NOTE: No New Yorkers were harmed in the making of this video.

So I’ve been totally swamped doing edits on my book this month. I apologize if I haven’t been responsive online because of it. At some point, I’ll tell the story of this process. But right now I’m still in the mess of it and there are only so many seconds that people want to hear a scrawny neurotic Jew crying I CAN’T DO IT! before it becomes tedious. An update will come soon though…

LITERARY UPDATE (for my geek friends)

Publishing is a bitch. But one exciting trend in the literary publishing world is that it is now officially a bitch to publish with a big publisher, a bitch to publish with a small publisher, and it is a bitch to self publish. General consensus is to crawl into the fetal position and weep until this passes.

GEEK UPDATE (for my literary friends)

Task management apps are still all the rage. There is a beautifully-designed task management app available on the iPhone that will help you manage all your other task management apps. But the big controversy is about which task manager app to use to manage your task manager task managers.

Hope I’ve provided insight here.

My excuse this time for playing with his toys is that I want to talk about writing groups. I’ve been in plenty of writing groups and here is my take on what makes an (in)effective writing group:

Hope the video is amusing and somewhat informative. I’m a bit new to low-budget, on-the-iPhone stop-motion animation, so it’s rough around the edges. (Also, a few technical things didn’t work quite right — for instance, in its first incarnation, the cat was a chain smoker, but that turned out unhealthy for both me and the cat…)

Click here to view other “I’m a failed writer” presentations.

Click here to view all my presentations.

On the other hand, you can check out the story that I read (“A Proper Love Story“) at intentionalducati.org. Thanks to Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose who put on this fabulous event.

METHOD #1

Buy a new house. Not to live in, but to write in. (Yeah, you heard me correctly: I ended that sentence in a preposition. My upcoming novel is full of those kinds of sentences, and also dangling modifiers, and split infinitives, and run-on sentences, hot damn do I have a lot of run-on sentences! And sentence fragments.)

OK. Now allocate one room just for the writing of the book. This is where you calculate word count, you target writing goals, you sit your ass in the chair and you just write.

But if you’re working on a book, then writing is not enough, you need to do some organizing. This is where the other rooms of the house come in to play. Dedicate a second room for outlining. Buy a gigantic whiteboard. This is for when you want to look at your book as a list. This is where you figure out the pacing and the flow of your story. How many chapters does it need? How does it flow from one chapter to the next? How long is each chapter?

But sometimes that is not enough, you need to visualize it further. This is where the third room comes into play. This is the room with a gigantic corkboard where you tac (tac? tack? tak?) index cards against the corkboard to represent the various chapters and scenes. This is helpful for you to see patterns and trends. Buy a bunch of colored markers so you can color code these trends as you see fit. This is where you can move things around or organize things based on theme or point of view or character.

There’s a problem though. If you change something in one room, you’ll need to adjust things in the other rooms. So now you need to hire a runner. A dude (or dudette) who runs between the rooms and adjusts things everywhere else when you make a change. It may cost you $15/hour, but it’ll be worth it, because you need to focus on the writing and you can’t afford to be interrupted in order to keep things in sync.

There are other things required for this method (like a room dedicated to research), but this covers the bare essentials.

Estimated cost: $200,000 for the house + $15/hr * 1500 hours for the runner + $30 for whiteboard + $30 for corkboard + $30 in pens and markers = $222,590.

METHOD #2

Just get a damn copy of Scrivener already. It covers all of the above requirements and way more.

Estimated cost: $45

(My tutorial and overview of Scrivener can be found here.)

*Note: I don’t get any kickback from Literature & Latte, the makers of Scrivener. I’m just obsessed with this program…

I know this is not the complete story, so please post a comment with any further questions or criticisms you have about all of this… I’d also love to hear any advice or suggestions.

Here are some links to the tools I discuss in the video:

Screencasting / Video Editing

• ScreenFlow ($99) — buy this program! It kicks ass.

