michelle.m.manus

Welcome back to another edition of What I’m Working On. Mostly guaranteed to come out sometime in the first half of every month, I talk about what writing projects I’m doing, editing steps, behind-the-scenes business parts of said writing, and probably whine about something. You have been warned.

As the title suggests, December has been the month of dreams meeting reality. I have probably mentioned before that I have a problematic tendency to try to do All The Things. Like if I decide to bake a cake from scratch there is a part of me whispering in the back of my mind, “Is it really baking from scratch if you didn’t go out and grow the wheat and grind it into flour and—” etctera, etcetera. So I know this about myself and have gotten better at not setting my sights on too high an unachievable thing, but every now and then I still overshoot.

I overshot with the whole audiobook thing. I did record the entire book. Since this was my first time doing it, I suspected, on going back to listen to it, that I would want to redo the first few chapters, and this was case. I loved how the last half of the book sounded, once I’d found my rhythm and character voices, but the first half would need to be re-recorded. I. . . delayed doing this. If you look up how long it takes to produce an audiobook, they will tell you generally anywhere between 3 to 5 hours per finished audiobook hour (this estimate includes things like retakes, editing, and engineering). It can be less if you’re really experienced, more if you’re really not.

The finished time for Siren’s Song was a little over ten hours. I would need to re-record about five hours, which doesn’t sound like a lot but there is setup, the fact that I record at home and don’t live in the quietest neighborhood, so sometimes when I have time to record, conditions are not ideal. I would then need to edit and engineer all of it, which I had already spent a lot of time doing on the initial chapters before I realized I’d need to re-record them.

Turns out I do not have time to work a full time job, write a book while editing another book (or two), do the formatting for the upcoming book that’s coming out, upkeep this site, record/edit/engineer an audiobook, AND care for an equine and spend time with my husband. Shocking, I know, but I’m me so I was convinced I could do it all. I had a fair idea of just how much time it was going to suck out of me to finish the audiobook, and my stress level was at epically high levels (I would just like to take this moment to thank my personal lord and savior Taylor Swift for releasing YET ANOTHER surprise album in 2020 and basically saving the last shreds of my sanity with her Evermore album).

Ahem, so anyway, I had to make a choice between releasing the number of books I wanted to release next year, or getting the audiobooks out. I chose to let the audiobooks go for now. I wasn’t getting wordcount in on new projects. I first decided to publish because I wanted to do more writing. For the hope that some day, this job can support itself and become my full time job, so I can write even more. It’s very difficult to make money in this business without a solid backlist of titles. Even then, it’s difficult. And I at least need the books to pay for themselves in terms of what I spend on editing and cover design, etc., or I can’t afford to keep doing this, much less continue to dream that one day it could be my full time career. Which means it’s more important to finish writing the Aspect and Guardian series than it is to record their audiobooks.

The perfectionist in me is still not happy. But I know I made the right call. I’m writing 2 to 3k a day on Valkyrie’s Call now, and I hadn’t realized how unhappy I was not having time to write until I got back into the groove. It helps, of course, that Random and Valkyrie are one of my favorite couples. They’ve been bouncing around in my head for a decade now, and I’m glad to finally tell their story. Random never fails to make me laugh, and when I need to soldier through something, I channel my inner Valkyrie.

If you’re an audiobook fan, I promise the audiobooks will eventually come out. But unless I magically get more time (i.e., win the lottery I don’t play), it’s probably not going to be until 2022. On the upside, without the audiobooks to worry about, Siren’s Song will likely come out much, much earlier than the slated release date of February 2021. It’s likely that Guardian of Chaos, the first in my contemporary fantasy series, will also come out much earlier than its currently-slated release date of June 2021. Which makes me very happy. I love my characters and can’t wait for you all to meet them.

So to sum up, I’m working to finish the first draft of Valkyrie’s Call, finish learning the ins and outs of formatting Siren’s Song for ebook and print distribution and. . .publish my first novel. Very exciting.

