When It's A Little Scary

This weekend I uploaded my first novel in ebook format. It's actually not the first novel I've ever wrote, but it is the first one that I shared with people. And by people, I mean random strangers on the internet who just happened to come across it, read it, and like it. I wrote the first draft in 2006, and then six years later, I pulled it out, edited it and stuck it on the Internet (complete with a few pesky typos). Now... I'm sharing it with not only those first readers, but with people I know. People who might look at me with raised eyebrows and ask: "Whoa, you wrote this crap? Thanks for polluting American literature!"

There's a different level of scariness to this step of self exposure. People you know can be dishonest in order to spare your feelings (thus lying to your face). People you know may be brutally honest. People you know may be disappointed. There's nothing worse that disappointing someone that I know, for whatever reason. So... yeah, this blog post scares me. I feel paranoid and anxious. I don't know why I'm getting so worked up. It's not that I'll ever know if someone in my life purchases the book (or doesn't). That's not really how book sales work. I'm more scared of the people who are like: "HEY, I bought your book!" Instead of imagining that they may really like it, I see them slamming their Nook/Kindle/iPad/etc. shut with a yell of: "What a bunch of poorly written sh*$!"

This will likely happen, at least for a few.

I can't please everyone, but wish that I could.

There's also a level of me thinking: "This book is who I am, what I like to do, the kind of writer I will likely be forever. What if people I care about crap over that.?" But at this point in my life, I'm trying to challeng myself to do things that are a little scary.

With that being said... KILLING MEMORIES (under my pen name: Tatiana Moore) is now available on Kindle and Smashwords.

If you buy it (.99 cents)... don't tell me. Thanks for any and all support!

Fourteen Novels

By the end of the semester (if I decide to take the challenge and not work with old material) I should have the plot outlines for fourteen different novels inspired by the following published works:The Great Gatsby, The Remains of the Day, Things Fall Apart, My Antonia, The English Patient, The Age of Innocence, Love in the Time of Cholera, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Tristram Shandy, Animal Dreams, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Annie John. All of this is for my novel class. We're reading sections of each book (first chapters, middle chapters, last chapters, tension moments, character introductions, etc.) It's difficult... to say the least, but I'm sorta looking forward to brainstorming ideas that I might use at a later time. I sorta wish that the class was more focused on writing a novel, but I'm sure this will help in the end. So, tonight I write my The Remains of the Day inspired novel outline and final chapter. We'll see how it goes.

The rest of the semester looks promising. I will be workshopped twice next week--first in fiction and then in memoir. Double whammie. I'm not sure what to expect. I'm incredibly nervous about fiction because of the content of my story. It's pretty out there and possibly could be frowned at since one of the main characters is a chimpanzee. I have this daydream where everyone just shrugs and says, "You want me to take this seriously? It's a monkey." Or rip it up behind my back as some folks tend to do from time to time when something doesn't interest them. Oh well, we'll see. I'm still scared. I'm not nervous about memoir--it is what it is. Damn, I should have the same attitude in regard to my fiction.

So far, the semester is going well. Hopefully I can keep up with all the work.

Cool Readership Stats

So, I was making some edits on my FictionPress.com profile and noticed that they have a new feature called "Readership Traffic". Curious, I clicked on it and it pulled up the August 2008 stats for my last completed novel (finished back in June). According to this new feature, in the past 12 days my story has had 5,394 hits and 1,424 visitors (which averages to about 118 visitors a day).

How FictionPress explains it:

Hit: the number of times a browser/visitor has accessed a story/chapter. Visitor: the number of unique hits, hits from unique IP addresses (Internet users), over a 24 hour period. For example, a reader named Jane accessing/reading 5 chapters of a story equals to 5 hits and 1 visitor. If Jane refreshes a chapter page 100 times, the system will record 100 hits, but only 1 visitor. If Jane came back the next day, more than 24 hours later, and perform the same task, the system would record 1 additional visitor. In summary, the visitor stat is the most important and accurate measure of reader traffic. Hits can be duplicates from the same reader.

It's a pretty cool feature actually because they also break it down by country.

Here's my country list: USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Singapore (the majority of the visitors came from these first five countries), India, New Zealand, Malaysia, Philippines, Poland, Germany, Iceland, Hong Kong, Finland, Ireland, Jamaica, China, Czech Revar, Chile, Slovenia, Pakistan, Estonia, Netherlands, Mexico, UAE, Brazil, Romania, Dominica, France, Yemen, Belgium, Norway, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Guam, Turkey, Portugal, Argentina, Taiwan, Italy, Thailand, Spain, and Sweden, Israel, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.

I'm not really sure how it all works, I know that many countries listed (especially toward the end of the list) only contributed 1-2 hits or one visitors. But still, that's pretty cool that someone in Guam happened to find my story, at least one time. Doesn't mean they read it though. None of these particular stats mean people actually read, although many probably did. Some may skim and see a bunch of trash and decide not to read, who knows. The feature breaks down chapter stats too, so according to this each of my 21 chapters averaged about 200 visitors in August (in 12 days).

Seems a little incredible, but the story was up for a Some Kind of Wonderful Award (the story did win too, btw), so maybe that's where this influx came from. It's a contemporary romance, I suppose, or shall maybe I should call it "women's fiction". I don't know how to place it. It's fluff... nothing serious, something for you to -- hopefully -- be entertained. For my program I'll be writing in a more literary style, but I plan to try to publish both styles. Anyway, read if you like, but be warned... it's a first draft and full of errors of all sorts.

Competition aside, the story itself is on the favorite lists of 454 FictionPress readers/writers. That's a lot of people.

I wonder if I could use any of this information in query letters to agents? Maybe I should work on editing this story because it's a rough draft now and needs lots of work.

Please share your opinion.

Finished...

I just finished the first-draft of novel #7.

It has 20 chapters and 146,377 words--not the longest one at all, but definitely long. And definitely better than the previous six. I posted the first chapter in March--so, it's taken me three months and one week to write it. That's pretty quick. I hadn't realized that.

I've had a lot of time to write the past 1.5 years--that time will dwindle come September, I'm sure.

Sometimes I can't believe that I--a girl who never finished stories--have completed the first drafts of seven novels. I credit FictionPress and excited readers that leave comments after each posted chapter. They fuel my writing. I'm very grateful.

I don't have any new story ideas, which is shocking. Maybe now I can focus on editing/publishing. No more excuses.