Being An Indy

Being an Indy

Sorry this is late this week. I had technical difficulties! But now they’re solved.

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at the Tuolumne County Historical Society. I talked about my life as a novelist and read from my three books. It was a blast.

In preparing the talk, I needed to say things about my choice to independently publish. I knew there would be people in the audience who would want to know more information about it. It is an important decision for any writer to make.

The first thing I realized is that the general public does not know the term “indy writer.” In the crowd I hang out with and the materials I study, that term is part of our daily vernacular. But the regular person has never heard ot it. They would call me a self-published writer. There is definitely a question of whether I'm “really a writer” or whether I'm just creating “vanity projects.”

In my presentation, I talked about my spirit. I told this audience that I had been an entrepeneur, working as an editor and transcriptionist, for the past twenty-three years. I told them I liked to have control over my work. The one advantage I could see would be if traditional publishers truly marketed your work, but except for a select few, now most writers have to market themselves. I said that I had talked to writers who were traditionally published and had noted a common theme: a lack of communication between the writer and the agent and the publishing company, many broken promises, an abundance of power plays that the writer had to navigate, a building up and then a tearing down, and just general bad behavior towards the writer. I had heard tales on podcasts about agents telling writers that they could not write a certain book. I'm sure if I was traditionally published, my agent would not be pleased if, after two coming-of-age novels, I said that now I planned ot embark on a series of talking cat fantasies. Many writers are sensitive souls. I know I am. If I was being told what to create, I wouldn't be able to write. I just couldn't do it.

There is often an attitude that if something is self published, that it is slapped together, not worth your time. When I talk to people about my books, I like to have my work on hand so I can show them the care that has been taken with the production. At presentations, I like to read from my books, so people can hear that I've taken time with the writing. I like to talk about my process in creating a book—writing drafts, turning it over to a beta reader when I can't stand to look at it any more, revising, handing it off to a developmental editor, revising, hiring a copyeditor to review it, revising, sending it off to the proofreader, revising, publishing. Granted, not every indy writer does this, but many of us do.

When people think of becoming writers and publishing, I think there is still often the wish of having an agent and being published traditionally. It's what many of us grew up with as our dream. There is still a cachet attached to that parth, although I think it is not nearly as desirable as it used to be. The indy road is growing stronger every day. We are indy. Hear us roar!

A Chat with the Narrator of The Loudest Meow, Kae Denino!

Great news!

The Loudest Meow: A Talking Cat Fantasy is now in the process of distribution. For this project, I worked with the audiobook company, Findaway Voices. One of the reasons why I wanted to work with them was because they have the largest audiobook distribution network in the world. The Loudest Meow is currently available at the following locations:

https://www.estories.com/audiobook/257016/Wendy-Ledger/The-Loudest-Meow

https://www.scribd.com/audiobook/395980639/The-Loudest-Meow-A-Talking-Cat-Fantasy

https://www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/loudest-meow-a-talking-cat-fantasy/366424

In the weeks to come, you will be also be able to find it at Audible, Google Play, Walmart, Storytel, and numerous other companies. I will keep you posted.

Findaway also helped me find a wonderful narrator, Kae Denino. If you sign up with Audible and need a narrator, they will take you through an audition process, where you fill out a questionnaire on what you want, and then they select candidates, and you can read their bios and listen to their clips and chose who you would like to audition for the book.  Through that process, I found Kae Denino and soon realized that she absolutely needed to be the narrator for this book.

After we had finished production on The Loudest Meow, I asked Kae a few questions via email about her work and the project:

Kae, when I listened to the different voice talents and their clips, I was immediately blown away by your zest and enthusiasm in your samples. You definitely convey your love of the work. Can you talk about how you got into this business and your wonderful approach to things?

Wendy, it’s all my parents. Listening to them talk to anyone…they do it with such respect, such love and humor. They’ve both been in customer service their whole lives, and are truly “people people.” And they read to my sister and I since before we were born. So speaking with kindness, respect, and love for a good written word has been with me my whole life. Growing up I was always the one grabbing the microphone—plays, speech and debate, poetry readings, weddings and funerals, and about issues I love to help, such as fighting human trafficking.

