Notes on my Novella

A good friend of mine Michell Plested gave me the honor to have first dibs on creating a book cover for him. I jumped at the chance, especially when I heard what he wanted the cover to be. Check it out! It's for his awesome novel Boyscouts of the Apocalypse that you can read for free on Wattpad. Michell knows the scouts because he is involved with them as a cub and scout leader. He volunteers his time to go on cool outdoor trips and things with his scouts which includes his son. I think that is awesome. My oldest is 5 but I can't wait to see all the things he gets involved with as he gets older and I can't wait to be a part of them. So go check out Mike's book Boyscouts of the Apocalypse.

Here's where I get to my novella. When Mike asked what I'd like as payment for his book cover I asked if he would be interested in reading my novella and giving me feedback on it. I really respect Michell and look up to him as a writer. I'm so thankful he agreed. He has given me some very honest feedback on my novella which is invaluable to me. I first found Mr. Plested online by searching for writing podcasts and found his fantastic Get Published podcast. You get to hear about his writing journey and listen to laid back and insightful interviews he does with other authors. Mike jokes around with his guests but also gets a lot of great writing advice out of them. Since he started the podcast he got published. You can pick up his debut novel Mik Murdock, Boy Superhero now published by Five Rivers Publishing. I bought it and had a blast reading it. It would also be great for your kids to read. I bet you'll hear them laughing as they turn the pages and ask you when the sequel is coming out once they've finished it.

So Mike read my story a couple times and then went through about the first 60% making notes for me and then stopped. He suggested I rewrite and tighten up the story before he goes on to finish his feedback for me. After reading his notes, which I found to be dead on, I whole heartedly agreed with him. I'm also thankful he didn't just get through it and hand it off to me. I can tell he cares. He wants my story to succeed. I really hope to meet Mike someday at a convention or something because he is a class act. He made a ton of notes pointing out a lot of things that could be changed in my story. I read through them last night. He made A LOT of really great points and I'm so glad he didn't worry about hurting my feelings and tell me it was a great story that was ready to publish.

He was very nice but as he put it "didn't pull any punches." I'm so thankful. That's exactly what you want as a writer when you're getting feedback on your story from beta readers before you go and publish it or send it off. I reworked the story quite a bit and changed a lot of it on my own, but that was as far as I could take it and I needed some help seeing the flaws. There are a lot of them. I still have much to learn. After getting Mike's notes though, I'm not disheartened. I'm excited! I have the chance to see things, lots of things, that are wrong with my story that I couldn't pick out on my own. Now I can fix those things before putting my name on the thing and making it available for sale online. I have a lot of work to do, but I think it will be work that will really improve my novella.

I bet I will learn a lot rewriting, hacking, and revising this novella with the help of Mike's notes. That in itself will be really valuable to me. I will blog about the things I learn that will help me write a better story the next time around as I go through this next draft of my novella. If you want to read the thing in it's current state, its just under 30K words, click the big banner at the top of this website and you can read it now for free on Wattpad. Pretty soon I'll be posting up new versions of the chapters as I work my way through it and you can follow along there.

Have you received feedback on one of your stories? Did it help you? Make you curl up in the fetal position? Anger you, or encourage you? I'd love to hear about it! Go ahead, leave a comment - and as always thanks for stopping by!

Robots Reading to Me

They say one of the best ways to see if your writing is good is to read it out loud. I've found this to be very true. Every time I have recorded one of my short stories to podcast it, I have had to stop recording and make edits. Then I go back to the text version after recording the story and update it and the story is better for it. When you read things out loud you use different parts of your brain than reading silently and you are able to catch things your eyes would glide right past. You actually will see what you think is there when the text is different in some cases. Crazy right? But true.

"When reading out loud, we form auditory links in our memory pathways. We remember ourselves saying it out loud, and not only do we form visual links but we are also aided by auditory links." 

- From Brainscape.com: "Does reading out loud cause you to remember things better?" By Sruthi Swami

A great tool I have used for years to review my writing in addition to reading it out loud myself has been running my stuff through a text to speech program. Kind of like letting Siri from an iPhone read your text to you - but I usually use a male voice. I will hear typos that I didn't see when reading it all the time. The free ones only have robotic voices available, but you'd be surprised how used to those voices you can get if they're decent. I've found the robotic voice of Peter in TTS Reader in some ways sounds better than the more realistic voices you can find for free. While his voice sounds robotic, the way he renders syllables is usually more like real speech. His inflection is pretty good. Most of the ones that use a real voice always have strange pauses and shift pitch in the wrong places, and I just can't listen to them reading a story. Maybe a news article - but not fiction. If you just picture a robot sitting next to you telling you the story - TTS Reader for your PC can be a great tool for reviewing your writing. It's free, it's a tiny piece of software that takes seconds to download and install, and it works great. You can even save the audio to .wav or .mp3. I have such files on my iPod right now.

