Category Archives: Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little

Writing with Lemons: Cheaper than a Therapist

We’ve all heard the tired old saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!” Many of us have heard the much better version from Portal 2, “When life hands you lemons, burn life’s house down!” The message of the first saying is clear: work with what you’ve got. The message of the second is, like so many things, more fun in theory than in practice.

The truth is that most people reading this blog would probably like to spend more time writing. The trouble is that other things, things which are not writing, keep getting in the way. Work, food preparation, family time, video games, root canals, repelling boarding parties, getting your car worked on, mowing the lawn, fulfilling ancient prophecies and exercise are just some of the potential distractions that keep you from your wordcount potential.

I can’t help with any of those things. What I am trying to help you with are the days where you’ve got the time but not the will. Mostly, I’ve found that lack of willpower points either to lack of energy or too much stress. In today’s increasingly specific blog post, I’ll discuss how to write through the daily stresses that accumulate and hamper you by turning their energy, aikido-like, against them.

There’s a well-known therapeutic benefit to writing out your problems, as though we can only unburden ourselves of something painful when we are certain we can’t ever forget about it. What that says about human psychology I don’t know, and there’s nothing revolutionary or innovative about this idea, but it can be so easy to forget that it bears reminding. Because while lots of people write out journals or diaries to put their stresses down on paper and get them out of their head, if you happen to write fiction there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too.

The answer is something I’m sure you’ve all heard before: map your real-world problems onto the pages of your stories. Now, it’s a little more complicated than that. Obviously I can’t put the bureaucratic stress I feel every time I have to order IT supplies at my day job into my second world YA fantasy. But if you strip away the specifics and dig down to the root cause of the stress, in my example the primal reaction to the sense of helplessness I feel whenever a powerful entity or person imposes arbitrary rules that make my life harder, there’s plenty of stuff to work with there.

You can come at this any number of ways. Maybe you’re trying to quit smoking and having trouble, so you project the same struggles onto your protagonist. The mere act of transferring the burden to another person’s shoulders, even a pretend person, can be therapeutic and make you feel as though you are less alone in your struggle.

The bottom line is that stress doesn’t have to be a block on the path to finishing your story. If you’re willing to dig into it a bit, you can even leverage quality character beats from your own real-world problems. Best of all, you know they’ll come across as authentic, because you are living them!

We all know what life is like. Some days it feels like the lemons just won’t stop. And writing your problems into your stories will not, sadly, make them go away. But sharing your real burden with your imaginary friends can help a surprising amount. Maybe they’ll overcome these obstacles and give you the courage to do the same. Or maybe they won’t and will give you the courage to accept that not every battle needs to be won.

 

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

 

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned In Indy-garten

UnwillingSouls_FictoriansOkay, so that’s not really true. You’ll never run out of stuff to learn as a writer, whether in the traditional or independent realms. I just thought it was a clever title. I apologize if it made you roll your eyes.

Despite my exaggeration, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying I learned as much about the publishing process this year as I ever have, maybe in all the years before put together. When you publish a book yourself, and you’re trying to do it properly, you have to.

I could probably write ten posts on this topic from my experience with Unwilling Souls, but I’ll try and keep it to the big stuff. For instance, did you know that when you’re publishing a print book, you have to set the margins differently for left-hand pages and right-hand pages so words don’t get trapped illegibly down the spine of the book? I didn’t, but thankfully I hired someone who did to help me.

I already knew that the different e-book vendors required different file types. Turns out they also require different sizes and resolutions for the cover image. More than that, the colors of the print cover have to be subtly altered to account for changes that occur when transitioning from digital to print. The format of the image is also strange and counter-intuitive for print. Who knew? My cover artist, thankfuMap With Flourisheslly.

When I drew up my map to be transformed into a digital image for the book by my map artist, I did so on 8.5″x 11″ paper, months before I’d settled on the physical size of the print book. Spoiler alert: shockingly, the book didn’t wind up being 8.5″x 11″ in size, but more importantly, it wasn’t 8.5″x 11″ in aspect ratio either. With some fast, creative thinking, my book’s interior designer and I were able to make it work.

And then there’s the really excruciating stuff, the tax information required by sellers, the decisions about pricing and DRM and keywords to use and categories to place the book under for vendor search engines. Do you go Kindle Digital Publishing Select for the extra exposure or do you open it up to more sellers than just Amazon? Did you want to do a pre-order? Well, did you get everything in place far enough in advance for that? No? Too bad, no pre-ordering for you.

How about ISBNs? Are you going to buy a block of them yourself (for a considerable fee) or are you going to write off getting the book published in brick-and-mortar stores unless they are willing to order it direct from Amazon?