And that, more or less, is What I’m Working On.

Welcome back to another edition of What I’m Working On. Mostly guaranteed to come out sometime in the first half of every month, I talk about what writing projects I’m doing, editing steps, behind-the-scenes business parts of said writing, and probably whine about something. You have been warned.

So last month we escaped without me whining about anything. Allow me to make up for that lack now. Thus far, November has been the month of shattered plans. My carefully plotted writing agenda was… destroyed? Obliterated? Shredded into confetti-sized pieces, doused in gasoline, and set on fire?

Okay, you get the idea. 

It all revolves around getting the copy edit for Siren’s Song back. If you know anything about novel copy editing, you know that it primarily focuses on sentence-level grammar and style issues, and consistency throughout the novel, and so it shouldn’t really create a lot of new work for the author. I had planned to turn it around in a few days, working at a leisurely pace. But my copy editor, who may well be a saint, was kind enough to point out a couple of things that fall more under the scope of content editing. 

I may have mentioned I wrote the first incarnation of this book a LONG time ago, and that it has changed significantly over the years as I poked and prodded at it. When I was getting it ready for publication, I was mostly cleaning up small things, but I was nervous about putting it out there. I loved the story, but I cringed every time I read the first half of the novel, even though I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. My editor hit in three bullet points everything that I hated about the book, and made a couple suggestions that I knew would fix everything 

This is great, I told myself, you’ll have a much better book, I told myself. Though I was disappointed to have to break from my schedule of writing Valkyrie’s Call to spend more time on the first, I was also excited to FIX THINGS. I thought it would take me a day to fix the macro-level problems. And if I’d just made the teensy suggested fixes the editor mentioned, I probably could have done it in that time. But, as I said, this was a copy edit so the editor wasn’t going to suggest I rewrite half the book.

You guys. . . I rewrote half the book. Not even joking. We’re talking over 40K words and an absolutely godawful amount of smoothing transitions to get the chunks I was keeping to fit with the newly-written chunks. Those three bullet points had created a shining vision in my head of how the book could finally be exactly what I wanted, and I sank my teeth in and went for it. And I was so scared of being behind schedule—I was supposed to start the audio recording of it last Thursday—that I worked feverishly trying to get it done. I took time off my day job and worked on it fifteen hours a day five days in a row. No exaggeration. And I’m still not finished. Which, since it usually takes me three months to work a full length novel, shouldn’t surprise me, but I’d never felt more like a failure. First, for needing to do the rewrite at all, and then for not being able to magically make it happen overnight. 

Which is, of course, ridiculous, but there you have my brain. Add in the usual other life stressors and I sank down into a funk where I became convinced the entire novel was trash that no one would ever want to read, only now I HAD to publish it because otherwise I was out a lot of money I couldn’t afford to not recoup. 

Enter my best friend to the rescue. After bemoaning my fate and whining piteously about my need for validation she agreed to read the rewritten novel and has since told me she likes it. She is obviously biased in my favor but I choose to believe her because she probably wouldn’t lie to me. Friends don’t let friends publish bad books. Anyway, I love her and she will totally join the book’s acknowledgements page for sure. 

All of this means I have written practically nothing on Valkyrie’s Call. It’s currently 15K words of mostly unattached scenes and I’m working my way back from thinking that this is the end of the world (yes, I’m dramatic about my self-imposed deadlines, I know). BUT, I can say I’ve finally finished fixing the macro-level issues on Siren’s Song, so now I just have to read through the rest of it to change small trickle down problems from the things I changed in the beginning. I’m glad I made the decision to rewrite it, but if there is any justice in the universe I’ll never do anything like it again.

