I know I’m not supposed to care about reviews. I know my work isn’t going to be for everyone… heck, I’ll go so far as to say that my work may not even be for the majority of sci-fi readers (making the people who like my work an elite subset of an already elite subset).
But gosh does it ever feel good to know somebody out there read and enjoyed one of my novels. It’s… like a small confirmation that I’m not insane, thinking that I can write. I love writing, but just because you love a thing doesn’t mean you’re good at that thing (although it is often an indicator that you will be, if you stick with it).
All this to say that I sent out a copy of A Desperate Path Through the Stars and the reviewer let me know he really liked it.
He also sent me a list of four more typos and a couple misuses of jargon (I used the term “Mustered out” to mean “outfitted with people and launched” in one case, which isn’t a correct use of the term), so the next people who read the book may even like it more!
Gosh, I’m so happy. Relieved, even. The book edges ever closer to completion!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Review Copies Sent!
Today I sent out a few review copies of my novel. One of the reviewers (Roger) is one of my favourite people, and has given me solid feedback and reviews on my work before, so I’m excited to hear what he thinks.
Excited and terrified, but ya know, that’s how it goes in this industry.
I managed to get an ISBN through the Canadian Government (and they politely reminded me that I owe them a copy of the book, which I will absolutely have to get on), so that’s another tick done… I think the novel might be basically ready?
Ooh, I got chills writing that. It’s been a long, long time coming… but I feel good about it.
I sold a short story this week as well that I have a month to finish the editorial process on it, and that feels pretty dang good. Slowly, slowly, everything is coming together.
Oh! And I started work on Novel 9! I haven’t started the book itself, but I’m fleshing out the framework for it. With some luck I’ll be able to crush through it soon!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Conversion Almost Done!
I’ve done most of the heavy lifting to convert the book into an e-book, with the usual problems that crop up once again cropping up.
So, here’s the thing: I write novels in Word. I’ve used Scrivener before, and it was fine, but the process of taking a Scrivener file in 2017 and converting it into an ebook was like pulling teeth. It was great for writing, but as soon as you wanted to do anything with what you wrote it was pure hell. The program has been around long enough now that I’m pretty sure they’ve fixed (or at least improved) that part of it, but gods, it was hell trying to actually do anything with the novel after I was finished.
Solution? Easy. Just use Word. Then take the Word document, transfer it over to an html/text editor, do all the fancy HTML-things that you need to do, and poof, e-book all ready to go.
And I’ve done that!
But my most trustworthy and diligent beta reader has now gotten back to me with a few more typos (gods, save me from typos). Which means I have to edit 2 different documents: the HTML-edited file to be converted into an e-book (which then means re-uploading the e-book), and the Word document itself so that if I want to make a paperback of the book I have a clean version to do that.
It’s a lot of very careful edits done very slowly so I make sure that they’re correct in all the places the book will eventually show up.
But the important part: almost done! WOOOO!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Edits Done!
That’s it. Officially, I am finished the last, final draft of edits of my next novel, A Desperate Path Through the Stars. I’ve begun converting it into a proper ebook, with metadata and… things… like a cover… and… keywords… you know, all the digital stuff that has to happen to convert my Word document into an actual book that you can all get your hands on!
Woo!
I’ve asked two people to do a final beta read for me, just as a final effort to catch the last typos (of which I hope there are none!), and then I’ll publish it through Amazon (which usually takes a few days). Oh, and I’m grabbing an ISBN for it because of… reasons? I don’t actually know why my books need those, but the Government of Canada offers them for free, so I’m happy to nab one (or 10, because that’s what they make them available as).
Still, it feels surreal. The last time I published a book was 2024. I had to re-learn a bunch of the stuff to do with HTML and Calibre and all that, but it came back pretty quickly. I’m proud of this book… I hope it does well.
Tomorrow I have to decide on an advertising budget for it… bleh… but I want people to read it, and that requires getting people to know about it. Fingers crossed it sells well!
But I am excited! Almost done!
