AM I LAZY OR JUST TOTALLY UNMOTIVATED?

 

Image courtesy of Shannon Wheeler.

Is there a fine line between unmotivated and lazy, or does one just lead to the other?  Honestly, I don't know.  I do know that when I have something to do or undertake a project, I go at it full pelt.  Having something to do motivates me.  Finding something to do, however, now that I'm retired and don't have to work, is difficult.  At first, I'd try to find useful things to do to fill my day and, not finding enough, had guilt trips.  What is the point of living if you're not contributing in some way?

This line of thinking became rather tiresome and just led to anxiety as well as to the mindset of digging my heels in and not wanting to do anything, because I was pressuring myself too much.  I've pressured myself all my life and I'm fed up with it.  When am I allowed to do absolutely nothing without guilt?  I know that if I did manage to, I would go stir crazy with boredom anyway.

I will not consider taking up cleaning my house to Good Housekeeping standards to justify my existence.  That is mind numbing stuff.  I do the basics, I'm tidy and hygienic but that is all.  Dust and I, for instance, barely acknowledge one another.  One day when my six-year-old grand-daughter was visiting, she flung herself on our loungeroom ottoman.  To my absolute amazement, a cloud of dust rose up around her.  Her mother was witness to this fantastic sight and so I resolved to vacuum it without further ado.  Every now and then, I also put my glasses on when I am indoors and see the layers of dust on my furniture and force myself to wipe every surface.  It always surprises me when the dust comes back.  It's funny stuff.  You just don't really see it in the air, but it's there.

It occurs to me that it is difficult to do absolutely nothing when you are at home as it is seen as lazy as opposed to being relaxed.  In order to get away with it, one must really be on vacation or on a trip.  This way, sitting around reading a book all day or watching television is condoned.  After all, you're on holiday.  I don't really have the funds for either lately so I must do these things at home, where I will be judged.  Vacations and trips can also prove taxing if you are travelling and must move from one place to the other and take organized tours.  These require effort.  It's an effort that I'm absolutely prepared to take if it's an excursion to the Greek Isles or the Pyramids in Egypt, but not if it's bus trips to places of total disinterest domestically during which people might decide to have singalongs between towns.

I have written about boredom in other blogs and also about hobbies.  In truth, the only thing that really interests me is writing and, sometimes reading, if I can find a good book.  The latter is also difficult.  I have taken to borrowing books from the library again in the last six months. I have read many good books in my time but finding one lately is becoming a quest.  I have read the newly released novels of two well-known crime writers and been appalled.  It is as if they are now being ghost written.  I know this can happen, as I've spoken to a woman who worked in publishing.  I was expressing to her my surprise and disbelief that a particular author managed to bring out a new novel every year in time for Christmas.  I was also amazed that he hadn't died of old age.  She told me that publishers often employed ghost writers to fill in the novels of best-selling authors after the authors themselves wrote the whole plot line.  The ghost writers copy the author's style and fill out the manuscript.

No wonder then, that it's hard for new authors to get a break in the industry, especially as publishers must compete with the internet and online publishing.  Unfortunately, although that resource allows new authors to publish, we miss out on the marketing and advertising that publishers take on for an author.  It is expensive and that is why we want to be accepted by them in the first place.

When I go into my local library, the newly released novels will have little stamps on them like, "Staff's top picks", meaning the library staff.  Most of them also boast, "New York Time's Bestseller".  When I come to that last one now, I go straight past the book.  As sure as it has that label, I will hate it.  I can't believe the dross I have picked up in these last six months.  I have read in this time a couple of new, young female authors, who are both listed in their blurbs as having done creative writing courses at elite universities.  I could tell within the first chapters they had undertaken writing courses as their writing was formulaic.

This isn't sour grapes.  Good luck to them for being published, but I don't want to read what they write.  It was also immature and fit for Cosmopolitan Magazine fiction.  I have, happily, found one author whom I really like.  Kate Atkinson is an English author who can go off on so many tangents, with so many well drawn characters, that I completely lose myself.  I've read five of hers in a row now and need a little break.  I'm also running out of her novels.  A novelist needs to have a unique voice, not one gained from doing a writing course.  There is no template for a novel.  The rule basically is that it needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end with a resolution.  I'm sure some novelists have played with these rules, but then, it depends how artfully they do it.

I've been told by a literary agent, who I phoned for advice, that my latest novel is, 'too long'.  My thoughts are, 'Well, how long is a piece of string?  As long as it needs to be."   She said, "No, it's the publishing costs".   Apparently, that wasn't a consideration with Tolstoy's, "War and Peace", or Margaret Mitchell's, "Gone with the Wind".  Going over one hundred thousand words is not a good idea these days.  Also, she told me that one needs a social media presence and followers.  At this point, I decided to stick with Amazon Publishing.  I'd already reduced the manuscript by thirty thousand words, and I wasn't reducing it anymore.

