Going on Vacation

I'm going on vacation and won't be back until November 2nd. Hopefully, I'll be able to post the next chapter of Scary Mary as scheduled on Oct. 26th, but I'm not going to worry about this blog while I am gone. See you all in a few weeks.

Scary Mary Updated

I decided to cut Chapter 12 into two. It works good that way, and it was seriously too long in the original incarnation.

And I posted early. Well, early for me. I'm pleased.

Fictionpress Update

Things are still going well over at fictionpress. I've gotten a few more comments and have enticed a few readers to the blog.

I've been trying to post a page a day, though I have slipped up a few times, but I'm doing better now.

Here are some screen shots of my stats if you're interested.





The hit stats are a little misleading. They record every page view not just unique readers, and since I'm updating everyday, anyone interested in reading the new content has to at least visit the first page to then jump to the new material. The alerts, favs, and comments are much better indication of how well a story is doing.

Nanowrimo and Unicorn Bait

Nanowrimo - National Novel Writing Month begins November 1st. I've participated in years past, and this year, I plan to participate again. My handle there is of course Windvein. My project will be a sequel to Scary Mary. Don't expect to see it posted anytime soon, but it is the project I'm going to be working on. I'm excited. I've held off writing a sequel, though I always planned to. I held off because it seemed stupid to write a sequel to something that hadn't been published. Well, SM is now published. Time to move on.

Even though the sequel will not be posted anytime soon, I do plan to continue posting original writing to the internet. I know what the next project will be. It's a much longer work titled Unicorn Bait. I've been going through it and making the chapters shorter and more net friendly. I hope to post twice a week. The story is a romance fantasy (if I'm naming the genre correctly). It concerns an Earth girl who gets mysteriously transported to another planet and within hours married to a very scary dude. It's fun. I hope people enjoy it.

Arg!!!

I just found out that Scary Mary didn't allow anonymous commenting. I hate that! I've been pimping the blog, and people have been clicking but because of the stupid comments they couldn't respond. Very bad!

It's fixed now, but I wish blogger didn't default to only allowing registered users to comment. The same thing happened here. I don't know why I didn't catch this setting with SM earlier. Oh well. It's fixed. Luckily I haven't pimped the blog too many places yet. Better to catch these things early.

Trouble Reading

I have a confession to make. I have yet to finish a long piece of fiction online. I have tried. I've clicked over to several websites and settled in, but I just can't do it.

It's frustraing, and if I can't commit to reading a long work, how do I expect anyone to commit to reading MY long work?

Some websites I click away from because I don't like the design of the site, I don't like the way the text is laid out, or I'm not grabbed by the prose. I've tried going back, but it doesn't work.

I'm beginning to suspect that this is why there aren't any online novel/novelog review sites.

This is not good.

How to make it better?

It would seem offering multiple formats is the way to go. If you can't get readers to read the blog, give them other options. You could make a print edition available for purchase. You could offer a .pdf download. You could offer a podcast. What am I going to do? I'm not sure yet. I may offer the .pdf download once the work is finished. I'm not sure yet about the print copy. I could set something up with Lulu. I don't know yet. The podcast sounds like a fun idea, but I don't know if I'm ready to commit to something like that.

And maybe I should try reading a few of those websites. If not, at least pin down WHY I didn't want to continue reading those websites, if for only my own edification.

Want to Post More Often

When I started, I decided to update Scary Mary only once a week. Now that I have a few people reading it, liking it, and waiting for updates, I feel the urge to post more often. I don't have much story left. Only two chapters. One chapter is extremely long. Not sure yet if I'm going to break that one up, but for now, it's a very long chapter. But knowing people are waiting, it makes me eager to give more.

But even if I break that long chapter into two, I only have a few chapters left. It's almost over, and I'm thinking about my next project. I've learned a few things from posting Scary Mary. The format of the template is basically what I'll use for my next project. (I just went and reserved the blogspot address for it because I'm that anxious to begin.) I'm going to post more often with my next project because for one, it's over twice as long as Scary Mary, and I don't want it to take a year to post, and two, I plan on having much shorter chapters. I've seen the light with that. I thought about shorter chapters with Scary Mary, but I didn't' feel right with the breaking up of chapters. But the next project titled Unicorn Bait, will have much shorter chapters. I don't know yet if I'll post twice a week or three times a week.

I work full-time and try to have something of a life, I worry I won't be able to keep up with such a heavy posting schedule.

