Fiction Unboxed – A Study In Silver

Yes! Come June I’ll be watching pros write a novel in a month. Not a crude rough draft, but (presumably) a finished, edited, publication quality novel which will join their copious inventory.

Yes, readers, this is an unashamed promotion here: If you help overfund the Fiction Unboxed Kickstarter, all of us backers will get some pretty cool stretch goal goodies. Such things as free copies of Scrivener, Johnny, Sean, and Dave’s own Scrivener template, and yet more stuff to be named later.

The real benefit for me will be actually watching the writing process rather than being told about it later. What I’m hoping for is a one-month apprenticeship in the self-publishing business — as opposed to a self-publishing hobby or self-publishing wishful thinking.

Yeah! June’s gonna rock!

…presuming they fund, of course.

I’ve reviewed Write, Publish, Repeat by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant on Goodreads. The title says it all. My problem is finishing what I write (other than blog posts, writing group event flyers, and similar non-paying projects…) I’ve got at least two, and possibly as many as five (yeah, I’m afraid to look) novel drafts that I could revise and publish, only one of which is even partly revised.

But Sean and Johnny are presumably going to help fix that. If their KickStarter funds, they will take a novel from nothing — no concept, no premise, no genre, nada — to a finished, published, roughly 75,000 word novel in thirty days. And their backers (Me! Me!) get to watch. Everything.

Before I listen to writing or publishing advice, I want to see a person’s credentials. Do they publish fiction? Are they self-published? Do they make a living writing fiction? A decent living? Sean and Johnny pass with flying colors. This is better even than a book of writing advice; I’ll get to see what really happens to get a book finished and published. As the inevitable writers’ advice goes, “Show, don’t tell.”

I will watch during June, and see if it helps me with what happens in Camp NaNoWriMo in July.