October 21, 2015

Time is a writer's most prized possession

by Ksenia Anske

"Hey, can you take a quick look at this summary I wrote for my book? It will only take a minute."

"Hey, you're good with words. Can you help me with this idea for a story I have?"

"Hey, can you please read my draft and tell me what you think? I so need your feedback!"

"Hey, I want to send you my book for a review, and you can send me your book for a review in exchange. It'll be a good deal for both of us."

"Hey, so how do you self-publish your books? Can you help me?"

"Hey, I'm in town! Let's have coffee!"

This is just a glimpse of the messages I'm getting bombarded with daily, and in my 3 years of writing I have gone through three stages of responses to them.

August 23, 2015

What do you spend your life on?

by Ksenia Anske

I don't like math, but I do...sometimes. Sometimes it lets you see amazing things.

I'm obsessed with improving my writing. I'm hellbent on getting so good, my words will make your teeth sing. I want to be so superb, no one will be able to put my books. No one. This is my goal. To take over the world. And so I'm grinding away at it every day, trying to maximize the time I spend on my work, because the more time I spend on it, the better I will get. I have seen a direct correlation to this. Remember I told you about spending 2 hours every morning on learning new words with the help of etymology? Well, that time shrunk to 1 hour, and the file shrunk to half its size! It's working! I'm getting better and faster!

I'm also trying to maximize my reading time, so I decided to calculate what I do every day to see where my time goes. I figure a typical life gets spent like this:

July 23, 2015

Making time for writing: keep the gates to your mind closed

by Ksenia Anske

Drawing by Stefan Zsaitsits — Drawing by Stefan Zsaitsits

The last few days I keep stumbling on the same issue that either some of you are expressing to me, or I see others struggling with, which is easy to summarize in the following statement:

"Oh, I want to write a book, but I have no time. There's ... (insert a valid-sounding reason like "millions of dollars to chase for my American dream" or "twenty elderly aunts to take care of" or "scores of TV shows to catch up on" or "hungry triplets to feed from three bottles at once" or whatever.)

So here's the deal. Life is full of busy shit. We're like muckworms squirming in it, fighting for that bit of sun to warm our slimy hides (you can tell writing TUBE is influencing my imagery here). And life is full of people. These people will demand things from you, like help with their own dreams of millions of dollars, or help with changing diapers of their forty elderly uncles, and on and on and on. Unless you employ a stopper for this chatter, IT WILL NEVER CEASE.

July 10, 2014

How long does it take to write a book?

by Ksenia Anske

Many of you have asked me recently how long it takes me to write my books, from start to finish, from the first word of the first draft to the last word of the last draft, before it goes to my editor. I have never actually sat down and calculated the entire process point by point. I've blogged about writing a first draft in 6 weeks (that was like 2 years ago, but it's still true) and haven't touched the topic since. But it seems like a curious math to calculate and write out the stages I'm going through and compare. Well then, shall we do a little math?

1st drafts take me 6 weeks to write (about 120K words total).

Okay, so I went through all my drafts and timelines, and it does seem that typically every 1st draft takes me about 6 weeks (max 7 weeks) to write, and when I write them, I write them fast, and I write a lot, about 3,500 words every day (in about 4 hours), 5 days a week. I take a break for the weekend, for family stuff, and, you know, to wash socks and feed my pet trolls. Some days I can write up to 5,000 words. My goal is to dump shit out of my brain, so I know how the story ends. I don't plan anything, don't plot, I only have a starting picture in mind, a scene, an image, and I go from there.

February 11, 2014

Why I decided to self-publish

by Ksenia Anske

I've been asked to write a blog post on my self-publishing journey, and, more importantly, on my decision to self-publish, why I chose to get out there in the wild wild publishing world on my own. I've written a bunch of posts on publishing before, like about self-publishing platforms (link), how donations make me more money than sales (link), how much it cost me to self-publish (link), and close to 20 posts more. They are all here (link). But I haven't really written in a single post as to why I have plunged deep into this scary thing called self-publishing. I'll attempt to explain.