Stream of consciousness . . .

from the inimitable Fairy Tales on Facebook

I have been sitting thinking today, working through the next phase of the WIP, trying to picture just what I want to happen.  I have an outline you see, a storyboard if you will and I tend to brainstorm at the end of a writing spell, write things down in pen, maybe a para, maybe only a word, but it helps me to move on more fluidly the next day.  So I was having one of those moments and my husband disturbed me (with a glass of wine) and I told him that I had an image in my mind for tomorrow.  I then realised that the idea that I had written two extra chapters way back before I had to leave it all on Nov 20 and which I thought I had lost, was indeed a figment of my imagination.  To be sure I had thought them up, I just hadn’t written key words or paras anywhere.  In my head the two lost chapters were there as a faint image, they just weren’t on the computer.  Does that make sense? As my husband said, I forgot to press the metaphorical ‘save’ at the time.

We then went on to talk about the publishing game, and as streams of consciousness tend to do, we walked down many roads.  The POD road, which I have done and enjoyed, and which made me grow up quicker than a baby on steroids. The desperately seeking agent’ road which I also travelled last year with a major Australian agent who seduced me with so-called interest, emasculated me, ridiculed me and then threw me away. The ‘mainstream publishing road’ . . . hmm, the road I hope to place a tentative toe on this year.

My husband is a media exec and he said that in electronic broadcasting which now covers podcast, radio, TV, V.O.D, Facebook ,Twitter, I-View, etc . . . the content is the thing.  Not the format but the C-O-N-T-E-N-T. In fact there is a saying: ‘Content is king.’ What surprises him I think, after watching the ease of  my POD experience, is why mainstream publishing hasn’t moved more speedily into that area.  There is so much on the internet about publishers thinking about POD, or thinking about E-Books etc.  His comment was that if the content is good enough, what the hell does the format matter ?  A good point and one I couldn’t answer, because I am a babe in the woods both as an author and a published writer.

There are those diehards who might say that because my novels are a product of POD that I am not a published writer. I would ask then: when is a carefully written story that has been professionally formatted, professionally cover-designed,  printed and then marketed and which has a small fan base, not  a published book?  I suspect its a semantic question for more experienced people in the field than I, so with that in mind I’m off to write down some key words and paras for the WIP that I hope may one day do its own bit of seduction.