How I started writing

... see, really, that title should read 'why I started writing it down'.

I've told myself stories for as long as I can remember. It was and is a great way to check out of boring situations. However, since voices in the head are never a good diagnosis, I kept the source of my entertainment to myself right through my childhood.

It took until my teens, in an all-girls' boarding school (yes, it was called The Mount ... laugh now, get it all out of your system), before I finally cracked and admitted to someone what my private sanity-saver was. Her response, which made me blink, was: "Why don't you write any of this stuff down?"

I'm pretty sure I gave her a funny look. Old people wrote books. I'd met several self-professed authors, and they were nearly as tedious as the other types of artistes that periodically showed up in my parents' circle. That, or they wrote serious things like Fibreglass Boats that you could use as a very successful self-defense weapon. It really hadn't seriously occurred to me.

I sat on this idea, thought about it, groused about it, threw up roadblocks around it, and generally chewed the cud for a month or so. Being fourteen, I suspect I threw some drama in the mix. I hated loathed was crap at was only moderately good at writing essays. A book was a hell of a lot longer than a 300-word essay.

I respected this friend's opinion. I don't generally respect any many of the opinions I'm offered, so on the rare occasions someone whose opinion I do respect offers me advice, I think about it. This is by no means a guarantee I'll follow it, but it will be taken on board.

This painful and long-drawn-out thought process eventually led to me surreptitiously scribbling odds and ends into a little notebook, about the size of my hand, that I kept on my person or under my pillow. It really was that small. It was that small because a page I could cover with one hand wasn't nearly as intimidating to fill as an A4 (letter size, for my North American readers) sheet.

It took me possibly as much as a year to graduate to actual A4 sheets for my writing. As this was in 1994 / 1995, when I say writing I really do mean writing, with a fountain pen. It took several more years before computer access was sufficiently, well, accessible that I started typing my books up from the longhand versions, and several years after that before storage solutions were reliable enough that I didn't keep losing (big) pieces to buggered floppy disks or corrupted files from creaky old school machines. A lot of my editing process in those early days occurred when I was (again) typing up a lost file from the hardcopy and my fingers wandered.

Graduating to A4 was a biggie. It meant, among other things, that I could write in my incredibly slow and almost interminable classes, all of which felt as if they were geared to the hard of thinking, and it would look as if I were taking notes. That was huge. For the first time in my formal education, I wasn't bored out of my tiny mind in my classes. I wrote five novels in five years (and, yes, thank you, passed my exams pretty credibly).

Were these novels any good? Hell no, they were awful. I owe an annoyingly huge debt of gratitude to the small circle of friends who long-sufferingly read them, made suggestions, let me read their stuff in exchange, made some more suggestions, and at no point ran away screaming.

However, having been written, and re-written, and edited, and ignored for a couple of years, and then re-written again after a lot more practice ... those early disasters stories formed the bones of both of the novels I have published today. And so far, the worst reader review I've had has been four stars.

Writing, on Twitter (note the comma)

'Cause, yeah, commas do useful sh*t. So do asterisks, or as one of the people I've worked with calls them: 'Those weird star things over the 8 key?'

I could've said 'writing on Twitter'. I do that too. But I wanted to write about writing, on Twitter, as in people who write and Tweet about it.

After following and being followed for a few years now, I've begun to realise what interests me in a Twitter feed, and in a Twitter biography, and look for folks to follow who share interests, or at least interesting stuff. Do I only follow authors, or only get followed by authors? Of course not. There are a lot of book folks, but there are psychologists, politicians, network security experts, security and law-enforcement types, porn actors, pilots ... Twitter's a great place to meet people.

Is everyone going to have the ability to provide useful advice for writers in 140 characters? (Insert JRR Martin joke about killing all 140 characters here .. sigh). Nope. Is everyone going to be a great blogger? Probably also ... yeah, nope.

