The Benefits of Paper Edits

Evening, squiders. I just need to get through this week and then things will calm down, fingers crossed.

I mentioned last week how my spouse was asking about my printing out the chapters to edit them, and then last night I saw the reasons in action.

Brains are weird. They work in strange ways, and sometimes the simple act of changing the way you’re looking at something reveals new issues, or provides a new solution, or any number of things.

I write primarily on the computer. I might handwrite sometimes, but in general I find it doesn’t flow as easily for me, and I do type up everything I handwrite anyway. I’ll re-read on the computer as well, and do lower level edits and revisions there.

I’d like to think I’m catching most of the issues there, but experience says I’m not. For some reason, printing a chapter (or a story) out onto paper resets something in your brain. Maybe it’s a visual thing. Maybe it’s a texture thing. I’m not sure and I’m too tired right now to go and look. But you see things on paper you miss on a screen.

Also, with a paper copy, you can more easily make bigger changes. I know someone who will physically cut the paper version apart if things need to be reordered. I like to underline or highlight problem words so I can see how often I’m using them, and I’ll use the margins to brainstorm solutions or ask myself questions, or point out something that’s not working and list possible fixes.

(Also there’s something very satisfying about scribbling out a section that is not working.)

As a final step, I will read the story out loud, because this again resets something in your brain and reveals new problems you didn’t know you were having. (Normally sentence-level flow issues, at least for me.)

Right now I’m working on the re-typing phase of Chapter 20.

(Revision steps go something like this:

• Print out chapter
• Read over notes I made about chapter
• Do paper edit with red pen, highlighting overused words, noting things that need changing, writing myself notes
• Re-type the chapter, making changes as I go, which includes fixing plot level issues or confusing areas, as well as fixing flow or voice as needed
• Repeat with next chapter)

When I did the paper edit on Chapter 20, I was pretty impressed with myself. “This is a good chapter,” I said. “Interesting things happen, and this is a good plot development, and the characterization is also working really well. I think I only need to clean some things up and add in more explanation in a couple of places.”

Last night I spent about an hour on the retyping phase. And that’s where I found this particular issue.

There’s a bunch of looking, gazing, glancing, etc. The viewpoint character’s eyes are doing ALL the work.

THIS is why I revise in multiple mediums. AND why I retype. My initial readthrough didn’t catch this issue. I didn’t catch it in the paper edit. But by working back through the chapter again, rewriting the chapter, it was obvious. And now I know I need to do another sweep to catch and fix filtering issues.

Because, invariably, when I notice something, readers will notice it too. Without fail. Sometimes I’ll leave something in before I send a chapter out for critique, and if it is something I’ve noted, someone else will always bring it up.

After all, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. And I really, really want this to be the last revision on this book.

Do you know why different mediums help your brain see different issues, squider? Favorite thing about working on paper versus the computer?

No guarantees about Thursday or Friday, but hopefully I’ll see you then!

Already the High is Wearing Off

First, before we get to anything else, can someone check and see if this last SkillShare class is actually live? I posted it, oh, last Friday, I think, and SkillShare wrote back that they’d hidden it because they felt the instructions for the project weren’t explicit enough, so I fixed that and wrote back on Tuesday, and, well, I’ve heard nothing. But I think you can find it in the search–though I don’t know if you can actually sign up for it.

The class is here: https://skl.sh/3ROgPhr

Thank you in advance.

Tuesday we talked about how perhaps some of the reason the beginning of the year contains such promise is because it’s kind of a weird, well, not liminal time, but a period where there’s a bunch of hope coupled with a weird lack of other things to do (due to the holidays being over and normal life not running at full speed yet).

I think we’re hitting that point where life gets back up to speed and everything goes back to normal, and everyone’s productivity falls off to standard levels.

(In fact, at my gym class yesterday, the teacher was like, we’ve made it past the two week drop-off!)

(Though I started going in mid-December so it’s unrelated to any resolutions anyway.)

Actually, when I sat down to write this post, I was like, oh, I haven’t done anything since Tuesday! Which isn’t true, in retrospect, because I did do some painting in my sketch journal and do my critiques for the critique marathon, but something does…feel different.

Which now that I’m typing it up, may just be my own brain getting in the way.

Or, it may be that Tuesday’s blog post was the last thing I did on a very successful Tuesday where I got a ton done, which was a snow day right after the MLK holiday (so two days in a row where I got a ton done, because the spouse was out of the house and the small, mobile ones spent a ton of time on a joint Minecraft project and I was left on my own) and that skewed my perceptions of everything ever.

Consciousness is both a blessing and a curse.

