A. Steve. Zimm.

Hi, I’m Andrew. I’m addicted to the inner edi­tor. Another was of say­ing this is that I’m a per­fec­tion­ist. Unfor­tu­nately, I have no sobri­ety. As I thought about it, the way that makes the most sense in mea­sur­ing sobri­ety is by the num­ber of day I’m able to get work done. I don’t know, maybe it makes bet­ter sense to mea­sure anti­so­bri­ety which for me is two weeks. Please don’t applaud, for I’m talk­ing anti­so­bri­ety, the time in which there is no progress on my work.

There is a mis­con­cep­tion about per­fec­tion­ism. Every­one who boasts about it is fooled by this mis­con­cep­tion. Per­fec­tion­ism is not where you do every­thing per­fect which by the way nobody does. Rather per­fec­tion­ism is an obses­sion or com­pul­sive need for per­fec­tion that par­a­lyzes our abil­ity to be productive.

That’s what I’m deal­ing with right now. This is the iron cur­tain cur­rently stand­ing in my way to get some work done on my beloved sec­ond novel, the true mile­stone of real authors. I would like to thank the pod­cast writ­ing excuses episode 5.29 (no, I’m endors­ing anything) of remind­ing me of what the prob­lem actu­ally is. I need to remem­ber that the first draft is about dis­cov­er­ing the story, who my char­ac­ters are, and just over­all fig­ur­ing out what it is I’m doing with it.

In my case, is Mon­ster Inside Him about extra ter­res­tri­als or is it about descen­dants of Frankenstein’s mon­ster? That’s two com­pletely dif­fer­ent sto­ries. Does it make sense for me to get caught up in per­fect­ing the struc­ture of my sen­tences when I’m still fig­ur­ing out macro details on that high of a level?

There­fore, for the sake of com­plet­ing an actual first draft, per­haps I will peri­od­i­cally report on how much sobri­ety I have from the inner edi­tor or in other words how lit­tle anti­so­bri­ety I have from get actual work done.

After all, things must be done in order. Step one, get some­thing writ­ten (go ahead and throw up on the page for it will be cleaned up later).

Step two, is what writ­ing excuses episode 5.29 calls triage edit­ing which is where you are mak­ing sense of what you up chucked (that’s the expla­na­tion in my own words con­tin­u­ing with the throw­ing up anal­ogy). What goes, what stays, what needs to be added, or rearranged in order for the story you fig­ured out in step one to make sense?

Then basi­cally you zero in on smaller and smaller issues. I don’t know why I’m say­ing ‘you’ when I’m actu­ally talk­ing about myself.

I always liked the anal­ogy of the painter that places his paint­ing above his fire­place and steps back and looks at it. He notices a prob­lem with it that is jar­ring. So he takes it back down and fixes it. He puts it back up above his fire­place and notices another jar­ring prob­lem. He keeps repeat­ing this process. What he finds is by tak­ing care of the big­ger issues, it is more appar­ent how to deal with the smaller ones. What he fixes is more and more refined until, he gets to the point where he is satisfied.

Of course, in the case of an author, the work is not ready to be pub­lishes until oth­ers, rather it be those ama­teur or pro­fes­sional (I would sub­mit both is pre­ferrable, but take opin­ions of first with greater grain of salt) cri­tique and edit the work. But again, I must not, I absolute can­not for­get that I’m only on step one of the process, so inner edi­tor, why don’t you hit the road.

I have my work cut out for me, because I’m tak­ing the novel Mon­ster Inside Him in an entirely dif­fer­ent direc­tion. It is unfor­tu­nate that I wrote so much of it prior to mak­ing this decision.

The fun­da­men­tal seed of the idea that was planted in my child­hood as me and my cousin enter­tained the con­cept is still going to be intact in the story. This con­cept is that of a part human, part mon­ster crea­ture hid­ing in exile and run­ning from his past as the story begins.

The direc­tion that I orig­i­nally took this story is where this crea­ture was a for­mer agent of Divi­sion X, a secret orga­ni­za­tion more pow­er­ful than the gov­ern­ments on the earth whose pur­pose is to keep peace with extra ter­res­tri­als that would oth­er­wise destroy the human race if we didn’t sub­mit to their will.

How­ever, after read­ing Mary Shelly’s Franken­stein, a whole new con­cept of what my story could be sprung up as the gears of my head turned. It’s funny, because the intent of read­ing her book was to see what influ­ence from it could enhance my cur­rent con­cept. What hap­pened instead was that it took on a life of its own like Frankenstein’s monster.

Here’s the new con­cept: “Mary Shelly’s Franken­stein was a true story, but the mon­ster con­tin­ued to live where the story ends. He had off­spring. In present day, they are now an under­ground civ­i­liza­tion known as the brethren. Bruce Rogers is one of these crea­tures hid­ing in exile from the others.”

A lot of the orig­i­nal story, how­ever, will be incor­po­rated into this new con­cept mod­i­fied to make sense of course. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

The achieve­ment of writ­ing and pub­lish­ing through self pub­lish­ing (teaser: this is the first thing I’d do dif­fer­ently and plan on doing dif­fer­ently) my first book Drae­gon Taymerx is a mile­stone in my career no doubt. I wouldn’t trade the expe­ri­ence includ­ing the pride of hav­ing the first baby and all.

How­ever, there’s the good old cliché that hind­sight is 20/20.  Any­one who hasn’t been through refin­ers fire vital to the matu­rity of an author them­selves could never pos­si­bly imag­ine all that I have learned. The painful part of all this is that now I want to fin­ish my sec­ond book and release it way more than I ever wanted to do so with my first book.

This is due to the fact that I’ve seen the light–a vision clear as day. I now under­stand the path of what’s required to be suc­cess­ful. I feel it in my bones. I have no doubt that my future’s so bright, well, let’s dis­pense with all the cliches.

