IT Fail

My little NetBook has died. I mourn its passing. I have to come to rely on it completely in the last couple of years. Not only is it my lifeline during my early-morning Starbucks writing sessions, but I also take it on holiday with me. This year it's been to Egypt, where it witnessed the birth of my new horror WIP. It's also been to New York.

I used to do all my writing on my Dell laptop, which sits docked in my Writing Corner. When I decided to be more disciplined in my writing, my husband suggested we get a NetBook, which was much more portable than the laptop. It's fair to say it revolutionised my writing habits.

The Dell laptop is seven years old, and has been getting decidedly slower and clunkier of late. In fact, when I turn it on I have to go away and do something else for twenty minutes, because it takes that long to think about things. So my main gift this past Christmas was a shiny new laptop running Windows 7. It's lightning fast in comparison to the old one.

But, on New Years' Day, the NetBook died. Literally. In the morning it was working fine; I went back to it a few hours later and tried to wake it from its sleep mode, and couldn't. Continuous restarts failed to get me past a black screen with the words 'failed to find operating system' on it. Apparently this means the hard drive has failed. Getting it fixed is going to cost almost as much as a new machine, and even then there's no guarantee we can retrieve any of the files.

I am, on the whole, pretty good at backing up. I transfer all my writing files between the laptop and the NetBook regularly, and every so often back them up onto the desktop PC as well. However, I'm not so diligent about doing this every day. I'd made a start on editing my short stories for the collection, and hadn't copied them over anywhere. This wasn't the end of the world, as I was able to retrive my Stumar Press editor's copies from his email to me, and it just meant having to do them again. However, when I had my novel critique session for the second Shara book, I made notes as we went along on the NetBook. That I hadn't copied anywhere, and so it's lost forever. I do have the hard copies from my critiquers, but the idea of making a document with my own notes was so I would have an easy-to-access precis of what I need to fix in the next draft. Bummer.

What's most inconvenient, however, is not having the NetBook to carry to my writing sessions. That I really miss. Not wanting to expose my shiny new laptop to the hazards of Central London, I have had to resort to hauling out the old Dell again and taking that into London with me for my writing mornings. It's very heavy. And as I said before, it takes a long time to warm up.

However, I have learned my lesson with regard to backing up. This little guy in the picture was one of my stocking stuffers. I call him Robbie. He's a USB flash stick with 8GB of memory. I have copied over all my WIPs onto him, and I carry him around everywhere. Every time I write more words, I copy them over straight away.

Having just forked out quite a lot of money on a new laptop, replacing the NetBook has to wait a while. In the meantime, I have to either get used to lugging the ancient laptop around, or I need to rearrange my writing schedule to give myself more time to write at home. Because I really don't want to use the IT fail as an excuse to not write. Much as it's made me realise how much I rely on technology, that would be a poor excuse indeed.

A Perspective on Reviews

Signed up for Goodreads 2012 writing challenge. 52 books. Of course, I'm sure I'll receive those constant annoying "reminders" of how far behind I am and Oh-My-God-If-I-Don't-Do-Anything-About-It-At-This-Exact-Second I'll cause the freaking Apocalypse.

Tough. I enjoy reading. Honest. But writing, revising, and promoting my book plus taking care of my family also have priority.

One goal, though, is to do more reviews, not only of books but also some movies and anime and manga. (I say "some" movies because I really don't watch a lot of them but if one inspires a review, why not?)

Speaking of reviews... OMG, what is it with the brouhaha lately over authors behaving badly and critical reviews? Geez. Look, folks, I got a "negative" review. Yeah, it stung. But I deleted the email and moved on. Right now my biggest worry is how to start the rewrite of this vampire detective paranormal mystery. The reviewer had his/her say and I'm cool with that.

Here's the thing. I got a bad review (with some positive comments). Did the world end? Nope. Did I contract a fatal disease from the review? No again. Did Congress call and tell me I can never write another book? The jury's out on that one... :-) J/K. Anyway, get my point? Life goes on as normal. I'm still going to write my angel UF, my vampire mysteries, my shifter erotica romance, my whatever-the-hell-I-choose-to-write-about. Like my writing or hate it, the worse response would be complete apathy.