Life has been very life-y the past few days, which isn’t helping. Also, my laptop will NOT talk to the printer which is making it hard to print out chapters for paper editing.

(Also my spouse was like, why do you print them out anyway? And I tried to explain how your brain works differently editing on paper versus on a screen and I think he probably doesn’t believe me. But anyway.)

(Also I can scribble all over paper with a red pen which is very satisfying.)

(Anyway.)

How are you feeling, squider? Do you agree about the first few weeks of January? Is your momentum starting to slow, or is it still smooth sailing?

Oh, I just thought of something else. Maybe part of why the beginning of January is so productive is because you still remember all your goals. Like, invariably when I go over my goals at the end of the year, I find some things that I have completely forgotten about. Like last year, I was going to publish Deep and Blue and then I…didn’t. Just completely spaced it. I don’t know why, but I make goal documents and then I don’t check them periodically (though I have, hopefully, built in a monthly check for this year. Time will tell), and then at the end of the year I am eternally surprised.

(I brought this up on WriYe, where everyone has a thread with their goals at the very beginning, because someone else was mentioning the same thing. Checking goals is, in theory, as easy as looking at your very first post, and yet…)

So! Maybe part of the productivity is you remember all your projects and can make progress on all of them.

Or maybe I should stop worrying about the psychology of goal setting, and just work on my revision.

See you next week, squiders!

False Sense of Security

Hey-ho, squiders.

So far, January is going great! I’ve read three books (and have decent amounts read of 3 more), I beat three video games and moved two more into my “don’t bother” category (I tend to buy game bundles, so every now and then I find a game that I don’t like/is too frustrating/is not fun, etc. and instead of forcing myself to play it, I just move it into this category and move on), I made a cover for Deep and Blue (and had it critiqued), I finished Chapter 19 of my revision (though not sure I’m happy with it) and did the paper edit for Chapter 20, and have Chapter 14 up for this week of the critique marathon, I made example projects for all my SkillShare classes, and, fingers crossed, I’ve reposted the last of the ones that were taken down (just waiting for confirmation on that).

Oh, and I made significant progress in my sketch journal (finished the line art and notes from the Scotland trip, completed the trip after that, and did line art for the final trip that will fit in the book) and have been doing some other drawings as well.

Deep and Blue cover

This morning I was working on my blog post for Turtleduck Press, and I was pondering why my and other people’s Januarys tend to be so productive.

Sure, some of it could be the whole “yay new year, new possibilities” thing. Most people do give the whole resolution thing a try, and normally stick with it for at least a little bit.

But I think what it actually is is that, in general, people have more free time in January. October/November/December (Hallowthanksmas) is a crazy time. Christmas is especially time consuming, with presents, decorations, parties, activities, cards and all that jazz. I know by the time Christmas morning raised its head, I was exhausted.

January, on the other hand, has no holidays that take a lot of mental and physical time. New Year’s is over as soon as it starts, and aside from attending some events on MLK Day, or maybe reading an applicable book or watching a movie, most people don’t put a ton of effort into that either. The next holiday that might take some prep work is Valentine’s Day, and we still have a few more weeks before you need to worry about that.

Aside from that, there’s just not a lot going on in January anyway. Everyone’s burnt out from the holidays, it’s too cold to spend a ton of time outside, the kids have a whole week before they have to go back to school. It’s almost peaceful.

So. More free time. This tied in with the “I’m going to become a better person this year” mentality tends to allow most of us to make significant progress in the first few weeks of the year.

Here is where the false sense of security comes in. I’m doing it, we think. I am actually going to make meaningful progress this year.

And then everything picks up and life goes back to normal, and we feel like failures. We’re not, of course–but after making amazing progress, it can be hard to go back to the status quo.

Don’t beat yourselves up, squiders. Embrace what you got done, and be gentle with yourself moving forward.

January will come again.

See you Thursday!

Dealing with Critiques and Commentary

It’s been an interesting week, squiders.

(And a tiring one. I’ve got a cold and so I haven’t been able to sleep much. Part of me wants to go take a nap, but it’s not like I’m going to be able to breathe any better right now.)

Both my in-person critique group and the critique marathon got Chapter 13 this week, and to say there is a range of responses would be an understatement. At times like these, it’s good to remind myself how to deal with receiving critiques, especially ones that don’t agree with each other.

Betas and critique partners are great, and I try to always have at least one person read anything I write before I do something with it. But they are people, with their own likes and biases, and what one says isn’t necessarily the best thing for your story.

So I have a few basic rules. Or thought processes, I guess.

Rule 1: Did more than one person point this out?