First day of September
The first few days of a new month are always a little weird. It’s a tangible confirmation of the passage of time, but it feels surreal in some way.
Like, I left my job working at a game store, where I had been for 8 years, almost 6 months ago. What!? It feels so strange… especially when I go back to the store (it’s still a great store!) and I catch myself referring to the products that “we” sell there.
What is time!? What does it all mean!?
Ah well. For now time means more opportunity for me to publish my books! And the next one is so close to being done… about 20K words of editing to go, or about 45 manuscript pages (they’re bigger than published pages). If I manage to put my head down and just work, I might be finished the edits today! That’s the plan at least!
It’s exciting, it’s terrifying… it’s all part of the process.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Cover Is Done!
The new book has a brand new cover! Very exciting!
I’m still trying to figure out a way to make it show up on the front page cleanly, but I am very excited about it!
So excited that, rather than talk about it more, I’m going to get back to editing the final 95 pages of the novel so I can release it! YAY!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Arguments
I don’t like arguing. I have done a lot of it in my days on this Earth, under that sun, but I don’t like it.
I just hate people being wrong ever so marginally more than I hate arguing.
Look, for the most part, for the vast, vast majority of issues in my life, I am a Live-and-Let-Live kinda guy. You love Kpop more than Jpop? You can’t stand onion on your hamburger? You think the Toronto Maple Leafs either will or won’t win that big cup thing? Give’er, you do you. I just don’t care.
But then there’s fundamental shit. If somebody wants to try and convince me that trans people aren’t people, yeah, I will stop whatever I’m doing and I will engage. You want to believe that some bearded white dude in the sky says you shouldn’t touch yourself, you go right ahead. You want to tell me that the same bearded white dude says homosexuality is a sin for everyone?
I will stop walking, smile, and we are gonna have a chat, my man.
I don’t know why I’m like this. My life would be easier if I were not (gods, how many times do I say that in a given week). But I am.
Last night I got into an argument about the nature of consciousness, which again, I don’t really care about. I believe that Free Will as most people understand it is an illusion, but other than the horrible ramifications that illusion has had on the justice system, it doesn’t really matter. But when the person brought up the possibility that there are things that exist and are not measurable… that got my heckles up.
All in all, a silly argument that should be of no consequence. Who cares what I think? I’m a self-proclaimed idiot. But it kept me up all night, and chances are very good that it will be weeks before I can forget the “Oh, I should’ve said this… and I shouldn’t have said that…” rerun reel I have going through my head right now.
Ah well. Such is life, sometimes.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Psychological Lengths
Today I went on a run. I try to go for runs 3-4 times a week… for most of the summer I was working towards a 5km run, which I accomplished about two weeks ago. Since then I’ve been doing 3km runs, because honestly? 5km takes too gosh darn long.
But yesterday I realized that I had been running about 2.6km instead of a full 3km (about 2 miles, for American readers). So I had to add a few hundred meters to the run… which I did today.
Those 400m (4 football fields, more or less) added over 4 minutes to my run. Which makes no sense! I was previously running about a kilometer every 6 minutes, and by adding less than half a kilometer I added way more than 3 minutes to my time.
But psychologically, it was a big addition. It didn’t add much actual range, but in my mind, it added an entire section to the end of the run, past the point I was mentally ready to be done.
I think the edits on the novel are a little like that. Every time I sit down to see how far along I’ve come, there’s a part of me that looks at the page I’m on and psychologically goes “Argh! Not even half way yet!”, when in reality I’ve done a tonne of work (writing it! Editing it four times already!), and this is just the last little bit that I have to get through to publish the book.
Anyway, just like with the run, it’s a question of putting my head down and just getting through it. Which I will!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It's Getting Cold Already
Gods, I hate the cold. As somebody born and raised in Canada, an ostensibly “northern” country with long, cold winters, you’d think I’d be used to the cold by now. And I kind of am, but I still hate it.
I mean, I accept that the weather will get cold. That I have a finite period of time every year to ride my bike and to go for runs outdoors. I get it… I just don’t like it.
