A.R. Van Halleorg

In many ways, the internet has affected the way literature has evolved in recent years. Like the film industry, it has paved the way for the underdog to rise up and really make a name for themselves. I’ve enjoyed quite a few of them and there are those who share their work freely on the internet who truly deserve to be published, but don’t.

If this were an article on publishing great works as an independent author, then I’d go on about it, but this isn’t that kind of article.

Independent publishing has removed the necessity of being rejected multiple times by a publishing house, because as humans who haven’t mastered an art form, we hate to feel rejected. So sad. Sniff.

Forget art. A few simple steps, a credit card and a click of a button can get you published. Ego fully intact. Congratulations, you’re an author…

I know, I sound bitter, but really I’m just frustrated. I think we’ve forgotten somewhere along the way that there is a learning process behind those rejection letters. If someone didn’t like it, there’s a reason for it. The world isn’t out to get you. Sometimes, you can glean some kind of information, sometimes valuable, from a rejection letter that might tell you what went wrong. Yeah, I know, not all of them will. Most won’t. But gems aren’t meant to be a dime a dozen. Unfortunately, many will tell you how crappy your writing is and you’ll feel discouraged enough to quit. Don’t quit. A little pain is worth it when you finally get that book published and your name is now attached to a legitimate piece of art that won’t embarrass you in the future.

After all, that’s the fun of being a writer, right? We all want to be the next Asimov, Tolkien, Reichs, Rowling, Cussler, King….Right!?

Right.

When I started writing at 5; my own internal solution to learning English, I just wanted to write my very own Goosebumps story. Simple enough, I’d say. I was told it was very hard to get published, but that if I worked really hard and didn’t mind people telling what was wrong with my story, then it was always a possibility.

I’ve been writing for 21 years, I’ve soaked in every piece of criticism, whether I liked it or not. I’ve had the fortune of teachers who provided me with editors and librarians who invited guests like Barbara Henner to speak to the kids about writing books and getting published. I was instilled with the belief that if I took every rejection letter, learned from it, and managed to do so well that even a big publishing house would publish me eventually, then I’d done what I set out to do. I would be a true author.

In the meantime, I decided to tell my stories to my friends. I wrote for them. I told for them. I aimed to please them. I drove them insane with hundreds of unfinished stories. I was just too excited to get all those ideas out of my head. But it was a positive solution to minor setbacks.

Despite the lure of a simple solution that would leave no room for true heart-ache, I have avoided the independent publishers. For one main reason.

They lack credibility.

No, not the publishers themselves, but the authors who choose to have their work published. I was appalled to realize just how many first drafts were published directly; spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, structural issues, and even things as simple as keeping their character’s eye colour consistent. It sounds silly, but it’s little details that make an author look like a rank amateur and make people never want to buy another book by them ever again. Heck, they want to draw and quarter them for wasting 10.99$ on a piece of crap.

It isn’t impressive and if you brag about it, you look like a bigger ass than before. This isn’t the tabloids and you aren’t an actor trying to stay in the media. Bad writing is bad publicity and bad publicity makes people not buy your book. I don’t care how many people tell you otherwise. If your goal is to catch the eye of some network or production studio, then please, go write scripts. Stop cluttering literature with garbage.

Most of all, people resent 3 things when authors publish shoddy work. 1) The money they put into it, 2) The wasted time, and 3) Their lowered IQ.

1) You can say, ‘Oh, it’s only $10.99’, but what gives you the right to take someone else’s hard-earned money for your lazy literature?…Obviously, you don’t care if you bothered to do it in the first place.

2) Who has time to waste? Not many. If you want them to sit down and read your book, you better make sure it was worth their time. Maybe not everyone will be happy with your story, but you want your target audience to mostly like it.

3) Ever read a story and felt dumber at the end than when you started? Don’t insult your audience. They don’t like it and they’ll hate you for it and smear your name all over the internet about how much of an arrogant ass you are for ever publishing it. Especially if they find out you self-published.

