Matthew Hanover's Blog

Lad lit is a fictional genre of male-authored novels about young men and their emotional and personal lives, often characterized by a confessional and humorous writing style. It often falls under the romantic comedy genre. What? Male-written romance? Yes, it’s a thing. And while it’s arguably targeted towards men, lots of women read it, too.

The question is, where do you start if you’ve never read it before? Well, perhaps you should start how I started.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

Anyone remotely familiar with lad lit knows about this novel, as Nick Hornby is widely recognized as originator of the genre. It follows 35-year-old pop-music fanatic Rob Fleming, who owns vintage record shop after his live-in girlfriend leaves him.

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

I discovered Tropper right before his novel This is Where I Leave You got big. He was occasionally described as the American Nick Hornby, and I would say it was an accurate description. As soon as I read this novel I quickly devoured his back catalogue. This is Where I Leave You follows Judd Foxman after the death of his father results in his entire dysfunctional family to be forced under one roof for a week to observe his shiva.

My Legendary Girlfriend by Mike Gayle

When it comes to lad lit, you don’t get more prolific than Mike Gayle, and this is the novel that started it all, about Will Kelly, who still hasn’t gotten over his ex-girlfriend after three years. Mike Gayle has an impressive back catalogue and this is where you should start.

Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman

I discovered Matthew Norman not long after I’d plowed through all of Jonathan Tropper’s novels. I don’t remember where I found it, but I knew from the cover it was something I’d want to read.

Not Famous by Matthew Hanover

Yes, this is my own novel, but seeing as it was my first novel, and thus, my introduction to writing lad lit, not just reading it, you should give it a try. A book blogger called The Irresponsible Reader called it “a sweet bit of lad lit that’ll fill your heart with song,” and said it was “almost as much a tribute to Nick Hornby as it is a story in the same vein as his work,” with “nods to Jonathan Tropper and Matthew Norman.” So, be sure to check it out as well!

For a while now, I’ve been using Scrivener for my novel writing. Originally, I was using Google Docs in combination with Microsoft Word. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but at the time, I wasn’t a big fan of writing apps. I’d played with Scrivener in trial mode, and found it intimidating.

But, eventually, I did end working with Scrivener, and found the features to be quite useful. The only problem I had was that the app’s interface isn’t great, and cloud syncing wasn’t exactly built into the app. To achieve syncing in the cloud, you had to use Dropbox, which is fine, but the way it worked, especially between desktop and tablet versions of the app, was not ideal, killing my desire to work remotely on the iPad.

Then I came across Storyist.

Storyist is like Scrivener, with a more modern interface, iCloud syncing built in. After experimenting with the app a bit, I decided that if I was ever going to get my 4th novel completed, I needed to feel more confident working on my iPad, and I trusted iCloud syncing more than Scrivener’s clunky way of syncing projects in Dropbox.

It took a while to get my existing work into Storyist. Importing was a snap, but there was still some minor tweaking necessary. After that, it’s been great, but there are a few features I wouldn’t mind having.

Custom icons for projects.

In addition to finishing my fourth novel, I’m also dabbling a bit with my fifth. Expecting to continue to use Storyist for even more projects, it would be nice to have the ability to differentiate the files visually. Personally, I’d love to use each books cover as an icon. It’s a minor thing, but I think it would a nice way to easy see your projects at a glance in the app.

Better functionality for moving sections.

Unlike Scrivener, which lets you use multiple folders and files to organize your novel’s content, making moving things around a snap, Storyist keeps your work in a single text file, and incorporates chapter and scene/section markers that allow you to see your novel’s outline in the project navigator. You can move sections around with some ease in the desktop app, but not the iOS app. It’s a minor issue, but it would be nice.

Better research functionality

One of the most disappointing things I discovered importing my novel into Storyist was the lack of support for storing my book research. Several websites that had been saved in Scrivener for reference did not carry over, and unless I’ve failed to find the feature, Storyist has no comparable feature for storing web links or pdfs to quick reference. I can use other apps to store my research, but it would be nice for this to come to Storyist.

