Okay, I’ve taken as long away from my novel as I can stand… time to dive into those fifth draft edits!
Still on course to be finished by mid-May… let’s see how the editing process goes!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It's Been One Week Since You Looked At Me...
“Threw your arms in the air and said I’m crazy…”
Ah, Barenaked Ladies. Truly a Canadian cornerstone of rock. Anyway, it has been a full week since I’ve posted, but there hasn’t been a tonne of new and exciting to post about.
Got my novel back. Talked to Christine about it, received some very useful feedback (and it was nice to finally meet her! We’ve been working together for 8 years now… not quite since the very beginning, but very close). Plus she had a chance to show off her beautiful home in PEI. Really, win-win.
But since then I’ve been stuck on other artistic pursuits, rather than my writing, in an effort to pay for my writing! The story of my life, really. But I’ll get back to the novel… probably this weekend, actually. And then I’ll finish up that fourth draft, and then that goes back to Christine for a once-over, and then into all y’all hands! Woo!
So just because I’m not posting, doesn’t mean things aren’t happening!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Another Successful Circumnavigation of the Sun
Just going to spend all day playing video games and trying not to think too hard about my life and what I’ve “accomplished” so far.
That’s the plan, at least.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Talkin' With Christine
Tomorrow morning I have a nice, long talk scheduled with my editor. This will be the first time I’ll actually talk with her, so I’m looking forward to it!
Basically, there are a handful of issues in the novel that I’d like to get more insight into. While her notes are extensive and very useful, there’s always more to be learned.
After that, no working on the novel for a couple weeks… just to get some distance and objectivity on my work, and to optimize the final draft (well, probably the final two drafts, but that’s an aside).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Editor Done
I’ve received Novel 8 back from my editor, and she had some really insightful things to say about it.
They won’t be quick and easy changes, but I do think they’ll make the novel a lot better… specifically a few plot threads that I wasn’t 100% on what to do with them.
Basically, I’m planting a few seeds in this book that I plan to pay off in future books, but I’m not sure how “central” those elements should be. I want them to be subtle, to suggest at a bigger tapestry of issues going on in the story, but I don’t want to risk anyone thinking that I abandoned or left some of the threads accidentally incomplete.
So we’re going to have a chat on Monday about the story issues, and then I’m going to dive into the last round of polish on the book. Current plan is a mid-May release! Exciting!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Have a Good Friday!
Looking forward to finishing up one of my major projects (a painting commission I’ve been working on for about 6 weeks) today. After that, I’m clear until my novel is returned by my editor (theoretically next week, but I’m not in a rush). Then I have a 6-week English course on Cyberpunk that I’m enrolled in as of May, I think, and then… well, and then other stuff, if history is anything to go by!
And that’s good! I enjoy being busy. I like doing this work!
I just wish I could make a living, however humble, from doing it.
Ah well. One day at a time, and all that.
Exciting stuff coming soon! Enjoy your Friday off, if you get one!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
On Brand
The trouble with social media is the nonstop-edness of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Instagram. I used to like Twitter before the name change and ownership insanity. But posting consistently has always been a challenge for me, and that’s kinda what social media rewards. It doesn’t want you to put down the phone and look away. You have to keep doing it. You have to keep posting, constantly, and hoping that something catches.
That’s not really my style? Although, admittedly, I don’t really know what my style is… or what my brand is. I write fun sci-fi. I paint models and shoot movies. But that’s not really “brand” so much as a sequence of facts about me.
Another fact about me is that I’m rather cold right now, so I’m going to go have a nice think while sitting in front of a heater. Maybe something will come to me about how to be more consistent with all this!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Art for Art's Sake
I love making the art I make. I love writing the most, but I also love my painting and films (and music, if we’re going deeper into the art I do purely for self-joy).
But not a lot of people read the novels I’ve written (yet). And the movie I’ve made has only been seen a few dozen times (and I’m going to have to give a serious think about leaving it up once I start doing more of them, since it has swearing and some… questionable… choices about shot composition and lighting). Do I do this art for myself, or for others?
Obviously the answer is “yes,” since I do it for both, but at this stage it’s probably true that it’s more personal than anything else. I would like for it to be more widely spread (specifically to the tune of about 10,000 copies per novel per year… piece of cake, right? That’s basically the equivalent of being a Canadian Best Seller for 5 weeks in a row, for each book).
For now, I have to enjoy the process, because there isn’t really a lot else going for me. But hopefully soon.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Filming Schedule
I’ve got to start thinking about a formal filming schedule for the stop motion animation I’m going to be doing.
