Saturday, August 3, 2019

The Adventure Begins

Finally Act III. Expect it will take two months but hoping to trim that.

I have the ready references copied over into the Scrivener file; map, pictures of the first location, weather for the day. Even a photo reference for a new character who is getting introduced here.

But now to draft. My first sketch for the chapter, I did a thousand words on the Desecration of the Herms. I'm keeping that for various pacing and other structural reasons, but cutting it down to under 800.

What I didn't realize until I hit this is that the previous 50,000 words were about my protagonist saying, "I'm no hero." Now she's accepted the role. So this; the character in the next chapters, is the character I will be writing with. Possibly for several books, if it all works out.

And I don't know how it works on the page. I know the character fairly well by this point. I am not sure how it actually works in a scene-by-scene basis.

* * *

And I'm not going to be able to prioritize writing over all else. The dust in my abode has reached critical levels and I will have to stop and spend some time cleaning, paying bills, making medical appointments, working out, and so forth. Sigh.

* * *

I did discover some possible new writer's resources. I'm on the fence about Quora. It is very good for general background and to pull possibly useful "bits" out of as you get a lot of people with local knowledge (and local opinions) speaking up. Hearing from a native born Athenian who is living in Athens about what HE thinks about street food or immigration is just wonderful.

But questions don't really get answered. I dropped one about the legal implications of jumping in a Venetian Canal. Actually, I found the answer through general search; yes, you can be fined even for falling in. The Venetians are really starting to put their foot down, and running, swimming, loud music, camping, even standing in the middle of Piazza San Marco eating a slice is considerably frowned upon and can result in a serious fine.

Anyhow.

There's a new outliner software I am interested in enough to at least watch the video on if not take a trial run. And another piece of software that exists just to game (or at least to explain the game) of KDP algorithms.

Amazon is doing something rather insane these days. It does make money, at least in the short term, so of course they are doing it. But what happens now is books are dropped in a black hole after thirty days. They stop counting analytics. They also stop connecting them in the "people who also read..." links. So not only are they harder to find, the sales numbers no longer count in your total ranking.

This has caused an entire sub-industry of people (often working together in teams under a house name) to factory-produce books once every thirty days. Books that are also similar enough to trigger the various recommendation systems. Authors who aren't for various reasons desirous of pursuing this approach have been experimenting with serialization, re-issue, packaging, etc.

(As a for instance, if you wrote three books, then thirty days following the last one issued a combined volume that bundles them all together, that counts as a new book and kicks your numbers up.)

Not anything that I want to play, but I am tempted to drop the ninety bucks on Rocket and see what it thinks are current and appropriate key words and meta tags.

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