Blogtober 2 – Reinvention
I’ve been at this writing game as a professional for coming on 13 years. In some ways, it feels just like yesterday; on the other side of that coin, it feels like I’ve been a professional writer for my entire life. Before that I was a professional dance teacher. In both careers, I’ve learned it’s vital to occasionally step back, breathe, and make appropriate changes of what I was doing and how I was doing it.
In dancing, I started by teaching swing at various clubs and occasional private events. Then, when the huge swing craze started to wane, I got a gig teaching at a ballroom dance studio. After a few years there, I saw how they kept making all the wrong business decisions, and so I took steps to go out on my own, even perhaps even open my own studio. However, a car accident took me out of professional dancing. On the plus side, that led to me stumbling my way into a writing career.
When I first started self-publishing, I was concerned with selling a few ebook copies for a few extra dollars of my storytelling shows. As the popularity of my books grew beyond my storytelling shows, I focused almost entirely on gaming algorithm Amazon’s algorithms… until Amazon started mucking about with their algorithm so that gaming it wasn’t viable anymore. It took them a lot less time to figure out what we were doing than we thought it would.
With ebook sales lagging, I course corrected the selling print books at live events like comic cons and such. That worked really well for a while. Then COVID happened… Just as I started my second MFA. Between school and my brain processing the ramifications of the pandemic, I didn’t have the spare bandwidth to really course correct. Hell, I barely maintained the creative energy to work on anything other than my school work for most of the lockdown.
As I wrote in yesterday’s post, my current big course correction is in becoming self-sufficient.
Over the years, I’ve learned that both the big online retailers and pretty much every publisher do not have really have a writer’s best interest at heart. Which is fine. It’s business, after all.
Now that I’ve got my footing again after another stint in grad school and the at the tail end of a global pandemic, I remember something Robert Kiyosaki said in his amazing book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. “Mind your own business.” To me, right now, that means leaning into getting my creative works into my space to maximize the legwork I’ve done to cultivate a community that’s supported me since even before I published my first story.
Publishing, both independent and mainstream, is in a time of crazy fluctuation. I’m currently of the opinion that no matter how a writer gets their work out to the world, they should prioritize making a space for themselves in the literary landscape completely removed from publishers, retailers, organizations, events, social media, or websites the writer doesn’t completely control.
The other thing writers should keep in mind for reinvention is examining their process, that is, how they do their writing.
I have a lingering shoulder injury from an epic night of drinking and partying at Comic Con 2019. It started in the VIP section of the Rave of Thrones party, wandered over to the VIP section of Ready Party One, caused some shenanigans in the streets of the Gaslamp District, and ended with whiskey shots at the Blarney Stone Pub. At least that’s where most of the memories fade to snapshot images, rather than a video playback. Anyway the next morning I woke up with my shoulder hurting more than my head.
My shoulder still hurts some today, especially after I’ve been typing continuously for about 15 to 20 minutes. I get shooting pains up my neck. Not great for someone in my profession. So… I had to reinvent my writing process.
These days, I write every rough draft of pretty much everything by hand in one of the many journals I’ve collected. I have a set of multi-colored pens that write smoothly (the rough draft of this post is in red), and I love the feel of them gliding across the page. For some reason, writing by hand with pen on paper doesn’t use whatever part of my arm the typing does, so I can sit and scribble for hours.
At some point after writing a draft in my journals, I dictate to my computer and get my rough drafts into Scrivener. I give the draft an immediate once-over to correct the errors in the dictation translation. From there, the writing sits in Scrivener until the whole project is complete.
After some distance, I print the whole project out and mark line edits with my sparkly pink pen. Big story edits and changes get noted in a generic journal just for that purpose. Once I go through the whole thing, noting what changes the story needs, I go to editing in Scrivener. Unless I need to write an entirely new section, and then it’s back to writing by hand. When editing, because it’s not continuous typing, I can make it an hour or more before the shooting pain starts up. Thankfully technology has provided me such an awesome such awesome options for reinventing my writing process.
I guess the whole point here is don’t be stuck in your ways or fall into the trap of only one right way to do things, no matter how many people do something a certain way. In both business and in the creation of art, innovation and reinvention are vital and necessary now and then.