If multiple people are pointing out the same thing, it’s probably a problem. (Unless they’re all saying “I really like this part!”) I always take an extra long look at something that multiple people bring up, and in almost all cases, something needs to be changed.

(Sometimes it just needs to be re-worded, though. Those are the best.)

Actually, this is my favorite sort of commentary. Consensus is good. Consensus is easy to fix (relatively).

It’s when everyone has differing opinions, sometimes even opposite problems, that you run into harder problems.

Rule 2: Consider all commentary equally

In cases where only one person has pointed something out, or where you only have one reader in general, I still feel like you have to give that person’s point full consideration. Sometimes there’s the inclination to discount something because, say, you had five people read this and only one pointed it out, so obviously the problem is with that person. They read something wrong, or they misunderstood, or something.

And sometimes that’s true! And certainly you can’t fix everything for everyone.

But sometimes that one person did find something that everyone else missed, or perhaps they’ve come up with a better way to do something, something that will be more coherent in the long run.

And I do try to minimize the amount of confusion.

So I do sit with each person’s commentary, and try to see the story how they saw it, and then I decide if I agree with their point or not. Or, in extreme cases, I go and find someone else to read that section and see what that person says, and if anything they say lines up with the commentary the first person had.

Or you can go directly to the person and ask for clarification, or bounce potential fixes off of them.

Right now, I have two spots brought up by one of my in-person people that I’m waiting to see if the critique marathon people bring up (I haven’t looked at the line by line commentary yet, only the overall commentary), and one of the critique marathon people has a problem that didn’t bother my in-person people at all.

(There’s also a spot that all my in-person people brought up, so I’m interested to see if the critique marathon people also find it. I did run through the chapter between the in-person and marathon and make some changes, but I left this one alone out of curiosity. I’ll give it a second look when I go back through the chapter with the marathon commentary.)

Rule 3: Don’t take anything personally

It can be tempting, especially if you get a heap of negative feedback, to mope around and feel sorry for oneself and bemoan your writing skills and all that. (Or I do, anyway.) This is silly and you mustn’t dwell on it for too long. Critique partners do tend to dwell on the negative; they want to help you find problems so you can fix them and make the story better. But it’s not a judgment on you or even your writing, really. So don’t let it get to you, even if you are sick and haven’t slept in three days.

I find sometimes getting to work fixing the comments (or making decisions about the comments) can help you move past this stage.

(Some people are just mean, though. Don’t work with those people anyway, they suck.)

Anyway, fixing is for tomorrow, unless I get sicker, and then Doctor Who binging is for tomorrow and fixing is for Saturday.

Thoughts on critique commentary, squiders? Tips or tricks you swear by?

WriYe and Author Bios

Here we go again, hopefully not forgetting about it for six months in the middle of the year this time.

January’s blog prompt over at WriYe is: Write your future author bio / FAQ page.

Which is a little funny because I’ve had both for years.

I think the FAQ was one of the first things I ever put up on my wordpress blog. I remember I wrote it in a notebook first before putting it up online, which in retrospect, is a little silly. It’s here, by the way (in case you’re coming from kitcampbellbooks.com and not wordpress itself).

It’s definitely on the sillier side, but hey, so am I.

I feel like, in terms of being an author, the purpose of a FAQ is less informative than it might be for other professions. Your job is to make things up, and your FAQ is kind of an opportunity to do just that. Maybe if one was especially famous or important, it might make sense to do a serious one, but where is the fun in that?

I have three main bios that I use for varying things.

Some places want a short bio. Mine is: Kit Campbell likes landsquid and plesiosaurs. She can be found online at http://kitcampbellbooks.com.

Short. Sweet. Weird.

My “professional” bio, the one that’s on my Amazon author page and my website, is this one:

Kit Campbell has never met a mythology she hasn’t liked. This sometimes leads to issues, such as the occasional Norse God of Thunder showing up in the Garden of Eden. She adores weaving in the possibilities forgotten magic can bring to a story, and enjoys making up new creatures, such as large, venomous monsters that hunt in packs.

Kit’s stories have been published in half-a-dozen anthologies, and her YA novella, Hidden Worlds, was released by Turtleduck Press in 2010.

Her debut novel, Shards, was released December 2013.

Kit lives in Colorado in a house of ever-increasing chaos.

This is not my favorite, and it does probably need to be rewritten. Out of date on things like short stories and whatnot. Something to add on to the to do list, I guess.

My favorite bio, and the one I use when I sell a story or go to a con, is this one:

It is a little known fact that Kit was raised in the wild by a marauding gang of octopuses. It wasn’t until she was 25 that she was discovered by a traveling National Geographic scientist and brought back to civilization. This is sometimes apparent in the way that she attempts to escape through tubes when startled.

