Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem

It’s October and everyone has been putting out their Halloween decorations, so it probably makes sense that I’ve been thinking about monsters a lot. Also, I’m reading a book about the way monsters are used in fiction, I listened to a podcast episode about monsters, and I write about monsters, so yeah… lots of monster contemplation going on over here, lol.

Monsters are an interesting storytelling technique because aside from your average human monster (serial killers, etc.), we don’t really encounter very many “monsters” in day-to-day life. We can live in a city or an urban area, and it’s highly unlikely that a lion is going to show up and start stalking us or a wolf is going to get a bunch of its buddies together and hunt us down. And even in more rural areas, we have houses and guns and electric fences and all kinds of tools and resources to protect ourselves, so the danger is a lot less than if we only had a spear or a knife.

Aliens haven’t shown up yet (as far as we officially know), Lovecraft’s creatures haven’t come knocking, dragons and other magical monsters don’t exist—and so our exposure to monsters in real life is limited to human monsters, wildlife safaris, and the occasional run-in with a black bear or shark (if you live where they do—I’ve not had that problem in Baltimore haha).

And I think that’s one reason we have such a fascination with monsters—it’s that we don’t face them in real life. And trying to imagine what it would be like is exciting, interesting, and reminds us of the things our ancestors faced back when they lived less digitally and more closely with the natural world.

At any rate, as Halloween rolls around, I’ll be enjoying the depictions of ghosts and demons and witches and monsters all over the city, and maybe, if the mood strikes me, watching a scary movie or two. And of course, working on writing my own monsters!

Do you have a favorite scary movie I should check out? (Preferably featuring monsters, of course!)

In celebration of Halloween, enjoy this image of one of one of my creepier monsters (at least, that’s what people tell me lol). It’s a hulla. They use human skin and human brains to reproduce. Yup, lol.

A couple quick updates:

I’m killing it on new manuscripts! I finished the rough draft of a brand-new urban fantasy trilogy (yes, all three books are drafted) that I’m excited to tell you more about soon.

I also got back the fourth book in the Land of Szornyek series from my betas, and just sent it out to my proofreader.

In Rove City news, I finished a short companion story specifically for my book release newsletter subscribers (click here to subscribe and get the short story for free!) and I have five more books in the series either partially or fully drafted. It’s been a productive couple of months!

I’ve also got a deadline for the audiobook version of Land of Szornyek (holding off on sharing until it’s confirmed!) and have started the process of creating an audio version of the Rove City series.

I’ll also be participating in NaNoWriMo for the ELEVENTH time (I can’t get over that it’s been OVER a decade since I did my first Nano), so if you follow me on Instagram (@arielesieling), you’ll be seeing an uptick in monsters over there.

I’m also working on a few other things (because I’m not great at sitting still lol) and I will check back in with more details once I have them!

Happy October, friends!

How To Do A Writing Sprint

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If you’ve never heard of a writing sprint, let me first say, Welcome to the World of Writing Sprints!

(I’m imagining saying that like the guy in Futurama episode 1.)

Anyway, doing sprints is one of my number one techniques for producing content quickly.

Here’s how they work:

You set a timer, close Facebook, and write until the timer goes off. And if you want, you can measure the number of words you have at the beginning of the sprint and at the end.

That’s it.

It’s that simple.

You can even race with other people if you want. (Though, remember, writing more words doesn’t make you a better writer, more competent, or more qualified. I can write “banana” a thousand times in twenty minutes and totally hack the sprint and make it look like I’m the fastest writer, but that’s stupid and pointless and don’t be a banana.)

My personal preference is to set the timer between 15 - 30 minutes, and take a 5-minute break between sprints. These days, I tend to be closer to the 30 minute range. I find less than 15 min too short to really get into it, and longer than 30 is too long and my attention starts to wane. Other people like to set the timer for five minutes. Or an hour. Or two hours.

It’s really about what works best for you.

Back in the day (way back, think like 8 - 10 years), I had heard of sprints and thought they were stupid. “Why need a timer?” I asked myself. “What’s the difference between writing for twenty minutes with a timer and without?” and so it took me a while to try it.

But there’s definitely a difference. Something about having a defined beginning and end point works really well for my brain. I also find that sprinting with others helps. Something about the social pressure of not having produced any words at all during a sprint makes me want to get my brain into gear.

There are plenty of tools you can use to do the sprint. You can set a timer on your phone, download a desktop timer, use online sites—some people even have browser blocker extensions that make it so you can’t use the internet for that interim of time. What ever works for you.

Quick tip: If you’re writing by hand and sprinting with other people, the easiest way is to do a quick average—count how many words per line for maybe 10 lines, and then how many lines per page, and multiply.

