Novelish

This is just to let Novelish readers know that I won’t have access to a computer for the next month or so. I’ll resume posting as soon as I get back.

I know I haven’t been particularly good with doing regular updates lately, but one thing I have been doing a lot is visiting Goodreads - a sort of additive site where you can catalog your books in various shelves. For example, if anyone’s interested, mine are read, currently-reading, to-read, i-own-this, made-me-cry, read-more-than-once, and to-reread. My main profile is here.

The comments problem on Novelish should be fixed now; anyone with thoughts on the new design, Daughter of the Forest or Murkmere - or any other entry - will be able to add them as usual.

Novelish has a new look. I tend to get tired of my designs every six months no matter how lovely they seem in the beginning. As this has been up for less than a day, I’m presently thrilled with it - and with any luck the general visual thrillingness will thrill me into posting more often.

I do need to tweak a few things. I may adjest the font, update the sidebar, and/or add a little color.

The Read in 2008 page is also up. (RSS subscribers may have noticed that I accidently published it as a blog post yestarday.)

…but I just got this really cool art print in the mail, signed by artist Tim Kirk, from a giveaway on the His Dark Materials fansite BridgeToTheStars.net. Which goes to show that it pays to keep trying, I suppose. Lyra is one of my favorite characters and she’s going on my wall just as soon as I can find an appropreately-sized frame.

A few days ago I was looking through the list of books that I’ve read this year, and it occured to me that it would be interesting to make a collage of the covers.

This image is going to be rather large:

[Read more]

This is a bit… odd. I’ve subscribed to Publisher’s Weekly for two years, and although I really enjoy browsing their bestseller lists, articles, and book reviews, I don’t want to spend $240 to renew again - at least not just yet.

They’ve already sent me the standard renewal messages - two or three of them - but today I received a more sternly worded notice by email:

Your subscription to Publishers Weekly ends this month and frankly I am surprised we haven’t heard from you.

We’re not only going to have to stop sending you your copy of Publishers Weekly, but we are now forced to deny access to PublishersWeekly.com. As you know, we’ve given you complete access to PublishersWeekly.com as part of your subscription. But now that relationship is about to end.

Feels rather like I’m being punished for something horrid.

I’m writing.

In fact, I’ve probably done more on my novel so far this month than in all of June, and it’s nice to see it start to come together. I’ve even been doing three or four handwritten pages in my journal every day - producing horrid crap that will never again be read is fun.

I’m just not doing it on Novelish. I suppose it’s the writing for an audience thing that’s stopping me. It’s been difficult for me to declare something “good enough to post,” especially on those days when, for whatever reason, the words don’t come out easily. But I think, and hope, I’m over it by now - mostly - so you may be seeing more of me, if all goes well.

Besides that (and a minor Read in 2007 page update), there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot happening this past week, either in the world of books or with me. A couple of reviews are very slowly being worked on. It’s enormously hot here.

It’s cloudy out. I took a picture of them - the clouds, I mean - with my sugar-snap peas in the foreground. It looked good in sepia.

My OS X weather widget tells me it’s raining, but my eyes tell me it’s not; as such, I must conclude that rain in the near future is not out of the question.

I’m reading bits of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend at intervals, which had a slow start and which is very different from her last novel but which I’m beginning to like.

I’m also picking up Watchmen and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer - oh, and a nonfiction research book - and reading a few pages of each before setting them down again.

But most of all, I’m staring at my Google Analytics statistics page in a state of dazed bewilderment, pressing the refresh button every couple minutes. Yesterday’s post made it to Reddit’s front page as well as getting some StumbleUpon attention, and the number of people who stopped by is quickly approaching 25,000.

Twenty-five thousand.

To give you some perspective, the daily visits have generally been between 20 and 50 until now. I was happy with that; I mean, Novelish opened barely two weeks ago and this is my first blog, so I’m still learning. But today I was forced to upgrade my hosting account just to keep the site online.

With so much attention, there’s inevitably been a lot of comments about “cover deja vu” around the internet (and on Reddit in particular). Mostly they’re positive. Some people felt that the title was misleading - or that photos repeated on multiple covers is really no big deal and I shouldn’t be so damn proud of finding it.

The truth is, I didn’t put much thought into the title or anything else. I wanted something short that would convey the content of the post; Cover Deja Vu seemed to sum it up nicely. I wanted people to know it involved stock photos, so I added The Dangers of Stock Photography to the end.

I thought the post was a rather good idea, but nothing huge - I expected to get a few hundred visits from it at most, if I was lucky. Would I have spent more time on it if I’d known about the 25,000 visitors? Yes. Yes. I’d have gone through another dozen drafts at least. Actually, I think I’d have been afraid to post it at all.

Which brings me to the main point of this entry: the realization that so many people are reading what you write can be a scary one. I wanted Novelish to be a place for me from the beginning - people who liked it would read it, but I wouldn’t concern myself with creating popular content. And I’m finding that it’s much, much harder for me to stick with that plan after such a huge traffic surge.

Sure, I’ll consider myself lucky if one in a thousand of those visitors become regulars here, but something about the knowledge that I might have even 25 more readers than I did last week makes me very conscious of the quality of my writing. I have to wonder how novelists with tens of millions of books in print (like J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, or even Charles Frazier) ever get by.

My next review (of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind) should be ready sometime tomorrow. is delayed, but will be posted soon. Until then, I’ll do my best to stop obsessing over whether I’m focusing on the right things, using the right words, and successfully getting my message across.