The Worst That Could Happen: Facing the All Is Lost Moment

Last night at our online writers' group we had a speaker who gave a presentation on bringing about the "all is lost moment." You know, the scene in your book where your MC is brought to the bitter end of her rope, her greatest fears are realized, everything has changed for the negative, and nothing will be the same.

The writing craft experts she consulted for this were agreed that whatever it was, it had to be the worst thing that could happen to the MC. Well, not literally the worst, since the worst for any of us would be death and damnation. But the worst given the wants and goals of the character. It has to have, in the words of the presenter, "the whiff of death."

And I look at Sandy, my female protagonist in my work in progress Strong as Death, and I think, damn. Because for her, the worst that could happen would be damnation.

I am not going there. Not because I'm gutless as an author, but due to immutable, external reasons. The first reason is theological: I'm having her share my conviction that once the Lord gets hold of you, He keeps hold of you, so that in the direst circumstances He'll enable you to face death before you'll deny Him. Besides, she's been in that position before and stood firm, why should she change now? The second reason is that of genre. If I had her do that, it would destroy the novel. It's romantic suspense, which expects the MCs to defeat the bad guys and live happily ever after. It doesn't allow for one of the couple joining the other side to save her skin and/or following Job's wife's advice to "Curse God and die!"

What am I supposed to do? I could ignore this "All Is Lost" rule. But I'm not so experienced and successful a writer I can turn my back on what the big kids say is a crucial element in any well-written protagonist's character arc.

I've been chewing the problem over, and maybe I'll escape through the loophole of "worst given the wants of the character" . . . in this particular book. In fact, one of the other attendees asked what do you do with a character in a series, you can't have them undergoing the same crisis book after book. I admit I didn't retain the presenter's answer; there's something about Zoom meetings that makes me feel stupid and the presenter's connection was bad which garbled much of what she said.

From what I did get I'm wondering if I can dial back Sandy's Big Want in the situation. After all, the point of the All Is Lost moment is that the crisis should strip away what the MC thinks she wants and reveal what she really needs. It's supposed to make her understand she has to fix herself instead of controlling and fixing the situation.

Sandy already has an issue with wanting to feel in control of her life . . . So maybe in this situation Her Big Want should be to feel she is in control, not necessarily of what's going on around her, but of her own spiritual strength and welfare. Kind of like, "Stand back, God, lemme show you what I can do!" And then hit her with the A.I.L. crisis such that she feels she's betrayed, not God, but herself. And so on from there.

Ohhhhhh, golly. If I go for that, I'll have to circle back and rewrite a lot of the earlier part of the book to give her more confidence earlier on. I've been a little uneasy about how I've depicted her inner life anyway. She's got too much self-doubt for no particular reason, which I've imposed on her mostly to keep her "human." Maybe reinforcing her "I've got this" attitude will help me clean those scenes up and ready her for the All Is Lost.

On the other hand, I may have already screwed up this plotting rule beyond redemption. Apparently the crisis is supposed to come two-thirds or at most three-fourths of the way through. I've got it happening at . . . let me see . . . nine-tenths.

And I still don't know what my MMC's All Is Lost crisis is to be. Before last night, I didn't know he needed one.

What Happened in August 2018--- A Retrospective Confession

I haven't updated this blog in a long time. Some of it is laziness, some of it is too much time watching 24/7 live kitten feeds on YouTube, and some of it has been, well, writing.

To continue the story from the last post, I published The Single Eye in ebook form on Amazon on August 24, 2018. That was the day it went on sale, at least; the upload deadline was the 20th of that month at 7:00 PM.

And wasn't that an ordeal.

It would have gone better if I'd spent the days between the 4th and the 20th making sure all the hyperlinks worked, publishing the website for Hendrick Hill Books, and, most importantly, proofreading the text to make sure it read exactly as I wanted it. But no, I had to go off on vacation for two weeks and save all this labor for the weekend before the deadline.

So there I was, swotting away at my laptop, not eating, not sleeping, not even getting out of my chair for hours. Around 3:00 in the afternoon I realized I had to revise my protagonists' big crisis point. Yeah, I'm glad I did it. It makes the story so much stronger.