There is a book I recommend reading regarding Artificial Intelligence and writing and it is, "The Well of Lost Plots" by Jasper Fforde published in 2003.  It is fantasy fiction but very relevant today where AI is writing essays and business letters and the like for people.  In "The Well of Lost Plots", authors are at risk of losing their jobs because a computer program will take over writing novels and the people of BookWorld, a world inhabited by characters from fiction, must fight to save their own lives.  That's a very loose explanation of the plot, however, the novel is very clever and, I thought at the time of reading, very far-sighted.

It is, therefore, also hard to be motivated when I see writing that I personally find uninspiring being published because it will sell easily.  There is also a lot of dross on the Amazon Book site but, because of its sheer size, there are also many good books.  I'm sure many people read the books on Amazon with covers showing men with six pack abdomens and adoring women draped around them, but there are all sorts of novels, including the classics.  Don't always go by the star ratings.  I think people get paid to pump up ratings and some very odd novels have five stars.  You just need the patience to peruse the millions of books on the site and sort the wheat from the chaff.

I now return to my quest to motivate myself into useful occupation or enjoy the sheer abundance, and lack of it, of choice in retirement.

END

DISAPPEARING IN PLAIN SIGHT: PUTTING YOUR NOVEL ON THE INTERNET.

 

It's hard being a writer these days because anyone can self-publish on the Internet and so the chances of standing out has diminished monumentally.  On one hand the Internet is a good thing for those seeking an outlet to express themselves (isn't everyone?), but it makes it difficult for a serious writer to gain a following.

Okay, so what makes me think I'm a serious writer?  I am and I've trolled through Amazon's Kindle site (on which I am also published) and, while some books are good, many are not.  As an exercise, one day I scrolled through the section under which one of my novels should appear and, after 74 pages of not coming across it, was forced to do a search.  Those that appear first have a star rating of four.  That means they've had reviews and there are pages of novels with ratings.  To be able to leave a book review on Amazon, you need to have purchased at least $50.00 worth of books.  I'm not sure if that's US or AUD dollars but most people read novels on Kindle Select, where you pay a yearly subscription of about $14.00 and can download as many books as you want.  That means they can't leave a rating so how do these novels manage to get one?  I'll get to that later.

A good third of the novels in the Romance genre have men with ripped torsos on the cover, no heads mind you, just torsos with a woman embracing the lower body.  The titles, too, boggle the imagination, "My Alien Lover" being one example, and there are three books by different authors bearing that same title.  Give them their due, none of them have a ripped torso on the cover.  Now I haven't read any of them and can't comment on the standard of writing but this shows that not even the title you choose is likely to be unique.  It's not like a username where, when you join an internet site, there can be no duplicates.  No indeed, if your story is titled "The Greatest Story Ever Told", it may be one among many, thus nullifying the superlative.

So why have I published two novels on the Amazon site?  Well, long story made short, I wrote my first novel thirty years ago in three very large exercise books.  I then put it aside and undertook a degree.  After that, while seeking employment, I transcribed my almost illegible handwriting and saved the file on Word.  I then reread the manuscript numerous times and edited it.  I have to say that doing an Arts degree helped with that as I am very voluble.  My father, a former journalist, also read and edited it.  Finally I sent three chapters off to a literary agent in Sydney, Australia.

My parents were staying with me on a visit when I received a positive reply from the agency.  Dad was over the moon.  The agency asked for the rest of the manuscript.  Shortly after I flew to Sydney from Brisbane where I lived, and handed it to them.  Some weeks went by and they asked me to rewrite a short section in the middle of the manuscript. I agreed wholeheartedly as that section was too long.  A month or two later I returned to Sydney with the altered manuscript and presented it to the woman who had shown interest.  There was just something in her manner this time that worried me.  Later I received a letter saying they didn't have sufficient faith in the story and, also, that they had been taken over by another agency that wasn't accepting new authors.  So close and yet so far.  It had been a long established literary agency, Sydney's best known, and my book turns up and the agency is bought out.

I then sent the manuscript overseas, I sent it everywhere.  It traveled more than Gulliver.  One day I phoned the University of Queensland Press.  It had published Peter Carey's "Oscar and Lucinda", but they were no longer publishing new authors.  I then phoned a woman at the same University who taught Creative Writing.  She was most helpful but bemoaned the fact that she couldn't even get her own students published anymore.

I don't know when the Internet started to have an impact on publishing houses but things were getting harder.  The nineties were still happening as this was going on and I think, although it was early days for the Internet, its spectre was hanging over the publishing houses.  Eventually I became tired of chasing a runaway train and got on with living and making one any way I could.  I was then nearing fifty, no one had wanted to employ me as a fresh, mature age graduate when I was forty and eventually I took any administration jobs that were going and part-time work was the only kind I managed to get.

