Arriving at a creative crossroads...

I have to admit it. I'm at something of a crossroads.

I have been working to promote my children's books, written, self-published and sold with all proceeds going to support the renovation of a local historical landmark, in every way possible.

With my sister and the rest of our team of volunteers, I've done everything the writers' magazines and websites have advised:

• We've made public appearances;
• We've worked hard to stir up interest in the media (with moderate success);
• We've created a website, a Facebook site, and a Twitter account for the books and our main character;
• I personally have been on the web as much as possible, trying to promote my own brand;
• I am writing regularly for at least four different blogs, including this one
• We've produced promotional mugs and fridge magnets, advertising posters and free bookmarks promoting the stories;
• We've designed and created an interesting point-of-sale display to help sell books in the various shops that offer them to the public; and
• Now, finally, we've produced an audio book of the stories in the first book.

Frankly, I don't know what more I can do.

The response has been very positive in a lot of ways. To our surprise, the first volume of stories sold more than 1,200 copies very quickly.

We were on a high. We were riding a wave. The media was interested, people were coming out to our public appearances. It was all good.

Sales of the second and third volumes, however, were not quite as overwhelming. Sure, selling 500 copies of each one is pretty good. Outstanding, to be honest, if you figure we don't have a publisher with a promotions arm to support us and we're only for sale at a small number of outlets in a limited geographic area.

But I just don't know where to go from here. How do we push this project to the next level?

How do we break out of the geographic limitations we're facing to reach a wider audience? How do we get national media interested? How do we reach readers who don't even know our books exist?

Or do I simply publish the fourth book (a Christmas novella, coming this November), promote it as best I can, and then move on to other projects?

After all, I've got an idea for a comic novel that is just itching to get out of my brain and onto the page. Should I call it a day on the children's story project and move on?

The trap of self-editing...

I don't mind self-publishing -- my Abigail Massey at McAdam Station stories for children are self-published and they've done very well; this blog is self-published, come to think of it.

What concerns me is not so much the self-publishing as the self-editing.

(maybe I'll write about the overuse of underlining and italics to create emphasis someday... but not today [which might lead to an entry on the overuse of parentheses {uh oh... I'm trapped...}]).

Self-editing is, in my opinion, one of the greatest chasms into which a writer might fall (including the placement of a preposition at the end of a sentence, which I narrowly avoided there [only to get myself caught up in another one of these parentheses spirals]).

Case in point. I finished the draft of my Abigail Massey Christmas novella in December of last year and, over the course of January, went over it at least five times, revising, rewriting and editing. I consider myself to be pretty good with grammar and punctuation and all that so I felt pretty good about editing my own work.

Fine. So, at the end of January, I sent the revised and refined (might I say "perfected") manuscript off to the graphic designer with whom I work (my sister, Lynn, who is as fine a designer as I've ever met [and I'd say that even if she weren't my sister {uh oh, more brackets}]). I was confident that it was in finished and final form.

Enter the trap.

Lynn did her usual amazing work over the next three months, coming up with an absolutely gorgeous cover design, an equal amazing title page design and a beautifully laid out, easy to read book. Wonderful.

Now it's mid-April and Lynn sends the design back to me for review. I'm blown away by the beauty of it. Who cares about the writing? This thing will sell itself.

I want to be a careful, detail-oriented publisher, however (did I mention that, when you self-publish, you are writer, editor AND publisher?) so I figure I should read the entire novella again, just to make sure no sentences got cut off in the design process, no paragraphs got shuffled, no pages went missing.

Crash and burn. Lynn made few, if any, mistakes, to be sure. Her work was practically perfect: I think I found three paras that weren't properly indented and one extra period at the end of a sentence. (and I'm not sure those weren't mistakes in my own draft). Other than that, perfect.

But, who the heck edited this thing? Who was responsible for making sure the writing flowed smoothly, the diction was appropriate and the story consistent? Whoever it was did a terrible job.

Despite my very careful revisions throughout December and January, I still found in April that I had some significant revising and editing to do.

For example, I still had characters going back in time: at one point early in the story Abigail looks at her watch and sees that it's 9:50 a.m.; five paragraphs later, she squeals "Oh Golly, it's half-past nine..."

How does an editor miss that kind of thing?

And how does he miss the fact that the author used the word "up" three times in a single sentence and then, one paragraph later, "mirror" three times in two short lines?

Luckily for me, the three months Lynn spent working on the book gave me time to gain a little objectivity and perspective on the writing. Time, plus the fact that it was now presented to me in a completely different layout and format, allowed me the chance to distance myself from the story and see it for what was truly on the page, not for what I had intended to write.

I ended up sending Lynn about 40 edits that should have been caught in the original review and editing process.

But that is the trap of trying to be your own editor: you can't see your work clearly unless and until you put some time (three months or more) and some distance (provided through reading it in a new format) between the author and the written piece.

With time and distance, you regain the ability to read what is actually on the page, to see the problems afresh and to lose your own egotistical love for your own writing.

Self-publish all you want. But self-edit with extreme care and caution.

The elements required for writing funny...

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about how to go about writing humour. Or "writing funny".

(Which, itself, sounds funny. Writing funny. "Hey, you're writing funny." What does that mean? That I'm holding my pen with my nose? That I'm hitting the keys on the keyboard with my toes? That my cursive script looks odd on the paper?)

Now, I consider myself to be a pretty funny guy in person. I like to believe that I have a quick wit and use language effectively in the back-and-forth of casual conversation.

In fact, I have often thought about trying my hand at stand-up comedy. But then I realise that I'd probably be better at the improvised-conversation-with-the-audience part than I would be with the prepared material.

And that worries me. It is a very different thing to be funny in prepared material, in writing, than it is to be funny in day-to-day life. Writing, by definition, takes time. And there is a time lag between when you write and when your reader reads. There is no interaction, no back and forth, no reading off your reader's reaction and moving off into a new (and with luck funny) direction.

Without the free-flow of a conversation, I am not so confident that I can be consistently funny.

On the other hand, I write a monthly blog for my work on Privacy and I pride myself on how funny it is. People actually watch our workplace's website for the next entry on that blog and, when it gets posted each month, I can hear people laughing out loud as they read it in their cubicles.

So maybe I can be funny in writing. At least in short bursts. But can I be funny over the course of an entire novel? Hmmmm....

I am planning to write a comic novel and I have already charted out the main points of the plot and developed most of the primary characters. It's a good start. But I find myself putting off actually sitting down to write because of my fear that I cannot be funny for that extended period of time... in writing.

I think I need to be in the right mood. I generally dash off a blog post on the spur of the moment when the mood strikes me. I have to be happy, and excited, and energetic and stuff like that.

To write an entire comic novel, I think I'm going to have to be all those things. And perhaps a little drunk. In fact, I'm already planning to spend evenings this spring and summer out in my back yard, with a tall G&T and my netbook, writing funny. I think I could be successful under those circumstances.