Improvisations on Reality

I think that one of the best things a plane could have would be a scenery camera.

I’m very sure that I’m stating the obvious, but it’s cross-country flights like this one where I get reminded exactly why I adore flying as much as I do.

Taking off from NYC, I get a bird’s eye view of my own neighborhood, and yes, the skyline view. At night, that skyline view is phenomenal; all the lights and buildings seem to almost wink at you. And landing/taking off from Minneapolis, I would get a stellar aerial of a park. Can’t identify the park, considering I’m not from the Twin Cities, but the view of it coming in, of floating over it en route to the Tarmac – now that is great.

One of my favorites is of Coral Gables/Coconut Grove when I’m flying for a cruise. Believe me, if you watch CSI: Miami, it’s both exactly and nothing like it. Of course, none of the gold-cast that’s on the cam lighting, but the sun floods on all those in-ground pools, and for a second, it almost feels like you’re on set.

Of course, I’m typing this as the Grand Canyon is coming into view outside my window.

It’s definitely one of the best sights. Even from 35,000 feet up, you see the different layers of the rock, the grooves and valleys where water had taken thousands of years to carve them out. Once in a while, a crater or two. This region is one of the best earmarks for how old our world actually is, and it’s humbling. Considering I write sci-fi, it’s a confirmation as good as any that the universe is a vast and beautiful place indeed.

Views like these are easily the best part of a cross-country journey. I love the jazz fest I’m heading to, but this – the view, seeing nature at its finest, between the Rockies and the Canyon – has to be one of the best parts of the trip.

It makes me feel alive, so alive that I have few words to describe it..

K.G.

I can’t even tell you how ecstatic I am to be aboard a plane again.

I came to the conclusion that I’m not flying enough. I need to explore more cities, more destinations… Hopefully, with the real estate thing, I would be able to get myself enough money to actually do all the exploring I want.

This will be a productive flight, of that rest assured. If I don’t finish the screenplay on my way to California, then I am pretty confident that I will finish it on my way back. Same goes for the minor touch-ups to Book 4. Yes, maybe 3-4 typos… This is what happens when you do the editing at two in the morning in tax season.

Really, I ought to learn by now: if your brains are Swiss cheese, then you really, really, really should refrain from doing tasks that require your full attention. Else it will not be good.

But it is okay. As I said before, it’s a human endeavor, and a human labor. It will happen. Such is the nature of this work.

So. I’m somewhere over Illinois right now, going through the Great Lakes region. I’ve written a guest post for Kathleen Doyle, which I will link as soon as it goes up. I’ve also started putting together some author interviews for people who had contacted me about guesting here. So you guys will have a whole different mix of things coming up.

As to where I’m going? I’m once again chasing music in Newport Beach, CA! It’s time for the annual jazz festival, and I’m personally looking forward to a great reunion with friends, sweet CA sunshine, and some stellar music/photos.

I just need to actually force myself to stay awake  through the entire flight. This is only the first leg. I got so into my writing that my body started to remind me that it’s on a plane and every plane, without fail, has a soporific effect on yours truly. I am honestly fighting to stay awake!

Until next time…

K.G.

When we the writers do our job and write our story, we focus more on plot nuances, grammar, spelling – all important things, and all essential in creating a good book. But we cannot discount than, when we endeavor to write a book, we have to keep our audience in mind and market to it.

Think about it. Let’s say you’re writing a hard-nose detective story. People who are in their early teens may not be as likely to read it unless it’s their thing. People with an eye for mystery likely would, regardless of age. YA stories are also read by people far older than the typical YA range of 13-19, but you would not market a YA story to forty-year-olds. Primarily, it’s marketing. If you feel that anyone can enjoy your story, great – but your marketing would need a slant.