This morning was twelve degrees. TWELVE. In August! Ugh. I had to wear long sleeves and pants when I ran. Not a fan.
Ah well. The one upside to the cold weather is that it makes me want to stay inside and write more, which is a statement of some weight. I already love doing that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Almost Covered!
The cover artist (the incredible, talented, brilliant Jackarais) is almost done with the cover for the novel, and I am excited about it. It is gonna look great!
The progress sketches to see how the cover evolved are neat, and it’s refreshing that Jackarais is so open to feedback. It’s been really lovely as far as processes go… and I hope the final result will showcase what a cool story I’m going to provide to the world.
Getting very close to release date! Final edits are still being edited, but I’m more than halfway through and I have squashed a few more typos… almost done, almost done, almost done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Book Funnel
I was listening to a podcast about indie publishing (and self-publishing, I suppose), and they interviewed a guy who runs a software company called Book Funnel. The basic idea is to help authors (like me!) get promo books out to readers (like you!) in exchange for signing up for a newsletter or whatever. You go on my mailing list, you get a free book.
I think this is one of those things that authors have been doing since self-publishing became a thing. I don’t have a mailing list yet, but it is something I’m looking into. The main reason I haven’t yet is because it costs money… and not trivial amounts. Enough money that if I’m going to do it, I kinda have to do it correctly.
Anyway, it made me think of the funnel in a general sense. There are a lot of readers out there, and I capture only a dozen or so a month. Those people are generally happy with my books (based on several hundred 4-or-5 star reviews), and I suspect that a few of them go on to purchase my other books afterwards. That’s kinda the funnel… Lots of people become a few people become even fewer people. But it’s there.
The goal isn’t to make that top tier huge… that requires marketing budgets and “teams” to do things, and I have neither. But it is to make it so that everyone who reads one of my books decides that want to read another of my books. Turning every single sale into 2 or even 3 sales… that’s the dream.
For now that involves making the best books I possibly can. So that’s what I’m gonna do!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Obstacles Along the Path
I’ve heard it said that obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the destination… which is ridiculous, of course (if you do or don’t see an obstacle, it is still in your way and needs to be dealt with… over, under, or around). But there is something to be said about the sheer volume of problems that seem to crop up when I forget about what I’m supposed to be doing and focus on what needs to be done instead.
What I’m supposed to be doing is writing. Telling stories, crafting worlds and characters, playing on new worlds and in new galaxies.
What I need to do is create a website, find a reliable RSS provider (service? Device? Program?), figure out if its worth all the work and expense to make my own mailing list…
But I don’t want to do any of that stuff. I want to wake up, write, and then eventually fall asleep. That’s what I want. Sprinkle in a few runs to keep my body in more-or-less shape and a good meal and that’s an ideal way to spend my life.
It’s not grand or huge in scope or anything, but I’ve never wanted that. I don’t want fame or ridiculous fortune: I want enough money to be comfortable in the knowledge I won’t starve to death if a sudden emergency happens, but that’s it. My needs are humble.
All this to say that I’m going to be putting more effort into writing again. There are so many stories I want to tell.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Thinking About Websites
I think I mentioned before that I’m working on a couple artistic products that fall outside the realm of what might usually be considered “a novel.” They are novel, in that they do not exist yet outside the confines of my skull, but they’re not “books” so much as they are stories.
And while I love storytelling in almost all formats, I’m not entirely sure here is where I should put my not-book stuff. Short stories, fine. Those are just, like, really tiny books or something. Novellas and so on, yes, all that can go here, and I’m even kinda okay with a few audio stories I’ve done. But I think I have to draw the line at movies, and that’s what I am currently working on. Or shows, I suppose? Whatever, a series of pictures stacked in such a way to give the illusion of motion.
Along with one of these projects (the bigger of the two, currently) I think I can also produce a pretty seamless and enjoyable audio listening thing. I hesitate to call it a Podcast, it would really just be the audio commentary to my videos, but it might resemble a podcast in the way one would download and consume it. So I need a home for that too, and I don’t know how Squarespace handles RSS feeds. It might very well. It might not at all. I dunno.