What I’ve learned came through var­i­ous sources: books that I received from my great­est moral support–my par­ents, writ­ing work­shops, a pod­cast called writ­ing excuses, and last but most def­i­nitely far from being the least is harsh crit­i­cism on my writing.

The funny thing is after my awak­en­ing, the next time I began read­ing a novel, some­thing inside of me was itch­ing for a red pen. I coined a new say­ing that seem to be inher­ently true, “Every writer an editor.”

Any­ways, I haven’t come to the point yet, have I? What would I do dif­fer­ently? The first thing that I hinted at above is the fact that there really isn’t a short­cut. Self pub­lish­ing is not the way to go.

There is, of course, excep­tions. Maybe you’re some big cheese like Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, Martha Stew­ard, Oprah, etc. Or maybe you’re a great expert on mar­ket­ing, so you know how to best sell your self pub­lished work. Maybe your tar­get­ing a niche like a par­ent who wants to pub­lish the mag­nif­i­cent work of their autis­tic child, so your part­ner­ing with an orga­ni­za­tion that would be appro­pri­ate for that sort of thing. Or maybe none of this mat­ters, because your not think­ing big in the first place, but rather your just cre­at­ing a sen­ti­men­tal fam­ily gem to be passed down the generations.

So I admit self pub­lish­ing is for some, but not every­one. The point is, it’s not for me. It was tempt­ing to make this post a bash against the com­pany I self pub­lished Drae­gon Taymerx through, but I’ll refrain.

Sec­ondly, is some­thing I find so impor­tant now I’ll repeat it thrice–revision, revi­sion, revi­sion. Don’t get me wrong, I did quite a bit of revi­sion on Drae­gon Taymerx, but I’ve come to learn it wasn’t enough.

How does one make it enough? I would sub­mit that the key to this is real­iz­ing the read­ers of your work fall into two cat­e­gories: those who read it to cri­tique it and every­body else. To put it bluntly, when any­one of your friends or fam­ily request to read your work before it is pub­lished, tell to keep their grimy fin­gers away and get lost. It’ll do you no ser­vice to have them read it. You, rather, need read­ers of cat­e­gory one. You need those who aren’t afraid to hurt your feel­ing to give you the truth you don’t want to hear. Your baby is butt-ugly.

I said I would refrain from bash­ing the com­pany I did Drae­gon Taymerx through, but I need to say some­thing. They were not cat­e­gory one read­ers. Did they tell me I was wrong to have an epic fan­tasy be only around 65,000 words? No! Did they tell me not to start it with a com­pletely dull expo­si­tion for a pro­logue? No! Did they tell me I’m telling to much and that I need more show­ing? No! Is all these gap­ing scars stick­ing out to me now like a sore thumb with all I now under­stand of writ­ing craft? Oh yeah, you bet­ter believe it.

My new plan is a multi-tiered approach to edit­ing. First step, write the book. Sec­ond step, revise, revise, revise. Third step, ama­teur cri­tique with revi­sions based on what I agree from that. I’m plan­ning on using this social cri­tique site called cri­tique­cir­cle to do this step. Forth step, the pol­ish­ing spit shine with a pro­fes­sional free­lance edi­tor. I found some­one awe­some for step four. Unfor­tu­nately, I’m still on step one were I still need to fin­ish writ­ing my work.

Of course, after all is said and done, it is not all said and done. After all, when suc­cess­fully sub­mit­ting the man­u­script to a pub­lisher, it’ll be in the hands of their edi­tors to tell you more stuff to fix.

Thus we see, I have some real work cut out for me when it comes to pub­lish­ing num­ber two, the mile­stone of the true cham­pi­ons. The jour­ney will be both dread­ful and won­der­ful at the same time.

I decided to dis­con­tinue the ser­vice I used pre­vi­ously to host an author web­site and try some­thing fresh and new in a Word­Press based envi­ron­ment. I couldn’t be more pleased with the results. I believe this one with the cus­tomiza­tion options avail­able to me made my site turn out to be much more attrac­tive than with the other one.

The fea­tures are espe­cially nice with it being hosted with Write Click Host­ing in whom I found through the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Writ­ing Con­fer­ence email cor­re­spon­dence. I’m by no means gain­ing any­thing from men­tion­ing this, other than the oppor­tu­nity to express my appreciation.

The funny this is that I had a débâ­cle pre­vi­ously with Word­Press that I blamed them for and in my rage deter­mined to never use their ser­vice again, but I’m back and embrac­ing it.

I now real­ize that Word­Press wasn’t the one to blame for what hap­pened, but rather those who setup the ser­vice for me as part of their social media pack­age deal. It was setup with licens­ing that was entirely dys­func­tional for the pur­pose of the blog, which was, of course, to pro­mote my work as an author.

Those who shall not be named were kinda incom­pe­tent come to think of it, doing all these screwy things I had to fix on the social net­work sites they setup for me. They did stuff like past­ing the syn­op­sis of my book in a place more appro­pri­ate for about me info. On the Word­Press blog they setup, there was a Flickr wid­get with a pic­ture of my book cover and another one of my author photo. This looked really strange in an embar­rass­ing way.

The point is I think they are the more appro­pri­ate place to place the blame for when the débâ­cle I referred to above hap­pened. Now, as I’m return­ing to Word­Press through Write Click Host­ing, it’s an eye opener of how cus­tomiz­able Word­Press actu­ally is. The com­plex­ity of it is mak­ing my head spin and my eyes go cross-eyed.

Now, how­ever, it looks like I’ll be man­ag­ing two blogs. For the one I have at Red­room, I’ll stick with the Red­room top­ics of the week. This one will be for every­thing else.