To change gears just a little, let’s talk about gearing towards YA. I’ve been reading The Hunger Games lately, and I love the way it’s written. Sure, it’s out of my age range, so to speak, me being newly twenty-seven. However, the plot is brilliant, and I find myself getting into the story the same way I got into Caroline B. Cooney when I was in the YA age range. However, if I had to really analyze the plot of The Hunger Games, I have to ask myself: how did this classify as YA? Is it suitable for a fourteen-year-old to read about a battle-royale played out between poverty-stricken kids for people’s entertainment? Because that’s what The Hunger Games boil down toward. But teens are reading it, they’re liking it, and they’re asking The Tough Questions that Collins raises in the Games. And of course, Suzanne Collins’s publisher is well aware of it and models the marketing towards the audience best suited towards it: teens who are wanting to read and think.

That is the key: best suited. And that matters a great bit as to what happens with the book’s success.

I’ll be the first to admit, I had no idea how to market when I published Mages. First books for a self-pub author are usually trial-and-error; unless you study your marketing beforehand, you find yourself learning on the fly. What I knew about my audience was this:

- They’re artistic, eclectic people who ask questions

- They’re older than 15

- They’re younger than 50

- They like to follow the characters.

Theoretically, I should’ve gone to my campus and pushed this book to people in the theater major programs. The Pace University theater people were a cool, varied, hippie bunch who never hesitated to follow along with a great character. I got some interesting book recommendations from them. But I published this after I graduated, and considering that my knowledge of marketing back then was next to nonexistent, I never thought to actually use the Pace campus as a marketing platform.

Big mistake. I will admit: it cost me sales in the long run. But know what? You live, you learn, and you try again.

However, now that the first arc of the story is wrapped up, I can definitely go ahead and go back on campus and say, “Hey. You like The Hunger Games. You like sci-fi and adventure. You will like this.” Why? Because as dystopian fiction such as The Hunger Games is getting more acclaim, paranormal-fic series as a whole are gaining a steady audience, one that isn’t necessarily constrained to an age group. Major caveat: the younger people do gravitate more towards this brand of fiction. 8 our of 10 of my readers are under 30.

Therefore, I will have to gear my efforts towards YA. I also have to market in a magazine, possibly, if I want it to reach my target audience. Which means my marketing budget needs an overhaul.

This sort of knowledge, however you come to acquire it, is possibly the most valuable knowledge that you can acquire in your publication journey, whether you’re already published, or stepping into the pool for the first time.

K.G.

Or, better put, more on the “real book” illusion.

You may have noticed that a lot of self-pub authors are not releasing print versions of their books anymore, but instead are going right to the e-book process. As a result, they are apt to hear, “But it’s not a real book!” for various reasons. I’ve addressed the genre-based prejudice of the “real book” here. But now let’s talk presentation medium.

In 1440 or thereabout, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Prior to this, books have been handwritten, hand-copied, and the more effort put into a copy, the more it cost. As such, they became signifiers of wealth for the longest time, until the printing press enabled mass production of print material, making books more easily accessible. The Industrial Revolution took over and made print reading material available widely.

Until the e-reader was invented, people just could not conceive of a book being presented any other way but printed.

That was in 2007.

Think about that: the e-reader has been around for only five years, and it already changed the way books are presented, and 562 years of precedent is shaken up. Just like that. With a page-sized electronic device.

However, think about this. That’s the e-reader. Not necessarily the e-book. The Internet has, inadvertently, made us all online readers since e-mail became the norm. E-reading is the same thing as what you’re doing now, except it’s on a handheld device.

Think about it. You’re reading this blog right now. I have enough entries in here to publish it as a book in and of itself. If you’ve stayed with it for some years, you’ve effectively read a book online already. If you’ve read a draft of a story online – congratulations, you read an e-book. Just not on an e-reader, but an e-book nonetheless.

No matter how solid a printed book feels – and I will be the last to deny a printed book’s effect; I have paperback versions of every book I’ve published so far – it doesn’t take a print version to call a story real. A story is real by the simple virtue of being written, as I’ve explained in the linked post above. Someone had spent weeks, months, or years of effort into making this story happen. It is completed and released. That alone, in and of itself, makes a story real. What we’re discussing here is a presentation medium, and having the presentation medium be electronic does not – contrary to whoever tells you otherwise - does not take away from the story being real.