Since publishing my sci-fi novel, Through the Hostage, (see what I did there, in terms of shameless plugging?) in February, I've become one of those writers who Tweets. Oddly enough, publishing a book has expanded my Twitter following massively. The flux of book-related tweets has probably pissed off my non-writing friends massively, too. Happily anyone still willing to admit they know me socially after five minutes is also virtually immune to my more annoying habits.

I confess I rather expected that I'd sell a few more books, and gain a few less Twitter followers. Probably everyone does.

Not that I'm complaining. I've found Twitter to be an awesome resource as an indie author. You can find cover artists, cover designers (no, not always one and the same), editors (for them as can afford them), reviewers, and any number of writers, tweeting about what they do.

Some of them (let's start with @NatRusso, or @FionaQuinnBooks) tweet incredibly useful blog posts and #writetips on a diverse array of topics.

Some people just do be on Twitter to tell you that they've written a book. Valid. If it turns out to be a good one, I may even retweet it. We're all going to do some shameless plugging of our creative genius at some point ... Others tell you some useful stuff, retweet publicity tweets (cultivate these folks too), and and some people focus on current news (yep, useful as well. If you're a sci-fi writer and you're not following @BadAstronomer, you may just be dead to me).

Also, there are the hashtags, the speakeasies of Twitter, where you can see what people you've never heard of are saying on topics that interest you. #writetip, #horriblewritetip, #amediting and #amwriting are all fantastic spots to belly up to the bar and listen in to the conversations. Not to mention #scifi, #fantasy and #IARTG. (You'll adapt the genre hashtags depending on what you write, yes? Good.)

You can learn a lot from Tweeps (or, as I occasionally can't resist calling us, Twits).

And here's the key bit. You may not think that most of what you're reading is at all to do with writing, editing, or, crucially, how to tell if you slipped a disc in your PoV. I put it to you that actually, the bits of Twitter you think are completely irrelevant to creating the next De Re Publica may be the most useful things of all. I didn't learn how to describe what drowning feels like by going to a writers' convention. Unfortunately, I learnt that one by damn nearly doing it. Likewise, the guy you follow because he sometimes comes up with awesome one-liners? One day your protagonist is going to run into someone really like that guy. Life and people are what you can find on Twitter, and what you can contribute back to Twitter. And, hey, guess what - if you're in any kind of fiction genre ... sooner or later it's about people. Even if those people happen to live at ten atmospheres in the utter darkness of a sea of liquid methane.

Amazon Author Central - Undercover to El Dorado

Yo, authors! I was kidding about El Dorado. This is much better hidden.

There's something provided by Amazon. It's free, it's useful, and it's very well hidden if you don't have its exact coordinates. It's Amazon Author Central.


Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.fr

Amazon.de

Amazon.co.jp

(See, I cheated. I gave you the direct links.)

It seems to be conceived as a hybrid of the very familiar Kindle Direct Bookshelf, where you can track sales, etc., and a personal profile page for you, the author, as well as a spot to track customer reviews.

Whether it will eventually expand to other Amazon country sites, maybe supplant the Bookshelf altogether, possibly not even Amazon knows.

However, as anyone who's spent a few minutes wandering around the books section of Amazon scoping out the competition knows, there's customer reviews, luvverly little boosts that they are, and then some people have an entirely different section, called Editorial Reviews.

This is one of the fun things that it seems you can only access from Author Central. Essentially, Amazon doesn't allow professional book reviewing sites to publish reviews to your book site. However, you are allowed and encouraged to take your pro review and copy it into your Editorial Reviews area.

From there, you click on the book you want to add an editorial review to, and go into the Editorial Reviews tab below the book image. You can add (a) review(s) there, as well as product descriptions, some about the author blurb, and a number of other tidbits. All good cess to get people to stop and buy your genius.

Your Author Page is another nice extra that comes to those who persist. You can add a photo, a bio, your Twitter feed, your blog and quite a lot of other stuff.

Have fun - love and wiggles, the Indie Publishing Hacker.