I know it’s true for a lot of creatives, but I often find myself struggling against the desire to do many, many things at the same time.
Like, right now behind me I have all the tools for another stop motion movie. I even have the script and the storyboard all done! I think I finished them in late 2024! I could just… do that right now… but instead I’m going to try and finish at least a chapter in the novel today. Maybe after that…
See? I’m already thinking about how I can work on a different project, despite not having even started today’s work on this project. And, to be completely honest, while I’m writing this blog post I’m also bouncing around, messaging some friends for board games tonight (Sidereal Confluence, a great space-themed trading game!), checking my email, and queuing up videos to watch!
Focusing is hard!
Ah well. For the most part it’s okay… I know I’m bad at multitasking, so I can usually hunker down and get one thing done (or a lot of one thing done) before I mentally switch to the next task. But there are days that are more difficult, no question.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Importance of a Good First Chapter
I’ve rewritten the first chapter to the new novel three times so far. I suspect it will get overhauled at least twice more before the first draft is fully done (although I think I will leave it as it is for the time being). Maybe a few tweaks, but overall I think it’s in a pretty good place.
The issue, of course, is that your first chapter has to be strong enough to kinda sell the book on its own. It tells the reader about your strength as a writer, and gives an overview of what they can expect in the coming pages. Scalzi, one of my favourite authors, is exceptional at first chapters… they tend to be a little funny, a little thoughtful, and very sharp. They give you a great idea of what the book is about, the tone of the book, and whether you’ll enjoy the rest of the work or not (which I almost always do).
My first chapters these days tend to be on the stronger side (not as good as Scalzi, but then again, he’s been doing this for decades), but they’re not as sharp as I would like. The stakes don’t usually get raised until chapter two or three, so you’ll get an idea of tone and pace for the coming story, but you might not know why the protagonists are involved just yet. And I have to work on that.
Anyway, the chapter is about half done at this point (pirates just walked into the bar!), so I think a bit more polish and I can move onto the chase scene through an asteroid.
Gosh it’s fun to write sci-fi.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Start Novel 9!
So I spent a few weeks working on a rough outline for what’s going to happen in this next story. That includes a day to read my previous book that this book is a sequel to.
I’m sure there are writers out there smart enough to keep all their characters and universes clean and clear in their minds. I am not one of those.
Anyway, the rough outline is now roughly done (there are still a few pretty significant holes I am going to have to fill!), which means it is time again to get down to writing. And so I did! On Monday I started writing Chapter 1 of the new Caitlyn Morcos novel!
And then on Tuesday I deleted everything I wrote and started over.
And today I’m pretty sure I’m going to delete most of what I wrote and start over. But that’s okay! Getting the first chapter perfect is very important to me. It sets the tone for the entire novel, after all, and is often the length of time a potential reader will give you to hook them. I mean, really, the first paragraph should be perfect-perfect, but I will work on refining that once I have the rest of the novel sorted.
Exciting! I’m estimating two months to finish the first draft? Maybe optimistic, but I have time on my side!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Hey China... 'Sup?
So for a few weeks now, I’ve been getting a significant amount of traffic from China. Nowhere in particular, and as far as I can tell completely incidentally (almost all of the hundreds of visits last less than a few seconds). I can only assume that I wrote something that flagged somebody toward my site for some random reason?
It’s a little weird. Not disturbing or anything like that, and hey, if my fiction is popular in China, amazing. There is some really fantastic Chinese sci-fi… I’m not a fan of the “Three Body Problem” series because the author’s outlook on the universe is too bleak (and the ending of the first book is very deus ex machina), but that aside, there are still some great works coming out. I’ve read a lot of short stories by both Chinese and Chinese-American writers, and gosh some of it is really good.
But I doubt that my books are very popular in China (if they are, they’re pirated). Just a weird little trend recently. But the upside is that my website is starting to get a more respectable number of weekly visits… no longer just 1 or 2 visits a day. And it’s nice to see that trend, even if I know it’s not for anything that I’m doing at the moment.
Who knows. Maybe someday people will visit my site for the books! A guy can only hope.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Good News on the Short Story Front!
I may have sold another short story! Yay!
Way back in April I submitted to a science fiction publication (a niche one, not one of the Big publications). Yesterday I heard back… the editor really likes my story, and had a short list of editing changes they wanted me to make.
I finished them up that day and sent it right back… hopefully this time it won’t take as long to get a response. But this is great! I’m super excited to have my work published, AND that they liked my story! I’m hoping to fire off a few more before the end of the year, now that I know their turnaround is on the longer side.
