by dmadson | Jun 26, 2013 | Uncategorized
Wow, what is this? Two blogs in as many days? Now that is called dedication… or perhaps procrastination.
So, where to begin. I attend a local chat group formed mostly of teachers, librarians and children’s authors who get together to talk about books, mostly ones aimed at children and young adults. I don’t write for children and I don’t really write for young adults, but I love books so I go along. They are always very entertaining evenings. Last time someone made the mistake of getting me started on my hobby horse about book publishing, but I must have been somehow inspiring rather than annoying, because one of the ladies passed my name on to a school… The following day I got an email asking if I would come and talk about writing with a group of grade 4/5 students (read 9-10 years old). I said yes. I say yes to everything at the moment, especially if the question is whether I want more chocolate or a cup of tea…
I went to the school. I took the first book I wrote (the infamous Sad Little Christmas Tree) and I talked to them about writing and why I do it. I told them how I came to be a writer because I never wanted to do anything else. That even if not a single one of my books had ever been published I would have kept writing because I couldn’t NOT write. Aaannd they all stared up at me with their blank expressions, waiting to decide if I am going to be this boring for the whole session.
No! I refuse to be boring. I had organised to do a writing exercise with them – so I took up the whiteboard marker, 55 students sitting on the floor at my feet, and I told them what you need to write a story. Protagonist. Problem. Let’s keep it simple, I thought, start with the basics.
“We need a protagonist, a character who this story is going to be about.”
“Can we call him ‘Bob’?”
“Yes, we can call him Bob. Now we need to know a little bit about Bob.”
It was sheer power! All these hands rising around me and I got to choose which one was allowed to speak. And choose I did, trying to be even handed and unprejudiced and make sure everyone got to have a chance. And what we ended up with was this:
Bob: 51 Years old. Cow. Lonely. Fat. Red with purple stripes. His only friend is a Slug.
A testament to the imaginative power of children. Ok, I can work with this, I can work with this.
“Bob needs a problem. A goal. Something he wants to achieve.”
“He needs to find his friend – Conner,” one of them says.
“Who’s a cat!” another shouts.
Much laughter. Conner is a child in the class I discover later, at least calling him a cat doesn’t seem to be rude so let’s move on.
So we move on and I am soon balancing on the slippery slope of over excited children, utterly amazed at the things that come out of their mouths. I have a three year old and a one year old, so now I get to see what I have to look forward to. Because you see, Bob needed to get out of the paddock, so logic dictates that there must be a unicorn upon whose back he can climb – thus breaking its legs. Yes, we now have a unicorn with broken legs and Bob is still stuck in the paddock.
One very lateral thinking girl informs me that Bob must wait until it is dark, because when it is dark he will be able to jump over the moon. Ok, but darn, turns out he just landed in another paddock. Perhaps my cruelty to characters at that age wasn’t special, it was just normal. I just didn’t lose the knack.
But look! There is another unicorn. Brilliant. Let’s eat it. “What?!” – “To gain it’s powers of course.”
Yes… of course. So now we are having the conversation about consequences, with reference to Harry Potter. It isn’t nice to eat unicorns, so what are the ramifications of this – Bob feels bad and the unicorn comes back to haunt him as a ghost, but when Bob explains why he did it, the unicorn forgives him and goes to get the farmer’s daughter to let Bob out of the paddock – yay!
It was at this point that I realised they hadn’t grasped the most important part of story structure – they weren’t linking anything together with the REASON – WHY? I started to ask them as they threw Bob’s next moves at me. “He gets stuck in some mud” “He goes and hitchhikes on the side of the road” “He follows the farmer on Instagram.” WHY? If he is trying to find his friend Conner. I have no problem with him getting stuck in the mud, but WHY? They were jumping from action to action instead of reason to reason, and it took about ten minutes for me to get this concept through to them. Internal logic. Always think of the goal, always keep your eye on the goal, and make sure your characters are trying to reach it.
We got there in the end. Conner likes climbing, so look up the trees. There he is, up a tree. How do we get him down? Magical unicorn powers (from the unicorn Bob ate) kick in and he floats up, but he is too fat and all he does is fall back down. He is too fat to save Conner. Answer – GO TO THE GYM – congratulations to the boy who came up with that one, realising that Bob has a secondary problem that is stopping him from succeeding at his goal, and fix it! Beautiful, character development here we come.
Bob is now able to get up the tree, but he is just too late! The Slug friend from back in the paddock feels betrayed and kidnaps Conner out of the tree with a helicopter. Bob gets a jetpack (as you do) and flies after it, (as you do) only to discover that it wasn’t really Conner at all, but a completely different cat. He goes back to his paddock because he’s had enough, and there, in a tree, is Conner waiting for him. Conveniently happy ending. You would think they’d read some books or something…
They invited me to come back and do it all over again with their other classes…
by dmadson | Jun 25, 2013 | Uncategorized
Ok, so I’m terrible at remembering when I should update this blog. I said I would do this crowdfunding one each week, but it’s pretty obvious I’ve been caught up with everything that is going on (read ‘slack’ if you like). Between running the campaign and working through the final copyedit for Blood of Whisperers, things have been a bit hectic.