I began another novel and quite liked it but the impetus wasn't there knowing how hard it was to get published.  Meantime I leased a taxi for my partner of many years and one day, when all the other work dried up, I took the bit between my teeth and got in and drove it and what a wonderful source of stories I discovered.  People's lives unfurled before me, information from so many sources filled my head.  I didn't get a story line from them but I did learn interesting facts with which to fill out my characters lives, but not for the novel I'd started to write.  I'd had a brainstorm and found my new novel and, no, it wasn't based on any of my customers tales.  It came from my head.  I'd needed a story that was different and I had it.

Waiting in a taxi gives you a lot of time to write and, in two years, I had finished my book and, again, it was handwritten.  I transcribed it of course, edited it and then followed all the instructions that literary agents and publishers put on the Internet as guidelines for submitting your work.  I thank the Internet for one thing: no more hard copy mailing of manuscripts.  Now writers could submit by email but there seemed to be so many more literary agents and the readers in the agencies all had specialties and wouldn't take this but would take that or were not accepting more work at this stage.

Added to this they all have different guidelines for submission.  Writing a novel is easy compared to the rigamarole you have to go to following their rules.  They want different length synopses, different chapters and often you have to change the manuscript you wrote in MS Word to a PDF file.  Added to all this they want you to sell your idea to them in less than so many words.  I felt very confident about this one but selling something just isn't that easy.

Let's be honest about what writers are.  They are not salespeople or they would be in a shop selling something or in an advertising agency writing copy.  Writers are usually sensitive souls with artistic natures.  The advice you are given when trying to find a way to have your manuscript accepted is to join a writers group and network.  Let me be quite clear, if I liked groups or networking I wouldn't be a writer.  I much prefer talking to myself than other writers.  Also, writers are competitive.  Do you think you're going to get lashings of praise from people who want their novel published before yours is?  Not bloody likely unless you look like a film goddess and the other writers are bespectacled and pimpled nerds.

I resist all forms of interaction with people in order to publish my novel, except over the phone.  When I began to phone literary agents one was a very experienced, nay old, female agent who asked me how many words my manuscript was.  I told her and she fairly shrieked down the line, "Too long."  My instinct was to ask, "How long is a piece of string?" but I didn't.

Instead I asked her what is considered too long.  Her reply was that novels should only be 70,000 to 100,000 words.  Well I was gobsmacked.  In all my school years reading Austen, Hardy, Bronte, Hemingway et al, my English teachers not once said that a novel could be too long.  I mean, how did "Gone With the Wind" get published if this is the case?

I asked her why.  "Publishing costs," she said and you need to have an Internet presence, a blog, good marketing and awards help.  Well how in hell are you going to get awards if you can't get published?  She even told me that if a writer had all that and she took their work to a publisher, that wasn't necessarily enough.

After speaking to her I did shorten my manuscript by thirty thousand words and that took me three edits, but there I stopped.  To do more would not have been true to the story, however, it did improve the work but it was still above her allowed number of words.

What galls me most is when I go to a bookstore and see a well known writer's umpteenth novel or a sports star's autobiography in the newly released best sellers list.  Don't you see the irony in the latter?  A ghost written 'autobiography' no doubt.  Publishers want a sure thing and that's how they get it.  One of my taxi conversations was with a woman who had worked in public relations to whom I mentioned a certain very well known author who still managed to churn out one book per year in his twilight years, always on the bookshop shelves for Christmas.  This author had once worked in advertising and she knew of him.  She told me his novels are now mostly ghost written by other writers.  He writes a plot sketch and another writer will use his style, which they have studied, to fill it out.  I'm not sure if I became a well known author I would allow other people to 'write' my books for me, no matter for how much money.  It just seems like cheating.

Let me return to the star rating of novels on Amazon.  I looked further into this and discovered that there are people out there in Internet land who have the ability to rate books on that site and, for a fee, will read your manuscript and rate it on the site.  Obviously they have bought enough books on the site and are probably writers themselves.  My guess is that this is more lucrative than selling their own work on it.

I have also tried using advertising on Amazon to promote my novels.  One month I spent a mere AU$100.00 as an exercise and did get a surge of readers but they all used Kindle Select, the subscription site, and I only made royalties by pages read and, while most readers did read the novels in their entirety, the royalties didn't add up to much.  I made around $2.50 in total and I'd had about fifty readers as I recall.  I've made about $3.00 selling one hard copy book on the site but few people buy hard copies.  To get a star rating would no doubt help but I'm not paying someone because what I spend would no doubt cancel out what I earn.

A dear friend read my latest novel and genuinely said she'd give it four stars but she couldn't as she hadn't spent the prerequisite $50.00 on Amazon books.  I was still enormously grateful that she took the trouble to read it.  I don't know about the experience of other writers but my friends and family resist reading my novels as if they'd catch Covid from doing so.  At least my son read my first one when he was eighteen years old and really liked it.  I was delighted that he bothered to read it to the end.

I would love to get a rating from someone who is able to give one on the Amazon site, nevertheless, I am deeply suspicious of these ratings especially given some of the titles that receive four stars.  I will never find out how it works as the Internet is a large and mysterious entity and, while I do love it for some reasons, life was often simpler without it.

END.