I’ve already finished the storyboarding (gosh, I did that months ago), but next up is building the sets. I think I’m going to try and keep each set assembled between takes this time… hopefully I won’t need to reshoot anything, but it will make life easier if I do have to.
I’ve cleared off the space, I’ve got the script done… I really just have to get started, but there’s my commission (painting) work that I have to finish before I can fully dive in.
Which is too bad. I’d love to start sooner, but the editor I hired is going to cost a mint (she’s worth every penny), and that money needs to come from somewhere.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Off to the Editor
Well, Novel 8, which I’m still waffling on the title of, is in the hands of my editor.
She says she’ll have it back to me by early April, which gives me plenty of time to get it out by the end of April, which is the current goal.
Woo! Feels good to have that done!
But no rest for the weary. Big plans already in motion, folks! Big plans!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Second Draft Finished!
Wrote my two favourite words in the English language (“The End”) on that edit last night before bed. Felt good!
Next I send it off to my editor (who is primed and ready for it!), and then I get her edits back in early April. On the one hand, that’s a fair chunk of time (and money, gosh it’s a lot of money) between now and then.
On the other hand, I can work on other projects! Woo! And then my next novel will be available to purchase in mid-to-late April, and who knows, maybe I’ll have the next short movie shot by then too!
What a time to be alive and creating art. I just wish I had more time!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
New Social Media (for me!)
So Instagram is by no means “new” in the social media scene. Well established, and not a usual choice for many authors, but I finally made myself an account.
The main reason is for the stop motion work I’m going to be doing. It’s very visual stuff, and I think showing some of my process there will be interesting to some people! As usual, I don’t need a big audience, just enough to make a little money at this (and by “little,” my expectations are humble).
Anyway, you can follow me @mhquestus, and I’ll put a link in the website page at some point. So far I haven’t posted anything except for a “family photo” of the protagonists for the next stop motion film.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Good Week of Sales
Last week was a surprisingly good week for book sales for me. Which isn’t saying a lot… it was only 7 books plus a bunch of Kindle Unlimited… but it was out of “nowhere,” of a sort? I did a bunch of free book giveaways in the two weeks before that, and I’m hoping there’s some crossover there (I gave away over 60 books, which again, not a huge number but still!).
It just… feels kinda hopeful? That maybe my efforts will, indeed, at some point pay off? At least a little?
Still spent way more on ads than I made in sales, of course. Wouldn’t want anyone to think things here had gone completely topsy-turvy. That would be crazy. But still, a significant step in the right direction.
Speaking of which, I got up at 6:30am today specifically so I could do more editing on the novel! So that’s what I’m gunna do!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
In Like a Lion
I’m pretty sure that the first post I write every March for the last… 8 years?… has been some variation of “In Like a Lion.”
I don’t even know what that phrase is from. “In like a lion, out like a lamb”? Or something like that?
Anyway. New month, new novel time!… theoretically! I’m still 30K words to go in the second draft, but it’s coming along really well. I love the feeling of flow. I sit down at my computer, and four or five hours later I realize that time has passed. It’s a really amazing feeling, and that’s what the edits have felt like.
Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to start the movie filming. I had hoped to, but the painting commission I’m working on has chewed up basically all the time I haven’t been writing. I’m happy with it, I think the client will be very happy, but yeah, super time consuming. But when I wrap up the edits (maybe by the end of the weekend, if I really manage to put nose-to-grindstone), then I’ll send it off to my editor and I’ll have all that time available to me.
And I’m excited! I love my art, I love making my art, and I’m hopeful that someday soon I can focus all my energy towards that instead of dividing it between the work I love and my muggle job!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Constant Worry/Worries
I worry about a lot of things.
I worry basically constantly, actually. There are many things I worry about, and all of them wax and wane in importance from day to day, from hour to hour, and from year to year.
But mostly I worry that I’m doing something wrong.
There are a lot of things I might be doing wrong. But first and foremost, I worry that I’m approaching my writing career wrong. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I love it, and honestly I think I’m pretty dang good at it. I doubt I will ever win a Hugo or anything like that, but there are over a thousand copies of my books circulating in the world, and I think the people who read them probably enjoyed them.
And yet I still haven’t gotten any traction. I still have only one sold short story. I spend more editing my books than the combined sales of all my books, and then when you add advertising costs on top of that… it’s not only not sustainable, it’s downright expensive.
But what else can I do? I try to stay on top of my advertising, I spend on good covers and editing…
So all I can do is keep on keeping on. Hoping that all the stuff I’m doing wrong, and all the stuff I worry about, won’t get in my way as I take steps towards being fully employed as a writer.