But here we go.
It has improved somewhat. Some of my shouting got answers, and I don’t feel like such a fool anymore. We are currently sitting at 62% with 10 days to go, so I am happy. People have been amazingly generous, especially those who have seen me working hard at improving my writing for the last ten years. People I’ve never met before, or even heard of, are supporting my books, leaving comments about how good it looks and how they can’t wait to read them. This is naturally elevating to the spirit. I got myself in the paper, have done my first interview with a fantasy/science fiction magazine, and have a reading in five days. Things seem to be moving. A few people know my name.
And yet there is still a strange feeling I have about it all, about the fact that this is MONEY. What is the issue we have with money as a society? It is the cause of so much stress in our lives – having money, not having money, losing money, owing money, bills, mortgages, bargains, pay rises – why are we so caught up with the importance of money? Why does going to the mailbox and finding bills make my stomach twist into knots? I’m sure there are many answers to these questions and someone who has studied western culture could surely answer them, but it leaves me with this strange need to justify myself, to explain that – no you are not giving me money for nothing. I am not a charity. I have put SO many hours into these books and they are worthy of being read, but I find myself spending more time telling people that they don’t HAVE to pledge, even as I hand them a business card with the campaign address printed across the back. Is this my inability to sell myself? Or my ingrained awkwardness about the feeling that I am asking for your money? No, I tell myself, this is a transaction. A sale. You can go to the campaign site and you don’t have to pledge, as is proved by my traffic stats versus the number of supporters I have. But also you can, and if you do let it be because you think the books look good.
When I was doing an interview I was asked what the hardest part of crowdfunding has been so far, and I answered that it has been managing myself – my issues. It has been learning to accept being ignored, learning to believe in myself, learning to cope with the sharp ups and downs that can happen all in the same day and knowing I still have deadlines to meet and must keep working, whatever my mood. The hardest thing is knowing that this is the choice I have made, to seek the funds to publish professionally where so many people do not, and it will forever be the beginning of my career, for better or worse. I cannot change it and would not want to.
I am reminded that we live in a changing world. The stigma of “self-published” still exists, but it now only has itself to blame. I am reminded that people come to their goals along different paths, different journeys, and that no one path is better than any other. I hope when I come to success I will remember that and be humbled by where I came from, and the people who helped me get there. I am very sure I will. Something tells me this is an experience I am unlikely to ever forget.
by dmadson | Jun 12, 2013 | Uncategorized
I miss just writing. I miss it so much it is like an ache in my stomach. At the conclusion of the first week of crowdfunding I thought I would take a moment to reflect on what this journey has so far been like, and in two words – it’s shit. I can not honestly thing of anything I hate more than I hate this.
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, money is one of the worst things to try and get out of people, even if they are getting something in return. People don’t like to part with it, and I don’t blame them. I have none. Zip. Zero. I am the poorest writer since JK Rowling couldn’t afford to buy coffee, in fact it is a good thing I don’t drink coffee because I couldn’t afford it if I did.
Secondly, I feel like I am talking to brick walls, or a void, shouting myself hoarse into a vacuum. I’ve read all the tips for successful crowdfunding, but all in all it’s a load of bull. You can set up a great project and do all the right things, but it isn’t any guarantee of success. You send out press releases – no one writes back. You send out emails – no one writes back. You feel like the loneliest asshole in the world as you post your updates on Facebook and throw your tweets into the roaring sea of hundreds and thousands of other tweets and posts and please help me fund my ‘blah’.
I am a writer. Before everything, I am a writer. I am not an entrepreneur, I am not a marketing professional, and I sure as hell am not a robot, and for a writer the internet is a very dangerous place. We take so much of our self-esteem from our work, because we are so obsessive in the production of it, that the sometimes unthinking assholery (now a word, I totally just called it) of people is like a knife to the heart and the pain lingers a long time after the memory of all the good words have faded.
I hate selling myself. I hate twitter. I hate sending out email after email and getting nothing back. It is like applying for a job. You send our resume after resume, cover letter after cover letter, you call people, you refresh job sites, you sit on your own in a corner and cry because the world doesn’t want you after all, and after that you somehow have to dig yourself out and remind yourself that you have to believe, and by god that is the hardest thing I ever have to tell myself, the hardest thing there is in the whole world to believe in – harder than believing in ghosts, harder than believing that your mailman is an alien in disguise, harder than believing that Fifth Shades of Grey is an amazing literary masterpiece.
The hardest thing there is to believe in, is me.
Never ever ever will I do this again, unless I develop a desire to stress myself into an early grave.
