Category Archives: Moses Siregar III

So, You’re Considering Indie Publishing “¦

Hello, neighbor. It’s so nice to see you again. I heard you’re thinking about dipping your toes in the indie end of the publishing pool. Well then, come away with me to a world of wonder, where authors can do anything they wish and even make a little money at it (but sorry, you’re not getting laid-that’s only for rockstars, CEO types, and firemen).

Right. Onward. Resources … resources are very good. They help you do stuff. You want resources. So then, knowledge … leads to power. Power. You like power! Yes you do. That’s why you’ll want to do some reading, follow some blogs. Otherwise you’ll fail, and failure is, like, really bad. So start with these, because the world of indie publishing changes at lightning speed. You’ll always need to stay on top of what’s happening (and be wary of any e-book on the subject that’s more than a day old).

The Writer’s CafÃ© at Kindleboards. It’s a jungle over there, but if you’re looking for current discussions, be there now.

Lindsay Buroker. Lindsay is quietly conquering the world. The best part? She shares all of her secrets.

David Gaughran. This one is quite the hub. Keep it on your radar. Btw, David actually wrote a better version of this very blog post.

Kristine Kathrine Rusch’s The Business Rusch. Good stuff.

Victorine Lieske’s “Why Isn’t My Book Selling?” Vicki is one of the classiest humans around, and you can learn a lot from this blog.

The Passive Voice. Smart people read this. You’re smart. You should read this.

Dean Wesley Smith. After reading his blog and his great series of posts on killing the sacred cows of publishing, I met Dean at the recent Superstars Writing Seminar. He was cool.

Robin Sullivan. Her postings have slowed down lately, but she has a righteous blog.

Joe Konrath, poking bears in the eye with badass style.

Elle Casey recommends YA Indie, a blog run by some indie YA authors. Looks good.

World Literary CafÃ©. I’m not familiar with it, but Melissa Douthit says “WLC is good for connecting authors to readers and vice versa. If you’re new, it helps to get your books up off the ground.” So yeah. That’s good. Another one that some people like for this sort of thing is Wattpad.

Looking for something else? A particular service, maybe? Jennifer Powell has a nice list of resources for self-publishers. As does Katie Salidas. And here’s a crapton of useful links for indie authors, from kindleboards.

Next, neighbor, we will discuss philosophy. Writer’s write. So, write. Moving on …

Some basic advice:

Make sure your work is ready. Don’t be stupid. Everyone thinks their writing is great. Make sure you can find some total strangers who think your work is the bomb before uploading to Amazon.

The most common regret indies have is that they didn’t hire a good editor. Hire a good editor. Also, copyediting and proofreading are kind of important. Ask around, ask for referrals, and get an editing sample before you splurge and spend big bucks on a crappy editor. They’re definitely out there. Don’t pay for crap.

Joshua Essoe, one of my editors and a fellow Fictorian, isn’t crap.

If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy and you want to sell books, don’t even think about not writing a series. This also goes for any genre where series are a big deal.

A good book cover has two ingredients: art and typography. Lots of indies have great art and awful typography. If you don’t have the skillz, spend some money on typography. Find someone who knows what they are doing and pay them to make the lettering on your cover look professional (Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone your secret).

If you’re the shy type …

You don’t necessarily have to do social media, you don’t have to have a platform, and you don’t have to do a ton of marketing. BUT, if this is going to be your path (the path of the shy gal/guy), you’ve got to write really frickin’ fast. Like, a lot of fast. And pick a big, hungry audience (for example, romance or thrillers), and know exactly what that audience wants, and then get up early every morning and make those readers their  frickin’ donuts. Serve up their donuts. You are going to be a slave to all of those hungry readers and you’re going to consistently give them what they want. Worship the readers, serve the readers, and you’ll do just fine. Yep, it’s a lot like a job. Disclaimer: I’m still working on this part.

If you’re the social type …

Set writing goals, stick to schedules, and make the writing the number bleeping one (#1) priority. Put your game face on. No smiling! Eye of the Tiger. It’s business time.

Thanks for going on this little trip with me. Just remember, the most important thing is to have fun and enjoy the journey. Don’t get too caught up with numbers. Live from your heart. And listen to Mr. Rogers …

 

Moses Siregar III is the author of The Black God’s War. It’s okay.

 

Major Character Fail: Alexander the Jittery Mess

I waited until 2011 to watch Oliver Stone’s 2004 movie Alexander, even though I’m a fan of Stone and a sucker for ancient Greece. Critics and moviegoers alike trashed the film, so I put off seeing it until I was sick last week and needed to kill three hours from the couch. I’m glad I waited, though, because now I can draw a critical storytelling lesson from this failed epic.