That said, let’s discuss the print book as a medium. Apart from the solid feeling of having it in your hands, the “new book smell” – yes, it’s a beautiful flavor…come on, you know it! – it’s also not as likely to sell for an independent. Personal experience: I moved more Kindle copies per month, invariably, than my CreateSpace prints. When I run a promo on any of my books, the other books sell right alongside the free one. For a self-pub who’s new on the scene, this would mean that e-books are a more viable way to market and make revenue. And, considering that uploading is usually at no cost, it’s a guaranteed profit. To release a print book, you may pay for a proof (or not, since CreateSpace introduced an excellent digital proofing option). You would have to wait for the proof to land, read it, send it to the editor again, make the corrections, lather, rinse, repeat until it’s perfect – a standard that is extremely subjective – and then release it. And then there are the shipping costs in sending out review copies. And then the rigmarole of getting a bookstore to carry them.

But the print book has also been around for 562 years. The e-reader and the idea of having a library on a portable device is still about five years old. You know how they say that old habits die hard. The e-book and e-reader are still new, and they’re a splash in a very established and very stalwart market. We’ve seen the decisions that B&N and the Big Six had made in the wake of the growth of self-pub. Things are not going to change swiftly, but they are changing, whether the people like it or not.

Again, let’s not discount the main crux of it all: the story itself. You’re getting a book, whether or not it’s in printed form or in a file on a reader. It is real, any way you cut it. Any distinction of “more real” or “less real” based on presentation medium, genre, author’s background, publisher or lack thereof, exists only in the head of the person making the statement.

There was also an address of quality control in self-publication, with the assertion that self-pub books are poorly edited, poorly formatted, etc. I won’t deny that such books exist. However, they exist across the board. Major publishers sometimes do not format their e-books well, and proof to the fact are my copies of Philippa Gregory novels and Gone with the Wind. Great stories to read, but the formatting on the e-version, honestly, sucks. I own Philippa Gregory paperbacks. Why is there nothing wrong with the layout, but the e-version lacks paragraph breaks in several locations and is more expensive than the printed version? Let’s get real: if we’re going to do quality formatting, then let’s do quality formatting across. the. board. Don’t tar self-published books with a brush unless you are willing to put all books under scrutiny.

Self-publishers sometimes do work alone. Thusly, the editing quality may lack until they gather enough to hire a professional editor. I will be the first one to admit that someone’s first book will not be edited anywhere near as well as the subsequent books (um, guilty, and not ashamed to admit it). Understandable conditions, right? Right.

Let’s be real, people. Writing, editing, formatting, printing, publishing – being an author is a human endeavor. Human errors will happen. We are becoming a reading culture because, with our digital immersion, we’re reading a lot more (screens, but still: reading words is reading words). Human errors will happen. If that is a deal-breaker for you, that is fine, but you may want to step back and evaluate what’s more important to you in picking up a new book. Some of my favorite books (self and trad alike) are not perfect, but the story is so good that I couldn’t care less about the editing/formatting job. Conversely, some books I had were edited and formatted to perfection, but I just couldn’t finish them worth a damn. While I will never deny that editing and formatting are crucial, none of us are so perfect ourselves to have imperfection be a deal-breaker.

The bottom line is this: a book is a book. How you prefer to read it is entirely up to you, but there is no contest with which one is more “real”. They both are. Whether you like it printed or downloaded, you’re still reading a book. That is what should be the first thing to note in the e-book versus hard-copy debate.

K.G., who has both paperbacks and a Kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/author/katherinegilraine

You know, sometimes I love HuffPo. They take a topic and sometimes hit the nail on the head.

Like this one.

And you know what, it’s the fastest way to cheese a writer off. I heard most of them. And honestly, I’m surprised that we writers aren’t shooting back with comebacks! I mean, come on. We the creatives can get creative with them too, can we not?

(In case you haven’t guessed yet, this post is mostly fun/sarcasm. And yes, I use some of those comebacks, because people really don’t think before they ask a writer a question…)

Have you been published?