Audio

• Blue Yeti Microphone ($100) — really great USB microphone; I’d also suggest a pop filter though I don’t have a great recommendation in this realm
• WireTap Studio ($69) — nice audio recording and editing app
• Levelator (donate) — tool that performs some magic to your audio so that it is leveled out

Drawing

• Bamboo Tablet ($50-$200) — I picked up a Bamboo tablet that they no longer make… but it is most similar to their cheapest one available today (Bamboo Connect)
• Sketchbook Pro ($60) — very nicely done drawing app that works well with a tablet
• Sketchbook Express (free) — free version of Sketchbook Pro; most features still available; great way to see if you like using this app

Animating

• Toon Boom Studio ($250) — really powerful 2D animation tool
• Pencil (donate) — this is a tool I used before picking up Toon Boom Studio
• Stykz (donate) — this is another tool I used before picking up Toon Boom Studio

Other Useful Tools

• iMovie (free) — great app from Apple for making movies without too much complicatednosity…
• Keynote ($20) — great app from Apple for creating presentations…
• OmniDazzle (free) — free app from the great Omni Group that lets you draw on the screen, among other things

Good luck!

1. I hid in the bathroom weeping for 30 minutes. My people didn’t specifically ask me to do this, but I find that this is an effective first step in any great (or tolerable) plan.
   
2. I created a Facebook author page. I know many of y’all aren’t on Facebook, but if you are a voyeur over there and you choose to LIKE my shit, I would appreciate it. If you choose to SLANDER it, I’ll also be flattered.
   
3. I contacted Frank Dickinson over at Creating Conversations with Frank. I said, “I’m scared shitless and my supply of Pepto Bismol is very low.” Or something to that effect…
   

   And Frank helped me clean up some broken and missing things about my site. (Thanks, Frank!) Specifically, here are some changes…

4. I’m using Livefyre to handle commenting on this site. I know my site isn’t one of those comment-intensive blogs, but I still like Livefyre’s conversational capabilities as opposed to my previous situation where you would never be notified if someone responded to you. I started to adjust the Livefyre color scheme to fit my dark depressing blog colors, but I still need to do a little more tweaking… Feel free to leave a comment about my commenting scheme.
   
5. I’m now using MailChimp for email subscriptions. If you’d prefer to keep up with this blog via email, I suggest you subscribe with the form on the right sidebar — my few subscribers are getting awfully lonely… I don’t want to reveal any numbers, but let’s just say that approximately 50% of my MailChimp subscribers have the name “Yuvi”. (If you’re already subscribed through my previous, slightly-broken Google Feedburner subscription, I suggest you unsubscribe from Feedburner and then subscribe through the new form… or let me know if you’d like me to switch things around for you…)
6. You’ll see other ways to stalk me via the sidebar on the right.
   
7. You can now pass word (which is similar to passing gas) about my non-crappy posts via Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ right from the bottom of each post. Again, I tried to keep this low key, but available.
8. I have a Contact form where you can slander me right from the confines of my overly dark and lonely website.
9. My people were pleased.
10. I sat on the couch and waited for the money to roll in.
    
11. VERY little money rolled in.
12. I hid in the bathroom again. I wept again.
    
13. My toddler pooped on the floor.
    

So that’s my current situation. Send me any comments. Or don’t.

Either way, thanks for getting this far down into my post. Even if it’s just a condescending sympathy read. I’m not above those.

In any case, I hope you find some of this presentation useful. I took the tremendous risk of getting my wife to film me naked for this video (which is risky for both my presentation gig and my marriage) because I wanted to show you many of the ways I try to get a fresh look at my own writing. Let’s see if it pays off…

(For the full scoop, check out my blog post at Writer Unboxed.)

I’m going to take a month off from the I’m a failed writer series to do a little work on my upcoming novel release (Fall 2012). I’ll be back in January with the series.

(But I still hope to make a short presentation in December about how I make my presentations… Michael Schechter, this is your fault.)

Click here to view other “I’m a failed writer” presentations.

Click here to view all my presentations.

The Cocktail Napkin, Episode #49