But all of this means other work in order to do my work. I stopped writing a script (already at 2K words I wrote today) in order to write THIS, which is me writing about other work I will have to do once I have written the script and recorded and edited it. I don’t want to think about that. I just want to make art. But that’s just not the way it works these days.
Anyway. I will figure it all out. Maybe it will be through this website, but probably not? I think the Venn diagram of people who are interested in both of my ventures (all three, fine) will have only moderate overlap? I dunno. Maybe more? I guess we might find out!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Reading Backwards
One of the hardest elements of modern novel writing is editing.
I think that’s been true basically forever. Editing is hard. Most novels have at least one or two typos… the novel I’m reading right now (“Promise of Blood”, a Powder Mage book that’s sorta steampunk-fantasy) has more than a few, and it’s a big name, “properly published” book. Nothing serious, a missing quotation mark here, a forgotten capital letter there, but the fact that even books with budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars can make these kinds of mistakes speaks to how hard it is to do editing properly.
And before anyone suggests it: AI makes things much worse, not better. AI editing is worse than no editing most of the time.
Which leaves me having to do the line edits myself. Now, I have an editor, and she’s fantastic, but she’s doing substantive editing: making sure the story and characters make sense and are consistent throughout the book. Think of it as “plot” editing. But the line edits… she does some, but that’s not what I’m paying her for. Were that I could, but editing is expensive, and it’s just not in the budget.
So instead I’m doing them myself. And the problem is that by this point in the novel I’ve read every sentence at least a dozen times. I know, in my head, how every line sounds, what’s coming next, what I wrote before. And therefore my eyes tend not to pay as much attention to what is actually on the page. The best advice I’ve found is to read aloud, and to start the edits from the back of the book and work forward. Anything you can do to jot your brain into actually reading the words, instead of skimming over them.
It’s hard! But I’m trying. I want as few typos in my novel as is possible… I take my work seriously, and I want the people reading my work to enjoy the story, not be distracted by silly mistakes I’ve missed a dozen times.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Edits Received!
My editor has finished with her most recent pass through the novel! This is a very exciting time… this means the novel is finally almost finished!
She still had a few changes I’ll have to go through, but nothing major this time. Tweaks, rather than overhauls. And some cleaning up to do… apparently there are several typos I need to catch. Always tricky, especially at this point in the writing process. I’ve read every sentence at least a dozen times, and so my brain substitutes what it thinks is there, rather than what is actually on the page. I’m going to try and read it backwards, see if I can weed out the last few mistakes.
But regardless… yay! It just needs a cover and to be converted into an e-book… looks like it actually will be published in August!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Stuff Around the Creative Stuff
So I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m working on other creative projects in addition to my novels. My novels are my love, they’re the soul and spirit of what I do. I love writing (not crazy about editing, but it’s part of the process and so I do it with joy as well).
But “writing novels” these days involves a LOT of not-writing-novels. Writing blog posts, for example! I don’t mind this, although it was occasionally a real struggle to remember to do it (which, if you look at my history of blog posts, you will see from weeks I’ve missed posting). But also creating and maintaining a website. And a social media presence. And converting documents into ebooks. The dream one day is to be successful enough that I have people who will help with this stuff (the ebook stuff in particular would be amazing to hand off to somebody else), but for now I’m doing it all solo.
Which brings me to the other creative projects I’m working on. Several of them are going to be on YouTube, but that means I’ll probably need/have my own website for that side of things as well. I don’t want it clogging up my novel website, after all. And there’s a podcast in the works (I’m a white man, of course there’s a podcast in the works), which means an RSS Feed and hosting for it as well…
Just thinking about this stuff exhausts me. I want to do the creative stuff, the stuff I love, and I don’t mind the work that surrounds it, but it’s just not a passion. I wake up every morning excited to learn more video editing, more audio editing, more ways to write scripts and books… and I drag my feet through the mud of learning website hosts, or how to create a newsletter email list, or if it’s worth posting on Facebook or Instagram or whatever.
