Wednesday evening I finished putting up the third story in the challenge and writing the posts here. I went back to working on other projects and about 3:45 in the morning (Thursday morning, the 13th day of the challenge) I decided to not work on a challenge story. But then I ended up picking up one of the books and thumbing through it looking for a title to start with the next night when out of the blue an announcer on the radio I have going in my office said, “My Socks Rolled Down.”
Now I have no idea what he said that phrase in context with, but it snapped my attention and after I moment I said, “Thank you” to the radio and opened up a new story file and typed the title. By 5 in the morning I had the first 2,500 words of the story and didn’t know how to wrap it up, so I shut down and went to bed. 10 pages, 1 hour and 15 minutes. That was light speed for me. I don’t even remember that hour plus other than typing and laughing at myself for writing something so silly.
(Yes, writers sit alone in a room and make themselves laugh, sometimes for the most stupid reasons. There, a secret to being a writer.)
Tonight, Thursday evening (actually same day) I took a break from another project and finished the story in about 15 minutes and let Kris read it on one of her breaks. Two pages new, for a total of 12 pages and 3,000 words.
While she was reading it I spent 15 minutes doing the cover.
Then I spent a half hour getting up on the three publishing sites and another half hour writing this post and getting it up here for you all to read.
A three thousand word story written and published both here and on Kindle and B&N and Smashwords in just under three hours. I wonder how much money in this wonderful new world we live in of electronic publishing I will make for these few hours over the next ten years?
Also, great fun. Great fun. Even when tired and planning on not working on a challenge story, I wrote most of one story. Got to love this kind of work. Oh, silly me, this isn’t work. A person can’t write a story like “My Socks Rolled Down” and call it work. (grin)
Enjoy.
TOTAL HOURS SPENT (Including writing, publishing, and cover and putting it up here and writing this post) under 3 hours spread over two days.
Started and finished January 13th. Posted and published electronically early January 14th.
Word Count: About 3,000 words.
Cackling in the darkness. Awesome.
One thing this challenge is teaching me is that it’s much more interesting to write full-time (which I’m calling 42 hours/week), no excuses. I’ve been sticking to the schedule I made up, and not only is it fun, I’m churning out these stories AND I’m more satisfied with the overall quality.
I CAN be a pulp writer.
At this rate, I’ll have to declare a “Business Side Friday” every week so as to throw everything together, then manage the epublishing and monitor the submissions churn…
Another thing that’s great about the new world of publishing. This little story is hilarious, but what pro market would this fit into? Not any I can think of off the top of my head. Now you can e-publish it and let the right audience find an original story you couldn’t find anywhere else.
Got that right, Rob. You can see why so many of my stories never found homes. As I told Kris when I finished it, I did “head-shakingly silly” again.
I’m going to admit to you my very simplified version of your short story goal: One a month. Twelve short stories e-pubbed in one year. (My writing time is very limited because of the four kids I have and other work.)
I started working on my story a few days ago. I wrote the thing in four hours. Ever since then, I’ve been working on trying to e-pub. I feel like I must be the dumbest computer person in the world cause it is taking me so long.
I didn’t have Photoshop, so I downloaded Gimp. Then I had to watch a bunch of tutorials on Youtube to figure out how to use it. Finally got the cover done. (That was about 5-6 hours.)
Next, I use Open Office as my word processor. (I have a grudge with MS word.) However, it has to formatted in MS word for Smashwords. So I had to get MS Word, load it, and start to try and format the story. (Another 4 hours.)
The formatting instructions from Smashwords is quite detailed, and so I read them over a few times. (Another couple of hours while trying to cook dinner.) Whew.
At last I registered on Smashwords and . . . it didn’t work. I’ve never had that happen on a website before. So, I’m going to have to figure that out.
Point is, I would have given up long ago if I hadn’t committed myself to this goal. If anyone else is out there feeling like it’s just too hard, don’t give up. I know when I read that it took Dean less than four hours to do the whole thing, I want to pull my fingernails out. HOWEVER, I’m certain that the first story is going to be the worst. It’s just one of those rite of passages.
Anyhow, I’m hanging in there and am really pretty excited to get more proficient at this stuff in the future. I don’t want to have to pay someone to do it for me, so I might as well learn it now.
Thanks for the motivation.
Lois,
Oh, the first one seemed to take days and days. There is a learning curve. I know without help from the writer Scott William Carter, and a wonderful day retreat set up by writer Christina York (Christy Evans in romance) I would have never been able to climb over the learning curve. And I was flatly the dumbest computer person ever.