Well of course I have! Else would I offer you this thing called….a book?

What do you write? [pause for answer] Oh.

Well, what do you like? [pause for answer] Oh.

Do you have, like, a real job?

Writing. Why do you think it’s not real?

I don’t read much.

So going online doesn’t count? Because seriously, you do read what’s on the screen, you realize that, right?

Do you know Stephen King? What’s he like?

I’d love to find out!

You should write a book about my life, it’s a bestseller for sure.

Sigmund Freud would agree! You certainly have a healthy ego.

I’m gonna write someday, when I have free time.

Then you never will.

[No sarcasm here. It's the truth. You either make the time, or you never will]

My sister likes to read. Have you written anything she would know?

Well, she’ll know what I’ve written when she reads it. If, on the other hand, you’re asking me if I can give her something to read, sure!

You write novels? I only read stuff that’s real.

Are those things on my bookshelf zombies?

I read your book. It was… interesting.

It is indeed, the Amazon reviews are favorable.

My mother loves your books.

That’s fantastic! Now what about you?

I’ve got a great story for you!

I’m not a literary agent.

I thought books were dead.

Have you read any lately?

You should write a screenplay! That’s where all the money is.

How nice of you to worry! Now why aren’t you writing one?

–

Snappy comebacks aside, few things irritate me as much as the idea that 1. books are “dead” and 2. there’s such a thing as a “real book”. If books are dead, then why has that particular medium been alive for several centuries? Come the hell on. Books aren’t “dead”. After all, there’s new authors writing them on a fairly constant basis, and the Hollywood movie factory needs to get its ideas from somewhere.

Far as 2, I’ve written about it at length here. Long post short: there’s no such thing as a “real book”. All books are real by virtue of being written. If you like nonfiction, you say nonfiction. Don’t denigrate a piece of writing just because it’s not something you read. You wouldn’t like it very much if someone devalued something that you’ve poured a lot of effort into, so why do you suppose you can do that to an author? You just don’t do that.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – and again, until it sinks in – that writing is a job. It’s a very difficult, sometimes thankless, and rarely financially lucrative job. If you’re not writing, you’re thinking about what to write. If you’re writing, you’re always thinking about what to write next. If you’re done writing, you always think about marketing and pushing it out to potential readers. It is a nonstop job, it requires a ton of mental resources, and considering the current financial conditions of being an author, it’s not lucrative. We writers do it because it is our calling, but we aren’t so starry-eyed to believe that we’re going to instantly become the next best-seller. That takes a hell of a lot more work than people think. Just because you see the finished product doesn’t mean it doesn’t take years to create it.

K.G.

My first one, I might add. I’m excited!

This is what the schedule looks like. I’ll update the links as they become available, and add tour dates as those too become available.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25th: With Raymond Frazee, discussing screenwriting and selling the screenplay as reading material.

FRIDAY, APRIL 27th: With Julie Campbell, discussing writing  as a business.

SUNDAY, APRIL 29th: At Amelia Curzon’s, talking about Amazon.

MONDAY, APRIL 30th: An interview with D. Von Thaer

THIS JUST IN: Interview with S.R. Torris.

Happy touring!

K.G.

No one.

Yes, that’s right, no one. And I am absolutely astounded that the Pulitzer committee wouldn’t award a prize for what is effectively the biggest category in the book market.

The collective *headdesk* from fiction authors and fiction fans was heard around the world, and I was among them. Really? What gives, Pulitzer? You’re giving the widest-read genre out there a kick in the pants. Not a good move.

But you know what this reminds me of? That time when the Grammy Awards cut contemporary jazz out completely, and Latin jazz to a sliver.

I didn’t forget that, and I don’t think anyone who is in the jazz genre has forgotten it either. My music people were and are certainly cheesed off. If you’re not sure what the Grammy move has to do with the Pulitzer, I’ll explain.

What do the Grammy Awards symbolize to the public? Acclaim. Critical reception. Accomplishment. Merit. In other words, all those things that people normally look to in order to determine if something is good. Because you know what? If something’s good, it usually wins awards, right?