Reviews are very important to indie authors. In many ways, they’re more important than sales. While I’m hardly getting rich off of my novels, the reviews I’ve received on Amazon and Goodreads represent a small fraction of my sales. As of this blog post, my first novel, Not Famous, has only 119 ratings on Goodreads, and 56 ratings on Amazon. Of those ratings, only a fraction have reviews along with them.

One of the toughest things about putting your work out there is that it will endure criticism. Some will be good and some will be bad. I myself have had some bad reviews, but the overwhelming majority of reviews my novels have received have been good. Still, when you’re dealing with dozens of reviews as opposed to hundreds or thousands, the bad reviews tend to stick out, and it’s easy to get distressed over them.

I’ve often told other indie authors just starting out not to worry about reviews, but even when I say it, I know it’s not easy. Bad reviews, when they happen, sting. But it’s true that your novel will not be universally celebrated. In fact, every novel gets them. Even your favorite novels from your favorite authors.

To prove this point, I’m gonna post a few select 1-star reviews (via Amazon) of two of my favorite novels.

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby — Without a doubt, the novel that inspired me to write fiction, and yet it gets trashed plenty.

“None of the characters in this book are likable.[…] Though the rhetoric is clearly meant to be humorous, it falls flat with sorry attempts at irony. I do not recommend this book to thinking people.”“This book has no plot or message in it. Just a bunch of jabbering by the main character with an inferiority complex. Not funny, just boring.”“Read the book and saw the movie; stupid book about a man that refuses to grow up; complete waste of my time”“Too drawn out. Boring. This book just rambles.”“I don’t like the book because it’s too introspective.”

This is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper — My first introduction to Jonathan Tropper. I loved this book so much I read everything else he published soon after.

“This book was full of cliches. Just when you thought you’d heard them all, why here comes another, more sensational than the one before. I will not read another of Tropper’s books. What was intended to be funny just seemed sad to me.”“This book was very graphic. I felt like it was written by a horny teenage boy. I read the first few pages and couldn’t no longer.”“There is not one member of the family, which this book is about, whom I liked or respected. Adults acting like children. Predictable story.”“This novel was so bad that I can’t spend the time itemizing any details.”“I did not finish this book. I have heard so many great reviews about this book and how it is funny and all that but I couldn’t make it past the 4th chapter.”“I really enjoyed previous books by Tropper, but I found this book to be nothing more than depressing.”

The moral of the story is: don’t fret bad reviews. Everyone gets them.

Reviews are very important to indie authors. In many ways, they’re more important than sales. While I’m hardly getting rich off of my novels, the reviews I’ve received on Amazon and Goodreads represent a small fraction of my sales. As of this blog post, my first novel, Not Famous, has only 119 ratings on Goodreads, and 56 ratings on Amazon. Of those ratings, only a fraction have reviews along with them.

One of the toughest things about putting your work out there is that it will endure criticism. Some will be good and some will be bad. I myself have had some bad reviews, but the overwhelming majority of reviews my novels have received have been good. Still, when you’re dealing with dozens of reviews as opposed to hundreds or thousands, the bad reviews tend to stick out, and it’s easy to get distressed over them.

I’ve often told other indie authors just starting out not to worry about reviews, but even when I say it, I know it’s not easy. Bad reviews, when they happen, sting. But it’s true that your novel will not be universally celebrated. In fact, every novel gets them. Even your favorite novels from your favorite authors.

To prove this point, I’m gonna post a few select 1-star reviews (via Amazon) from two of my favorite novels.

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby — Without a doubt, the novel that inspired me to write fiction, and yet it gets trashed plenty.

“None of the characters in this book are likable.[…] Though the rhetoric is clearly meant to be humorous, it falls flat with sorry attempts at irony. I do not recommend this book to thinking people.”“This book has no plot or message in it. Just a bunch of jabbering by the main character with an inferiority complex. Not funny, just boring.”“Read the book and saw the movie; stupid book about a man that refuses to grow up; complete waste of my time”“Too drawn out. Boring. This book just rambles.”“I don’t like the book because it’s too introspective.”

