Emily Guido’s Vlog #1 – Challenges, Disappointments and Triumphs

Thank you Emily Guido, for all your support and love!
Big Bear Hugs!

The Light-Bearer Series by Emily Guido

 My first Vlog Folks!!!  

Come in my house for a few minutes and talk!!!

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WHY is there such a thing as “Too Much Description”?

Yes, Virginia, there IS such a thing as too much description.
Why?
Time, or the lack of same.
Attention spans, or the lack of same.

Kristen Lamb has summed this up perfectly in 3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Writing & Increase Sales.

Attention spans are shrinking. The average time spent on a website is roughly 3.5 minutes. I’d wager most people give a website 3.5 seconds to catch their attention and that 3.5 minutes only applies to those browsers who happen to stay.

 

We can apply these business lessons to our writing, because we writers also have something to sell. Our job is far tougher because 1) discoverability is a nightmare 2) less than 8% of the literate population are devoted readers 3) the remaining 92% equate reading with homework and a chore. Thus, we have the task of convincing 92% of the population to spend time they don’t have engaged in an activity they believe they dislike…and spend money to do it.

One thing Lamb didn’t specify is that we, the “8%”, are the highly influential arbiters for the other 92%. Our rave review of “Book X” might motivate one or more of our “92%” friends to pick up “Book X” and read it.

There’s more to all this than time and money, however.

When I wrote my original “Yes, Virginia…” post back in April 2011, I was wringing my first novel through the hands of a critique group. An environment which encouraged, and “enabled,” lavish descriptions. And yes, I mean “enabled,” in the sense of “enablers” helping you to abuse substances. In this case, words. More than once, I would find myself reading ten pages of beautiful, impeccably-crafted descriptions in scenes where nothing was actually happening.

I found myself motivated to post “Yes, Virginia…”, without elaborating the larger reasoning behind my favoring economy of words.

In the petri dish of the group, many were oblivious to the needs of real-world readers. Without being able to take the entire work in context, people could bring in chapter after chapter of lavish description (with little or no action occurring!) and get “raves” from the group. And the “logical” outcome of this would be a novel full of indulgent prose, crafted for the hardiest of the literati, not the everyday reader.

Kristen Lamb:This tenet applies in a lot of areas. We don’t need flashbacks or lengthy details of why a character thinks or acts a certain way. The more we leave to the imagination, the better.

In general, this is true, but some stories will need a certain level of context to make readers care about the characters. The opposite of the above “description” scenario could, and did, happen. Someone could, for instance, bring the group wall-to-wall action scenes and be lauded again and again, but reading their resultant Kindle novel full of wall-to-wall action (lacking any back story, character development, or any other context which would have made me care about why these characters were fighting) made it clear that the weaknesses of “writing by committee” were hardly limited to an excess of descriptions in lieu of action.

You do have to achieve balance, as well as economy. If you need to describe something, you have to. The trick is to figure out what you need to describe, and what you don’t. You have to figure this out, and not through the process of working with a critique group.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. ”~ Strunk and White (as quoted by Lamb)

Seizure Challenge! (Slushie)

Ice-Bucket Challenge 2.0: The meaningful and educational version!

Chapter One

I am honored to have inspired this Mr. Anderson!
Thank you, Jason Thayer!

Kid From Out of Town--A novel in Progress

My alarm clock came on.

“Good morning, Murrydale!” the DJ announced. “You’re tuned in to the voice of the Wolfpack, WWPK! This is Ronnie Danger and it’s August 28, 1986! Happy first day of school to you if you’re going to Charles Wallace High! Maybe this will get you moving. It’s ‘Conga’ by the Miami Sound Machine!”

As the song played, I got dressed for the first day of school. I checked myself out in the mirror. I have curly red hair that’s actually not too bad to comb, and green eyes. I’m fourteen years old, and it’s my first day of school as a ninth-grader.

“Hey Kaylee! Big sister!” an annoying voice came from outside my bedroom door.

“Hey Emily, you know the rule!” I sighed. “What if I wasn’t decent?”

“So what? Blame mom.”

I shrugged. Not worth getting into on the first day, I told myself.

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The Rejection Window, Part II

Back in October 2011, I wrote “The Rejection Window“, a treatise about the big publishing industry’s future.

The rejection window is the length of time an author will keep submitting and revising their unpublished manuscript to agents and large traditional publishing houses.

What will define the future of the major publishing industry is the length of time for which the authors who do still submit manuscripts to agents and publishers will keep their rejection windows open.

The Big Five’s traditional position of strength, even as Amazon KDP and Smashwords were building their e-book empires, was that the major publishers got the first shot at the “quality” pre-published manuscripts. In other words, prospective authors submitted their queries to the major houses first, then they would pursue alternatives after the Big Five’s rejection of their work. I know this very well, for I was one of those authors. 😉

Of course, even back in 2011…

Some authors are already slamming the rejection window completely shut. They aren’t even bothering to submit their manuscripts to agents and publishers. These authors upload an eBook the moment it’s finished.