My projected work outline is. . . tentative. Extremely tentative. The audiobook recording takes next priority and starts tomorrow, and once Siren’s Song is finished I can go back to what I want to be doing right now, which is getting Random and Valkyrie together. (Hang in there Random, I promise it’ll all be okay!). I’d wanted to do my self edit on the second Guardian book this year, but I don’t know if I can reasonably expect to fit that in. My editing brain and my writing brain are very different beasts, and I don’t like to edit at the same time I’m creating an entire new book, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know in December. 

And that, more or less, is What I’m Working On.

Welcome to the first edition of What I’m Working On. Mostly guaranteed to come out sometime in the first half of every month, I’ll talk about what writing projects I’m doing, editing steps, behind-the-scenes business parts of said writing, and probably whine about something. You have been warned.

Writing: I finished up the Project I Wasn’t Supposed to Be Working On at the end of September, so October is for moving on to Aspect Society #2, Valkyrie’s Call. I was super nervous about this one for a number of reasons.

One, even though I recently did a major overhaul on the first book in the series, Siren’s Song, I actually wrote that book years ago, and I was worried I’d have trouble getting back into the world and getting the tone right.

Two, Valkyrie, being Valkyrie, is closed-lip about everything, which makes her a very difficult character to figure out and get right on the page. Fortunately, after rewriting the opening scene three times, she got annoyed with me and finally explained why she is the way she is. Things are going much more smoothly now.

Three, you guys I love Random so much, so I want to do him justice. Also, he’s in love with Valkyrie, so obviously he’s in for a rough time. Like, really rough. These guys do not get to HEA easily.

Anyways, I’m pleased to report that having started it, I’m unexpectedly excited about it. I project it will come in around 75k to 80k words on the first draft, and am hoping to have it finished by November. Realistically, we all know the book’s getting finished in December but hey, one has to have dreams.

Editing: I’m due to get Guardian of Chaos back from a beta reader in the next week, and need to give it a final obsessive going-over before it goes to the copy editor in late November. Siren’s Song is with the copy editor now, so there’s nothing more I can do for it at the moment.

The Business Side of Things: Erm, so, I have an obsessive tendency to try to do ALL THE THINGS. To explain my current situation, let me take you back four years to when I started the first ever job that required me to commute. I decided a commute meant that audiobooks were the thing to do. Despite being a lifelong reader and working in a bookstore for several years, I had never listened to audiobooks. (Okay, fine, I listened to Neil Gaiman when he narrated his own books because listening to Neil Gaiman talk is like having a gentle lullaby whispered in your ear, BUT I DIGRESS).

So I decided to start listening to audiobooks on my commute, and let me tell you, I hated them. Absolutely hated them. Then I talked to people who loved audiobooks and they were very clear on the fact that finding the correct narrator was key. I researched. I found a beloved narrator reading one of my favorite book series so I tried it. I still hated it. I hated the way she did the voices, everything. But I had paid thirty dollars for the damn thing so I was listening to it. Three chapters in a magical thing happened. I fell in love with the narration. Everything I had hated before was suddenly wonderful. I had just needed some time to adjust to having things read to me, and once I had, I discovered I did indeed like it.

That’s all good and well, you say, but what does this have to do with you now? Well, a year or so ago, before I embarked on the indie publishing journey, I was toying around with the idea of narrating audiobooks myself, because I suddenly liked audiobooks so much. That was a rabbit-hole plagued with too much work to go down at the time, but now that I’ve decided to publish my own books, I thought, why not narrate my own audiobooks?

In theory, I still agree with my decision to do so, and the setup is honestly not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, but like any new skill, there is a lot to learn, and it’s a lot of added pressure and scheduling to try and get it done so I can have a simultaneous audiobook/ebook/paperback release. There is especially a lot to learn on the technical side of things and I am, at heart, not a technical person. But all my equipment has finally arrived, so it’s time to record some test chapters and figure out how this works, so that in November I can go insane trying to record my first-ever entire book when Siren’s Song comes back from the copy editor.

And that, more or less, is What I’m Working On. Hey, I don’t think I even did any whining this time. What are the odds?