wheePub

I have always wanted to publish things. When we were in the Arctic I created books with an unbreakable but ungovernable Gestetner duplicator, the kind for which you cut a stencil with what looks like a dentist's tool, affix the stencil on a drum, apply far too much ink, and feed the paper, sheet by sheet with one hand while you revolve the drum to print through the stencil with the other.

Later, I was the editor of not one, but two monthly newspapers. Layout involved printing out the columns of text to appear in the paper, and placeholder spaces for the images, and then crawling around (and on) the layout sheets spread out on the floor with a glue-stick or other affixer and trying to get the right columns in the right places, and all parallel with each other. Then I would trundle the layout sheets off to the printer, where the staff would try not to sigh to loudly while correcting my sillier misteaks mistakes.

Boy, is it easier now.

I just published the first of a half dozen or so collections of my plays as an eBook. I wanted to see what was involved in creating such a book, and was not averse to sharing some of my plays with the reading public. I read a couple of online guides about eBook publishing and then tried my hand at it. The result is available on Kindle, Kobo, the Barnes & Noble store, and lotsa other places.

For those playing along at home, I created the cover using Canva. I generally write scripts using Celtx, but the standard script format is designed for an 8.5 x 11 page. I therefore had to blow away all the formatting Celtx provided in its export-to-PDF option by dropping the text of each play into a text editor (EditPad Pro), copying out of the text editor into Libre Office (or Open Office or Word), and providing some basic formatting that would read clearly on any mobile device.

Then I uploaded the document to create the eBook in Smashwords, which not only has lovely book-creation tools but also delivers the result to most eBook markets except Kindle.

After that I took the epub version of the book that Smashwords had created and uploaded it to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing to create a Kindle version. The link for the image above goes to the Canadian Kindle store, but you can find the book easily in Amazon Kindle for many nations.

No one step is too onerous. I spent the most time (aside from writing the plays in the first place, d'oh) reformatting the scripts to make them readable on screens of many sizes.

I have three more collections ready to go, and a fourth on the horizon. I won't belabor you with the construction details every time I publish a book, you'll be happy to know. But I will tell you as each book becomes available.

World-building

I am at the same time writing two plays, a couple of choose-your-own-adventure games, and another thing that may turn into a book...or nothing at all. I tend to launch into projects as early as I can in order to let the characters inform me about what happens in the story, rather than me telling them. I often have a hope about how the story will turn out--and often the characters educate me on the way, and the story ends differently, and much better, than the way I had at first hoped it would.

This morning a question came up on a games forum I follow about creating the "world" for a game. The writer was daunted by the amount of work that seemed to be required before you could start the first sentence of the first page of the actual thing you wanted to write. Here's my response (I'm posting it here so I can find it again when I need to remind myself):

You can write a first draft of a game without knowing much about your main character's physical world, world-view, opportunities or threats. But to go beyond first-draft level you need to discover and articulate the world. 

Knowing the world of the story keeps you honest as a writer: it leads you to write about things the main character would be concerned with, not what is on your authorial agenda, and it helps you keep things believable. If there's a pirate attack--how come? What forces them to become pirates? If the main character finds treasure, whose was it and who else is trying to find it? If there's a love interest, do the social rules of the world make it easier or harder for the main character to pursue that person?

If creating a world seems daunting, then go ahead and write the first draft of the game against a blank backdrop. If it seems like fun and you want to make it a richer game that's fun to play, you will then be motivated to explore and define the world.

I was writing about making games, as you can see. But I think the observation is true for any sort of creative writing.

Altogether too much fun

As you know, I do a lot of freelancing. I have enough work coming in that sometimes there is a bit more than I can handle, so on the oDesk job site I developed an agency of freelancers. There are five of us now, covering editing, graphic design, and voiceovers.

Partly for fun, and partly to show off what I can do using Moviestorm, I created this animation about our agency. I have had far too much fun (read: spent far too much time) on this, and so am releasing it into the world even though there are a couple of things I really, really should tweak just one more time. Or two more times.

The sun never sets

Was just reviewing the list of clients for whom I am writing these days, and decided to plot my editing empire on a map. The realm of Cottage 14 is in blue:

Makes it fun (harrowing fun, but fun just the same) to check the inbox first thing in the morning and see what new task has come in from Moscow or the United Arab Emirates.