I might submit two… or even three stories at the same time. We’ll see!
Either way, this is great news. The pay is pretty good (for a short story… I don’t think anyone can make a living off of just short story submissions these days… I mean, it took 7 months for them to potentially accept this one!), and just in time that I can turn this story into a bunch of presents for the holidays. Hopefully! I’ll definitely post here if they do decide to buy the story!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
New Ad Campaigns
In order to try and sell my books, I advertise through Amazon. It makes a sort of sense… that’s where my books are available, that’s where I should advertise them.
My success has been… limited with ads. They tend to cost me a very significant sum of money, and I’m doing my best to try and limit the amount of money I spend on ads that don’t covert into sales. That has proven… tricky. There’s a real art to doing proper advertising, and I don’t really have the brain for that kind of art. I’m a writer, not a sales person… in fact, even when I worked in sales, I always took the approach of trying to talk people out of buying stuff they didn’t need or would enjoy, rather than trying to talk people into buying stuff. I dunno, I guess with how tight money has always been, it’s just kinda the way my brain works.
But I’ve had to put more time and energy into this. If I want to be a successful author (spoilers: I absolutely do want that) then I have to figure out a way to not only get my books into people’s hands, but also to make money while I’m doing that. My 5-to-10 books a month isn’t cutting it, and writing more books of the quality that I’m satisfied with takes too long for success to find me that way alone. Gotta figure out the ads.
Part of that is going to be redoing a few covers. Now that I have a cover I really, really love… it’s making me question some of the other covers I have. The Queen of the AIs, in particular, I’ve never been a fan of (but it was the best I could get at the time)… but that’s a future-me problem. Current-me is just trying to figure out a way to nudge my ad campaigns away from “This Costs a Fortune for No Sales” into “This is At Least Cost Neutral for a Bunch of Sales.”
Baby steps. We’ll get there, I hope.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Managed to Get Sick
Nothing serious, I hope, just a cough/cold thing that’s filled my brain with mucous for the last week. Made it very hard to do much of anything. But I think the worst has passed… I first had symptoms on Saturday, so almost a full week of nothin’. Not how I wanted to start my November, but it is what it is.
Ah well. These infrequent “No, Seriously, You Need to Sleep” moments help keep me grounded. As much as I want to finish my outline and get writing, I need to remember that I’m only mortal, and if I keep pushing myself, eventually some part of me is going to push back.
But since I am feeling better, and since I just got an estimate for the new bathroom we want to put in the house (spoilers: expensive AF), I’d probably better get back to it! Books aren’t going to write themselves!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Book Promoter
Yesterday, for the first time since I’ve become an author, I was approached out of the blue by a book promoter.
They had an interesting pitch, basically I would pay them to send copies of my book to a bunch of people who might leave reviews for it.
They phrased it better than that, but that’s the fundamentals. I pay, with some luck I get a bunch of positive reviews for my book. And not my newest book, either! They were pitching for The Hunt for the Wind’s Howling Rage, which is my third best selling novel (although Caitlyn Morcos is my best by a fair margin, doing better than the next two combined).
I was kinda sad that I can’t afford a service like this. The idea of having a bunch of people who love sci-fi and would be willing to give reviews is great! But the price… oof. That’s just too much money. Ah well.
Semi-related, I’ve been looking into reviewers and podcasters that I can send my books to in the future to try and get some feedback and buzz before I release the next novel, but it’s just not what my brain is good at. I can do it, but I’m not wired for marketing. I’m a writer, I just want to be writing.
Speaking of which, I should get back to writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Paperback Available, Back to Work
So the paperback (with a small tweak to the cover) is now available through all the usual Amazon-affiliated channels.
Which is to say… Amazon. It’s available through Amazon in whatever local flavour you shop.
With that headache out of the way, it’s time to get back to writing. I’ve almost hashed out the rough outline of the next novel, which means another day of work there and I can actually put quill-to-paper starting this week. That’s so gosh-darn exciting!
This will be the first time I’m writing a sequel to one of my books since the Tintian series. Caitlyn Morcos is my best selling book and has sold 1/3rd of my total book sales (out of 8 books!), and I’m hoping that a sequel will help people who already enjoy the character pick it up again, and bring visibility to a fun little space western. I’m proud of that story… although I think A Desperate Path Through the Stars is probably a little stronger overall, Morcos is real good.
I know this because I re-read it in preparation for writing the next book.
Anyway, I’m excited to finally shift back to the writing part of my job and away from the “Everything Else” part of my job. I wish I got to do more of the Writing part, but until I get an agent and/or a publishing deal… this is kinda it.
