Confused and Mystified

Participating, watching others participate, wondering what and where is the magic in this digital mind-boggling world. You are a writer. You write because of need and because you have identified writing as the talent you most likely possess more than any other, because just maybe that activity keeps you alive and in tune with the world around you. You go through the spasms of depression, frustration, and an occasional adrenaline rush of encouragement and excitement.

Then, you take a look at the marketing aspects of selling your books, the various providers of platforms, tools, and applications. Perhaps, like me, you become aware of the specialized and confusing language used in the digital market places, things like Avatar, widgets, SEOs, RSS feeds, URLs, hash marks, and all of it somehow cannot seem to make sense to you. You become angry with yourself, with the computer and its devious foreign language, and with the madness of minds making life so much more complicated than it really needs be. You wonder what you should be doing that you are not doing but most of all how to do it. Could you have been selling more books and yourself if you had joined this group, used this platform, done this, done that?

Sure, you can hire someone for a tidy sum you think you can trust to take the marketing worries away that allows you to concentrate on your writing. Yet, you either feel not quite comfortable among the so-called professional or you are too money-tight to give it a try. So, you muddle on, writing good books – books that should be selling – and attempting a one-person publishing house. Is there an answer? Is there a Nirvana out there for you?

The odds might not be great, but you figure to keep on writing – because that’s what you love to do. Hopefully, before the grim reaper comes calling, a benevolent event, a magic will come your way and finally make all those moments at the laptop pay off. A Publishing deal with a handsome sign-up bonus? An Amazon selling spree that puts your books virally in the top echelon of the Indie market? Okay, more realistically, beautifully written and sincere heartfelt reviews may lack the money and fame but they do make you soar for a few moments in those heady clouds of success. Maybe that is all we can hope – that and learning the foreign language that is the internet.

Writing mimics life and weather! Just wait a few moments with the emotion you are currently feeling…it will soon pass and be replaced by another. Time is the arbiter of all things – it is here and gone!

Just in the time it took me to write this blog post, I became a famous writer! Talk about an emotional uplift… A good caring and loving spouse can do that for you.

Keep Writing! Good things can happen!

 NOTE:

My NEW BOOK,  A Common Evil is set in Mexico along the Sea of Cortez – murder, mystery, suspense as good fights evil among the drug cartels. The initial reviews are 5-Stars – Hope you can enjoy it at Amazon Worldwide authl.it/B00LMHJUIS. Reviews are welcome.

Feel free to leave a comment. My best wishes.

http://www.about.me/brchitwood

http://billyraychitwood.weebly.com

http://twitter.com/brchitwood (@brchitwood)

http://facebook.com/billyray.chitwood

http://facebook.com/billyrayscorner

http://linkedin.com (billy ray chitwood)

Who Am I?Posted on April 4, 2014 by billyraychitwood1


                      Who Am I?

Who am I?

Not a terribly original question, perhaps one that is often asked over the course of one’s life. What got me to thinking about the question are the genres in which I write my books – mystery (some inspired by true events), romance, bio/memoir, political thought. So much of my writing deals with the underbelly of life, the bad elements in our society, the really evil and ugly people who live among us – fictionally or in fact. It must be my admission that at times it bothers me that I focus my writing so much on a salacious news report about someone being sexually assaulted, people being horribly murdered, an awful pedophile hurting or killing our children, or some dark and greedy enterprise. Another aspect relative to the question is my concern that the books I have written are not necessarily going viral.

Don’t mind me. I feel that much of my life has been spent in introspection, analyzing myself as I lie awake in the night, as I drive the open road, as I view television or a sad movie, even in the middle of a conversation. It’s my way of trying to piece together another part that is unknown to me. Maybe in some sort of loose and nebulous nexus I’m creating everyman, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The way I’m built, the crazy DNA I carry inside, does cause me concern. So much emotion and mobility in my early building stages account for the calculus here. I’ve always been drawn to the action, crime, drama, mystery, and suspense of the big screen or tube. My wife loves comedies and musicals, the ‘Hallmark Movies’, and neatly trimmed family adventures. I started out loving cowboy movies, then graduated to the more fast-paced ‘True Lies’ and ‘Jesse Stone’ types. That’s all okay for different likes and dislikes. There’s a spiritual part of me that nudges me now and then to write something wholesome, like a strong Christian story with an uplifting theme for all ages… Hopefully, one day I shall satisfy that nudge.

If you had not noticed, I’m rambling and trying to figure an apt finish to this post.

Here it is.

I’m doing all this word vacillation when it comes down really to this. There is a lot of me in what I write, in the characters I create, and in the plots. There is fun in the penning of my tales, and I experiment with my writing. There are times when I organize a book – in my fashion – and there are times when I simply allow the characters to take me where it is they want to go… This is likely to make a ‘writing purist’ cringe. For me, the process of writing can take any form a person wishes. The readers ultimately will decide whether or not our writing efforts are worthy.

That brings me to the final point of this post.