Now, we know that that is not necessarily true. After all, plenty of great stories never see an award, and we know a hundred songs that got snubbed needlessly by multiple radio stations.

Why even go so far? Steve Cole’s Spin album is deeply underrated, and I don’t think that many tracks off it had ever been spun on commercial FM radio. And personally? I think that it’s his best CD. It’s bright, strong – hell, happy, even.

Now, the Grammy Awards sliced out the contemp-jazz category. What message does that send to listeners and Grammy fans?

It sends a message that this music is not good. It sends a message that this music is not worth spending money on. That this music is not worth someone’s attention. Even if, very plainly, that is not the case.

But that’s the message. And that’s the parallel, because the message is the same.

The article linked above states that anyone can apply for the Pulitzer for a fee, and everyone did. In other words, the message is that there’s a deluge of fiction out there and none of it is good enough. In all actuality? It probably is good enough, and because it didn’t fall into what’s considered to be “good enough” commercially – which does not necessarily reflect the public tastes – then it gets kicked.

But the fact is, there is good fiction out there.

To play devil’s advocate for a second, though, there is a metric ton – kinda literally – of fiction out there right now, especially now that self-publication opened up better access to seeing work in print. The Pulitzer committee was probably deluged with books, top to bottom. I can well see them getting overwhelmed with submissions, and I can understand that. After all – been there, done that, got the proverbial T-shirt.

As it is, though, the withholding of the prize is sending the same message to both authors and readers as the slicing of the jazz categories sent to the music world and to music listeners alike.

We’ve seen self-published authors take center stage with John Locke, J.A. Konrath, and Amanda Hocking. They’re new, and they put a solid crack into the idea that the only good fiction is trad-pub fiction. We see from author communities that there is both good and bad fiction. And we also see that good self-pub fiction that hasn’t reached the scale of Konrath and Hocking struggles to get acclaim, if it has to still get taken seriously first.

The thing is, while I do understand Pulitzer’s decision to withhold the prize for fiction, I’m amazed that they hadn’t even thought of the impact that this sends to writers and readers. Bad enough that authors get to hear all the BS that comes with self-publishing stereotypes, but now Pulitzer – a major player in the lit world – is reinforcing them.

K.G.

So, because tax deadline kills the sleep and stokes the muse, I started working on the script counterpart to Book 1. Yep, I’m writing a movie. No, not for Script Frenzy – because tax season will eat me if I try that, and I’m actually about to head to work as I’m writing this – but because, frankly, it’s fun, and I want to pitchThe Index as a film series.

And I am slowly getting really, really into it.

I will admit this: when I first started laying down The Index, back in 2006, I had every intention of writing it so that it could translate to the screen easily. I can see this being a great series in film; I wouldn’t put my work on the same scale of potential that Harry Potter had ended up with, but I definitely think that my work has a certain visual appeal. At least to the nerds who ended up loving it so far (yes, I’m looking at you, and you know who you are!!!).

With all the difficulties and travails that I’ve had with the first book of this series – for the details on that, everything with the Book 1 category on this blog that dates back to 2009 will tell you exactly what was going on – I’ve had a surprisingly easy time so far templating out the first few scenes of the book in screen format. While in the first book I had the challenge of layout, conventions, scenery, and the general flow of the book, right now the challenge has shifted to having an effective portrayal of that same text. There is much less focus on the writing details when you’re working in screen form. It becomes all about the visual, all about how the characters will be seen, and all about how to see everything effectively. i.e. soundtrack cues, potential actors, etc.