Or, you know, I suddenly become super successful through Patreon. That would work too.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Paperback under review!
I jumped through all the hoops and did all the things I think I need to do in order to make my newest novel, A Desperate Path Through the Stars, available as a paperback. I think. I hope?
It’s a lot of hoops. And a lot of things can go wrong. Typos, formatting errors, making sure the pages show up where they’re supposed to show up… just lots of fiddly little things which, again, is not why I’m a writer. I don’t fall asleep at nights dreaming of modifying margins or counting pages.
Alas, such is the life of a writer these days. At least until I can get signed and afford to have a publisher handle all this stuff for me (although I would then lose the ability to pick a cover artist… so it’s not all bad being independent).
The price of my paperbacks has been creeping up too, as Amazon increases the price to get books printed. Thankfully not too bad yet, but it’s something I’m going to have to stay aware of.
Anyway! That was a full morning of doing silly paperwork… time to do some actual writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Problem with Heists
I’ve talked here before about my deep love for the genre of Cyberpunk. From the classics like Neuromancer and Snow Crash all the way to more modern works like Altered Carbon and Cyberpunk 2077, the stories and worlds these writers craft have been a constant joy in my life.
Which, considering how depressing they tend to be, is a statement.
Anyway, the reason I bring it up is because my eight novel was originally going to be a cyberpunk heist novels. While not all cyberpunk works are heists or murder-mysteries, most are (and all of my favourites are!). But I ran into the trouble that I’m not as smart as my protagonists… I couldn’t figure out a believable and interesting way to make the heist work.
Usually what I do in these circumstances is I dive deep into what other people have done, and then cobble together a solution from the best pieces of other works. The car chase from The Italian Job with the secret rooms from The Da Vinci Code and the emp pulse from Oceans 11 or whatever.
But for whatever reason, I just couldn’t come up with a believable second half to the story. I’ve put it on the back burner for now, I think I’ll revisit it for Novel 10 (Novel 9 is the one I’m working on now, and it’s a sequel).
But the reason I’m bringing all that up now is because Novel 9 is a mystery novel, and I realized that I’m not having any of the same issues!… at least not yet. The pieces are falling into place nicely, the mystery (as a rough sketch) feels satisfying…
All I have to do now is actually write it, and hope that it feels as good in the rough draft as it does in the outline! We’ll see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Plotting Stories
So as I mentioned, I’ve started work on Novel 9. Right now that involves writing out a rough plot that I’m going to try and more-or-less follow.
I’m an exploratory, “pants”-style writer by nature. I love to just sit down and figure out where my characters want to go, and my job is to both make sure they get there, but also to make sure they don’t get there too quickly or too easily. I have to throw challenges in their way, I have to watch them grow as people.
The novel I’m working on, Caitlyn Morcos Book 2 (obviously not the title), involves characters I wrote a few years ago and so I’m spending my time right now re-reading the book and taking lots of notes. Caitlyn has a nervous tick, she has a favourite drink, she always carries her mom’s old service pistol (although she’s only used it once), that kinda stuff. Things so that if you read them back-to-back the continuity feels natural and flows.
But the plot… what actually happens to Caitlyn and her co-workers… that’s ambitious. I wrote Caitlyn Morcos Interplanetary Marshal Service long enough ago that my feelings towards law enforcement were significantly less nuanced than they are now. It was a very simple story, and although I am very proud of it, I want to bring a deeper level of consideration and thought to this new novel. I want Caitlyn to grapple with many of the issues that I myself grapple with these days.
I’ve got a good rough idea of where the story is going to go, but I need to write it down and, perhaps most importantly, I need to figure out the conclusion. Right now I have an idea of what the final conflict is going to be, but I want it to be as smooth as silk when I get to writing it.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Back At It
Well, I have started novel number 9, despite some push-back from my mom (who begged me not to write another book) and skepticism tinged with financial concern from several other members of my family.
I mean, they’re not wrong. Each of these novels costs me a fortune (a small one, but considering my financial level, a small fortune is more than I have) to edit, and the response has been… warm, sure (I get good reviews, I have semi-consistent sales), but certainly not viable.
Trouble is that I don’t know what else to do. Nobody will hire me on my own merits (questionable as they are), so I scrape by, day to day, begging for enough to get me through to the next novel. Maybe the novel after that.
If you can do anything else with your life, do that. If you can’t do anything else, write.
There is some venom in those words, but the heart behind them I think is true. I don’t think I can do anything else with my life. I’m a storyteller at heart, and I have been since I’ve been a child. I keep trying to find ways to tell stories and not starve to death… haven’t found it yet, but going to keep trying.