For the audition, I was happy to discover that Findaway would let me choose my own excerpt (with a certain word limit). I selected a passage where my four main cat characters were in high-voltage dialogue. I wanted to hear all of the really important voices. I wanted to make sure that my narrator would be comfortable in operatic situations. What did you think when you first encountered the cats?

What can I say? I LOVE THE CATS! When I first learned about it, I counted them up—there are roughly fourteen—and walked around telling everyone, “I’m going to be fourteen cats in a book, all with different voices and personalities!” I was excited but didn’t really believe I could do it. It was only when I really delved into the text that I learned how each cat was so different, so rich in character. Even how they talk by the end is different than how they talk in the beginning, because they grow so much throughout the story.

Do you want to say anything about what it was like to work on this particular project?

This was the first story I ever worked on that seriously got out of hand. Every other story has had parameters—it’s going to have this kind of feel, it’s a classic romance novel, it’s going to follow this kind of course. But by the time the cats are literally on a beach, creating and destroying all kinds of things and jetting off into space, the reader knows all bets are off with this story. It has a wild, feline mind of its own. There are no good guys or bad guys, just fully formed beings trying to navigate unforetold circumstances, just like real life.  It was a true pleasure to narrate and I missed the cats as soon as we were finished.

As you know, I am so thrilled with your work. It was such a pleasure working with you. I hope we can continue to collaborate. Thank you so much, Kae.

I love working with you, too! Thank you! Let’s get some more books out there! I think The Loudest Meow would make one heck of an animated movie. Looking forward to the mewture.

A Writing Refuge

Happy Holidays!

Mike gave me a tremendous gift this year. He bought me a heated mattress pad for my writing bed. He hung up pictures on the walls of my office—a collection of owls, so smart, aware, and fierce; a horse in motion; the ocean showing off its waves; a road lined with trees in fall foliage; a black-and-white cat sitting in a window, staring at me, reminding me to try my best to get it right. Now I sit down to write and work, and I'm surrounded by images that mean so much to me. I'm toasty warm. When I walk into my office, I feel even more that I am in my cave, where, of course, cats are welcome. And with an electric blanket and a heated mattress pad, they visit often. With these changes, I have fallen more deeply in love with my office. What do you have in your work space that makes it so welcoming to you?

Fifteen Minutes

This week I continually reminded myself of the Fifteen Minutes Principle (my silly name to make it sound more official and professional and authorly in my mind). The Fifteen Minutes Principle basically states that if you can even give yourself fifteen minutes a day to work on your writing, you can accomplish a great deal. I first realized this years ago when I joined a guided writing prompt group after a lengthy hiatus from writing. The leader of the group would give us a suggestion, and we would write for fifteen minutes, and I would be amazed at the number of pages I could crank out in this short period of time.

When I decided that I finally had to sit down and write that novel that I'd wanted to write ever since I was a kid, I relied on this principle. Writing your first novel, at least for me, was frightening. I had tried in the past. I had left behind a trail of unfinished drafts. I had no assurance that I could actually make it to the finish line this time. So when I started out, I wrote for fifteen minutes a day three times a week. That was all I could do. But that was all right. I had begun.

Now I generally write for an hour a day when I can. But, three weeks ago, I finished a rough draft of The Sharpest Claw, the follow-up to The Loudest Meow. Stephen King would recommend that I let that draft sit for several months. I let it go for two weeks. And that felt hard. It felt difficult this time because it felt so good to let it sit. I actually didn't miss my writing practice. So then I worried. “Do I really want to write? Will I be able to go back to it when the two weeks are up?”

Last Monday, I sat down again to start on the second draft. This how I re-enter that writing world. I print out the draft, and I read it out loud and take notes. It usually takes me about two hours, or two writing sessions, to go through the draft in this way. Then I go back to Scrivener, back to Chapter 1, and fill in and take out and reshape and revision what I wrote before.