I’ll get there. But gosh it’s a slow process.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Some "Time Off"
For the next seven days, I don’t have a muggle job to worry about… and gosh do I plan to get a lot of art stuff done!
I have the novel to finish editing (so close!). I have the movie I want to shoot (I have the script, characters, and some of the settings already built!). I have short stories I want to submit to publishers (gotta write them first, but that’s minor!). And I have some commission painting I need to get finished (I’ve started, it has a very strong start).
So much art! Gosh I wish I could make a living this way…
sigh
Ah well! I’m getting there. Slowly, steadily, these are all steps on the path.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Free Books
So I’m giving away another of my novels for free… technically, I just gave one away for free for the last five days, and I’m giving a different one away for free now!
20 lucky people received free copies of “Starconvoy EH-76” last week, and I’m hopeful that more than that will receive free copies of “The Wind’s Howling Rage.”
The goal, of course, is to encourage people to buy my books because they’ve read and enjoyed a free one. And at this point, I have 7 novels in circulation, and I can afford to give one or two away every once in a while. It’s been a few years since I did one of these free giveaways, so I was about due.
Plus, the advertising hasn’t been working out so well. The amount I would have to be able to afford to have a significant hit-rate is… well, it’s probably much higher than I’m doing, that’s for sure. Maybe in a few years if I have some extra money I can devote more energy into ads. For now, the effort continues to go into writing more books.
Speaking of which, I’m 3/4 of the way done the 2nd draft edits for the new novel! Exciting! Hopefully I’ll have it done next week, at which point I can jump into shooting the movie!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Painting Work
In addition to writing, I have to do various other jobs to pay for… well, life. Food, housing, transportation, stuff like that.
One of the things I do is commission painting. I’m not the best out there, but I am pretty dang good, and very fast relative to most of my colleagues in the field. It’s not the best paying gig, but it’s something I can do with my art to pay some of the bills while I continue to work towards being a full-time writer.
I recently completed an order for 6 giants from Warhammer Age of Sigmar. Great models, but gosh they took a long time (almost a full month!). Still, it was nice to get them to their owner, and he seems very happy with the results, which is nice. I’ve already started the next job (a bunch of Chaos Space Marines, specifically World Eaters), and I’m looking forward to that one. I love painting sci-fi almost as much as I love writing it!
It’s just neat to find new ways to turn my artistic passions into income.
I just need to figure out a way to turn it into reliable income, and I’d be set. Oh well, one step at a time!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
What Do I Bring?
Still spending a lot of mental cycles on this question of what my “brand” is or should be. I know that my goal with being a writer is to bring a little hope and happiness to the people that read my work. The world is a hard, depressing place, and a little escapism can be a very powerful thing.
The stories that tend to stick in my brain are almost all about rebellion. Fighting against big, overpowering forces and the steps needed to overthrow (or at least resist) those forces. Star Wars, Firefly, Babylon 5… these are all about the “little guy” to some extent (although in all cases a very well trained and dangerous “little guy”) standing up to overwhelming force. The Alliance, the Empire, the Shadows.
But the other stories I love are ones about hope. About looking at what could be and seeing how much easier and better things are as a result. I’m mostly thinking about Star Trek here, but there are others that shine a spotlight on a glorious “what if” sort of thing. We can include several of the Marvel movies in there (although those are usually underdog stories as well), but also Terry Pratchett and John Scalzi’s works. Stories about “Okay, but how can we make this better” are fantastic.
I’m nowhere near that stage yet. But day by day, I’m working on getting closer.
Speaking of which, I should get back to editing this here novel I’m writing! I’ve pushed back the editing timeline to March 18th to give me some extra time to go over it one or two more times, which I think will really help. The only problem is that by pushing it back… I can’t start my other projects yet! Gah!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Lot of Ads
Well, hands up if you’ve spent the last week (in addition to editing the new novel) writing up a thousand new ads?
Okay, okay, not a thousand. Only ten, technically, although each had a unique set of issues to solve. I dived into trying to give more visibility to my books without increasing the cost of doing so, so far with mixed success. Previously I ran ads on three of my books, but it was a total of one ad campaign per book: now I’m up to five campaigns per book, and I’m doing two books.
Ooh, and in two different countries. So technically, I created 20 different ad campaigns in the last week. Phew! No wonder I’m so tired!
I remain cautiously optimistic that this may result in a slight improvement in my overall writing fortunes (I mean that in the “luck” sense, not in the “financial” sense, although that would be really nice as well!). The process seems to make sense, and it’s had some success so far already, but I’ll revisit again in a few days, start making tweaks and changes.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!