This is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper — My first introduction to Jonathan Tropper. I loved this book so much I read everything else he published soon after.

“This book was full of cliches. Just when you thought you’d heard them all, why here comes another, more sensational than the one before. I will not read another of Tropper’s books. What was intended to be funny just seemed sad to me.”“This book was very graphic. I felt like it was written by a horny teenage boy. I read the first few pages and couldn’t no longer.”“There is not one member of the family, which this book is about, whom I liked or respected. Adults acting like children. Predictable story.”“This novel was so bad that I can’t spend the time itemizing any details.”“I did not finish this book. I have heard so many great reviews about this book and how it is funny and all that but I couldn’t make it past the 4th chapter.”“I really enjoyed previous books by Tropper, but I found this book to be nothing more than depressing.”

The moral of the story is: don’t fret bad reviews. Everyone gets them.

By accident, I discovered a writing app pitched as the best alternative to Scrivener called LivingWriter.

I’ve been using Scrivener for a while now, and after being initially overwhelmed by all its features, I found myself liking the aspects of the software that I chose to use. That said, its interface is dated, and switching to an alternative has never been off the table.

So, I decided to do a trial of LivingWriter.

Design

Let’s get the superficial stuff out of the way. The user interface of LivingWriter is so much better. It’s sleek and modern, and better in almost every way. It’s exactly the way you think Scrivener should look like right now, but doesn’t.

Migration

LivingWriter made a point to say that you can switch from Scrivener and pick up right where you left off, but that’s not entirely true.

For one thing, you can only import from a Word Doc, so you have to export from Scrivener to Word. Not a big deal, but, you can only import into a brand new Story, before you can set project defaults like font style, font size, paragraph indents, etc. I found that some chapters simply didn’t take to the modified default style. That’s probably my fault because of how the styles were improperly done in Scrivener, but the imported file was kind of a mess… and the time it would take to get it right isn’t just a few minutes.

Migrating posed other problems too. One feature I really like about LivingWriter is the Smart Text / Story Elements feature, which makes character names and places “smart” with a variety of options to take advantage of. But, if you’re migrating from Scrivener, there doesn’t appear to be a way for the app to recognize Story Elements like character names from imported text. I tried using the global Find/Replace function to see if that would work, but it didn’t.

Desktop App Problems

LivingWriter started as a web app, and it shows. Personally, I prefer working from a desktop app, so I downloaded it and used it, and rang into a few snags. I made several attempts with the desktop app to import my 4th novel (which is still in progress) so I could experiment with the app. Well, once I figured out how to get it to properly identify chapters, whenever I imported it, the chapters ended up imported in the wrong order. I finally discovered that if I attempted to import with the web-based app it worked—however a second test with a different file produced the same out-of-order chapters in the web app. So, this bug is something that is hard for me to get beyond.

And other things worked better in the web app. For some reason, Ctrl-A would not Select All in the desktop app. I reported the bug quickly, and hopefully it’ll be fixed, but clearly, the desktop app has bugs that the web app does not.

The Missing Feature I Really Need

While LivingWriter looks nicer with its modern interface there are some features that are lacking. For me, I don’t write by chapter… I write by scene, and sometimes I move things around until it fits just right, and towards the end of the writing process I combine scenes into chapters. For example, in my fourth novel which I’m still working on, I wrote a scene (not a whole chapter) that was originally planned for earlier in the novel, and about 40,000 words of writing later I realized I wanted it towards the end.

In Scrivener, I can merge and split files as needed with a few clicks. It’s a method I’ve grown accustomed to and hate to give up. While you can rearrange “chapters” in LivingWriter, you can’t merge them, or even split them with ease. Sure, there’s a long way to do it, but when I’m used to doing it easy with a few clicks, the lack of the feature is felt.

The Cost

I’ve paid my license fee for Scrivener already. It was $49. One and done. LivingWriter is a subscription-based model that will cost you $96 annually if you pay yearly, or $119.88 a year if you pay monthly. So, you’re paying a lot more for LivingWriter. That alone is enough to hesitate.

