Author Archives: CrissyMoss

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About CrissyMoss

I've been writing as long as I can remember.

What makes you think you’re so special?

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I’ve been in writer forums, workshops, blogs and more, and invariably there is someone who says something like this:

“I want to write, but I’m afraid to write a bad story.”

One… no you don’t, or you’d be writing.
Two… why the hell do you think you’re so special?

Stephen King writes for years in the corner of his living room before he finally produces something worth selling. But you’re going to produce awesome prose on the first try?

Do you know how many times an author re-writes, re-vamps, throws out, and tries again… on the same project?

But you’re special. Right? Whatever comes out of your head must be perfect and wonderful the first time or you’re not going to write.

Let’s look at it from the view of an author who writes, puts out, and publishes a book, or several books. I’ve labored for hours, months, and possibly years to produce this book. I’ve tortured myself about what to write on that page, or who to kill on that page. I’ve lost sleep because of deadlines, skipped dinners, and missed out on fireworks… all to finish a novel.

And it sucked. The first draft was horrible. The second draft less so, and the third draft finally started to look like something worth publishing.

But you…. you think you should be special and everything out of your hands should be pure bliss to read?

I think it’s time for you to re-evaluate what it is that you really want. Do you want to write? If so, WRITE! That is all you can do. It will probably suck. People might laugh. So. If you are writing because that is what is inside you to do then none of that matters.

Unless you are Motzart, Pascal, Akrit Jaswal, or John von Neumann, you’re going to have to fumble and screw up just like the rest of us poor mortals.

I wasn’t a prodigy. I write. I suck sometimes. But I still pick up that keyboard and write.

What’s your excuse?

“Forgotten Ones” and a Free Book?

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A few months ago ZC Bolger (@zcbolger), an author and friend of mine, read “Necropolis”. That is a short story in “Twilight Tales“.

It sparked a short discussion, which sparked a bigger idea in my head, and I’m now writing a sequel, of sorts.

“Forgotten Ones” is getting away with me a little bit. It is already 12,000 words long, and only half finished. This is good, I said I needed some longer titles. I guess I’m getting them.

It also worries me a little bit. I can’t afford editing right now, more now then before. My car needs repairs, rent is due, children to feed, blah, blah, Blah, BLAH!. Whatever, you don’t care what my troubles are.

What you might care about is “Forgotten Ones”. Set in the modern era, it is a fantasy story involving dying gods and goddesses, three fates with the ability to see the past, the present, and the future (respectively), and political intrigue as gods and man position themselves to save/destroy the world as we know it. But who wants to save it, and who wants to destroy it?

I really love this story. I’m going into how the Fates became what they are, and how the world works. It’s set in this world, and has some things from current events in it, like the Pope, (though only as a distant figure that has no actual influence on the current story) and the rise of technology.

I think this is the longest thing I’ve written in a while. “Flight of the Griffins” was 12000 words, and “Osiren’s Tears” was 30,000, but they were both written back in February. I love the change of pace, and I honestly can’t wait to write some longer books.

I’m also learning a bit more about how to complete longer works faster. I wrote a bit over 5 pages today, and I am working to write more pages each day. It doesn’t seem as daunting as it did six months ago. It makes me think I could do this full time some day, and produce a novel every month (if I could just work out the pesky money issues).

As for the free book….

I am going to be entering “Small Bites: The Complete Collection” into the Story Cartel contest. 5 copies of the paper back will be up for grabs. What do you have to do? Read the book, write a review, and get entered into a drawing to get the free paperback. Story Cartel lets you download the ebook for free in order to do the review.

I will have more info about that later, and I will also be putting up separate paperback for those who already bought the book and would like to get in on a drawing for a free paperback. I just have to figure out the logistics of this.

Come back next week for more info.

The Camera is OUT!

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camera2“The Camera” is finally out.

Ever have a day when you know what you need to do, you know the process, and how you’re going to get there, but you just can’t seem to do it?
That was this book.

I knew the plot. The characters. What was said, when it was said, and who got hurt because of it. All of it. But when I sat down to put it together my mind froze. I’m not even sure that I know why.

The idea for “The Camera” actually pre-dates “The Ring”, which is the first book in this series. When I first started writing it I didn’t really know where I was going with it though, just that a boy bought a camera that actually stored things within the film, and it was going to cause him some trouble.

I had “Needful Things” in mind when I started it. Or “Friday the 13th”, or “The Room”, or “Warehouse 13″… you take your pick. They all have one thing in common. Cursed items that seem to give you what you want, but come at a price. The camera didn’t give Anthony anything he needed or wanted, it just happened to do something unexpected.

So I had this story idea, and I thought it was a good idea, but it was born during my “stress induced writers block” years, so it never went anywhere.