Having said all that. I may not have finished NaNoWriMo on time, ever, but I have pride in what I write. I work it and re-work it until I’m satisfied. I will continue to do so, until I feel like it’s worth the money I’m going to make someone spend on it.

Love your audience, respect your audience and if you MUST go through an independent publisher….please get your work edited or reviewed and listen to what people have to say. Some demands might be completely illogical and will be outright trolling, but there’s usually a hint of truth and they just don’t know how to tell you why. Look for the reason why or try to find alternatives that work with your story and please the readers too. No opinion is a sole opinion. Keep that in mind.

Have a great day!

Thanks for reading.

Fear is one of the most fascinating things I really enjoy writing into a story, because when you get to the point where you’re freaking yourself out on behalf of your character, you know you’ve captured it. It gives you a rush as if you have finally had a ‘real’ writer moment.

Ideally, you would best describe me as a morbid writer, because I write about fear, death, murder, and even torture as passionately as a sappy person writes a romance novel.

We write about the things we know about from experience. That does not mean that I am a psycho murderer who enjoys torturing people. I just enjoy capturing the emotions; not the happy sort.

Back to the introduction: What kinds of people do and do not write about fear? Why?
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I decided to randomly look at my own blog today and I realize that I haven’t blogged in a week!…I thought that was utterly terrible of me and completely slack, so here I am, writing a post at 12:32 AM.

Learning Italian : I bought a book this evening called 501 Italian Verbs. I thought that having a book of conjugated verbs may help me in establishing a better understanding of the language. It gives really great examples with most of the verbs to be able to know how they’re used, so it’s great! I’m totally loving the experience. I haven’t felt this way about learning something, since I started learning programming.

Script Frenzy : Well, I’m 50 pages into Script Frenzy now. It’s 15 days in and we have another 15 to go. I’m on schedule! I’ll probably hunker down and hack out the next portion of it over the weekend. At least get most of the rest finished. I’m looking forward to getting to be able to go back over it all and make it into a polished piece of art. Fantastic.

Southern Gals : I’ve recently discovered that Twitter is quite a dangerous world. Flying tweets left and right. Everyone vying for attention and sometimes…sometimes you get a random message from someone and you’re thrown for several moments. You wonder if they made a mistake, surely no one responds to a tweet!

But they do!…who knew. So this southern gal, (who shall remain nameless, *cough*GO HERE*cough*) decided that I was deemed worthy of a tweet back! And I’m shamelessly linking you to her website, because I can. *waves banner and gushes in a southern drawl* “I’m her biggest fan, y’all! One day I could even get an autograph on my banner!”

What was I on about? It’s late and my mind is wandering lol. Right, so it was pretty cool to be able to meet someone on Twitter who had very similar interests to me. It’s rare that I get to talk to anyone who thinks anything I think is of interest, let alone it be their idea! So after hours of brain picking and confusing conversations about nothing in particular, I decided she’s cool and is now invited to the inner circle of friends. *crickets chirp in the empty field* …okay, it’s an empty space, but I have to start somewhere!

Okay, I’ll write more tomorrow. I’m too brain dead lol

Have a good day/evening all!

Ahh, I think this is now day 4 or 5 of learning Italian and I thought I’d share my improvements over the last few days.

So one of the last things I had a big issue with was the inability to properly process the information and spit it out in written form. Well, I got better at it. The last written submission I sent in only had 1 mistake! It made me so excited! (not in a dodgy manner) And then to make matters even better for me, I finally got out my microphone and decided to record my speaking submissions and see how that went. Apparently I’m much better at speaking Italian than writing it. Not a surprise. I’ve always been better at speaking random languages than understanding them.

But, apparently I speak shyly when I speak Italian, which makes sense, because I haven’t yet learned where to put the emphasis on the parts of the words in order to speak it confidently. I’m just trying to focus on saying it right, before I get overly sure of myself and manage to epically fail at life. Like Post 1 in which I described my failed attempt at trying to be clever by switching words out. What can I say, I learn fast not to make that kind of mistake again.