But it’s part of the job. And so because I do truly love creating, I guess I’ll do it.
I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Passing of Our Cat
Yesterday I had to say goodbye to our 18-year-old cat, which had been a foundational part of our home for the last 17 years.
Little Donut. She was a regal old woman, and a tiny little kitten. She was poise, and proud as any noble, but sweet and kind. She spent evenings snuggling up to me or my partner, making sure we always knew that she loved us, and cared for us.
On her last day she purred for us, snuggled into my arms. She was a great cat, and she will be dearly missed.
I’ll get back to creating soon, but for now I am going to sit with my grief and give it the time and space it needs to fill the hole her passing has left.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Names, Names, Everywhere are Names...
Coming up with names is honestly one of the hardest parts about writing novels.
The hardest part is the silliness that you have to do to self-publish a novel. Advertising, writing ad copy, converting into e-books, all that stuff. That’s really hard.
But after that, coming up with a name that’s punchy and catchy and not too long and still descriptive… it’s tough! I envy the hell outta authors who can drop names like “Snow Crash” or “The Interdependency” or “Ancillary Justice” and walk away like there’s a slow-motion explosion behind them. Not for me, each book title is like wrestling with an alligator.
I haven’t even started dreaming about a title for Novel 9 yet, but it’s definitely too early in the process for that. But I decided on the title for Novel 8 (“A Desperate Path Through the Stars”) about three weeks ago, after the novel had been mostly finished for over a year. Originally I named it “The Trojan Stars,” but those are actually a thing that had nothing at all to do with the story and I didn’t want to confuse people.
Ah well. I’m working on naming a few shorter projects right now, and that’s causing me all sorts of issues. Hopefully something will come to me soon!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Waiting is Hard!
My next novel (the one with the big “Coming Soon!” banner on the front page) is waiting. Waiting for editorial feedback, waiting for a cover, waiting for me to convert the whole thing into an e-book and release it into the world.
I hate waiting.
I don’t know why I hate waiting? I’m perfectly capable of it as long as I have something to do. A good book or two, my phone in a pinch, a sketchbook to doodle in, or one of my single player board games… I have lots of things to do while I wait, and therefore if I have to wait usually I don’t mind.
But you’ll note that all of those things allow me to do things while I wait. So I’m not really waiting, I’m just doing something else while this other thing doesn’t happen, until it does happen. That is my style: do things. Don’t think too much, don’t plan too much, just do the thing and then do the next thing and hope eventually one of the things works.
It hasn’t worked yet, but I have high hopes.
Anyway. All this to say that I’m anxious for the waiting to end so I can get back to doing more of The Things Novel 8 needs, so that I can put it firmly in the rearview and get stuck fully into Novel 9.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Prep for Novel 9!
I’m writing a sequel to one of my previous novels. This is notable because this is the first time I’ve written a sequel without knowing what specifically I was going to write first.
My Tintian trilogy I knew before I started book 1 that it was going to be a trilogy. I already had a rough idea where each story was going to go, where they were going to end, and what the overall arc was going to be. Plus, of course, they were each loosely based on an old Tintin comic arc, which meant that I even had source material for where the story was going to go before I got started. Made it pretty easy.
But for this novel… well, I always leave sequel potential in most of my books, but this is the first time that I’m going to turn that potential into an actual book.
What that means right now is a bunch of reading… and the most difficult reading of all: my own work. I’m very proud of what I’ve written, but it’s a weird feeling reading something you know you can’t really change any more. It’s no longer in my hands, it’s out in the wild. I might be able to squeeze in a few revisions, but I have to be careful that the changes I make don’t actually undo or make things worse!
Anyway. Mostly reading my story and taking notes to make sure that the characters, universe, and story all tie together neatly. That it feels like a Part 2, and not just another story that happens to use similar names or whatever.
I’m 30% done, and hopefully will be finished by the end of the week! We’ll see!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!