When I set out to self-publish Unwilling Souls, I had no idea of the answers to most of these questions. I didn’t even know most of these questions existed, and there’s an excellent chance I’m still getting some of them wrong. If your book is traditionally published, these sorts of decisions get made for you. The loss of power can be bad, of course, but at least the burden of a wrong decision is taken away from you and placed upon people who hopefully have more experience with this publishing thing. I would be lying if I didn’t say how very overwhelming dealing with all this felt at times leading up to publication day. I hesitated even writing this blog in this way because I worried it would make me appear like I didn’t know what I was doing. And at times, I didn’t. But that’s okay, because I’ve learned a lot and next time will be so much easier.

In the end, I’m damned proud of the book I put together. If there’s one thing I did right, it was to acknowledge that I couldn’t do it all myself. I found a highly talented team of freelancers who helped me through the process, and the final product speaks for itself, I think. My hope is that someone out there reading this will get a glimpse of the magnitude of the decision to self-publish and be a little bit better prepared to field the questions than I sometimes was. Or, if they are already in the middle of the effort and worry that it’s too much to handle, maybe they’ll realize they aren’t alone and feel a bit better.

Just a quick reminder. The Goodreads Giveaway for Unwilling Souls has just hours to go. It ends today, December 10th, at midnight! Click here for a chance to win one of five signed copies!

 

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

 

Book Launch: Unwilling Souls

UnwillingSouls_FictoriansHello, Fictorians readers! I’m thrilled to announce that today my first novel, Unwilling Souls, launches.

Ses Lucani has never known her parents. Powerful leaders in the cold war left over after the gods’ imprisonment, Ses’s mother and father are now bitter rivals, each pretending their secret daughter doesn’t exist. Raised by her grandfather, Ses now lives in the hollowed-out center of the planet and learns to forge wrightings, tools imbued with soul energy and used to maintain the prison of the gods.

When terrorists attack the prison on her sixteenth birthday, Ses is forced to flee after the ensuing investigation reveals the secret of her parentage. Suddenly, the very parents who abandoned her may be the only people she can trust. Running from government operatives and fanatic cultists, Ses meets Murien, a boy with fingers in a shadowy network that can lead her to her father.

But some secrets are darker than parentage. On her way to find her father, Ses will uncover truths about her family and herself that will shatter her understanding of the world and risk the return of the gods themselves.

This book was a lot of fun to write. I set out with the conscious goal of crafting a fast-paced tale in a second-world setting with as many amazing locales as possible. As Ses races from the core of the planet, where the gods are kept imprisoned, to the surface cities built out of the corpses and bones of the immense creatures that nearly destroyed humankind, I feel I achieved that goal. I hope you’ll check it out!

Unwilling Souls is available in ebook formats on Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBooks and in trade paperback from Amazon.com!

 

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com) or at his Author Page on Facebook.

 

Like a Movie Trailer for Your Head

In approaching this month’s topic, I realized something irritating. I’ve already written about my best inspirational stories on previous Fictorians posts. As I had little desire to repeat myself, I knew I had to come at this issue from a different angle. So rather than focus on discrete stories about what’s influenced my writing, I asked myself what techniques I used to get psyched to write day-to-day.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell any of you writers that some days the effort to get started writing can be too much. Unless you are already a professional writer or are both independently wealthy and childless, you spend your days expending energy on something or other that isn’t writing-related. You have to divert energy to writing that could be used elsewhere on higher-priority things, like earning money to eat.

So in order to get any writing done at all, we have to find ways to slip past exhaustion, laziness or a bad case of The Mondays and get excited about it. Quite without meaning to, I stumbled upon an admittedly silly technique a number of years ago that works well for me.

The answer? I advertise my book to myself.

Think about how you felt the last time you saw a really well-done movie trailer. Maybe it brought a rush of excitement you thought you’d left behind with youth. Maybe you watched it over and over again on Youtube just to wring that little rush dry. It makes sense. The people who make movie trailers mostly know their business. Their goal is to get you to mentally commit to seeing the movie in advance, ideally without paying attention to those pesky review aggregate sites before plunking down your hard-earned cash.

Now take your work in progress and try translating it into a movie trailer that you play in your head. Your hero, covered in grit and with a wound on their forehead from all their heroic efforts, stares stoically into the middle distance just to the right of the camera lens. A series of sequences flash by in which characters dodge bullets or spells or leap off of buildings only to turn back around and fire lightning bolts at their pursuers while their hair flows in the wind, all in slow motion with a dramatic swell of the soundtrack.

Writing it out like this makes it seem silly and self-indulgent because it is. You’ve seen these sorts of scenes in a million movie trailers, and after a while they all start to look the same. But guess what? If scenes like this didn’t work, the people making the trailers wouldn’t use them. And there’s one big difference here: these are your characters in your world, both of which you are (hopefully) already excited about. I suspect you’ll feel at least the hint of a giddy little thrill imagining them starring in their own expertly produced movie trailer.

A lucky handful of us may someday write works popular enough in print to be able to see our characters brought to life on the big screen (or the small). For the rest, a little daydreaming can give us that spike of excitement we need to sit down at the keyboard after an otherwise long day.

Give it a try. Don’t worry, you don’t have to admit it to anyone.