IT’S SATURDAY…

Posted on June 26, 2021 by charliemoore

It’s Saturday and I wish I had the day off. I have a TON of things I could be getting done today. Or at least a ton of things I could be working on. Things I WANT to be working on.

Lately I’ve been going back to the old shorts and updating them. I have a new cover on ICONS TO ASHES, and a new cover and product description on PLAYGROUND OF THE GODS (the story formerly known as Cuneiforms). I’ve also been working on new covers for the Angel Hill shorts CARLOTTA VALDEZ and FLAGPOLE SITTA.

That wasn’t actually part of the plan for this week, but inspiration struck and I had to follow it through. And I’m glad I did because I’m REALLY pleased with what I have coming for those two stories.

But the part I’m having the most trouble with, and the part I wish I had today off to work on for 8 hours straight, is the product description for PLAYGROUND. I’ve got it. I know I’ve got it, I’m very happy with 75% of the description. But there’s just this one sentence I can’t nail down.

I’ve been through half a dozen versions and none of them are right. I’m so close, but that perfect last few words keeps eluding me.

Hell, maybe working today is what I need, something to get my mind on something else and let my subconscious work it out. It’s worked many times in the past.

Then again, I’d really just rather go get back into bed with Kara. I’m still tired and she’s cuddly.

ALMOST!

Posted on June 18, 2021 by charliemoore

Well, I THOUGHT I had the updated ICONS TO ASHES done, ready, and published. Then I got to work today and thought, “You know, that text really needs a shadow under it…”

So I came home today and did that and now I have to wait AGAIN for the processing to be done. And the print cover … the text might be placed just a TAD too far to the right. If so, that’s gonna take even more work to fix. But I want it right and perfect, so it’s work I will do in service of the book.

Meanwhile I’m also revamping, retitling and re-covering an old story previously called “Cuneiforms”. Now it’s called “Playground of the Gods” and this will be it’s cover:

AND A DEADLINE IS SET

Posted on May 24, 2021 by charliemoore

Okay, I had to set a deadline for myself, otherwise I would never have got President’s Day DONE and published.

I seriously feel I could tinker with and edit and revise this story for the next year and not feel bad about it. But that way lies the death of the work.

Believe it or not, you can OVER-edit a story.

So, my deadline is set. BY Memorial Day—no later—maybe even sooner, I will hit publish on the next Holiday Horror story.

I added a few lines today to help disguise a certain character’s motivation, and I’m gonna show it to Kara and get her opinion, and I’m SO very close to finalizing the text on the cover. God, I can’t believe how purposeful I’m being with every detail on this one. But I really believe in this story, I think it’s that good.

Hopefully I’m right.

TUESDAY UPDATES

Posted on May 11, 2021 by charliemoore

See? I tell myself I’m going to make this a regular part of my writing day and I manage, AT BEST, every other day. And I’m cool with every other day; I don’t feel I have important enough things to say every day. But now I’ve missed the last THREE days. But I do have things to announce today.

One, I’ve got what I think is the final cover for “President’s Day” as well as a 5th draft at 24,028 words. I’ve got the first few edits for “Invasion Agents #13”, and hope to have a rough version of that cover soon.

I FINALLY updated my Amazon author bio. I haven’t touched that thing since I put my first book on Amazon in, what, 2012? It was WAY outdated, mentioning my most recent anthology appearances which were recent in 2012, but since I haven’t submitted to an anthology since then, aren’t so recent anymore. I was also able, finally, to add Kara to my bio. I really love that part.

And on Sunday I published a new short story to Amazon. Not a NEW story, it’s actually about 10 years old, and this isn’t the first time it’s been published. “In the Presence of Loneliness” used to be included at the back of THE THIRD FLOOR but I took it out years ago and made it an exclusive available only on Instafreebie, which then became Prolific Works. But now it’s back on Amazon as an exclusive, enrolled in their KDP Select program, which means anyone with an Amazon Prime account can borrow it for FREE. So you should totally do that. Go borrow it and then read it. It’s like 16 pages. Go do it now:

After a bitter breakup, Tom is trying to start over, this time on his own. Except the house he’s moved into isn’t exactly empty. This Amazon exclusive is set after the events of my best-selling novel THE THIRD FLOOR, and sets up the events of the upcoming sequel.

