Bookish Moods and AI

February 9, 2019

A lot has been going on in my corner of the world. The spousal unit continues to improve following neck surgery. How long this will last I can't guess. The occupational therapist has him taking things out of MY cupboards and putting them back - the Medicare dollar at work. The first time he breaks something, I'm taking a day off work to break her. 

My stepfather is whining about not being able to drive. Does he really think I'm enjoying doing his grocery shopping and hauling his arse to doctor appointments? Nooooooo. This morning my duties include taking his trash to the landfill. Fun? Nooooo. 

At the day job, the boiler failed. Half the building has no heat. All of the interiors of the building is
covered in a layer of fine soot. Luckily, my area is heated/cooled by a heat pump. My office was far enough away from the furnace to be barely impacted. I dusted, changed the air filter, and got back to work. Instead, I should have milked it into working at home for a week. 

On the writing front, the Grammarly project has hit about twenty percent completed. The 

Amethyst Cove books are finished, as are A Friendly Neighbor, A Perfect Hire, Lightning Shifts, Desert Snow, Doors of Time, Eye of the Beholder (I must get that uploaded today), The Ghost at the B andB, Hey Joe, and Passion's Victory. I don't know if it's vitally important to my readers that I'm doing this exercise, but it matters to me. It's feeding all those author-ish masochistic tendencies about how foolish it was to pay for "professional" editing. I know I learned a lot from working with editors but you know how we all gripe about those things we view through hindsight. 

Not that the Grammarly system is perfect - far from it. It can take off with you in the middle of a correction and drop you pages away. Very annoying. That little glitch might be adding problems if the system fails to go back and pick up that spot. The major plus is I feel better about the books because I'm at least attempting to improve them. 

I'm sure the Grammarly folks will continue to improve their product. After all, we should all write in one voice, shouldn't we? Therein lies a rub. We should not. We should all sound like ourselves. A comma here or a comma there is not as important as an individual voice. I see that in the number of "suggestions" I decline to accept, especially in dialogue. People should sound like people, not echoes of the robotic. 

Cautiously embracing artificial intelligence makes me feel like a sell-out. It goes against one of my core values that says individuals are more important than the tools they use. On the other hand, this tool may have earned its place in the writer's arsenal.  I suppose like any other tool, it's all in how you use it. 

But enough finger chatter (that's my current slang for typing). Daylight has arrived and my coffee cup is empty. I need to upload the updated Eye of the Beholder manuscript and maybe even get Bored, Stroked, and Blueprinted back out before the demands of the day crash down on my head. 

Because once I've fulfilled my responsibilities to dog, cat, spouse, and stepparent, I'm going to close the door and hide in my office. I may even get some new writing done. Or should that word be accomplished? Where's the AI when you need it? 

KC Kendricks
My home on the web- Between the Keys: http://kckendricks.blogspot.com
twitter.com/kckendricks
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My country life at Holly Tree Manor

The writer in the new year

January 9, 2018

When I embarked on this so-called writing career, there were a few things of which I was unaware. Yes, it's true. I was the perfect example of the neophyte. I was lucky enough to get some good advice early on, and perhaps I should recount that here for posterity. It's really quite simple: keep track of everything you do. 

Welcome to 2018 and the blank spreadsheet! 

With the arrival of January, it's time to close out the last year's spreadsheets. I have spreadsheets for everything. It's ridiculous but necessary. 

Taxes. I have individual folders for each tax year and a spreadsheet summary on all income and expenses for each year. It makes filing the annual tax return a lot easier. 

Activity. Speaking of taxes, I may one day need to prove I actually "participated" in the business I report income and expenses on. I have a spreadsheet with book names, dates, word count progress, completion date, upload to the .com date, and release date. 

Sales. I have a spreadsheet to track the number of copies sold per book and the income per book. This is also handy at tax time but mostly it's because I think it's important to know these things. 

Backup your work. It's January so I have a new jump drive (memory stick, flash drive, whatever you prefer to call it). I keep the old ones in a little box just in case something fucking weird should happen. 

Ideas. I have a spreadsheet with possible titles and possible character names. The best titles come to me while I'm driving. I've actually called home to ask Himself to write down a title for me so I don't forget it by the time I get to my computer. 

Who, in the beginning, knew writing was a business? Not me. But you know what? It's sort of a mood booster to look back over those spreadsheets at the beginning of a new year and pause for a moment. Looking at the data can bring to mind specific moments in the evolution of each creation, a snapshot only the author can see. 