Writing is enough for me, the process itself…most of the time. Believing I’m under no delusions of grandeur, I truly feel my words are strung together well and tell compelling stories. I get some 5-Star reviews here and there which make me jubilant. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are used daily and perhaps for some, ad nauseam. I admit to a certain ineptness in this digital world, but I’m doing so many things to get people to read my books. Apparently, I’m not doing nor am I capable of doing some of the things I need to be doing. An old man (me) dusted off some manuscripts, rewrote, edited them, wrote several new books along the way, and self-published them. My first ‘Bailey Crane Mystery’ (“Probable Cause”) was picked up by a publisher, eventually went out of print – that book is now “An Arizona Tragedy – A Bailey Crane Mystery” Book One. There are five ‘Bailey Crane’ books in the series – the original book two manuscript (“Stranger Abduction”) was done on a StarWriter word processor and the manuscript was lost during one of my mobility moments…still not found. Thus, there are five ‘Bailey Crane’ books in lieu of six.

The final point is taking longer than expected.

The mistake was made, I believe, in coming out with so many books in such a short period of time. There were no ‘launching parties’ for the books, no book tours, and there was very little internet plugging. Add to that, I’m no longer a young man who can keep the pace of author book signings, events of one kind or another, or other vital networking avenues. So, the end point is this: my books are good, and I would like to see them in the hands of readers. Yes, writing is enough for me most of the rime, but I do get hungry for reader reaction. Like most authors, I hope for some gratification. My books are bought too infrequently, and I am at a loss to find some magic buttons to push… Of course, I could turn the books over to someone specializing in all phases of marketing, but that of course is costly.

I just finished a KDP giveaway of five of my books for five days (likely, should have been one book instead of five). It looks like some seven hundred total all books were given away during that time, with much tweeting, much Facebook activity, much Goodreads and LinkedIn activity, with my weekly blog announcing the giveaway.

Baring one’s soul is perhaps foolhardy and senseless, but there it is.

What you need to do, kind followers of my blog, other than commiserating, is to start a viral situation with my books…having not the foggiest idea of how you will do that. Do not worry if you fall short of doing either, the commiserating or the viral thing, you will still have me doing a weekly blog, valuing you – and still writing my books, flash fiction, poems, songs, and short stories.

Incidentally, if you have any idea of ‘who I am’ please let me know in the ‘comment’ section.

Here are various links to my books and me.

http://www.about.me/brchitwood

http://www.goo.gl/fuxUA (My books on IAN – Independent Author Network)

http://billyraychitwood.weebly.com (My main website/blog and my books w/some reviews)

Follow me on http://twitter.com/brchitwood (@brchitwood)

http://facebook.com/billyray.chitwood andhttp://facebook.com/billyrayscorner (‘fan’ and ‘like’ page w/updates)

https://www.linkedin.com/nhome/

http://thefinalcurtain1.wordpress.com (The origination blog site of all my posts)

Please leave a comment if so inclined.

        

So Many Ways To Confuse!
Posted on September 8, 2012
  by  billyraychitwood1

 Fancy yourself a writer?

Yeah, me, too. I’m writing my tenth book. My first book was actually published by a small pub house in the 1990s. It was after this experience that the decision was made to go it alone, that is, be a one-man show: write, proofread and edit, re-edit, re-edit, re-edit, publish, market/promote, sell, and try very hard to understand the new internet language of the day. You know, URLs, Feeds, Links, Tags, Keywords, Blogs, Posts, Websites, Widgets, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, on and on? That’s when it hit me like a bad tooth ache: I’m a freaking anachronism — I know nothing about this new digital world we live in.

Well, you can see I didn’t give up. You do see, right? Those nine books I’ve got on amazon.com? Really, you haven’t seen them? Well, you should… Whatever, with all my hooting and hollering, my ranting and raving, my wife sure wished at times that I would give up. I’ve tried the social media, nay, I’ve become a slave to the social media. There are several long visits each day to Twitter, to Facebook, to WordPress, to Goodreads, to Pin-It, to Google Plus, to my Website and blog sites, to two e-mail sites, et al. Now, being an older fellow, I’m up at 7:00-8:00 AM and, darn, before there’s a clue, it’s 5:00 PM and I’ve done virtually no writing at all. And everyone knows what happens at 5:00 PM, right? No, not cocktail hour! Well, maybe cocktail hour! But, the news of the day comes on at 5:00 PM, and, being good citizens of the world, we need to know what’s happening around the globe… So, now, it’s dinner time and soon to be 8:00 PM. My wife needs to watch a couple of TV shows. Now, it’s 11:00 PM. I’ve got no juice left for writing my masterpiece. I take a pill and go to bed. No writing!

That’s the point! No Writing! I want to write and finish that tenth book (I like even numbers!). Yet, like all of us ‘best selling authors’ (mind your chuckles!), there is the almost prurient side of me that wants the books I’m writing to sell — like, viral sell! Time is of the essence for me (playing the age card!) and I’m beginning to wish this electronic age had not been so fast and furious in coming at us. It would just be so very nice to have a publisher again, a good one, a publisher who expertly handles the nitty-gritty details of editing and promotion. They would surely find more of my errata than I’m likely to find. They could likely even suggest ways to make my masterpieces even better — it’s okay to ‘yuk-yuk.’

Anyway, there are so many ways today to confuse us poor beat-up writers, to keep us from doing what it is we really want to do. Sure, there are those with the ‘e pluribus unum’ to hire publicists and get these things done, but I’m a stingy stick-in-the-mud who has just got to do it his very own way, goofs and all.

So, the question is: Is there someone out there who will work pro bono and get me out of this mess I’m in?

Okay, if you’re all going to sit there laughing your fool heads off, I’m outta here!