So for example, if you have a sheet with 20 lines, the top ten lines might look like this: 7 words, 8 words, 11 words, 13 words, 15 words, 7 words, 10 words, 8 words, 9 words, 10 words. Add them up (98), divide by the number of lines (9.8 — you can round up to 10) and that gets your per line average = 10 words per line. Then, when you do your calculation at the end, just multiply the average but the number of lines. So if you have 20 lines on the page, it’s 10 x 20 which is 200 words per page.

I know sprints don’t work for everyone, but I’m a big fan. Lately, I’ve been working on my speed.

I use a bot in Discord as my timer (you can join my server if you want; I do monthly prunes, so lurkers get booted, though), and my top speed is 52 words per minute, which beat out my previous personal best of 48 words per minute.

That said, quantity isn’t the important part of sprinting.

The important part of sprinting is the focus.

It doesn’t matter if I write 50 words during a twenty minute sprint or 500 words or 1000 words. What matters is that I stayed attentive to my project for the entire sprint.

Sometimes, I can get into the zone for the entire sprint, and my wordcount is insane.

Sometimes, I need to go back and read some of what I wrote previously, before I can continue forward. Then my wordcount is lower, but it’s fine, because I was doing what I needed to do in order to move forward.

Sometimes, I need to go back and fix something, I delete a few sentences, and my wordcount actually goes down. But it’s fine, because I was doing what I needed to do in order to move forward.

Sometimes, I don’t even write during sprints. I often edit (and count pages) or do completely other things, like responding to emails or setting up ads or whatever it is I’m working on that particular day. And then I make up completely random numbers (for the Discord bot—it counts wordcount to measure sprints), but it doesn’t matter, because I’m doing what I need to do in order to move forward.

As we move into November, I’m going to be doing a lot of writing sprints because it’s National Novel Writing Month! I’ll be writing a whole book in Nov, so I’ll be needing that word count to succeed.

And if you’re interested, I invite you to join me!

A couple of last minute thoughts:

• Sprints aren’t for everyone. If they stress you out, don’t do them!

• You don’t have to share your real wordcount. Nobody cares. Make it up if you want. It’s the focus that matters.

• Even though doing sprints with other people is structured as a competition, it really isn’t. It’s about focusing. It’s about getting words on the page. Or getting some work done. And if the sprint helped you move forward, you’ve succeeded.

In the end, it comes down to focus. And sprints help me focus. <3

As a side note, I’m putting together a weekly email of writing tips. If you’re interested in joining, click to sign up!

On Audiobooks

Those of you who have been following my career progress know that making my work accessible has been important to me. I’ve done a lot of research over the past year for how I can do that, and right now, though my books are mostly only available on Amazon as e-books and paperbacks, I’ve made some huge strides.

Rutherford has been on major effort: currently, four of the eight books are now available as ebooks wherever ebooks are sold, and I’m working on video editions of them all as well.

Starting next year, Land of Szornyek will be available wherever ebooks are sold (not only on Amazon) and I’m working on taking my paperbacks wide as well (meaning they will be available in more locations than just Amazon, including available for wholesale purchase for bookstores and through the platforms libraries use to purchase their books).

I’ve also made a lot of progress on audiobooks.

For those of you who don’t know how the process works, there are two major challenges with having books turned into audiobooks: the cost and the process.

The cost is of course the most prohibitive part. A good narrator costs at least $200/hour of finished audio. So, a ten-hour audiobook minimally costs $2,000 for production. And that’s fair—cheap even. The process for the narrator requires reading, editing the audio, and fixing any mistakes that they made. It’s a significant time investment on the part of the narrator, and they deserve to be paid for their time.

There are, of course, other options—like royalty share, where you split the royalties 50/50 with the narrator, or an in-between option where you pay them a lower per hour cost, and also split royalties.

But all of these options are complicated and require contracts. And what if the narrator disappears halfway through a series and you have to switch? Or what if after doing a book or two together, you find out that you really don’t like working with each other?

The decisions are difficult, and with that amount of money at stake, it’s extremely draining. It’s a time-consuming and challenging process.

And I have 12 novels and novellas already published which means that’s a minimum of $24k of investment. Not counting the money I’ll have to spend on the design of the audiobook cover image and marketing of the books. And the cost of the upcoming books I currently have in production.

That said, I still think audio is worth it, so I’ve hired one narrator for one series, and have been looking into other options as well, including doing my own recordings for the shorter manuscripts.

And more recently, I experimented with a platform called Descript, which allowed me to record a sample of my voice, which I could then use to read my work. The sample I provided (for my 7-day free trial) was low quality, but the results were still really cool.

I have a lot of thoughts about what I’m going to do moving forward and haven’t made any decisions yet, but I thought I would share the short low-quality sample with you for novelty’s sake.

And if you’re interested in financially supporting my quest to make audiobooks, joining my Patreon is the best way to do that.

At any rate, check out Robot Ariele’s debut recording here! This segment is from the beginning of Ghost Below, a short story companion to the Rove City series, which you can get for free by signing up for my book release newsletter.