Finding What Works for You

Hey, look! A post!

Let's talk a bit about online presence—how writers and other creatives are told (or expected) to have one whether they like it or not. You gotta be on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and blogging (well, maybe not blogging anymore, but I will! Sometimes! Screw you, conventional wisdom!).

So the two of you who pay attention know that I've been streaming on Sunday nights for *checks calendar* about a year now. I started because it looked like fun, because I thought it would be a good way to play games I couldn't play around my kids, and because I saw people gathering an audience and I thought, "Hey, maybe I could do that."

Understand, I know how hard it is to build an audience, and I know nothing makes that happen overnight. I never expected to have hundreds of viewers who would all run to buy my books. I figured I'd just build something small—like I did here and on Twitter and Facebook—and maybe, maybe when I had something to sell or to say, that would be another platform for it. And I'd get to play games in the meantime.

Anyway, it turned out not to be as fun as I thought.*

* For me. Other people have fun with it, and that's awesome, but it just wasn't meshing with my schedule or personality.

I am no longer streaming. Could I have built an audience? Sure. But I realized I was no longer looking forward to it, and the idea of not streaming felt like... relief.

And that's my point. When you're looking at ways to build an audience or online presence, you have to HAVE TO evaluate what works for you—what do you enjoy, what comes naturally, what do you look forward to (at least most of the time)? Because otherwise... it just won't work no matter how hard you bang your head on it.

And besides, streaming (and blogging and tweeting and instagraming and... tumbling?) doesn't sell books. Books sell books. And now I have a little bit more time to do that.

So anyway, there's your conventional wisdom for today. Also your general update: I'm still working on stuff for you to enjoy, but I've got nothing finished or announced yet.

I do have a progress chart for the mobile gamebook though (I post updates for this on Twitter and Facebook occasionally). Here's where I am:

I hope to have this thing turned in by early July. We'll see.

So what are you working on?

Editing Tip: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

I know it's been a while. I've been ridiculously busy, but as promised, here's a quick editing tip on something I always wished I had known and now I do.

So, I'm a very meticulous human being (most of the time). I like precision, accuracy, and the difference between the two. I like knowing the right way to do things, and I very much like doing things that way.

Which is why the English language drives me absolutely nutty.

One space after a period or two? Leaped or leapt? Jesus' or Jesus's? God damn it, God dammit, or gorramit? How the hell do you pronounce gif? Lots of people have opinions on these things, and many will tell you there is a right answer to them. And there is a right answer, but it's much more wibbly-wobbly than we want to hear:

The correct choice for most spelling, punctuation, and style questions is the choice that is used consistently.

Really.

Really, really.

It honestly doesn't matter whether you use one space or two after a period so long as you do one or the other consistently. How you spell "damn it" doesn't matter so long as you do so consistently. Whether you italicize foreign words or not doesn't matter so long as you do so consistently.

"Hold on," you say. "Does that mean I could choose not to capitalize any words at all, and that would be correct so long as I'm consistent? Isn't that objectively bad grammar?"

There is surprisingly little that is objective when it comes to language. But yes, that is usually considered bad grammar...

And yes, you can do it so long as you're consistent. E. E Cummings was famous for doing exactly that as well as screwing with punctuation and word order in general. And lest you think "Well, that's poetry," R. J. Palacio did the same thing for some chapters of the wonderful Wonder, even eschewing basic punctuation like periods and quotation marks.

So even grammar is just like the other "rules" of writing—you can break them so long as you do so intentionally and consistently.

Will it work? Well, that depends on what you're doing and how difficult it is for the reader. But there's nothing that says you can't try.


"Okay, wait. My editor told me I have to put one space after every period, regardless of what my typing teacher taught me. Why can't I do it my way like you're saying so long as I'm consistent?"

That's because your editor is following what's called a style guide—a list of rules they follow to make sure that everything they work on is consistent not just within each work but across every work they publish. Style guides are lovely because they do tell you what is right and wrong (kind of), allowing you to have that feeling of being Right (usually).

Most publishers have their own style guides, which are likely (but not necessarily) based on the Chicago Manual of Style. They are also probably using a specific dictionary (and a specific edition of that dictionary) to determine how words should be spelled to be consistent.

For example, the CMoS recommends one space after a period, serial commas in lists of items, and capitalizing words the way you learned in elementary school. If you're talking about what's "objectively" correct, the CMoS (along with other, similar style guides) is the closest thing you're going to get.

But even the CMoS only "recommends" certain things, stopping just shy of laying down the law. I hope to write more of these posts, exploring some of what the CMoS says about certain rules (rules I always wondered about but have become much more clear on lately), but in the meantime, you can find the answers to a lot of rules' questions with a little Googling, the full content of the 16th edition of the CMoS, or if you're really hardcore, a subscription to CMoS 17.

Or ask me! What questions have you always had about what is objectively right or wrong? If I don't already know the answer, I probably should (given my current, primary means of business), and I am more than happy to research it.

[UPDATE: I am a horrible person because for some reason I had typed that CMoS recommends two spaces after a period when I know, I know it does not. This has been corrected, and I have been self-flogged severely as a result.]

March Update

I've got a writing tips post for you next week, but here's where things stand with me now:

• I'm writing dialogue for a game I can't announce yet (but will as soon as I'm allowed). There should be a reveal trailer soon, though I don't expect the actual game to be done for several months or more.
• I'm writing a gamebook-as-mobile-app (I'm doing the writing and choice design; the publisher is doing the systems design and actual functionality). So far, I've turned in three chapters out of ten. I hope to have it all done within two to three months, at which point... we'll see.
• I recently finished a crapload of big editing projects (hence the silence here), which is kind of nice because I feel like I don't have to worry about money for a few weeks. Some of them are exciting too, like a major RPG rulebook and a couple of tie-in novellas to a major MMORPG.
• I've been streaming Cuphead (stream is here, archived videos here). This is a ridiculously hard game, folks, but it's fun to be forced to work my way through it in public. I've also recently streamed Portal 1 and 2 with my parents alongside me and River City Ransom: Underground with my family and friends.
• My brother roped me in to Sea of Thieves, and although I don't have a lot of time for it, I'm awfully glad he did. I love everything about it so far, but nothing more than concertinas and hurdy-gurdies.

I know there are a lot of vagueries in those earlier bullet points, but that's because there are a lot of NDAs in those bullet points. I have a feeling I'll be announcing a lot of things all at once one of these days. Until then, vagueries are what you get.

So how are things with you?