This also brings an entirely new dimension to the process: I have to actually think of this in visual terms. I will admit shamelessly that I thought of anime noir at the time I was writing the story in the first place, but right now, and especially right now, I”m thinking of it as a live-action endeavor. Yes, might cost more, but it will work better this way. I have to actually consider who will play whom in the film. I can’t cast Shou and Kian, for the life of me, but I’ve earlier mentioned that Arriella would be best played by Serinda Swan (you may know her as Erica Reed if you’re a fan of Breakout Kings). Shourron I, both sides of him, would be best done with Liam Neeson. Rena would have a worthy portrayal in the hands of Annabelle Wallis (Jane Seymour from The Tudors, season 3). Arriella’s scheming mother, Morrhia, would go to Catherine Zeta-Jones. Lord Kirare, the Viceroy of the Underworld, will go to the actor whose presence inspired his creation to begin with: Chris Noth. And Jason Watson, the redheaded, lovable-little-shit bon vivant based on one of my dearest friends, will be played by the most versatile redhead there is….Damian Lewis. Whom you may have seen in Homeland.

Hey, dream big, right?

But in reality, all this is helping me put the movie into motion, so to speak. Now that there are flesh-and-blood people representing the people whom I’ve written into existence, writing the screen form suddenly becomes that much easier. Same for soundtrack: no movie is complete without sound, and now I have to dig at my collection of jazz, rock, Celtic, and everything else to start matching scenes to songs.

In other words, the story hasn’t changed, but the presentation is wildly different. And considering that I spent the past six years heavily entrenched in and perfecting the noveling side of writing, to switch gears like that is quite the lulu. I won’t deny one thing, though: I rather like it.

To note, I will put up Mages on TriggerStreet.com, which is a great hosting site for indie scripts, and I will also make a PDF of it available in e-book format. Print will be entirely too clunky…or not, I don’t know. Still thinking about it.

And, to note, if Mages does get picked up for production? Well…then let’s just say it. My life will be changing very fast.

K.G.

Slight addendum: Book 1 can be found here, and is free for Kindle on April 17th. Yes, a slightly shameless plug. :)

Ok. You may have noticed that I password-protected my last post. Reason is – I’m still at my day job. If you’d like to read it, contact me privately for the password to access it.

Now, I did something that might be a little bit foolhardy, but…I have been eyeing it as a real possibility. And a real career possibility, at that. And I think I can do very well with it, considering that 1. I’m great with people, 2. I’m awesome with numbers, and 3. I keep up with the law and the news.

I purchased a LivingSocial deal and will be registering for classes at the New York Real Estate Institute.

Yep, your girl is becoming a realtor for her next Day Job.

It may be a foolish step, but I think that if I don’t get on a career path soon, I’ll be 1. at this front desk forever, and 2. going nowhere fast. Not an option. I’m way too ambitious to stay at a desk job all day. I need to actually be around people, making things happen, taking control of things. This is why I run my own business on the side.

The other beautiful thing about real estate is that when people come to you looking to buy or sell an apartment, you have no idea whom you’re going to meet. This is also a great step to kick my photo/design business into gear as well. And also in RE, you have the chance to make your own hours. I have been looking for this since the beginning of my working days.

The huge drawback is that this job relies mostly on commissions. Which means I won’t be saying goodbye to accounting just yet. That or I will have to add independent bookkeeping to my repertoire. I have Quickbooks on my home machine courtesy of another accountant buddy of mine (outside of this job) and will put it to good use.

Ladies and gents…wish me luck. Tax season wraps up April 17th. May 13th, I release my book. May 18th, I’m in Newport Beach. May 31st, I will begin the classes to turn my life in a new direction.

K.G.

Another brilliant post idea from Ileandra Young.

This is an odd one for me to answer, because I’m a solitary individual as it is. I’m the sort of person who prefers to be one-on-one when in company, and who is usually counted on to be a homebody; I enjoy doing work around the house, I like to be by myself and reading a book in the park. I am great in crowds and conversations, but being solo is just where I feel best. It’s when I do my best writing, and when I feel that I can do anything I please.

It doesn’t mean I’m depressed. It doesn’t mean I need to get out more. I just like it, and there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, solo, homebody, or whatnot. It actually irks me quite a bit when people don’t understand why I don’t want to go out on one day or the next, or why I tend to go alone when traveling.

It’s just how I am. Take it or leave it, people.

But that said, there are times where feeling alone is more a hindrance than a help. Behind the cut, because I will proceed to reminisce/wax personal.

Read more…