Her transition to normalcy has been slow, but scientists predict that she will have mastered basics such as fork use sometime in the next year. More complex skills, such as proper grocery store etiquette, may be forever outside her reach.

And then I stick my website on the end. Cuz let’s be honest, I feel the same way about bios as I do about FAQs. Is there any reason to be serious? Maybe eventually. Maybe one day I will win a Hugo award, and then I can add a line about that somewhere.

But for now? Nah.

Anyway, that’s me, at least for now. Thoughts on author bios, squiders? Do you like someone to list their accomplishments, or do you prefer they have a bit of fun?

2023 Reading Stats

STAT TIME, SQUIDERS

My favorite time of the year. My spouse thinks I’m crazy.

If you recall last year, I missed, uh, 43 or something when I was keeping track of how many books I’d read, resulting in me only reading 49 instead of 50. Quite upsetting, but not enough for me to fix how I count (manually, over at Dreamwidth, which is essentially LiveJournal but not owned by the Russians). I checked before I did my stats this year, and I’d forgotten, oh, 37 or something, and had gone from 46 to 38, so. I can’t be trusted.

(Actually, going back, I can’t find either error. So apparently I copied something weird when I did my final count. Yay.)

Anyway.

Books Read in 2023: 51
Change from 2022: +2

Of those*:
13 were Mystery
11 were Fantasy
7 were Nonfiction
6 were Romance
3 were Science Fiction
3 were General Literature
2 were Horror
1 was a short story collections
1 was a biography
1 was Historical Fiction
1 was Magical Realism
1 was Memoir
1 was Folktales

*Some genre consolidation was done here. YA or MG titles went into the general genre. All subgenres of fantasy or romance, for example, also went into the general genre. And things like Science Fiction or Fantasy Mystery went into SF or Fantasy respectively.

New genre(s)**: biography, folklore, historical fiction, magical realism, romance
Genres I read last year that I did not read this year: heist, middle grade, children’s, self-help, metaphysical, Gothic
**This means I didn’t read them last year, not that I’ve never read them.

Genres that went up: mystery, nonfiction, general literature
Genres that went down: fantasy, science fiction, short story collections, memoir

Mystery and fantasy are consistently my two highest genres. Fantasy makes sense–it’s my favorite, it’s what I write, it’s what I read. Mysteries are, like, brain candy. They’re a nice break and they don’t require too much brain power. Science fiction is normally number 3 but apparently I slacked this year. Whoops.

General literature is, like, any story that doesn’t fit into an obvious genre. And nonfiction includes some weird stuff like aliens and ghosts that are arguably not real but good story research. (And also normal nonfiction.)

16 were my books
35 were library books

This is almost exactly the same breakdown as last year. And the books of “mine” I’m reading tend to be ebooks. I really need to get through some physical books around here. They’re taking over. I also need to stop requesting so many books from the library because then they take preference over other books.

(Says the woman who has a book ready to be picked up at the library.)

39 were physical books
12 were ebooks

This is the same breakdown as the year before as well. I go through phases where I read a bunch of ebooks and then I forget all about them and don’t touch them for months on end.

Average rating: 3.51/5

Top rated:
Legends & Lattes (fantasy – 4.4)
The Easy Life in Kamusari (general literature – 4)
Lavender’s Blue (mystery romance – 4)
Red, White & Royal Blue (romance – 4)
The Valley and the Flood (magical realism – 4)

Not my normal genres this year, for the most part. Average rating is down a bit too.

Honorable mentions of 3.9: Keeper of Enchanted Rooms (historical fantasy), We Have Always Been Here (science fiction)

Most recent publication year: 2023
Oldest publication year: 1983
Average publication year: 2017
Books older than 1900: 0
Books newer than (and including) 2018: 37

Wow. I read a lot of newer books this year. I mean, I read 15 books from 2023 alone.

The first book I read this year was A Merry Murder by Kate Kingsbury (historical mystery) and the last was Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett (fantasy).

And now, on to 2024! I finished my first book yesterday (the Christmas mythology one I told you guys about on Tuesday) and have started the DNA one, as well as an ebook that seems to be a romance set in Germany? I don’t know, sometimes I just pick up random books for whatever reason. Read broadly, as they say.

See you next week!

2024 Has Arrived

Hey ho, squiders, I hope one and all have survived the holidays and are now making the transition into normal life in a mostly successful manner.

(I won my office’s Fantasy Football championship. That doesn’t have to do with anything specifically, it’s just kinda fun. Especially since Yahoo–which is what the league is run through–gave me a D on my draft and told me I’d end up 7th out of 8th.)