This is not false bravado on my part. You see, I've been conditioned early on to deal with rejection. I mean having orange peels thrown at you and your eye nearly put out by someone snapping a rubber band in your face during the middle school years is far more stressful than having someone say, "I don't like your book." At least with the latter, there's little chance of bodily injury. Eating lunch alone, being unable to find a seat on the bus because other students wouldn't move over until the bus driver yelled at them, those are the obstacles, along with physical and psychological abuse, that shaped my past.

It's all about keeping things in perspective. Remember, as always, your mileage may vary.  

Reading goals

I love having a lot of books, but there are just too many dead-tree books in this house. Last year I did a major culling of the herd but I think I'll have to do it again. We've got books that were read once, placed on a shelf, and never read again. Those are the ones that need to go. I don't mind keeping keeps that are loved, that are likely to be read again.

In fact this year I'd like to re-read some of my favorites. Several times I've thought I need to re-read the Dresden Files series but I never get around to it. I've also got a lot of books in the To Be Read pile that I need to get to finally. Some of those have been sitting around for a shamefully long time.

I have a ridiculous number of books on my Kindle that were offered as freebies that I still haven't read. Some of those I might not finish. That happens with the freebies sometimes. But sometimes you discover an author and/or a series you really like, well enough to spend money on. I've had that happen, too.

Every year Goodreads has a reading challenge where you can set a goal for how many books you want to read. I did that last year but I'm not going to do it this year. This year, my reading goals are not about numbers but about putting a dent in that TBR pile and enjoying some good stories.

Do you have any reading goals for the new year?

Best Books of 2011

I have talked before about how much I like Goodreads. Not only is it a good platform for writers to promote their books, it's also a good way of keeping track of all the books you read. This time last year, I set myself a challenge to read 50 books in 2011. The challenge only works, of course, if you are diligent about logging every book you read on Goodreads. This is not something I have a problem with - I am quite shameless about broadcasting my reading tastes to the world. Some folks, I suspect, will only log on Goodreads the books they want the world to know they're reading, but that's an entirely different story.

In any case, I have no shame and I am somewhat anally retentive about keeping track of my reading habits, so I find Goodreads rather handy. I read 55 books in 2011, so I exceeded my reading goal.

Because you can also rate books on Goodreads, it's fairly easy to pick out which ones you thought were the best. So I am presenting, in this post, my Top 5 Books of 2011. I will add a qualifier here, and say that these are from the perspective of books I read, not books that were published, in 2011. Some of them I have reviewed on Goodreads. Rather than repeat myself here, if this applies I have included the link in the title.

SISTER - Rosamund Lupton. A beautifully-written book about the grief of an older sister, trying to find the killer of her younger sister. Not exactly a cheerful read, but well worth a look if you're interested in the dynamics of family relationships.

NOW YOU SEE ME - SJ Bolton. This is a book I had to review for SHOTS, and it had me hooked. A gripping and genuinely spooky crime thriller that offers an interesting slant on the Jack the Ripper legend.

HEARTSTONE - C J Sansom. The quality of the writing in this series of historical crime novels blows everyone else out the water. Sansom's protagonist, hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake, investigates murders against the backdrop of Henry VIII's court. In this book Henry's wife is Catherine Parr, which possibly means, sadly, there won't be too many more in the series, unless Sansom plans to carry Shardlake through the aftermath of Henry's reign.

CHANGES - Jim Butcher. Harry Dresden, the only wizard in Chicago, inhabits a contemporary alternative world in which magic, vampires and faeries exist, with most humans being oblivious to this fact. Harry, a chivalrous and flawed character, can never resist coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress, and it is the voice of his character - brave; wise-cracking; resourceful - that make this such a fabulous series. Poor Harry has a hard time in this novel, and this is only one to read when you've already got the sequel in your TBR pile, because it ends on a cliff hanger.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE - Shirley Jackson. I've wanted to read this since I saw the film adaptation (the original 1963 version - not the 1990s remake). It's classic gothic horror at its finest. Four people gather in a haunted house, as part of an experiment to study psychic phenonema. They all bring their own psychological baggage with them, and the way they interact with each other is as much part of the atmosphere as the ghostly goings on.

