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A Bridge To The Quiet Planet: A Few Thoughts On The Final Run

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

All right, A Bridge To The Quiet Planet is out.  Done.  So it was a bit later than I expected, and the final run on it gave me food for thought.

WATCH SWITCHING BETWEEN SOFTWARE: I found some annoying artifacts from moving from one piece of software to another – there can be subtle differences.   I had to do some annoying search and replaces.

THINK OVER STYLISTIC CHOICES EARLY AND FOLLOW UP: You may make certain formatting choices – like bolding certain things (business cards or telepathy), certain uses of quotes, etc.  Make sure you’re consistent.  I found ONE case of not following my own formatting, and I nearly missed it.

DO A SERIOUS READ-THROUGH AND CORRECTION EARLY: I wish I did this.  Take, say, an early draft, and edit it as if it’s for print.  This will help you find your mistakes, issues, common problems, and get plenty of distracting tiny errors out of the way – so you can edit.

KEEP A LIST OF ERRORS YOU FIND OR WORRY ABOUT: This helped me a lot.  As I did my final readthroughs, I kept a list of suspicious things or choices I want to review.  This let me do some amazing fine editing easy because then I could globally search.

SEARCH AND REPLACE IS YOUR FRIEND IF YOU DO IT STEP BY STEP: Global search and replace can mess up your document (as we all know).  However going slow, reviewing EACH possible replacement (or doing it by hand for each found) let’s you avoid problems.  Also it acts as a second review!

YOU CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH: At some point you can’t edit forever.  So don’t.  Learn your limits.  In fact . . .

GO EBOOK FIRST: This is a trick I evolved from a friend.  Do an ebook first, and distribute it.  It gives you immediate feedback, then you can update the ebook quickly.  Go print a bit later (like I’m doing it 4-6 weeks later).

KEEP A “LIVE” DOCUMENT: A big advantage of going ebook first is feedback.  So I keep a “Live” document I’m always editing as a core, representative document.  That will become the print book – but if I find errors I modify all 3 documents (ebook, Print, Live) for later.

So lots of lessons to share.  I’m certain I’ll have more to share – I think I need to make a kind of writing checklist sometime!

Steven Savage

History Will Judge, But We Do Anyway

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

My friend Serdar had a very insightful post on how we compare our  creative work to others.  He realize’s it’s a bit of a fools game:

My work can only really be measured against my other work. It can be compared to other work, and I guess you can draw lessons about what it might lack or where it might excel, but those lessons only really help to shape the directions you choose to take for your own present or future work.

We can compare works all we want.  Indeed, we should as it’s educational, but ultimately all we can do is learn by contrast.  If we’re not careful, we’ll stress ourselves out racing against other authors – and those aren’t the people who have to compete against to get better.

The person you’re ultimately racing against – or pacing yourself against – is you.  You are not other writers, and you can never directly know them or their limits or abilities.  What you can do is know yourself so you can improve and grow.

Writing is challenging and complex enough as it is without making yourself miserable with comparisons that will yield little insight.

That doesn’t mean you won’t worry about your work’s success, or its meaning, or how people take it.  That brings something else to mind – history is going to judge you, and is going to no matter what.  You can’t be 100% sure you’ll succeed, or be popular, or even be understood.  You merely do your best.

Now what if you’re really sure you want your work to be noticed?  You want to attract the eye of history?  Fine, good, but . . .

. . . it doesn’t exactly matter if your writing is good in that case.  Let’s be honest, writing “quality” has a subjective element to it.  A story may be poorly written – but also timely and what people need.  A story may be brilliant – and ignored because its ahead of or behind it’s time.

So if you want to be noticed, make history, then write well, using yourself as the yardstick . . .

. . . but develop the self-promotional and marketing skills needed to get the attention you want.

Just remember they’re not the same.  In fact, maybe you should be judging your marketing skills the same way as your writing by just getting better with you as the yardstick . . .

Steven Savage

A Bridge To The Quiet Planet Is Out!

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

It’s out – A Bridge To The Quiet Planet, my somewhat sarcastic techno-fantasy tale of people living in a post-post-apocalyptic world of magic, gods, and technology.  With the world stable, the worst thing you could do is mess it up . . .

. . . and our protagonists manage to put themselves into deep danger of doing that.

You can find the eBook at Amazon right now, and I’m planning to do other formats later.  Print will probably come in a month to month and a half (experimenting with proper formatting and the holidays keep me busy)

So hang on, and join over-organized sorceress Marigold Rel-Domau, enthusiastic field technic Scintilla Ferr-Orbil, and the Reverend Beacon Rindle on their adventures.

Steven Savage