serious?  I read less informational material in grad school and now I have a Master's.

10. Do I need G+ and Facebook pages for myself as an author, as well as for each of my books? In addition to a personal website? These, of course, also need content.  

11. Do I need to do paper books as well as eBooks?  Do I need to charge more for my eBook so there's less of a  price difference between the two? .99 for the eBook and $9.99 for the paper book just seems stupid to me.  Yes, my eBook is worth more than .99, but pricing low gets volume and readers and reviews, right? 

12. If I do need paper books, which paper book producer should I go with? Xlibris, Book Baby, CreateSpace, Lulu, Autharium, or some as-yet-undiscovered winner? Who has time to research and document the costs, features, and services of each of these vendors in order to make an educated decision?  These are my books.  This is my LIFE.  I cannot afford (literally or figuratively) to fuck this up.

13. Pressbooks? What the hell is Pressbooks?

14. Sales tracking...um, yeah, I don't have that yet.  It would entail downloading month-specific Excel spreadsheets from Amazon that I probably should have been doing all along.  But now I'm behind.  So catching up is hard.  Damn it. 

15. You *are* eating five servings of fruit and veggies daily, aren't you?  And drinking eight 8-oz. glasses of water?  Without whiskey?  As Count Rugen says, "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."

16. Is it worthwhile to pay for a service to advertise the free days you get on KDP?  (Joe Konrath mentions having good luck with eBookBooster, but he's Joe Konrath, making $8,000 a week.)  Also, now that Amazon changed the rules about advertising free days, is this still viable?  Is KDP still viable?

17. Should I take my two KDP-exclusive books off exclusivity and release them through Smashwords, too?

18. Should I be doing more with Kobo?  What *can* I do with Kobo?  Nobody buys my books there, but is it because nobody buys my books there or because I'm not doing anything with it?

19. You mean I need to be in Kobo so I can sell eBooks in real bookstores?  Shit. Shit. Shit.

20. Should I be doing more (read: anything) with Shelfari and Goodreads? Is Boikeno.com the same thing?  And how about BookTalk, KindleBoards, Library Thing, Authonomy, Bibliphil, Booksie,  BookBrowse, Nothing Binding, Filed By, Bookhitch, Scribd, Figment, etc....What are all these places?  Should I use them or ignore them?  How will I remember all the logins and passwords and bears, oh my? 

21. Wait...you mean I have to post fresh content on some of these and then come back and monitor what people say about it? Yeah, sure, I'll do that from 25:00 to 27:00 hours in the parallel universe where I need absolutely zero sleep.

22. You *are* maintaining your LinkedIn page, right?  You *are* posting regular updates, and joining communities, and generally making yourself useful to the twelve writer groups you're in, right?  You're not just deleting those automatic email updates, are you?

23. Why hasn't one of my books sold a single copy since I changed the cover?  This new cover is awesome and the old one sucked. I thought I was doing the right thing.  What gives?  

24. Is there even a point in querying for the novel I just finished?  Querying takes time and rejection takes time and time is what I don't have.  

25. Should my next thriller incorporate characters from my first thriller?  You know, for continuity and increased sales.  They say that helps...but what if I want to create some new characters?  Am I shooting myself in the foot?  What if I'm kind of done with those characters?  Does that mean I created boring, uninteresting characters?  Am I a literary philanderer, incapable of committing to a genre, let alone to a family of characters?  Literary syphilis...is that what awaits me?

26. Is it a waste of time to finish the second romance novel I started, a kind-of-sort-of sequel to the first one I did, since my heart isn't in the genre?  I'm more than halfway through, and one of the best ways to generate readers and sales is to write multiple books in a series, or even in the same genre and I SO DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THAT.

27. When will I have time to research the next thriller, which requires knowledge of French police-type agencies, French cultural institutions, French universities, art theft, and Parisian geography?  I know pretty much nothing about all of these.  Okay, you can delete "pretty much."

28. You *are* using HARO to try and get some free publicity for yourself, aren't you? You're reading the daily emails and querying reporters for any stories you're qualified for, right?  You have a perfectly honed pitch and bio, don't you?

29. What have you done in terms of planning the blog tour for the next book that is soon to be rejected by all agents I plan to approach?  I mean, first I have to design the book, produce the book, make the cover, and plan a to-market date. But really, I need a blog tour.  I need contests.  I need autographed copies to give away.  WHAT?  I HAVE LESS THAN 200 TWITTER FOLLOWERS?  Help me help you...if a tree falls in the forest....insert third cliche here...