Their numbers now include many former Big Five mid-list authors (such as Joe Konrath) who are now making more money from e-books than they ever did when they wrote for the major publishing houses.
These romance writers ditched their publishers for ebooks — and made millions

(if only people gobbled up like sci-fi like they do romance… *sigh* 😉 )

2011:

The sea change I predict is: If the traditional industry rejects a first-time submission, they’ll never “sea” it again. 😉 In other words, if the publisher said “We love your story, but we want you to re-write one of your characters,” few if any authors would bother with such re-writing.

By then, the majority of authors will be likely to e-publish their manuscripts immediately after the major publishing industry’s first rejection. Revisions of manuscripts just to fit the ever-changing whims of agents and large traditional publishing houses will increasingly be seen as a waste of time and effort.

This one didn’t take five years to come true. Even the relative few authors left who won’t settle for anything “less” than being published on the Big Five will most likely start working on a new story they think will be more to the agents’ and publishers’ liking, rather than revising any existing stories. Any authors still patient enough to slog through the old-line process of querying agents before they do anything else, would also be willing to devote the keyboard hours necessary to charm their would-be masters with a story hewing as close to Big Five “formula” as possible.

Back here in the real world, the situation is now evolving beyond “the Big Five will never see the manuscript again”, to “they’ll never even see the author again.” Authors’ prose tends to improve along the lines of the “ten thousand hours of writing” rule. Years ago, if an author’s first “green” submission to the Big Five was mediocre, this was not an important factor. The author would take the rejection in stride, then query their newer and better works, until one of those works was of sufficient quality to pass muster. This archaic process was called “author development.” 😉

Now, the “newbie” author, whose first work has been rejected by the Big Five, is much more likely to head straight for the “greener” fields of Amazon KDP and Smashwords, taking all of their future works with them. Their better future works. Thus, the Big Five lose the author’s “dynamite” second or third novel, and the author is able to sell the e-books of their first work while they wile away their typing hours on the better work they had inside them all along..

Another big problem the Big Five now has, that I did not foresee in 2011, is of their own making: The narrowing of categories that they will even consider for publication. I recently read an interview with a Big Five editor where he spelled out what categories were being considered by his company, and those that were not. The shocker was that over two-thirds of the titles issued by my publisher, PDMI Publishing, LLC, are in categories his large company was no longer accepting submissions in! PDMI is, of course, reveling in the opportunities presenting themselves, now that entire categories of books are essentially being handed to them on a silver platter. PDMI was even forced to cancel their most recent open submissions period, due to the overwhelming number of manuscripts awaiting review in the system. The irony of this situation is not lost on me. 😈 When the potential exists to build a fairly large publishing operation simply by publishing books in categories that the Big Five are rejecting, something in the major houses’ system is obviously broken.

And that “something” would be their formulas. So we now have a few authors still trying to hew to the Big Five’s formulas, even as top-selling e-books continuously disprove the validity of these same formulas. And, to be fair, could anyone in New York have predicted the commercial success of the Fifty Shades trilogy? The same series Random House turned to for a quick and easy cash grab, because none of their “formula” books were selling as much as Fifty Shades?

Now, I ask you, what happens if you are a pre-published author, and someone in the Big Five thinks you should change your book to suit their formulas? Think of Amanda Hocking and Hugh Howey, who got their Big Five contracts precisely by proving they didn’t need them. Hocking and Howey would almost certainly still be “not-yet-published” if they had waited for the Big Five to accept them through the age-old traditional vetting system. Hocking and Howey didn’t meet the Big Five formulas, and (better yet!) they still don’t, contracts notwithstanding. 😈

2011:

The more this happens, the stronger the case will be for major traditional publishers to accept novels they would have rejected before. The old business model of waiting for the author to re-write a rejected manuscript over and over again will no longer work. This is when the wall of large traditional publishing house formulas will at first start to crack, then finally crumble under the increasing pressure of the marketplace’s realities. The large traditional publishing houses will have to evolve, or die alongside their old business models.

Hocking, Howey, E.L. James et al have backed the Big Five into a corner, and forced them to publish novels that would not have passed the traditional vetting system. In the case of Amanda Hocking, they were also forced to publish several works they had rejected previously. The Big Five still lack the intestinal fortitude and vision to break out of the “formula” pattern on their own, ensuring more cracks will permeate their walls. So far, they have only “evolved” when forced to, resorting to base tricks such as suckling on the revenue streams of Fifty Shades, just for a quick infusion of life support. The day will come, however, when the Big Five approach a best-selling author, and said author will want nothing to do with them, no matter how much money they offer.

Kristen Lamb: Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World