But that meant I hadn't much time actually to put The Single Eye up on Amazon. Oh, gosh, that title font is way too big. Quick, fix the code, run the HTML through Calibre to convert it to ePub (or is it EPUB?), upload it to Amazon again. What's this? Those chapter titles are now too small? Tinker with the code again, run Calibre, upload, etc., etc. And so on, and so forth.

Just before the deadline I had a version that looked good. But blast it, I'd forgotten to add the back-matter paragraph crediting the designers of my open-source typefaces. Of course it was the right thing to do, but it could have waited till after the book went live on the Friday.

Because in all my fuss and hurry I overlooked one little thing: that there was a Publish button I had to find and click before I was done. To be fair to myself, on my dinky laptop screen it was hidden off to the right and I needed to scroll over to see it. But if I hadn't been in such an adrenaline-stoked muck sweat, I might have remembered to look for it.

Oh, I thought I'd gotten my final version published before my time ran out. So imagine my feelings when Amazon let me look at what was going on sale on launch day and it was the pre-revision August 4th version. Nooooooo!!!! And due to how Amazon works, I wouldn't be able to provide the real version for 48 to 72 hours after it went live.

So what did I do? I went on social media and told everyone I knew to stop buying the presale. And not to get The Single Eye the day of launch. Because it wasn't right. It wasn't the version I wanted readers to see.

Yeah, I did that. It was stupid, it was dumb, but I did that.

You wanna tank sales?  That'll do it.

And we won't even get into the fact that I rushed the August 24th publication date to be before school started, so my younger fans wouldn't purchase The Single Eye at launch and mess up my Also-Boughts. Guess what? That's the very time Amazon decided to get rid of Also-Boughts and replace them with sponsored ads. Grump.

It's May 2020 now, and book recommendations are back. So that's something. And the book is up. You can get your own copy of The Single Eye here.

(Next time, fun with print.)

Creeping through Amazon's Publication Maze

My novel The Single Eye is now up for presale on Amazon.  Goodie.  Am I celebrating?  Am I giddy with joy and relief?  No, and no.  My gut is in knots and I still feel about to cry because of all the confusion and mystery.  

Nobody told me that publishing your ebook on the 'Zon would be such a Byzantine process, or feel so much like creeping through a maze looking out for the Minotaur.

The website seems devoted to telling you what you can do, but you have to fight through the underbrush of unhelpful Help pages before you get to where you can actually do it.

The customer service people get back to you pretty fast by email, but, well . . . when I asked how I could discount the price during the presale period, why did the Amazon email help desk person ("Siri," if you'll believe that) tell me to run a Kindle Countdown Deal?  Of course I discovered I'm not eligible for that, not till I publish.

So not only was my price higher than I wanted for this period, but my book was listed with an ASIN, instead of the ISBN I put down for it.

Stressful as the experience is, the solutions I'm getting from fellow writers and the ones I'm blundering onto myself are working better than what I'm hearing out of Amazon customer service.  The strain of it has me looking around nervously for Horrible Things to jump on me around the next corner, but I guess I'm making progress.

So I stumbled onto the fact that if I go into the right publication details page in my Bookshelf, I can "revise" my list price.  Nobody who visits the Amazon book page will know it's special, but I can let my tribe (sorry, writer marketing jargon) know it's a good deal.

And I saw that the form had somehow stripped the hyphens out of my ISBN.  That may be why Amazon didn't list it along with their ASIN, which, I learn, they give to every ebook they sell.  I resubmitted the form, with the hyphens in, and hope the sales numbers will accrue to the right number.

I wish I felt better about this.  There seems to be so much to get wrong, from sheer inexperience.  I'll survive, sure.  But for tonight, I just needed to vent.

Getting My Chapter Heads to Refer Back to My Table of Contents

A few minutes ago I made a noise that scared my tabby cat.

Why?  Because I've finally found the solution to having my chapter, etc., heads link back to the Table of Contents, and I was able to get rid of the underlinings on the hyperlinks and to eliminate the border around the hyperlink targets.

That's worth a yelp of joy, if anything is.

If I were a really nice, helpful indie publishing blogger I'd reproduce the code from the style sheet and the HTML right here for all to see.  But if I do it once . . .  