I have now done or helped on upwards of 130 stories and novels, both electronically and POD. And I have learned when to take time and when to do a quick cover and say “good enough.”
And I’m still learning shortcuts. So give yourself time on these first few. It gets faster and faster and faster as you go along.
Great job!!
Great story, Dean. Weird, which is my favorite kind.
I love reading your descriptions of how you’re writing the challenge stories as much as the challenge stories themselves. It’s a wonderful glimpse into a working writer’s day and very inspiring.
I can relate to Lois’s frustration with how long it all takes the first time, and I haven’t even gotten that far yet! For me it will take even longer because I’m in Canada so there are more hoops to jump through like filling out the W-8BEN form so Amazon won’t withhold tax. The first time for everything is always the longest. Seeing these examples gives me the incentive to push through! Keep ‘em coming!
Lois,
I have five stories up, and I can say my experience is similar to yours, there is a learning curve, but I found that with each cover/upload my time spent on this has been cut dramatically. I too started to make my first cover in Gimp, but that program has, like Photoshop, the capability to do so many things, and has so many tools that I don’t understand that I had to put it away and try something else. All I want is the be able to place print over a photo and for the photo to have the same approximate proportions as a sheet of typing paper. I believe this can be done easily in PowerPoint but I lost the program at some point. However, I found I could do the same thing in Apple WP program Pages. Basically you open an new doc, then drag a photo onto that. Then drag the corner of the photo until it fill one page. Then create three text boxes. One for title, or for a subtitle (as in “a short fantasy story”) and one more for the byline. Type the text in the boxes and use the font toolbar, and the color toolbar to format the text. Make the text very big, so it’s legible in thumbnail size. Find a picture without a lot of different complex compositional elements in it, so that when you cover most o it was text the end result doesn’t look too busy. You can do all this in Word too, but Pages looks better. If I didn’t own Pages already I would use PowerPoint not Word. I am a born putterer and I could probably spend half a day changing the font size from 96 to 92, and trying out twelve different font types. When I sense I am starting to do this, I tell myself to get over myself, that done is done.
For uploading I recommend going to Amazon first. Why? Because the amazon uploading pages has three functions very valuable to the newbie like me that Smashwords doesn’t. Number one and two is that it enables you to preview the thumbnail of your cover, and also preview the text of your file before saving everything. Most importantly it allows you to save your work as a draft. You don’t have to finish it all at once. You can start a draft, fill in all the easy stuff, like the title, keywords, categories whatever, and save it until you have time to do the more time-eating stuff like formatting. Also Kindle is much easier and forgiving to file upload, (maybe because it’s only going into one format) rather than the Smashwords meatgrinder process. All this gives the feeling of progress. On the whole I think Smashwords is a terrific site. It’s my preferred shopping site and once one’s over the hump of formatting for them, it’s wonderful and very user friendly. (One thing epubbing has changed about my work habits is that I will never, never, ever ever, intentionally touch the TAB key on my keyboard again!) Not sure what version of Word you are using, but older versions (not .docx) work best. I’m not sure the newest verison of Word will work at all.
I don’t know if you have tried the so-called “nuclear option” by it does work. (http://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq#nuclear) I had to use it one of my stories that had been worked on on several different machines over the years, (and been heavily edited and then had to be refixed by me) and even though I’d already done a couple other stories using the styleguide, this one would just not format. Nuking strips out ALL formatting, so you have to go in and redo italics afterwords, and reformat the paragraphing, but it can still save a lot of frustration. Smashwords is worth the time to invest in the learning curve I feel because the premium catalog it the gateway to Sony, Kobo, iPad and more. For a 99c short story on Barnes and Noble, Smashwords pays a royalty of 60%. A 99c upload directly to B&N PubIt pays 40%. You can check out my results by clicking on my name above this comment which is linked to my smashwords pages. I think they look decent, at least to start will, but a couple weeks ago I was pulling my hair out. I wouldn’t have got this far without Dean’s inspiration either. I admire you, Lois, for your determination not to give up! Because I lot of people will give up and they will be left behind, and no one will have the chance to read their work.
Michael,
Thanks for the info (and encouragement). I think your covers look fantastic! Very cool art. I think you’re right about GIMP. It’s a great program, but it’s probably too much for what I need.
Keep churning your stories out. It looks like you are on a roll!
Thanks Lois!
There is an online free photo editor I heard about, but I haven’t tried it yet, figured I’d post the link here in case anyone is interested: http://www.picnik.com/