Small nuisance with the program I’m using is that the speaking submissions tend to use very different words than the lessons themselves, which is really odd to me. It’s like…oh hey 3 lessons later, why don’t we randomly use camion instead of autocarro. Or borsa instead of borsetta. It just messes with my head, I don’t know why they do it. I’m going to assume it’s like when you randomly run into someone in Italy and they’re suddenly using some warped language and they want you to be on your toes just in case!

So that’s all I had to say about that for today, as the days go by, I’m sure that it’ll get more interesting.

Ahh, another day come and gone in the lovely world of learning Italian. It’s still random, I still don’t have any sound basis for wanting to learn it, but I can tell you one thing. I love it! I’ve always heard from people, especially here in Quebec, that Spanish is super easy to understand, especially if you know English and French, but personally I’ve always found it a little difficult to get my mind around. Which is odd, but eh. Italian on the other hand…seems like French has a pretty big Italian base to it and is MUCH closer to sounding French than Spanish does. Someone could explain something to me in Spanish and an Italian could explain the same thing and odds are that I’ll understand the Italian more than the Spanish one.

Sorry, I’m rambling a little, it’s pretty early in the morning and I haven’t slept yet.

Yesterday didn’t really have any huge dramatic episodes of corrections, but I also haven’t done the written submission portion of Lesson 2 yet. I’m almost having nightmares in my waken state just imagining the resulting commentary I’m going to be receiving once I do complete it. I can just imagine the grilling. Hopefully I don’t try anything clever and manage to get the singular/plural/feminine/masculine right this time. Now that I understand that the language is styled much like French, this will be much easier for me to understand. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it that way before, but eh.

I’ll be sure to update as regularly as I can. As boring as it all is, it keeps me wanting to push forward and keep learning the language, just so I can rant about the whole experience and enjoy the fact that I’m understanding it more and more

All in all. I’m loving this! What a beautiful language.

Have a great day!

I’m in the process of randomly beginning to learn Italian. I don’t know why, I just woke up this morning and thought ‘I want to learn Italian’. So I went on to Live Mocha, which is where I’m relearning my German. I use this because it has a community of people who are also learning other languages and people who are native of the language you’re trying to learn can correct you and tell you what you did right/wrong. This is generally awesome and with my German I didn’t see much trouble when I received corrections. But I also used to know German, so I guess that helps.

Well, Unit 1, Lesson 1 of the Italian one is just nouns. It’s just knowing boy, girl, man, woman, you, me. And then saying stuff like..is rich, is poor, is whatever. But this thing also doesn’t tell you how to switch between feminine and masculine yet, because that’s in a later lesson. Well let’s just say that in my clever attempt to switch out nouns, I sent up a red flag among the Italians and suddenly I had tips on how to switch from feminine to masculine and some confusion was thrown in by also pointing out the difference between singular and plural terms.

That didn’t bug me. But their explanation for it was written in Italian. So you can imagine how difficult that was to try to decipher what they were trying to tell me was. My only saving grace was that French is very much based on Italian/Latin, so I got there pretty quickly. On the plus side, here’s what I learned.

1- By default, switch the e at the end of a descriptive word when dealing with a female actor. (pretty standard, we have this in French too)
2- Don’t be clever and switch things around until you have at least a minor grasp of the language or else people send you complicated explanations back with words you’ve never even dreamed existed.
3- Even when you see words you didn’t dream existed, having a backup language helps a lot.
4- Think about what I’m writing in my submission. If I don’t want them to correct me based on something I didn’t mean, then I need to be clear.
5- Take it all constructively and be even more determined.

Consider that my random useless post of the day. I just wanted to talk about it.

If any of you are using Live Mocha as well, go ahead and add me to your list! I’m arvanhalleorg on there.

Hope you guys are enjoying your day.