DON’T FORGET TO TIP YOUR SERVER

Posted on May 5, 2021 by charliemoore

Good Lord, I’ve been doing some mad edits. An insane amount of edits. You might even say a PLETHORA of edits. And thank God for them, because they are working to make “President’s Day” into the story I always knew it could be.

I want to thank all of my beta readers, even the ones who haven’t got back to me yet, for taking the time to read this new story for me, in most cases before it’s even in its final form, when it’s still a little rough around the edges and some of the sentences are clunky as all hell.

I owe you guys huge.

One in particular, Brenda … I’ve spent the last 3 days working my way through the incredible amount of work she’s done for this story to make my words shine. Only one more day to go on her edits, and then I take another look at the overall flow. I’m very psyched to see this story in its final draft version and to share it with the world.

COVER STORY

Posted on April 29, 2021 by charliemoore

The current dilemma is in coming up with a cover idea for my upcoming publication, “President’s Day”, the next story in my Holiday Horrors series.

The inspiration for this series was the slasher movies of the 80s that I grew up on, FRIDAY THE 13^th, HALLOWEEN, APRIL FOOL’S DAY, etc. I wanted to go down the calendar and write a slasher story for every holiday there was. So far I’ve written stories for New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Groundhog Day, Ash Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, and now the next in line according to the 2013 calendar I’ve been using (when I started publishing these stories): President’s Day.

The story is one of my favorites I’ve written and sums up, I think, perfectly the spirit of the Holiday Horror stories. But now I need to come up with a cover idea for it, and that sucks. My first thought for the cover was perfect. It summed up the story in a singe image and was one of those cases of a picture being worth a thousand words. I was very excited to see how the cover turned out with that image. And then I realized that, while it is the perfect image for this story, it also spoils the entire plot, including the identity of the killer.

Well, that’s not gonna work…

I had another idea that centered around images of President’s Day sales everyone has, but the more I looked into those, the more sure I was they were stupid and didn’t even pretend to lend themselves to horror imagery.

And there I was at an impasse.

Because, really, that first image was so perfect, anything else I could possibly come up with afterward is going to be weak and, in my heart, I’ll know it’s not as good.

And then a new inspiration struck. The idea for this series came from those old slasher movies I loved as a kid. And because the very idea of a slasher story taking place on President’s Day of all days is such a ridiculous notion that, in my opinion, works so very well in this story, I didn’t think I was going to find the cover that properly summed up the mood of this story without reaching back to those old 80s covers.

And while I don’t actually HAVE the cover just yet, I know which direction I’m leaning now and this is going to make putting my ideas into words that I can then hand over to my cover designer who is, more and more often my 21-year-old daughter (see the “Valentine’s Day” cover), all the easier. Finally I can give her something to work with. I’ll pass them over to her today at lunch.

That’s a weight off my shoulders and one more thing off my incredibly long and convoluted to-do list.

Welcome Back…

Posted on April 23, 2021 by charliemoore

Hey. Long time no see. Man, I haven’t posted here in forever. And I don’t think I’ve really said anything of import on this version of the website at all. I used to blog almost daily, when I was writing first thing in the morning before work, I would wrap up the morning with a quick recap of the work I’d done that day. I didn’t give specifics or story details or anything, but I would tease out a few things sometimes with pictures. For example, if I mentioned a roller coaster in the story, I would post a picture of a roller coaster and say, “Today I wrote about:”

I don’t know why I stopped doing that.

Then for a while I was wrapping up each day with a motivational post, and eventually I collected those in my book Doing it Write.