I wrote “The Ring” years later. It was one of those stories that just flowed out onto the page, and I think that is why it is one of my better stories. It took about five hours to get the entire story written, but I wasn’t publishing when I wrote it. I didn’t even think about it when I first started publishing, and I’m glad I didn’t. If I had, I would have put it up as a stand alone story and “Illicit Gains” would not exist.

After “Flight of the Griffins” and “Twilight Tales” were out I did an audit of all the stories in my files, and found “The Ring”, and several other stories. I started grouping them together to form books, and noticed the five stories revolving around cursed items. It was too perfect. I went back and added some foreshadowing in “The Ring”, edited it, and published it.

I thought “The Camera” would be easy to finish. I had three-quarters of it already written, and already knew what happened in the middle. Easy. Right? WRONG!

Every time I sat down to write it something would just scream “wrong” at me. The plot wasn’t right, lets tweak it. This character isn’t right. Lets tweak him. This could be worded a LOT better, tweak. Tweak. Tweak some more.

The entire plot (beyond boy finds camera, boy discover camera does something weird, boy has a horrible thing happen because of camera) changed at least four times. At first there was a thief, then there was a bully, then there was… Well lets just say that I didn’t have the true plot until I started fleshing out the 5th book in the series, “Marco”.

Those of you keeping score, I’ll actually give you the titles of all five of the stories in this series:
“The Ring”
“The Camera”
“The Scarab Necklace”
“The Pocket Watch”
“Marco”

If you read “The Ring” you’ll know who Marco is. He ties the whole series together.

Pressing publish on “The Camera” was a huge weight off my shoulders. After three weeks of saying “it’s going to be out this weekend” I finally got to say “It’s OUT”. I was starting to wonder if it ever would be.

But, this is a good thing. It means I don’t want to put out just any old crap. I want to tell a good story. Maybe there’s a missing comma, or I screwed up a homonym, but the story itself, the characters, the plot and setting, I’m proud of that. I can go back and fix the typos and polish the grammar a bit. But I can’t retract a bad story. I don’t even want to put out a story I’m not proud to call mine.

Now, ten years down the road I fully expect to hate everything I wrote and want to rewrite it. But I’m going to resist the urge. I’ll definitely be hiring a pro-editor, when I can afford it, to re-edit everything, but I won’t be changing the core story. I will let it stand as a testament to my progress because I fully expect each story to be better than the last.

Around the Web

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And I need to do another “Around the Web” post, because I have a few interesting links to share, and i don’t want to forget.

Smashwords is allowing “pre-orders” of books published through them to any platform.

KDP select is adding support for Japanese, and a couple other changes.

4 real inventions inspired by SF, a video from SciShow.

Garrett Robinson put up a fantastic formatting tutorial for print and ebooks. (there are several on his website.)

Templates for all the headers, avatars, icons and backgrounds on social media.

A great example on world building with map making.

A flow chart on how to break free of writers block.

Cliche Book Covers… Don’t do these, seriously.

Watch Neil Gaiman read his book, The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman discusses being disappointed by books (writing or reading them.)

The Round Table Podcast is back with an episode about “The ‘Death’ of Cyberpunk”

Joanna Penn shares her experience taking a traditionally published book back to self publishing.

Charting Progress

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It has been a long time since I shared my progress in writing every day, but I think it’s important, at least to me, because it is an act of accountability. I hope it also serves to inspire others to start on the journey of “writing every day”.

A few things I learned….

  • Completing a project is like coming to the edge of a cliff.
    • Once you reach the edge, where do you go? I am starting to see little ledges and paths below so that I can just continue to write on another project, but this takes practice.
  • Editing, formatting, book covers, and marketing SUCK!
    • I don’t mean they suck, as in they are terrible, I mean they suck time away from writing. Some of these things only take a few minutes a day, but editing… man that’s a time suck. At which point I write a lot less.
  • When I’m stuck, I need to switch projects for a little bit.
    • As long as I continue working on the “PRIME” project a little every day I have given myself permission to go nuts on something else, often adding 1500 words to another project in my list, or coming up with another idea for later.
  • My word count is improving!
    • The best part, that rising blue line marking “average word count” is going up and up and up, and it’s awesome! I am really close to 1000 words a day on average. If I keep this up eventually I can write a book a month instead of short stories.
  • Can’t wait for NaNoWriMo this year!

chart

 

Influences of the Past

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I was talking to a fellow author today, and we started discussing authors we know and love. There are a number of them I love at the moment. Neil Gaiman, Kim Harrison, Elizabeth Hayden, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman… all fantastic authors with wonderful books that drew me in, and kept me reading. Kept me looking for the next book.

