Recently a thought struck me that I guess has been buzzing around in my head for years, but I’ve consciously or subconsciously been ignoring it. I don’t think I write traditional books as my stories are more a slice of life rather than something with a beginning, middle, and end.
When I say a slice of life, my stories tend to be a day in the life of Foxy and Larry, the fictional pervert couple in my books. Just as an average person gets up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, and goes to bed, my stories tend to be that way.
I’ve always struggled with two words, “The End,” which elude me most of the time when I’m writing.
I started writing to give myself the ability to talk about fictionalized versions of our adventures in the world of wife swapping or swinging, also known as throwing your house keys in a bowl.
So far, most of my stories have ended up with a vague ending as I never really had a final chapter in the story but more of, “I’ve got an idea for a new story, so somehow I’ve got to kick this one out the door!”
One of my latest WIP’s is House Party 2, which is an effort to correct the problems I created in the original House Party. In HP, my fictional wife runs off to LA and becomes a porn star. Now in HP2, I’m struggling to be a marriage counselor and patch things up. The original was 85,000 words, and the sequel will likely approach 90,000 words, which is way too long for a smut story, but I just can’t seem to quit.
HP2 is my first serious attempt to write something with Scrivener, the word processor for writers. I’ve pretty much figured it out except for the output process, which I haven’t really looked at yet. Scrivener allows you to break up your story in blocks such as chapters.
Rather that one long file, the story can be broken up into sections (chapters), and the writer only deals with that section at any time. For me, it works well as I get tired/bored working on a scene and can instantly jump to another chapter for something new.
One of my faults is that I’m easily distracted by a shiny object or a short skirt and have problems keeping my focus on the job at hand or possibly in my hand. I guess to be a writer, you should have a vivid imagination, which I seem to be guilty of but have absolutely no control over.
There was a moment of sadness and reflection when I learned of the passing of Terry Jones, one of the key people behind the silliness of Monty Python. I first became aware of the British comedy series of Monty Python and Benny Hill back when we lived in the mid-west. Our public television station would run shows from these two series during fundraising weeks.
The British people have a wonderful sense of offbeat humor and a weird fascination with spanking but to each, his own. Every time I see Spam in the grocery store, I think of those crazy people and wish we could return to a simpler time where our biggest problem was determining the airspeed velocity of an African swallow and what is the best way to tie a migratory coconut to it. At least we learned how to determine if someone is a witch or not. That would have made things a lot simpler for the Pilgrims in Salem. Watch out for the Killer Rabbit!
Once again thank you for struggling to the end of this post without resorting to beer, and as always if you’re in the bathroom with nothing to do, grab one of my stories: https://LarryArcher.blog/stories
XOXO Foxy and Larry
Re the output process; it is worth taking some time to work through Compile in Scrivener. You will need to learn it, because it is quirky, especially in Scrivener for Windows, and it has some limitations.
It is my considered opinion that you can push the first ebook draft out of Scrivener, but to make it look really good, you will need to optimize it using other software.
but…it is cool to get Compile working, even if you have a gash cover and front matter, so that you can actually produce an ebook and be able to read it the way that your audience will see it. I learned a lot by creating a draft ebook, then leaving the project alone, then coming back and reading as a prospective buyer. That has led me to a 59 point list of changes for my first novel, some of them significant.
Rupert,
Thanks for the suggestions. My plan is when I get the story completed I’m going to export it as a Word document and publish that. Since Scrivener creates the chapter heads automatically, I’ve been trying to figure out how to format the heads but haven’t worked too hard at it since I’m not there yet. I’m using the beta version of Scrivener on my PC’s and the final version on my Mac. I tried exporting the story to ePub and found that Scrivener screwed up the formatting on one chapter so I’ll stick with outputting to Word first.
Amazon and SmashWords take the cover image separately and so I’m not worried about that. I think in the long run, I’ll be happy with the program but am a glutton for punishment.
Part of the problem is that despite the fact that the ebook standards that we use are at least 20 years old, no 2 ebook readers render a book identically. I have tried half a dozen different ebook readers on different platforms (mostly windows and android) and each one always displays and renders the same ebook file slightly differently.
I generally output a test ebook to EPUB first (no encryption) and try it out. I have not found any rendering issues on chapters, but there are some more sophisticated formatting options for ebook rendering which are definitely not supported in Scrivener. I have a small number of reviewers who I send the files to in PDF, EPUB and MOBI (Amazon Kindle) format.
I use Calibre for conversions when needed and Aldiko (sp?) on Android for reading. My issue that i talked about with Scrivener was at the beginning of a chapter I used a larger font than my normal (none) style for the body of text. What Scivener did was to ignore the change in font and print the whole chapter in the wrong font. When it switched text files, it corrected itself.
I wasn’t concerned about it as I’ve always published in .DOC format and while I could see there was a problem, it didn’t concern me. Now if I would output straight to ePub then I’d need to figure out what went wrong.
The spelling function in Scrivener seems to be less accurate than I’m used to, but as I intend to export the document to Word, it’s not a big deal. I think what I’m going to try is export a chapter at a time to look for any siuggestions that Word has. This way I only work in blocks of text and not the entire story.
I’m still trying to convince myself that the benefits of Scrivener are worth the extra hassle.
I do hope you manage to resolve the conflicts in HP2 some time soon. The world is breathlessly awaiting your next opus!
(I feel a bit responsible, since I was the one who kept bugging you, saying you needed some sort of conflict in your tales.)
And yeah, Monty Python was unique – silly but somehow smart at the same time. RIP, Terry Jones.
I know Lisabet and while I have a problem with conflict, I appreciate everything you’ve taught me about writing. A lot of what I do is your fault. 🙂
I’m also working on a cuckold – Hotwife story that has been a lot of fun. It has a bit of a kink in it and I’m trying to get it out the door under 50K words. I’m going wide as I’ve been ignoring SmashWords lately.