Anyway. Enough doom and gloom. I got a 5-star review on the new novel (yay!), and I’m cautiously optimistic about the next novel. I have a good feeling about it, despite it being in the pre-planning stage.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Reviewed!
A good friend, Roger, has written a review for “A Desperate Path Through the Stars!” I am extremely grateful to him for the time and energy he put into it, and it helps that he seems to really like the book!
You can find his review over here on his blog, and I highly recommend checking it out in case you were on the fence about picking up my newest novel yourself, or if you want to read what somebody else thinks about my work.
The book has been selling consistently, and quite well relative to my other works. It’s still a small, tiny, insignificant speck on the tapestry that is modern publishing, but it’s another step along the road I am trying to travel.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Released!
Well, it’s officially out in the world. Sales have been “good” (good under the conditions of “sales compared to how often my books usually sell”), still way less than I want or need in order to make even a humble living from my writing, but that’s okay.
This is just a step. A significant step, granted, since this is probably the best book I’ve ever written.
It’s real good. Humbly speaking, of course.
But now it is out in the wild. It’s done, I have done all the polishing and cleaning and editing I can, and unless something catastrophic comes up (please no), I am putting this one in my rear view mirror and moving on to the next project… Novel 9!
Thanks if you’ve been with me this whole time, or if you’re brand new… hello! Nice to meet you. Hope you’ll stick around.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Final Editing!
I received the last batch of edits from my noble, hardworking beta readers, and all I have to do is make the last 10 chapters worth of changes, and then the novel goes out into the world.
Gonna try and finish that today. Because as soon as I finish this, I get to start on all the other exciting stuff I wanna do!
So no rest for the wicked or weary.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Weekend Activities!
I’ve been compiling a list of fun activities to do around the town I live in (Kitchener, Ontario). Just fun things like going for a hike, or joining a sports league, or whatever.
Most of it is probably unchanged from the kinds of things you could do twenty or thirty years ago in the region. Breweries, vineyards, coffee shops, museums… all pretty stock standard.
There are a few more recent inclusions. Board game cafes, escape rooms, indoor mini golf… some interesting options for a relatively small town (although the big tech boom a couple decades back probably had something to do with that… a massive influx of money and people who wanted to spend that money doing fun stuff).
As a general rule, I don’t get out much… the life of a writer is quite solitary and my budget is super tight these days. But it’s nice to have a list of things I could do, even if only theoretically.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Best Laid Plans...
I decided to have a chat with my older brother. He has lived a very colourful life, to put it mildly. During the call, we started talking about Canadian Prisons, as one does.
I don’t know if other families do this. My family certain does. We pick a topic, and we talk it into the ground. And the topic for today was prison.
The talk meandered to the topic of prison escapes. A topic I have a passing interest in from a scholarly perspective… I love heist stories, and a breakout is basically a closed box heist. But my knowledge of breakouts is purely media-fed. I know of prisons only from television and movies, but I haven’t studied or visited one. But my brother has taken something of a deeper interest in these facilities, and so we discussed a hypothetical situation about how one might exit a prison earlier than is strictly… legal.
It was an interesting bit of mental exercise! Me, with my purely media-fueled perspective, and his opinion which is better researched and thought-out.
The take-away was basically that if you really needed to escape a prison early, you could… but a lot of things would have to go exactly right, and it’s better not to find yourself in that position in the first place.
That stated… I might start my next novel with the hero in a prison. The seed has been planted…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Genre Hopping
One of the nice things about being a writer in the modern era is the ability to switch genres.
I mean, historically authors could (and did!), but since historic authors were usually beholden to a publisher who would refuse to publish anything they weren’t completely convinced would sell out instantly… I mean, don’t get me wrong. I would give my left leg to be a traditionally published author with a solid contract (sigh), but it is limiting.
Whereas I can write and publish anything I want! It just turns out that what I really want to publish is sci-fi.
But I was thinking during my morning run today (solid time, 3km in 18:20.22, which is very good for me) that if I wanted to write a sci-fi romance, I absolutely could. Which reminded me that I have written a sci-fi romance (albeit a short story) and it sold to a traditional publisher who paid real-world USD for it. Humbly, I think it was very good! I’m proud of that story.
Which made me think that maybe for the novel after my next novel (I’m working on number 9 right now, so novel 10) I’d write a big sci-fi romance. It might be fun! And there’s no publisher (yet) to tell me that I shouldn’t do that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Positive Review!
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!