When I was younger my tried and true authors were Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey, with a little bit of Mercedes Lackey thrown in. If you caught me with a book (which you often did) eight out of ten times it would be one of these authors.

I was a voracious reader. I have read about 80% of Piers Anthony’s, and Anne McCafferey’s books (both of who are/were prolific authors. Piers Anthony is still writing to this day, and is currently writing a book through his twitter feed.)

Thinking back, I realize that my consumption of these books had a great influence on my writing. Piers Anthony especially.

I once found myself in a discussion about his books on Reddit. Now, Reddit is an odd place, and  you can find some incredibly thought provoking commentary in there. You can also find a bunch of trolls just looking to get a rise out of people. That day I just happened to meet someone who honestly didn’t like Anthony, and when she saw my comment about what a good writer he was it pushed her buttons.

Apparently some people think of Anthony as “an old pervert”. Okay, I’ll give you one, but not the other.

Yes, Anthony writes about younger girls falling in love, flirting, sex, and centaurs and mermaids with their breasts showing. He even wrote an interesting book called “Pornucopia” which is exactly what it sounds like. Does that make him a pervert? I don’t think so. Writing erotica doesn’t make you a pervert any more then enjoying sex because, you know, it feels… GOOD!

Sex is a part of the human condition. So are the subjects of body image, love, relationships, gender equality, and age of consent. Issues that he addresses in many of his books.

I kept reading his novels because they spoke about the human condition without being preachy. He often addressed race, religion, beliefs, fear, politics, and social and political issues of all kinds, throughout many of his books. But he did it in a way that even a young adult could understand. And he did it without shoving his own personal beliefs on you (even if they were sometimes pretty obvious.)

In “Race Against Time” Piers Anthony deals with the complex idea of “conformity” and how that could cause the stagnation of society and innovation. Written in 1973, it still rings true during a time when political correctness is almost crammed down our throats. We are taught from childhood to sit down, follow directions, and learn and grow just like everyone else, and if you stand out your risk punishment for being a “disturbance in class”.

I wonder if “Race Against Time” would be publishable, through traditional means, in this decade, especially if Anthony were an unknown. Some have openly called it racist because he uses race as a device to accentuate “conformists” to “individualism”, but it was never meant to be about race.

When I say that Piers Anthony influenced my writing today, I mean that if you take the time to read between the lines of my stories you will find a deeper meaning. It isn’t just about a pretty leaf, or a scarecrow, or death. There is something behind it, some deeper meaning, even if that deeper meaning is “pay attention, ask questions, think for yourself.” Especially with my “Eversword Saga“.

I only hope that I can do half as well as Anthony, and others, did.

SPRT Episode 6

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SPRTJust finished up another episode of Self Publishing Round Table.

We discussed pricing. What should an author price their book at? What influences it? What should they consider?

We also talked about “The Beam”, and Neil Gaiman a bit.

 

On that note, Small Bites the complete collection is out, and priced at $2.99…. But I’m going to be raising it to $3.99, and raising all the individual books to $1.99. You may want to get it before the price increases…. It is also available as a paperback through Createspace. It is $6.99.

 

A Conundrum

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image

As you can tell from this picture…. the blue is spreading.
A while back I shared this list of my stories in progress. There were a couple spots of blue (marking published) and a lot of orange (marking almost done). Now it’s the opposite. Lots of published, not as much “almost done”.

My publishing schedule, up until now, reflected the fact that I had a lot of short stories that were almost done, or done and needing an edit. It is a lot faster to finish, and edit, a 5000 word short story, or several flash fictions, then to complete a sprawling 30-80 thousand word book.

I can’t capitalize on that anymore. Most of the “almost done” drafts I have started are 20-50% of a 20k word novella. That takes time to finish.

This is a good thing in the long run. I wanted to get a lot of little things up and expand into longer works. I wanted to have a variety of lengths available.

It means I’ll have to slow down publication, or write faster. Hopefully write faster. That’s what I am pushing for at least. Probably both.

It’s incredible how far I’ve come in the last eight months. Osiren’s Tears was written last October. It was published in February. Since then I have written or completed 18 short stories, 2 novellas, and published them in 10 books. Two of which are also available in print.

That’s a lot in eight months. I’m kind of proud of myself for sticking with this and following my dream.

I have 12 more short stories waiting to be finished, and a lot of novellas and novels. I may not be able to get something out every week now, but I will definitely keep people posted.

Expect “The Camera” out later this week. As well as the print version of “Small Bites the Complete Collection”.

Pax is also next month. I will have stickers and buttons available. If you can’t get to Pax and you would like a button and/or sticker then just write a review for one of my books and tweet about it. I would love to send you one.