I can’t stop selling for the life of me. Really, it’s like I was born to sell. I do it with everyone, everywhere, at all times. I used to be ashamed of it. I used to not even understand what it was I was doing. When I was a little girl, I learned to survive by talking people into selling them on the idea of not hurting me. I had to. So I practiced it every day, from very early on. Then, when I understood I could make money with it, I was told it was an egoistic, capitalistic desire that was shameful, and I shouldn’t be selfish, and I’d never be able to do it, and I must be altruistic and self-sacrificing, and on and on and on, the glorious bullshit of patriarchy teaching me to be subservient and non-ambitious and mediocre and quiet and compliant.
Read MoreTHE BADLINGS audiobook is published!
It's here! It's here! Get your copy at:
Comment below and tell me why you absolutely HAVE TO HAVE A FREE COPY, and I will pick a bunch of winners so you get the audiobook for free (I don't remember how many free codes the ACX people send me, I think it's 20, so maybe I'll give out 5).
Now, to the story of production. This little book only looks so very innocent, but the production of it wasn't innocent at all. I want to share with you Erich's story.
Erich Lane is the incredibly talented voice-over actor who fell in love with the book and reached out to me on ACX with a reading sample, and I loved it, and so we started working together, and then in the middle of it Erich disappeared. I waited for a while before pinging him and asking him if anything was wrong. And turns out, something was.
Erich's father died.
Read MoreHow I do my research: I don't.
"I'm too exhausted to think of a blog post and I NEED to write one. It's been like a week. All this writing. What do you think I should blog about?"
"How about your research?"
"What do you mean, research?"
"Like how you come up with where the book is happening, and who the people are. Like how did you decide to have Janna happen in the South?"
"What South? I didn't decide anything. It just...happened."
"Exactly."
I stare at Royce and I don't get it.
"See, you can't tell me how you come up with it, but you come up with it SOMEHOW. Think about it and blog about it. I think it would be interesting for people to read."
Breaking your manuscript into chapters
"Hi Ksenia,
I love everything about the blog and your work, kudos. I am writing my first book (non fiction), and am lost as to how to break the whole thing into chapters.
Mayowa"
Hi Mayowa,
Thank you, darling. Great question. I used to break up my manuscript into chapters as I wrote it every day. In the morning I would start a new chapter, and by the end of the writing day I'd try to finish it. The good part of it was, I completed a chapter a day. The bad part of it was, I have constrained my writing into this one-chapter-per-day schedule, and sometimes I rushed my story to make it happen, and the rushed part almost always had to be rewritten, so I wasted time.
Later I got smarter. I read a lot, as in, A LOT, and I steal chapter structure I like. It struck me to see some chapters very long and others very short in the same book. "How could that be?" I thought. I would imagine what's to follow can apply to any book, fiction or non-fiction.
Instead of focusing on chapters focus on the scenes.
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