This is the software I use on PC but I bought a MacBook Pro a while back and have found the text to speech on there to be even better. I use Alex. He seems to be the best male TTS voice on a mac. It is still a bit robotic, but they actually programmed in breath sounds between words. It sounds surprisingly natural to hear him take a breath every sentence or so. His inflection is good too making him even easier to listen to than my beloved Peter in TTS Reader.

If you use these free tools and get into it you can find more realistic voices. The best ones I have found are at Ivona. Even then you need to experiment with what voice sounds the best, but those voices are about as good as it gets with TTS. You can download a trial and use that first to make sure you want to buy it. It can get pretty pricey. I'm content with my free TTS voices, especially now that I found Alex on my mac. You can also save to an audio file there, but you'll have to google it to figure out how. Strangest way I could have possibly imagined. Weird Mac programmers! :) I do love my MacBook Pro though, great machine. By the way, this TTS software is also a great way to review your blog post for errors before publishing it.

Alright, I better get back to pushing my novella Sword and Urn into its third draft so I can hand it off to beta readers soon and get some feedback. The story is working now, I just need to clean up the text. If you'd like to give it a read and give me some feedback you can start reading it right now on Wattpad here. Thanks for stopping by!

My Revising Process

I took the first draft of my novella and broke it into chapters, then used Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet to find all the important story points and found out where they should be in the story according to chapter for the structure to be right. You can read about how I did this in my last blog post right below this one. So now I have all the elements of the story in the right places and it flows how it should. The story structure is nailed down. 

I've been rereading this second draft and am finding that while things are in the right place, there are still many places that need some more cleaning up. So I'm going to do one more draft before I send my manuscript off to beta readers. This last draft won't involve any story revision, but revising the prose down to the paragraphs and sentences to make the writing clearer. So for this novella I thought it would be fun to make a simple list of my process to get it ready for sharing with other eyeballs:

Revision Process: Write the First Draft Give it time to cool so I could distance myself from it Reread the story Organize it into chapters Write a new outline based on these chapters  (A brief paragraph per chapter) Use Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet find to all the story points Place these story points into the correct chapters Revise Outline Revise/Rewrite manuscript into a Second Draft so the story structure is right Reread the story and realize there are still spots of sloppy writing Revise the manuscript into a Third Draft so the prose is clean and concise Read the story again to make sure it's ready for Beta Readers

What's your process once you have that first draft done? I'd love to hear about it! Leave a comment. Thanks for stopping by.

Soundtracks Fueling My Novella Revision

I have never been that big on listening to music while writing. I tried it and found it distracting. Then I found myself trying to get some writing done while my wife and I watched TV after the kids were down. I found that even if it was a show I hated, I couldn't help but watch the dang glowing box. My wife on the other hand is a multi tasking wiz and actually prefers having the TV on while she gets work done. I've seen her bust out tons of work, homework, and the like while occasionally glancing at the TV and listening to the story. I simply can not do that.

So I tried writing with music on, but only music without words. Mostly soundtracks. It was ok. I didn't like it as much as writing in silence but when it was the best alternative to getting three sentences down in an hour while the TV was on - it worked.

Then I tried listening to music while revising the novella I'm currently working on. I love it! For me revising is mostly reading and thinking about the story with a little writing here and there. It is a different brain space for me and for some reason listening to the mood music really enhances the process for me. 

I'm writing a fantasy adventure novella and I have mostly been listening to this video game soundtrack while I revise:

The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker Soundtrack

I'm honestly not sick of the Wind Waker soundtrack, I can't get enough of it, but I snagged this soundtrack when they were offering it for free one day and it has some pretty awesome songs that sound serious and epic. The game is awesome too. I think I'll listen more to this during some of my more intense scenes and/or emotional scenes:

Torchlight II Soundtrack

Do you listen to music while writing or revising? What do you listen to? The same few albums or something different for every story? Movie soundtracks? Best of compilations from other decades? Let me know in the comments. Thanks for stopping by!