But I'm excited about the possibility. I hope the readers of Scary Mary will follow me to Unicorn Bait. It's a fantasy story with a lot of humor in it. It's basically written, but I'll be revising it heavily as I post. That's what could slow me down. I've been trying to do some revision now, but like I said, there's a lot of novel here, and I'm trying to polish up Scary Mary.

I'm still revising Scary Mary too. I found myself updating the first chapter the other night. Nothing too serious, just trying to make the text better. I'm a revising fool. I can't stop meddling.

Oh, and I plan on updating this blog a lot more often. I'm thinking daily right now, but I'm not making any promises.

Good Ideas?

I've been wondering how to promote Scary Mary and really the question is how do you promote a novelog?

What's appropriate?

I've been looking at various things and considering them. I've already posted on a few bulletin boards that were okay/allowed to post/promote on and gotten a few clicks.

I've been thinking about other spots.

I've come up with a list of likely places it would be nice to get novelogs into:

1. Library Thing - an online cataloging/social networking site.
2. What's on my Bookshelf - A book swap site, their slogan is "Connecting People with Books". It'd be nice to connect Scary Mary to some readers...
3. Book Mooch - Another book swapping site.

I figure if novelogs are free then in spirit, these sites might be interested in them. They have nothing set up currently for novelogs, though maybe Library Thing does, if the work has an ISBN.

I'm considering approaching these sites about posting a little something to direct users to electronic writing. It could just be a topic on a discussion board, but I don't want to write to them until Scary Mary is done.

Trying to find novelog promotion on the internet is tough work. One reason is the word isn't used. Blook is used interchangably, but out of respect for Cheryl Hagedorn, I'm using novelog, and it does help to differentiate between fiction content that is only available on a blog and a blog that has been traditionally published. But even googling Blook doesn't get me much. Am I missing obvious search terms?

I feel like I'm in uncharted waters with this stuff, and with my sense of direction, I doubt I should be the forerunner. David Wellington seems to have gotten a lot through word of mouth. But how'd he put the words in people's mouths? Was it all due to being published on brokentype?

Also: Updated Scary Mary

Studying Other People's Success

I've been trying to find other successful online fiction writers to see what they did to be successful. I've been looking especially hard at David Wellington, the author of the zombie novel series Monster Island, Monster Nation, Monster Planet.

David Wellington might as well be the poster boy for novelogs. He has published six novels online in a serial fashion, and has three of those novels currently out in print. But how'd he do it?

He started out posting Monster Island, his first online novel at brokentype.com. I'm not very familiar with brokentype, but it seems to have a robust community already so there was some built in readership there. Getting published on an already popular blog is a good way to get noticed, much like being published in a pro-print magazine, but still he had to promote his writing somehow. Right?

From a message board hosted by brokentype for Wellington, I found this post very interesting. It's a list of things fans could do to support the author.

1) Post the first chapter of thirteen bullets to you blog or myspace page and link back to the site

2) Recommend the books in other forums you are a member of – don’t spam, obviously, just be honest

3) Create an amazon listmania list with your favorite zombie fiction - and link Monster Island.

4) Pre-order Monster Island.

The idea of posting the first chapter of a work on multiple blogs as a way to promote it is a great idea and ridiculously simple and free, but how to get people to post them? Wellington had a discussion board to tell fans to do that. Somehow I feel like the cart got put in front of the horse here.

Holding Steady

There isn't anything really to report, but the comments that I've been getting have really bolstered my confidence in this project. Thank you to everyone who have sent me feedback. I've gotten a few comments on the latest chapter of Scary Mary, and I've gotten a few comments at Fictionpress. If you're curious about what's happening with me at Fictionpress, here's a link to my profile.

One thing that is slowly driving me mad though is the narrow white strip below the Blogger navbar up top when the page is viewed in Internet Explorer. I can't make it go away! And it isn't just my blog, every Blogspot blog I look at has that stupid narrow white strip. What is the freaking deal? It just showed up one day. It did get me to look at my blogs through Firefox which I don't use, and I caught a formatting problem with the banner on Scary Mary. I was able to fix it and now it looks like it should and no narrow white strip when viewed with Firefox. It's almost enough to make me switch browsers. I can't find any mention of this anywhere by anyone. I tried asking Blogger help about it on a discussion board but have been ignored and those boards are really slow and clunky so no confidence inspired there anyway, but I did get to promote Scary Mary which has brought a few brave souls to the blog and who have kindly commented.

Otherwise, that's it! New chapter coming Friday.

P.S. And I swear, I am not on crack, though rereading this post makes me wonder.