So there we have my Top 5 reads of 2011, and happily it represents a cross-section of the genres I read in.

With a degree of overconfidence, I have set myself a new target for 2012 - to read 60 books. It remains to be seen if I will succeed, but my TBR pile is big enough to give me plenty to be getting on with in the foreseeable future.

Happy Anniversary

Today is the first year anniversary of Death Sword's publication. The journey began in November 2008 when I wrote the first draft for National Novel Writing Month.

Death Sword is the first in a planned four-book series focusing on the angels of death. Altogether I have eight or nine angel urban fantasy/paranormal stories planned, some partially written, some finished and ready for revision, and the rest mere ideas. Many of the ideas are developed from information I come across in my research.

If you ask me where I even got the idea to write about angels and demons, I would probably shrug and admit I've no idea. Perhaps it was independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger who piqued my interest with Lucifer Rising. Or a question that seems to be a recurring theme through my stories. What I do know is I enjoy upending notions of good and evil. Maybe not necessarily in Death Sword, but the ride's not over.  

You can buy Death Sword at the following:

Lyrical Press
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

My Bradbury experiment

Self-publishing is something I've had mixed feelings about so I decided to try it and see what my opinion was after the fact. Basically, I still have mixed feelings about it, ha.

I think that self-publishing is something a writer can do in addition to the various types of more traditional publishing, like the Big Six large houses and small press houses, many of which are now digital. Maybe you've got the rights back on backlist titles and want to get them out there, or maybe you decided to experiment with something that might not be a good fit with a publishing house. Or maybe, like me, you just want to try it and see what it's like.

My main interest was in actually putting the book together so when I finished the first volume of my serial The Bradbury Institute I decided to put it up on Smashwords and Kindle. It's becoming increasingly popular for free serialized works to be self-published at low prices and I think it's a great way for a fan of the serial to have a copy on their ereader. I used the Smashwords style guide and had no problems with formatting. The most important thing I did, other than following the directions carefully, was to start out with a clean document. To do that you have to nuke your Word doc, meaning you use Select All to copy it, paste that into Notepad or something similar what will strip the formatting, then paste than clean version into a brand new document. Next you go back through it and add all your formatting - font, tabs, italics, the works. It's a bit tedious but not hard. Thanks to starting with a clean doc and following the directions, The Key of Darkness qualified for Smashword's premium catalog, which means it was distributed to Barnes and Noble and other outlets. To upload it to the Kindle store I followed their directions, which mostly meant using Mobipocket Creator, which was easy. The main thing with this is attention to detail - you can't skip steps and you don't want to do them out of order. If you can handle that, you can format your ebook.

Of course I did have another writer help me with editing. The only thing I would do differently is the cover, but I can't afford to hire a cover artist so that's not something I can do differently. I'm not expecting to make any money from this and I'm not sure how long I'll leave it up for sale, or if I'll offer the second volume for sale. I can't offer any thoughts on promotion because I haven't done any - between the holidays and some things going on in my personal life, I haven't had the time or the inclination. Promotion hasn't much worked for my books anyway, to be honest.

So all in all, I did enjoy the process of putting the file together but this is not something I would want to do for every book I write. I like having a publishing house behind me. There is no way I could afford to hire an editor or a cover artist and promotion and marketing is surely one of Dante's levels of Hell. But for making the volumes of my serial into ebooks, it's fun. Which is what I was going for, and that's really the first thing you want to ask yourself before you do something like this: why am I doing it and what do I hope to get out of it? I wanted to do this so that if any Bradbury readers wanted the stories on their ereaders they could get them, and I wanted to learn how to create an ebook. Mission accomplished!

If you'd like a free copy of The Key of Darkness, email me at sonya @ sonyaclark.net with "Free Bradbury" in the subject line, and let me know what format you'd like - epub, pdf, or kindle/mobi.