Well, if anyone trips over this post and is interested, leave a note in the Comments and I'll edit the post with it in.

One thing that disappoints me, though:  I joined the ebook forum at Stack Exchange last week to get the answer to this very question.  Even though I included the non-working code, no one has come up with a single suggestion for how to solve it.  One member posted a comment asking why I want to do bidirectional links on my TOC in the first place; doesn't the Kindle system take care of that?

And ya know?  Now that they mention it, I confess I've forgotten why I've been so passionate about it.  Maybe it's just that it seems dumb to have a hyperlinked table of contents that's only good when you're at the beginning of the book.  If you're going to leave it all to Kindle, why include your own TOC in the first place?

Anyway, it works.  I still have to see if I can get my chapters (all 78 of them) to nest under the division heads, but I think I'll leave that till tomorrow.

Closer, Ever Closer to Publication

I'm actually getting to the point where I can say I'm close to publication.  Here's where I've gotten with my HTML formatting, as seen in the Kindle Previewer:

See those TOC links on the lower left? They all work. (The one on the lower right I hope to eliminate, so I haven't hyperlinked it yet.)

Here's my typical division and chapter head:

And fun with scene breaks. That's a stock HTML symbol, so I don't have to mess around with centering asterisks.

The song and verse quotations are formatted out, too. So I'm close to done with the formatting.

Except . . . well, there's a couple of cool features I'd like to include, and I'm still researching the code on how to do them.

1. I'd like readers to be able to click the chapter heads, etc., and go back to the Table of Contents. So far I can get it to work only if I lose my formatting and alignment, which I'm not willing to sacrifice. I've got a question about it on the Stack Exchange Ebook forum, but no answers so far.
2. I want something of a table of contents at the front of the book, but not a long, long, looooonnngggg list of chapter numbers. I want the reader to be able to hover over the "Division" titles in the TOC and it'll expand to reveal all the chapter titles in it. Last night I tried to implement some code from the w3 schools website, but it's so full of formatting bells and whistles (button colors and all) that it's conflicting with my styles and not working for me.

So that's where I am. I think I'll make a list of everything I have to do before I publish. But not in this post.

Adopt, Adapt, or Abandon: What to Do With Writing Advice

When I turned thirty, I decided I was old enough not to have to justify myself to people who liked to lay down the rules on how things had to be done, when their rules didn't work for me.

Like the teacher of a sewing class I took, who dictated that proper tailors/seamstresses/sewers used only one particular size needle, and all others should be thrown away.

I kept those other needles.  The one she favored worked for me in some circumstances, but not in others.  I realized that, unless she was actually planning to come to my house and rifle through my sewing kit, it wasn't necessary to argue the matter with her.  With that instructor and any other, I could adopt the practices that worked, adapt the ones that needed adjustment, and quietly abandon whatever didn't fit.

I'm thinking of this because yesterday morning I listened to a podcast where a guest was being interviewed about scheduling your writing.  He said he wrote his X-number of words faithfully in the designated time, then shut off his mind and didn't think about writing at all outside of that.  And tonight I was reading another, quite prolific, writer's blog posts on how one should approach writing in general. This writer has strong opinions about writing and rewriting, especially on the value of generating a clean first draft, letting go, and writing the next piece.

These stood out, because usually I can see myself using the advice I get from writing gurus.  Maybe not now, but someday.  But I've thought about it, and in these cases, it isn't so.

And that's fine.  Someone else's proven practice may very possibly run counter to who I am and how my mind works. If that's the case, I can smile gently and let their advice go.  E.g., a lot of my "writing" doesn't take place at my keyboard, it happens when my body's busy but my mind is free at my night job.  And as for extruding a workable draft the first time, I don't even know who my characters are the first time around!

I'm not saying these more experienced writers have nothing to say to me.  Certainly, writing story after story after story can get you to the point where you can whip off good prose without hours and days and weeks of polishing.  Heck, if I would stop making perfectionistic edits to my WIP I could publish the blinking thing and get onto the next.

In other words, I might be able to adapt that advice to how I work, or maybe, I can adapt my work practices to better serve my writing.