For a very long time, though, I haven’t bothered to come on here and write about what I’ve been writing. Most days, by the time I stopped writing, I only did so because time was up and I had to start getting ready for work. Now that I’m writing after work, I still haven’t bothered because by the time I’m done writing for the day, it’s almost time for my wife, Kara, to come home from work and I like to be downstairs to meet her when she gets here, so I would have to cut short the story-related work that day, new words or editing, to write a blog post about what I’ve been working on. Or I could just keep adding new words and/or editing. Which is what I’ve been choosing to do with that time.

But today, even though I spent the day editing the first draft of the upcoming 13^th issue of my super hero comic book in prose, Invasion Agents, I did find a stopping point that made sense and I decided to get on here and say a few words.

I read recently that the best way for a writer to build an audience is to blog regularly. I honestly don’t know how true that is, with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, I think there are a ton of easier ways to connect with your audience. But I do have a website and that website does have a blog page and I know when I see a blog that hasn’t been posted to in a year, I just assume the writer is dead or no longer writing and since I’m neither of those things, I really should make more of an effort to be visible here, especially since I’m not on Facebook, my Twitter is occasional at best and my Instagram is devoted mostly to what comics I’m reading, what records I’m listening to, and pictures of Kara on our weekly dinner dates.

So. What I’m currently working on is editing. I’m editing, like I said, the first draft of the 13^th issue of this supposedly-monthly series (year one was monthly, but I didn’t get anything else written that year and that is unacceptable, so this time, as I work on year two, I’m going to keep to as regular a schedule as I can, but not at the cost of getting anything else written) while waiting for the beta readers to finish with my latest Holiday Horror short story, “President’s Day”, which, at 24,000 words, isn’t so short.

Man, if you grew up on 80s slasher movies like I did, you’re going to LOVE this story. More on that later.

Kara will be home soon, and I missed her today, so I’m going down to see her. We’ll catch up more later.

–CDM.

EDITING–BUT WHY???

Posted on December 22, 2019 by charliemoore

What’s the most fun part of writing? For me, it’s the editing. I know a lot of writers hate that stage, some refuse to even do it. They’ll finish the first draft, MAYBE read it over one more time to make sure everything’s spelled correctly, and out into the world it goes.

I call those people writers. The people who take the time to EDIT their work, change things, take out the bits that don’t work, emphasize the bits that do, and generally work the story into a tight knot of tension and release, I call those people Writers.

One of the most important parts of editing is the taking out of things that don’t work or that don’t contribute to the story, and a huge part of that process is taking out the pretty bits.

We all do it, we write that certain turn of phrase, that metaphor, that line of description and we think, “Man, I didn’t even know I was capable of coming up with something like that!”

We’ve all done it, and it’s got to go.

Faulkner said “In writing, you must kill all your darlings,” but he’s not the only one.

Samuel Johnson said, “Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage that you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

Arthur Quiller-Couch said, “If you require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–wholeheartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.”

And French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette said, “Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”

Why do we do this? More importantly, why MUST we do this? Because they don’t add anything. A lot of the time, they don’t even fit. Be honest without yourself and re-read the story, or the section of the story, without that pretty bit in there. I bet the story makes just as much sense, gets to the point a lot quicker without it, and you didn’t even notice the absence. Now admit the only reason you wanted to keep it is because your ego said it was so much better than what you normally write, you wanted everyone to see how clever you were with words.

Those flowery parts have to go, they only serve to distract the reader, without adding anything at all to the plot, and anything that distracts the reader from the plot is death to the story overall. The reader knows how clever and talented you are, that’s why they’re reading your story.

You don’t need to buy their affection with baubles that sparkle. You want a reader to like and trust you even more? Don’t waste their time. Tell the story you need to tell, tell it as succinctly as you can and let them get back to their life. That is your only job.

THIS POST WAS CROSS-POSTED AT WWW.MIDWESTCREATIVITYCOACHING.COM