Rather than inciting me to rest on my laurels, they send me forward to the next story. I will make the first wordcount entry on a new spreadsheet and feel as though I've accomplished something that binds my past, present, and future as a whole. 

I like that. 

KC Kendricks
www.kckendricks.com

Words I don't want to say

August 20, 2017

August has not been a productive month. It's been unseasonably cool, too. Not once in this month have I been brave enough to jump in my little pool and soak in seventy-degree water. I'm paying the price for that at the moment. The PH levels are all wonky. To keep them stabilized, you need to get in the pool and move the water. I dropped two cups of baking soda in this morning in the hope that the water temp will reach eighty today. 

Like the weather, I've been unseasonably quiet. The people around me have demanded my time leaving the people in my head unable to tell their stories. I've seriously considered running away from home. I think about how great it would be to take my laptop to a motel room for a weekend. I doubt I would actually write anything but just getting away from the constant barrage of phone calls and the subsequent time-sucking acts of dealing with problems not my own would be wonderful.

Do I sound selfish? Too bad. 

It's time for me to put my foot down. 

Time is critical for a writer to actually write. If one is at the nursing home visiting one's mother for thirty minutes every day, on the phone with one's stepfather thirty minutes every day, and on the phone with a different chatty friend for thirty minutes every day, that's an hour and a half. Walking the dog adds another half hour. Cooking and other household chores add up to at least an hour. So we're up to three hours. Full-time job? I get up at six a.m. to prepare and don't get home until five p.m. That's eleven hours which puts us at fourteen hours a day, Monday through Thursday.  Friday evening is bowling. When I finally get the computer around eight or eight-thirty p.m., I'm too exhausted to focus. 

I spend my days doing things for everyone else. Even my day job is all about aiding people in crisis. If I'm to continue being a writer, it's time for me to go back to basics. It's time to write first and allow the people around me to stop being lazy. Because that's what it is. They're too lazy to solve their own problems. It's too easy to call me. I'm too available. That's ends today.

It has to end today. It has to because the last thing I ever want to say to anyone is, "I used to be a writer."

KC Kendricks
www.kckendricks.com
www.twitter.com/kckendricks

Life is a constant re-set in thinking

June 30, 2017

Reaching the halfway mark in any given year always seems to catch folks by surprise. Everyone I know comments on how fast the time “flies” by. I certainly wonder about it. Was I somehow not paying attention every day? I was. Days filled with things to accomplish do pass quickly when we’re absorbed in our tasks.

That’s not a bad thing. I’m passing 2017 in what feels like yet another career re-set. Looking back, the first reset came in 2007, after the Triskelion debacle. That’s when KC came into being. Skip ahead to 2013 and I read the writing on the wall in a post from my then publisher, Amber Quill Press, now defunct. It was time to learn how to create my own covers and prepare to become an independent.

That publisher closed at the end of 2015 and I re-set as an indie author. The dedicated march to republish my entire backlist continues. A surprise in this endeavor has been the reception of my early work as Rayne Forrest. I republished those works more to please myself than anything else and apparently there are readers out there who remember the brand.  So there’s another reset.

Maybe it’s a good thing to re-set some parts of your life, especially if you can prepare for them. My recent birthday brought to light some ambivalence with the idea of early retirement.  There have been changes at the day job and going to work is fun again. If I could take Deuce to work with me, it would be perfect. Maybe I’m not ready to reset that part of my life and I've been adamant about retiring at the earliest opportunity. That’s a re-set in my thinking and planning.

All these resets have been educational. The more I learn about the publishing industry, and life in general, the better equipped I am to make the right choices. Opinions abound about where the industry is going but those opining tend to look at how those changes effect the “big name” writers. They bypass those of us writing for the joy of writing a story we want to read.

Perhaps if we could get the naysayers to give themselves a reset and find a little romance for them, the world would be a better place.

Ultimately, that’s what writers attempt to do. Whatever world we create for ourselves and our readers, we weave the story until it can reset and continue on in a better way. I think that’s worth doing.

KC Kendricks

My home on the web- Between the Keys: http://kckendricks.blogspot.com
twitter.com/kckendricks
facebook.com/kckendricks
pinterest.com/kckendricks/boards
instagram.com/kc_kendricks
My country life at Holly Tree Manor