30. Should I be buying my own ISBNs?  (I can't afford to buy my own ISBNs.) 

31. "You don't have Google alerts set up for each of your book titles?" 

32. Should I be making Vine videos?  How the fuck does one make a Vine video?  I have a digital camera and a Kindle Fire HD, nothing else.  If push came to shove, I could probably make a tripod with dowels and duct tape.  Would that help?

33. Should I be making book trailers?  My computer came with basic video editing software, but I'm on extremely limited country-ass bandwidth and if I go over 5 gigs per month, the hubby pays for it.  But again, I'm minus the webcam. So that kind of kills that idea, right?

34.  Should I buy a webcam?  (And HD makeup so no one sees the sun damage and zit scars from twenty years ago?)

35. Should I be paying for a template to make a better formatted eBook using Word?  Right now I use the Smashwords nuclear method and it seems fine, but I'm a quality-over-quantity kind of girl and the templates appeal to me even though the ones I looked at are $47/book for paper/eBook template combos.  I do not have $47 x 4 books, fifth coming soon. I do not have InDesign.  I cannot afford to get InDesign.  I fear Pirate Bay.

36. Scrivener?  What in holy hell is Scrivener?  Bartleby, you sick fuck, what are you up to? 

37. How do I get (good) reviews for my comic mystery?  I have some bad ones.  I don't think they "got" it.  Or did I not "get" it?  Oh, crap, what if it's me?  WHAT IF IT'S ME?

38. How do I get anyone to review my historical vampire book?  It's the only thing I've ever gotten a fan letter for, and it has no reviews. The agony.  The humanity.  The feeling that I'm doing something really wrong....

39. When do I find the time to query book bloggers in order to solicit guest posts in order to build my brand and my as-yet-nonexistent website?  I suck at writing query letters.  If I didn't, I might have landed an agent in the first place.

40. "Start by figuring out which book bloggers you share common interests with and connect with them."  SURE.  In my copious spare time.  I'll, like, befriend them all.  Because I'm so good at making friends.  (Did we cover the part where I'm a WRITER?  If I were good with people, I would probably be doing something else with my life.)

41. When am I supposed to find time to follow the 500+ people my trial LittleBird subscription found?  When am I supposed to read their tweets?  When am I supposed to bookmark and then read the 800 websites and posts those tweets recommend?

42. Calibre is what, again?  E-book management software?  What fresh hell is this? 

43. Do I need to hire a photographer to take a few shots of me for the as-yet-non-existent website? My digital camera sucks and I have no Adobe software whatsoever and can't afford to buy any.  I can only traffic on snapshots from 2004 for so long.  

44. BookBuzzr.  Writer.ly.  Might as well learn quantum mechanics while I'm at it.  

45. Instead of producing paper books, is it worth querying small/indie presses directly?  Are you allowed to do this if you've already made an eBook?  What if I yanked the eBook?  

46. Wait, I'm supposed to be currying favor with readers on social media?  Searching for people with keyphrases like "book lovers," "book club, "librarian," "didn't barf when I read Twilight"? When do I find these people, interact with them in a meaningful way, read their tweets and posts, etc.?  Is there a second clock that only really special people have that gives them more hours in the day than I have?  That's it, isn't it?  I knew it.

47. Apps for Facebook that advertise my website?  Do I need this?  Should I?  Wait, first I need a website...

48. Should I use StumbleUpon to help make sure my content is found online?  I have to write content first, remember.  And are you allowed to only Stumble your own stuff?  Isn't that lame?  I don't want to be lame.

49. Fuck, Pinterest.  I need to upload my book covers to Pinterest.

50. Fuck, Flickr.  I need to upload my book covers to Flicker.  Someone somewhere said you get up to 75 keyphrases per image.  75.  I can't think of 75 words right now, except for the ones with four letters.

51.  Fuck.  See, I told you.

52.  No, really, fuck.  What keyphrases should I use in my Flickr images?  Or in general? 

53.  Oh, my God.  Should I be doing AdWords campaigns or Facebook sponsored ads?  Or both?  What landing page do I use?  You can't use a third-party as your landing page, can you?  CAN YOU?  

54. Wattpad?  Is this where James Watt lived?  Unless he invented Visine, I don't give a shit.

55. Writing contests, literary journals, all the regular writing-type submission stuff I did in grad school...you mean I'm still supposed to be doing all that?  You mean I still have to use words like "liminal" and "ontological"?