Despite feeling kind of bleh about the idea of goals and arbitrary passages of time and whatnot, I did eventually give in and lay out a general idea for the year. I’m re-introducing non-writing goals (which I didn’t do last year in an attempt to force more writing time, to mixed results) for reading (though I did read my normal 50 books last year–more details on that Thursday or Friday), video games, and art (completely abandoned in 2023).

Writing goals ended up being kind of a combination of last year (NOTHING EXCEPT MY BOOK 1 REVISION RARGH) and previous years. 2023 wasn’t too shabby all things considered, but I did feel like I could have done more if I hadn’t been quite so focused. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have a side project to go to if your main one is driving you crazy, you know?

So, for 2024, big projects are working the same as last year–one needs to be finished before we move on to the next. And hopefully we’ll actually finish something.

Book 1 is still the priority, but I’m 75K in (with 40K or so through my critique groups, and the winter marathon starting next week) of a potential 120K, and the later parts of the book have always been in better condition than the early stuff. Then submission materials for it, and, fingers crossed, maybe we’ll get an agent for it by the end of the year (not counting that as a goal, though–should never set goals that rely on other people doing something, that way lies madness).

If Book 1 gets finished, we’ll move to Rings Among the Stars (a scifi horror novella set on a decrepit space station), and then on to Not So Bloody Murder, which is the first book of a paranormal cozy mystery series.

Last year I think I got five revision projects deep, which is crazy pants and apparently I was very optimistic. Trying to be more realistic this year. RatS is in pretty good shape, just needs some tweaking on the ending, which my betas found a little unrealistic, and NSBM needs a little more meat in the second half of Act 2. I have some beta comments to go over there (which I haven’t looked at yet) and I bought myself a red herrings class through Writer’s Digest to help.

Anyway.

I’m adding in some side projects as well, things that should be easy to do around my revisions and make me feel better about my list of accomplishments at the end of the year. There’s five:

• Publish Deep and Blue as a complete novella – Deep and Blue is a scifi novella with some horror elements (my fav, not going to lie) that was originally published as a serial over on Turtleduck Press in…2021, I think. I’m going to combine it into a single story and release it widely. Needs a cover, mostly.
• Write some RaTs entries (one a quarter) – RaTs is a prompt system WriYe runs. I’ve used it on and off over the years to do background scenes and side character viewpoints of various universes, which has proved very useful as I go back through Book 1. I’ve traditionally done it monthly, but that does tend to take away from useable big project time, so I’m cutting it down.
• SkillShare classes – I think I posted about how SkillShare closed three of my classes back in February because of “lack of engagement” (see above about relying on other people to do things). I wonder if they got a ton of negative feedback because as far as I know they haven’t cut any other classes since then. Anyway, I’ve been reposting the classes, and have one left to put up. Then, assuming SkillShare doesn’t do anything to piss me off again, I’ll do a new class over the summer.
• Short Story Challenge – I’m out of short stories. Haven’t written any in a while, as I’ve been focusing on novellas (which can be published serially). I’d like to try my hand at some new ones. Probably set a month later in the year to do a new one a week and see what we end up with.
• New Novella Project – Last year I wrote Across Worlds with You as a side project and had a great time, and before that was Deep and Blue and Rings Among the Stars. I’m really digging the novella format, and I’d like to do another one this year, either for posting serially or publishing more traditionally.

As for non-writing goals, for reading I’m doing my standard 50 books a year, which breaks down to four a month (five two months). I’m adding in a requirement to have one book come off my TBR lists (at my library and Goodreads) and one book be one I own, so as to cut down on books just sitting around.

For art, I found a “sketch a week” challenge, so I’m going to give that a try, with the addition of working through an art book (like, a how to book) once every other month. Later in the year, depending on how I’m feeling and how things are going, I may also incorporate learning how to write music.

I’m also going to add back in a video game goal. I tend to hoard games on Steam, and I need to play through some of them instead of just buying more. I’d like to play 20 hours a month, with most of the focus being on the Steam games. (I play Just Dance on the Switch quite a bit, which does not count, and also sometimes play other games there and on the PS5.)

That’s me for 2024! For January specifically I’m continuing the Book 1 revision (the winter critique marathon starts next Monday), working on a cover for Deep and Blue, and re-posting that last SkillShare class. The other goals are ongoing (4 books, 4 pieces of art, video games) but I have picked out the two books for the challenge (a book on older pagan-related Christmas mythology that I’ve had for three years now, and a book off my TBR about DNA solving cold cases) and selected a few Steam games to focus on (two of which I’m partially through).

Hopefully this is all achievable! I hope 2024 is treating you well thus far, and that you achieve all your goals as well!