Two kinds of writing

I am doing a lot of freelance editing these days, and many of my clients find me through a freelancing site called oDesk. I have worked with a bunch of freelance sites over the past decade or so, but am finding oDesk to be ahead of the pack in several ways: the jobs offered seem to match my skills pretty well, the contracting and payment processes are straightforward and--so far--I have not had a tiff with a client.

They let you add a link to a video in your profile, so I thought I would create one. I am not delighted with the technical quality, but the light glinting off my glasses at least partly conceals when I am reading my notes rather than looking into the camera.

The video is below. The burden of what I had to say is this:

Here's a thing I've learned about writing: it comes in two broad categories.

The smaller category is writing that calls attention to itself: if you're a playwright, a speechwriter, or maybe a marketing person, you sometimes want text that is tangy as lemons off the tree, words as rich as chocolate, phrases the reader wants to read again just for the delight of it.

This writing is a lot of fun to put together, but unless you do it right it can get a little tiresome. Think of a meal of nothing but chocolate...

And the larger category is writing that's a vehicle for the important information you want to deliver. You have a point to make, a process to explain, a product to describe. For this you want writing so clear and efficient that the reader hardly even notices it.

I'm good at both kinds of writing, either editing and improving what you'd already got, or creating new material to do what you need.

And, of course, I'm very good at the essentials that both kinds of writing require: correct grammar, no punctuation or spelling mistakes, the right word in the right place in the sentence.

Let me know about your writing project. I can help make it clearer, more effective, and more worthy of what you want to tell people.

My profile on oDesk is here. Drop by if you need some writing or editing help.

On the very first page

I've been slowly adding samples of a whole bunch of my short plays to this blog, and in the course of that I have had the chance of pondering what makes a good first page.

Before the play is produced, you want a good first page or the director or producer reading it will never get to the second page. So from the point of view of text, the first page of a script has to:

• be technically solid. The play has to be in a format the theater world recognizes and accepts; and of course there have to be no typos or grammatical face-plants to make the reader ask herself whether she wants to continue with this thing even one.more.page.
• cast a spell. George Bernard Shaw prefaced some of his plays with technical notes or "directions" that ran into the hundreds of words and described all sorts of stuff that the characters did or experienced before they ever got to the stage. You cannot do that these days. Even GBS could not do that were he writing in these days. You have to start with a vision (a woman tied to a chair; a man in a bathrobe in a public place; two people joined around the forehead by a long rope) to get the reader to say, "Oh?" and possibly, "Oh!"
• pose a problem. If the play starts with two people sitting on a couch, waiting for the pizza guy and bickering over the remote, and nothing beyond that happens by the bottom of the first page, I the reader will probably go on to the next play in the pile. I can get bickering at home, the potential director says, why should I have to read about it at work?
• create an opening. While producers and directors want plays that are solid and pretty sure to "work", they also want to see where they can fit it. Where can they make this their production of your play? I try to do this by providing just enough stage directions ("A Ferris wheel in an amusement park") to excite the "Oh, how would I do that?" response, without telling them how I would.

Ah, but the first page of the play also has to work its magic when it gets produced. The audience in the theater doesn't care that the script is well-formatted. The audience wants to be magic-carpeted away by the theater experience, and the script has to make that possible starting from the very first page.

So, in addition to the bullets above, the first page of the script has to:

• tune the audience's ear, so they know how to listen in this particular theater to this particular play. In a full-length musical you get an overture to tune the ear and set the tone; with a short play you get maybe three lines of dialog and MAYBE one sound effect before the audience starts to give up on listening and starts feeling around for candies wrapped in crackly cellophane..
• catch the eye. The play can start with just an actor standing in a pool of light, but that actor had better be pretty interesting to look at or do something notable very soon, or the audience will think something went wrong with the rest of the lights.
• show us the main character(s). In a longer work the main character might not even show up for a couple of scenes, to build up tension. In a short play, you don't have time for such tricks.

In Tom Stoppard's "The Real Inspector Hound", two theater critics are watching a truly awful who-dunnit. The lights come up and--nothing happens. And nothing happens. One critic says, hopefully, "It's a pause." The other says, "You can't start with a pause! If you want my opinion there's total panic back there."

If you don't have a good first page, your audience will have the latter reaction every time.

A lot of the plays listed on my Stage plays page have links to their first pages. Take a look: let me know what has you looking for page 2 and what has you running for the exits.