Critics slammed Alexander on many levels, but I saw one central problem with the movie: a tragic failure to give us a central character that we’ll want to watch for any length of time-not to mention for nearly three hours.

Stphen Hunter writes:

If you played a word-association game with “Alexander the Great,” you’d probably come up with “conqueror,” “king,” “warrior,” “legend,” “despot,” “wastrel” or “killer.” Unfortunately, Oliver Stone has chosen to build his epic of the Macedonian military genius around a word highly unlikely to make the list: “crybaby.”

 

It’s almost as if Stone set out to make one of the world’s most storied conquerers as weak and unlikable as possible. With a strong, charismatic Alexander, this film might have turned out fairly well. Without such an Alexander, it’s a disaster.

The first problem I found was that few characters in the movie actually liked Alexander. David Farland once pointed out in one of his free Daily Kicks that in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, one of the reasons we like Ferris is because everyone else does; he’s incredibly cool. Stone’s Alexander isn’t. His soldiers argue with him. His mom thinks he’s a “boy” even when he’s a grown man. His dad nearly kills him and frequently threatens to do it. His wife doesn’t respect him. Many of the finest men in his army think he’s a royal putz.

And you expect me to care about the guy? Maybe if Alexander seemed like a real victim–just a poor misunderstood guy. But that’s not what we get here.

Compounding this problem is Colin Farrell’s portrayal of Alexander (I liked Farrell in In Bruges, btw). His errors remind us that a protagonist shouldn’t make us want to slap the snot out of him in every scene. Desson Thomson writes:

Farrell puts a lot of energy into his role, but his character’s pulled and tugged in so many directions, we’re not sure what to make of him. He’s tough in the battlefield, anguished over mutiny from his soldiers, torn between lovers, impulsive and fearful, heedlessly brave and fitfully sensitive.

Hunter again:

His Alexander, as expressed through the weepy histrionics of Colin Farrell, is more like a desperate housewife than a soldier. He’s always crying, his voice trembles, his eyes fill with tears.

So, few characters in the movie really like Alexander and Alexander himself is a jittery mess. Can we at least feel sorry for him? I didn’t. Sure, he had a complicated childhood. But Stone and Farrell never gave me much to actually like about Alexander.

Alexander says he wants to do good things for the people he conquers, but this feels hollow when he seems to be driven by an ambition that comes out of his Oedipal psychology. Then he actually does some nice things for the conquered, but his men sneer at him for favoring foreigners. Even when he marries a sexy Persian dancer, Alexander gets no dap from his boys.

Our protagonist just wants to be loved, but even after he sexually conquers his tigress of a wife, he whispers something in her sleeping ear (or at least he thought she was sleeping) about her heart being a pale reflection of his mother’s. Meanwhile, Alexander doesn’t have the conviction to give himself to his true love (his boyhood friend and lover Hephaistion) in a passionate way; or, if he does, it happens off stage.

And then he wants his men to cross snowy mountains to die in India, while none of them seem to want to go along with him.

What am I supposed to feel now?

Pity? Meh. How many people has he gotten killed?

Admiration? What’s there to like?

On top of all of this, Alexander just seems bland. Roger Ebert writes:

Farrell is a fine actor, but on a human scale; he’s not cut out for philosopher-king. One needs to sense a certain madness in a colossus; … Farrell seems too reasonable, too much of ordinary scale, to drive men to the ends of the world with his unbending will.

Stone and Farrell gave us plenty of reasons to dislike Alexander and few (either unconvincing or undermined) reasons to like him.

As a writer, telling a good story with an unlikable protagonist takes great skill and creativity. When a story like Alexander’s depends wholly on that central figure then it’s even more important that the character works. When writing about a relatively unlikable figure, at least give us something to like or respect about the character, and at least define him well. Alexander wasn’t likable to begin with, we never quite figure out who he is, and he ultimately meets a tragic end without redemption. So I just watched a movie about someone I want to choke, someone I don’t understand, whom no one else seems to like.

And then he dies.

Note to self and kids: Don’t try this at home.
https://www.fictorians.com/category/fictorians/fictorians-alumni/moses-siregar-iii/
www.fictorians.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-49
43063
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JBSWJEWCDZYVL5OGUUCY3LQ3XSSKOJOM
<urn:uuid:f6eaac0a-8c50-447c-8550-6282b73118ce>
2022-11-30T23:25:49Z
137.184.14.172
text/html
sha1:RUNTJC2GYJ272NYMKII72T3MJWJGKJOE
<urn:uuid:f3989b79-0d21-4c83-bc49-dcc1ab61fd09>
https://www.fictorians.com/category/fictorians/fictorians-alumni/moses-siregar-iii/
response
<urn:uuid:d721d0d1-9c4e-43c7-a006-9657929f9d33>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-125
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/