But instantly embracing every last piece of writing advice isn't going to serve me.  A lot of it is aimed towards keeping the novice out of trouble, but you'd think it was written by the finger of God on Mount Sinai.  "Don't write prologues."  Do you realize most of the books I've checked out from the library in the past couple of years have them?  "Don't write in omniscient POV, it only leads to Narrative Intrusion."  Ditto--- published authors love them an omniscient narrator.  "Show, don't tell."  Well, maybe, sometimes.  But not everything is worth showing, and maybe "telling" can reveal a lot about your characters and the kind of people they are.  "Get up an hour earlier in the morning and do your writing while you're fresh."  Charming, but some of us have schedules or physical limitations that prevent that.

The point is, all the advice we get is good in its way.  The question is, is it good for you and the work you're doing?  To answer that, you have to know yourself.  Those physical issues that keep you from getting up and writing at the crack of dawn may be real impediments, or you may just be lazy.  It's up to you to be honest with yourself and decide.

Adopt what fits, adapt what needs adjusting, and abandon the rest.  Or maybe just set it aside for later.  It may come in handy, and if you've kept yourself from justifying why it simply won't work, it'll be easier to adopt or adapt it when its time has come.

Learning from My Mistakes, or Professional Book Formatting for Amateurs. Sort Of.

I need to be more regular on this blog, and I've told myself I can't read the latest Business Musings post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch over at Kriswrites.com (a high point of my week) until I've produced something of my own.

So, take this as a glorified apology for not having blogged since last autumn.  My only excuse is that I am doing the formatting on my book myself.  Which is why it's mid-way through April and I haven't yet published The Single Eye.

Yes, I know there are lovely professional services and remarkable tools out there that will do the job for me.  But I can't afford them, and besides, I know what I want and I haven't seen it available commercially. 

I've been working steadily.  Just being aware of the pitfalls in doing things myself brings out the rabid perfectionist streak in me.  I want my book, both versions of it, to look as professional as it can.

But that doesn't mean I've been working efficiently.  Oh, my, no.  Which is why it's mid-April and, despite a good three to five hours spent on this per weekday, I'm only now scenting the end of the trail.

What I've learned in the process.

• If you're working to format a big file, split it up into sections.  There's less of a chance of corruption, and if the inner coding on one page is the issue, it won't drag your whole ms down with it.

The Single Eye, at around 145,000 words, is not a short book, and the formatted-for-print version made for a pretty hefty file.  In December I started to have issues with saving it, and in mid-January it crashed altogether.  Thank heaven I was able to remember the edits I made when the latest version of my manuscript refused to open, but several days worth of reconstruction was required.  That could have been averted by breaking the file up.

• If you're working in Dropbox, save a copy of your latest working copy on a thumbdrive or at least in another directory on your computer.  

When my Dropbox file took a nosedive on my laptop, the desktop version went down at the same time.  And thanks to the efficiency of the Internet (she says ironically), the copy on my cloud backup service was toast as well.  Not only that, but the corruption spread somehow to other recent versions that were in the same Dropbox folder.

Thank heaven I was able to find an earlier version that wasn't messed up and restore the edits out of my memory and the ebook version.  But having to do it really slowed things down.

Which brings me to something else:

• Assuming you're doing a print book, format it first.

Gosh, I wish I'd tumbled to that last autumn!

Why do it first?  Because you'll pick up on a lot of typos, grammatical errors, and plain old writing that needs to be revised when you're going through your print version page by page making sure your hyphens are in the right place and your bottom margins line up.  Get that done first, then when your ms is nice and clean and edited, start playing with your ebook file.  Do you really want to be like me and correct your ebook file (with all its wonderful html entities) every time you make a change?

No, you don't.

• If you don't know how to already, learn to use Styles in your word processing program when you first compose your text.  

Doing that from the beginning would have saved me hours of work updating and correcting features like chapter titles and opening paragraphs one at a time.

What else?  

• The best way to get your quotation marks, apostrophes, em-dashes, ellipses, and so on to look right in the ebook version is to convert them to html entities yourself. 

I've learned some effective ways to do that, but it's been another long day, and yes, I want to see what Kris has said on her blog.  If I'd been blogging about this last fall when I learned it . . .

Well, never mind.  Next time we can talk about something more cheerful, like DIY typography.

Cheers!