‘Add new post…’ I added 11 today and they were a merry devil to get in. I also made a liter of grape juice with a potato ricer, and may say that this small-holder producing wine thing is over-rated. It takes me a lot longer to make it than it would to drink it. I’ll do another few trays of grapes tomorrow. My hands are sore.
Now both the economy of scale, and the issues of needing to be a jack-of-all-trades come into all this, as well as having the tools for the job. The wine will probably – based on my attempt at making cider, be the far edge of bloody awful. But I will have done it, and, maybe, just maybe, decide the results are worth learning from my mistakes and trying harder. Or not, as the case may be. The truth is, unlike the peasant-farmer (who probably learned how to do it fairly well from his father) I don’t really need the wine. It’s more to prove I can, and to exercise my curiosity than anything else.
It is mirrored in writing process for so many of us indies. That book is certainly going to have taken more time to write than it does to read, and, yes, to be honest first efforts (mine included) were not that brilliant. You’re still learning. You do end up having to be the jack-of-all-trades (with the obvious corollary) — but you do put a lot more effort and care in than the large-scale producer (especially when it’s a first book they haven’t paid top dollar for)
Thing is, IF you persist (and that is a lot easier now, with Indy) your skills do improve, you get the tools… and sometimes find it worthwhile to hire in expertise. And like my post-hammering, and grape-squeezing one learns a lot along the way (both about hitting your thumbs because you’re thinking about an absolutely terrific alien species, and, well about the sheer grinding labor — and the knowledge and labor being a peasant farmer took. It makes a contribution to the book I’m doing as a side-piece about castaways.
What I am saying is: contrary to popular belief, this is not an easy or instant victory (yes, some people write that corker first book and never look back. And some people win the lottery). Persist, friends, persist.
Nil carborundum illigitimi
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Grapes of froth”
Gosh, I thought. This guy is even more amazing than I knew. He writes for eleven places. I kinda wish I knew where they all were because I like his writing… … … Oh, that’s not what he meant. Pouty lips appear. … I am certain he did it on purpose. … I slink away quietly.
Don’t feel bad. I remember a post some years ago where Dave was writing about poking his hands into dark, dirty holes.
My first thought was proctology. Or perversion. Or maybe perverse proctology…
lol…
I maintain an author’s worst book is likely to be their second published one. Authors sweat blood writing their first, pouring everything they have into it. In long ago times to ensure it was good enough to be accepted for publication. Then after surmounting the slush pile and getting it in print, it sell, and your publisher / editor / agent is begging for a second, while you have momentum. So you throw together something quickly.
By the third book you have figured out the process (if you survive the second book) and put together something that equals, if not exceeds, your first book.
I saw that in my own books, and I see it a lot as a book reviewer. I’ll read a really great first book by an author, look forward to the second – and it comes out flat.
What say the rest of you?
Same thing for software; Brooks in his Mythical Man Month referred to it as the “Second System Effect”, where the developers put in all the cool ideas they didn’t have time to put in the first one.
Writing in parallel has few advantages, but it does mean that Madeleine and the Mists got as much attention as A Diabolical Bargain.
Never willing to do things by halves, it’s my second series, not my second book, that got the portmanteau effect. That’s one reason I’m so determined to get the third series out, to balance the scales (as well as to find out what happens…).
::Sigh:: A reviewer of the fourth book in the series, three or four chapters in “This sounds like the start of the book” right where I started writing the whole series . . .
Being Indy from the get go really messes things up.