Now, I don’t begrudge LivingWriter for being more expensive. The subscription model is basically being adopted everywhere now, and they are hosting who knows how many authors work in the cloud, so it’s arguably justified. But, that another factor that plays a role in my decision.

Bottom Line

Hey, Scrivener works for me. It’s not perfect, but what is? The interface is painfully out-of-date and ought to be overhauled, but is that enough to ditch it? With LivingWriter, your work is stored in the cloud, making it quite safe from catastrophic failure, but, Scrivener works with iCloud, and I do incremental exports as back-ups in the cloud as well.

All the good things about LivingWriter make me want to switch to it and never look back at Scrivener, but migration issues (the improperly ordered chapters, and no way to recognize imported character names as Story Elements means that migrating to LivingWriter when my current WIP is already at 60,000 words just isn’t the right move for me right now.

When it’s time to start a new novel, believe me, LivingWriter will be back on my radar. Hopefully the bugs and inconsistencies between the desktop app and the web app will be resolved by then, and the features I really need/want will be there. But, right now, the effort to get a migrated manuscript perfectly set up in LivingWriter would be too much—especially for what it costs.

Should the various issues mentioned above be resolved, I’d be open to changing my mind… If Scrivener releases an update that modernizes their interface, this might become a moot point. But for now, I think I need to stay put.

Okay, well, 2020 was an interesting year. Soon after the release of my second novel, Not Dressed, there was a global pandemic, and many of us went in lockdown. While this sounds like prime opportunity to do a lot of writing, in reality, it took me a long time to get “in the zone.”

Eventually, I did get in the zone and started writing my third novel. In fact, after a while of starting that, I came up with the idea for my fourth novel and ended up working on both novels at the same time. I finished the first draft of Not Awkward several weeks ago, and it is currently going through beta reading and revisions. In June/July it will go through copyediting, and it will finally be introduced to the world on August 24.

Of course, you can pre-order it on Kindle in the meantime.

2021-08-24T15:01:00

  days

  hours  minutes  seconds

until

the publication of Not Awkward

While that’s quite a long time away, that time is necessary to get the feedback I need from my trusted beta-readers and to get the book properly copyedited.

In the meantime, I’ve taken a pause from working on book 4, in order to give Not Awkward the attention it needs. But, book 4 is already at 67,000+ words, so I suspect by the time I’m ready to get back into it the wait between it and Not Awkward will be much shorter than the wait between my previous novels.

In other news, the audiobook of Not Dressed was published in April, so if you’re a fan of that format, check it out!

Two years ago today, my first novel, Not Famous, was published.

It’s hard to even think about it as a two-year-old novel when it actually took more than seven years to complete from first inception to publication. But, yes, it has been two years since Not Famous was made available to the public.

The tremendous effort it took to complete my first novel made me wonder if I could even write another. Alas, not only did I write another novel, but it only took me seven months, not seven years to complete the first draft. That novel was Not Dressed, which was published in February 2020.

And my writing still continues. While finding my muse during the pandemic in 2020 was a challenge, I am actually now writing two new novels. This wasn’t planned. The idea for my third novel (no title reveal yet, but I’ll call it NA for short) was probably almost as old as when I first came up with the idea for Not Famous, but progress was slow as the pandemic drained me of creative energy. NA currently stands at roughly 43,000 words—nearly halfway to my target word count.

Curiously enough, an idea for two more novels came to me while I was struggling to write the third. To make a long story short, I experienced an incredible burst of inspiration for the fifth novel, NP, and churned out 25,000 words in two weeks. This ultimately led me to move NP up in the release order and it will now be my fourth novel in my Wallflowers series.

So, yeah… things are happening!

Finishing one novel was a huge accomplishment for me. Today, I’ve had two published, two in progress, and another planned. I’m very excited about this coming year.

Earlier this month I was made aware of a Spotify playlist that had been created by a reader of Not Famous. I checked it out and was very impressed by it.

Playlist for Not Famous by @MatthewHanover

Okay, well, it’s been a while since I’ve added anything to this blog, so I’ve decided it’s time for an update.