56.  When are you finally going to get around to using AdWords campaigns to A/B test possible titles for your next book?  Because you SUCK AT TITLES.  And you LACK A LANDING PAGE.  And the money to pay for AdWords.  For the love of God, tell me Blogger is still free.

57. Five essential Twitter hashtags for writers?  I can't even fit what I want to say in the fucking message, let alone leave room for 5 goddamn hashtags. 

58. Which social media management tools will I use?  How the hell should I know?  Fuckers spring up like mushrooms...MarketMeSuite, Seesmic, SocialOomph, CoTweet, Buffer, TwitterFeed, SpredFast, Sprout, Social Flow, AgoraPulse, Ping.fm, Engagio, Hootsuite, Pingraphy, and TweetVisor?  Might as well ask me to explain the difference between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.  

59. Wait, now I have to make sure my social media outlets "talk" to each other and my website(s) so my updates are blasted everywhere? Isn't that overkill?  Isn't that a duplicate content penalty waiting to happen?  If not now, later?  Panda happened, folks.  Penguin happened.  

60. Writing conferences?  Are you freaking kidding me?  Do you know how much that shit costs?  I credit carded the gas to get to my grandma's memorial service.  Plus, I can't get time off work.  I need money because I have to pay for a mortgage and repay the student loan money I used to go to grad school so I could learn to oh, you know, WRITE.

61.  "800 million sites for Indie Authors."  "5 trillion authors you NEED to know."  "World's Best Marketing Tips Scattered Through These 50 Links Because It's Friday and You're That Lucky."  Dude, by the time Friday rolls around, I don't even know my own name anymore.

62. "Build your brand. Get a logo.  Make your website look like your social media, which looks like your newsletter, which looks like your website."  Did we not cover the fact that I have NO design skills, money, or Adobe software?  Good luck with that.

63.  Understand all copyright laws so you know when you can and cannot use an image in your amateur-ass book cover.  Re-do your amateur-ass book covers, like, eight times because although you can do a lot with PowerPoint, it is no Photoshop.  Which I do not have or know how to use.

64.  What?  You don't have a Google Partner Account?  But to get my eBook on Google Play, I have sell it through my own site.  I do not have my own site.  OH MY GOD, I DON'T EVEN HAVE MY OWN SITE. 

65. Have you crafted a better author bio?  Because, you know, when you *are* the brand, you can't afford to suck.  And you probably suck, you know.  Just saying.

66. You *are* keeping up with your Google+ communities, aren't you?  You *are* making helpful and useful connections and reading everything and commenting, not just +1'ing, right? You need these people.  Be nice to them.  Be responsive.  Read their books.  Leave reviews.  Participate, dammit.  Participate like a motherfucker.

67. You DO have an about.me page, right?  Everyone else got theirs in, like, early 2011.  AND IT'S FREAKING 2013.

68.  Google Reader says I have 18,349 unread items.  All of which contain vital, helpful information I need right now.  Sure, I'll get right on that.  Lemme just grab the toothpicks I use to prop up my eyelids late at night.

69.  NO ONE READS LONG BLOG POSTS THAT HAVE NO IMAGES.  No one.  Don't you know the first thing about content marketing?  Or visual marketing?  Or marketing?  

70.  Wait, I'm supposed to be writing about my own books on this blog and trying to sell them?  But that's embarrassing.  I'd prefer to write about writing and life in general.  Plus I don't know which keyphrases to use.  We covered this, didn't we?

71.  When are you going to write the blog post you started ages ago, about why you don't believe in hiring an editor?  (Sorry, professional editors.)  How many flaming comments will I get for it?  How will I explain that I paid 30 THOUSAND DAMNED DOLLARS for the ability to go to grad school and learn to do it myself?  Did Shakespeare or Milton or Donne pay an editor?  Well, then holy hell, I won't either.  I'll take the responsibility of producing the goddamn best book I can because...I can.  Got a problem with it?  Call my editor.

72.  Someday I'd like to read a book for fun again.

73.  Maybe write one, too. 

Oh, holy Jesus, that's a lot of worries.  I don't have this many balloons.  The balloon factory doesn't have this many balloons.  MAKE IT STOP.  

All joking aside, every single one of these points is a question self-pubbers have to answer.  And then do something about, once they find the answer.  It is exhausting. And liberating.  And scary.   And, at the moment, requiring a liberal dose of whiskey.