Along with being a writer, I'm an editor and transcriber. That's my day job. Holiday times are often slow, but it turned out last week that I suddenly had a great deal to do. I couldn't see how it all was going to get done, with or without my one-hour writing practice. Part of me panicked. “I have to write. It's time,” and then I heard the voice that reminded me of the Fifteen Minute Principle.

So that's what I did last week. During breaks from editing or transcription, I would write down notes for this draft. And ideas came in funny ways. For example, in addition to everything else, Mike and I also had Christmas errands to do. We're currently listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks on our drives, and at this point last week, Jim Dale, the narrator for these books, sang a Sorting Hat song. And that made me think. There are certain songs in this draft of this book. I hadn't thought of actually giving them lyrics and a melody. Now that seemed like opportunities I would like to take.

This is how the mind is funny. Today, I knew that, after breakfast, I would have a full hour to write. While Mike was making pancakes, I started constructing a game plan for that time. This early chapter had one of the songs in it. I played with ideas in my mind about that tune for a moment, then decided, “I will just jot down what I want to do here and then proceed. Songs don't come on command.”

And, at that moment, it showed up, a short little ditty, very silly, complete with a melody. I wrote it down, ran into the kitchen, sang it to Mike, then went back and recorded the song on Voice Memo so that it wouldn't be lost. Then I ate pancakes and went back to work, marveling at the mysteriousness of this process we call writing.

The Power of Audio

Somehow I missed writing here last week.

Here's my excuse.

I spent eleven hours listening to audio files of The Loudest Meow: A Talking Cat Fantasy. (With the help of Findaway Voices and narrator Kae Denino, I'm in the middle of creating an audiobook. It's actually five-and-a-half hours long. I listened to it twice.)

You have to know that I love audio. I'm primarily an auditory person. When I was young, I was prone to nightmares. I believed that if I closed my eyes, I could die. So sleep was a problem. One of my parents would lay outside my open bedroom door and read until I fell asleep. I also listened to recordings—mostly musicals, West Side Story, Man of La Mancha, The Fantasticks, Camelot . . . Somehow I believed that anyone who could stand on a stage and sing could defeat Death. No problem.

Later in life, when I discovered audiobooks, I fell immediately in love with the form. Mike and I have stories about the power of these books—how on a road trip, we missed our favorite restaurant by several hundred miles because we got so lost in a story. How, on that same trip, on the way back, we managed to get to the restaurant, but then we started the book up again and almost ran out of gas because we forgot to go to the gas station. But that was when we were new to the form. We are not that foolish today. We get to everywhere we need to go. We just have more fun doing it.

There is still room for reading books in my life. I'm primarily a bedtime reader, and I can't listen to audiobooks before going to bed. They do make me fall asleep. I’ve grown out of those nightmares. Now I want to keep track of the story. But, in other parts of the day, audiobooks give me more opportunity in life to experience books. Through audiobooks, I will listen to books that I would never read, like nonfiction. If it's a memoir and the author is reading it, I want to hear the story told that way. And oftentimes nonfiction feels like more serious study to me. It's not something that you pick up in order to drift off to sleep. It's something where you think and ponder and maybe take notes. Again, I'm an auditory learner. That's my best approach for these types of books.

In the week that I spent listening to files, I felt thrilled. Kae Denino, the narrator for my book, is incredibly talented. I believe that she gives the proper voices and truly invests in the emotions of the story. And somehow I didn't realize how emotional the story was until I heard it. That seems like it would be such a basic thing, but that really happened to me. For writers out there, I would say that preparing an audiobook is a great way to learn about yourself as a writer. You can really experience your strengths and weaknesses. You are able to get a whole different perspective on your story. I now feel closer to my characters. I understand the story more. I felt like this came at a great time because I have recently finished the first draft of the sequel to this book. Diving down deep and listening hard to Book 1 has led me to rethink some aspects of Book 2. I'll be writing more about this in the future, but let me just say right now that I am so happy with the audiobook. I can't wait for you to hear it.