The biggest thing going on right now is that I am working on my third novel. I planned to start it not long after Not Dressed was released, but I needed time to think over the new story for a while, how I wanted to structure it, and you know, let everything congeal for a while.

Then the coronavirus lock downs happened and I was in a bit of a rut, not having much inspiration to write. Eventually, I did get over it, and I’ve been plugging away. Currently, I’m at roughly 26,000 words with a target of 90,000 to 95,000 for the first draft.

This new novel will be a bit different than my previous novels.

Before I explain what’s different, I should note that this novel will be set in the same universe as Not Dressed and Not Famous—though if you follow this blog you know that already.

So, what makes it different? Well, both my previous novels took place over the course of several months. But, the bulk of my new novel will be taking place over the course of four days. This has presented some unique challenges for me in the planning stage, as I have to plan the events of the novel in smaller time segments. Previously, it was easy to fast forward through trivial periods of time in the story, but in this new novel I can’t do that. Virtually every period of the day needs something to happen, and that action has to contribute to the overall plot somehow.

So, it’s a bit of a learning experience. So far I’m happy with what I have done, but there’s a lot more to add. Lately, I’ve found myself tweaking the same scenes over and over, rather than writing new ones, which told me I need to step away from writing for a while and wait to be properly inspired again.

While I’m not writing as much as the moment, I am thinking about the characters, their backstories and other traits. So, while maybe I’m not adding to my word count, the process is still moving forward. It took me 7 years to complete Not Famous and there were times that I didn’t touch it for months, so a little break from actual writing doesn’t concern me. Some of my best ideas have come while I’m not writing at all.

After finishing my first novel, Not Famous, it was difficult to get my head out of the world I’d just created, and it was sad to leave those characters. I used to say that I could have made the novel twice or three times a large because of how much I wanted to explore those characters more.

Of course, there were also thoughts of a sequel. And why not? With a sequel I could just continue the stories of the characters, maybe even delve more into their backstories. Perfect solution, right?

Except it really wasn’t. As much as I loved those characters and the story, I knew I was done writing the story of Nick Forrester and Alli Conwell.

And I knew this before I even finished the novel. I can’t really explain without giving away spoilers, I knew that another novel focusing on their story just couldn’t happen. I had the basic plot of my second novel in my head already, and it didn’t work for them. The solution came towards the end of the writing process: to set my next novel in the same universe as Not Famous, without it being an actual sequel.

This is hardly a new concept, so I’m hardly claiming to pioneer this idea. Nick Hornby quietly did this with his novels. In About A Boy, the main character Will shops at Championship Vinyl, the record shop Rob Fleming from High Fidelity owns. In his third novel How to Be Good, the main character Katie Carr encounters Dick from the same shop. DJ GoodNews from that novel is referenced in Hornby’s next novel A Long Way Down. All of Matthew Norman’s novels take place in the same universe as well, as the fictional novelist Curtis Violet, a central character in his debut novel Domestic Violets, is referenced in his subsequent novels.

This became my solution. My next novel would be set in the same universe. Those of you who have read both Not Famous and Not Dressed probably recognized that Nick’s one-night-stand Emma has a larger role in Not Dressed as Jake’s friend and co-worker at Burnham & Modine, the architecture firm that Nick and his business partner Jay design a website for during the events of Not Famous.

It was a lot of fun to expand on the world I’d created in Not Famous in an entirely separate story. And I even used the opportunity to give a peak about Alli and Nick’s future.

The question I ultimately had to answer was whether I’d connect the books as part of a series or not. To keep a long story relatively short, I chose to brand them as part of a series, and I settled on calling it the Wallflowers Series. Calling it the Not Series just sounded weird, and naming the series after Alli Conwell seemed disingenuous because even though she’s ultimately the primary character of the universe, she does not make an appearance in Not Dressed.

I chose Wallflowers as the name of the series because Wallflower is the name of a song and album of Alli Conwell’s and also a unifying characteristic of both Alli Conwell and Kaylee Cooke, the main female character in Not Dressed.

Of course, I am working on my third novel now, and it will also be set in the same universe, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, and there will probably be a few surprises for fans of the first two books.