I think one of the hardest things for me to mentally cope with as I've aged is the growing realization that I'll never be a hero.
I mean in the "Aragorn" or "Kelsier" or "Jade" (from Beyond Good and Evil) sense. A hero who goes out and does heroic things. Just never going to be me.
I love writing about those sorts of people, though, and if I can't live a life worth writing about, at least I can write stuff worth reading.
Either way, it's been a slowly dawning thing. I now know I'm never going to be a martial arts master, I'll never be a gold medalist at anything, and I'm certainly never going to be in spaceship hurtling through space-time. Or at least it's remarkably improbable.
Anyway. I should get back to writing. Just having somewhat somber thoughts today, thought I'd share 'em! Hope everyone is doing well!
Wow! A Full Week!
Hey folks! Took a few days off, and suddenly a week has disappeared! Crazy!
Good news for those of you episodically following Tintian: Episode IV goes live tomorrow! I'll update the links and the book page tomorrow afternoon.
Other than that, "Starconvoy" is now officially in the hands of my (amazing) editor, and she's dutifully making it better. Ah, love that feeling.
Anyway! I'm back, I'll be posting all the time again, and thanks for checking out my stuff!
A Bit Run Down
Sadly, I've gotten a bit sick recently. Nothing serious: a chest cough, a bit of a headache, exhaustion... that sort of deal. Still, unfortunate timing, and hopefully I can shake it off quickly!
In writing news, nothing really exciting. Still working on the last few thousand words for "How to Train Your A.I.", and preparing to receive editorial feedback on "Starconvoy".
Haven't submitted anything in a few weeks, either. Gotta get on that! Anyway, thanks as always!
There Are No Weekends for Writers
Strictly, this isn't true. Writers, just like everyone else, have days we write more, and days we write less. High energy days, and low energy days. Days we stay under the covers until noon, and days that we don't manage to close our eyes until well into the following morning.
That stated, the overriding narrative around writing is always about production: you have to write. You have to make stuff, and you have to send that stuff out, and a tonne of it will be rejected and so you have to send out EVEN MORE and then you repeat that dozens of times.
So every time I have "time off", I'm either prepping for writing (watching good sci-fi, reading good sci-fi, playing good sci-fi), or I'm actually writing. Not a complaint, of course! I love writing. But it does take a lot out of you, for sure.
Anyway, just a thought as I head into Sunday, with a couple novels creeping closer to being finished their first draft.
Oh! Good news! I have a few short stories that I'm planning on putting up here (and for my Patrons... you support me on Patreon, right?) very soon! Hurray!
Rightio! Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend!
Staggered, But Recovering
Well. That was a thing.
With Trump officially poised as President-Elect, I've had the full gamut of emotions run through me. Starting with hope, rapidly sliding towards disbelief, then in rapid succession fear, anger, disappointment, and crushing depression. This is not how things were supposed to go.
But it is what it is.
The problem is that it's very hard to sit down and write silly stories right now. It's hard to remember that the good guys win. It's difficult to summon up the energy to create fictional evil when there's so much actual evil to deal with.
This feeling will pass. The reason I write stories like I do is specifically because the world is a dark, depressing place. Occasionally we all need to believe that the good guys win precisely because it so rarely happens.
But for today? Today I'm just going to soak in my feelings a bit, try to get my feet back underneath me.
Tomorrow... tomorrow I write.
Episode 3 is now live!
Quick update today: Episode 3 of Tintian went live on Amazon today! Woo!
Only 2 more episodes to go... and then I get to publish something else! Excited!
Anyway, you can find it here, or just follow the big picture on the "Books" page! Thanks for reading!
My First Writer's Convention!
So today is "Wild Writers" in Kitchener/Waterloo. I'm cautiously excited about attending... I think it'll be pretty overwhelming, and probably a lot of scathing commentary on both my writing and on my odds of being a professional writer.
Not maliciously, of course. The industry seems to just be full of people who are trying to helpfully direct everyone into any other occupation other than writing. But maybe that's just me? Who knows.
Either way, I do think it'll be interesting to hang out with other people who identify as writers. I'm also really curious what kind of draw will be at the event... I know one of the people from my writing group will be moderating one of the talks, but that's literally the extent I know about the event.
So I guess we'll see! I'll try to come up with a report afterwards about the event.
Hope everyone else is having exciting Saturdays!
Useful Feedback
A friend of mine who is a member of the "Stopwatch Gang" gave me some great feedback on a story I'm working on. Took forever to get said feedback (he's got 2 newborns to take care of!), but it was definitely worth waiting for.
A lot of the feedback revolves around making the characters more personalized, and less characters. Fleshing them out. I also, apparently, don't give sufficient detail for the setting ("The room had a table and four chairs", instead of talking about what the room looks like, what type of table it is, what kind of chairs, etc... etc...).
Anyway! He also kindly gave me a laundry list of resources that I'm going to spend my writing-days next week reading. I am 100% behind homework (most of my "homework" involves reading good sci-fi, so this is a nice change!).
I'll let you all know how it goes!
NaNoReaMo!
So November is "NaNoWriMo" for many aspiring writers. Nothing wrong with that... for those of you not familiar, the basic shtick of "National Novel Writing Month" is 50,000 words written in the month of November. A steep, but achievable goal.
But not for me this year. First off, I've been writing more than 50,000 words a month every month so far in 2016 (I think October may have only been around 40,000). But secondly, I already have about a dozen longer works on the go... I'm in dire need of buckling down and editing my work, not producing more.
I, personally, hope that a NaNoReaMo catches on... as a writer, the best thing is when people buy more books, whether they're mine or anyone else's. And far too few people read these days...
How about any of you? Planning on any new novel purchases? How is your reading list looking?
Video Review of Tintian! Yay!
A guy who happens to hang out on some of the same forums as I do put up a review of Tintian on Youtube, and I'm extremely grateful for it.
Quick word of warning: there are some light spoilers in the review, but otherwise, do give it a watch!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L27kErBFMOI&feature=youtu.be
Almost 50!
It's strange the little milestones we set ourselves. For example, there's no real reason that "10" or "100" are significant numbers, other than they're base-10 numerals that we seem to think are important. I imagine if humanity had evolved with 7 fingers on each hand we'd find 14 and 196 to be terribly interesting.
But, all the same, "Tintian and the King's Claw" is halfway to being downloaded 100 times. And that feels good. It feels nice. I like that a bunch of people have now seen my work, and hopefully are curious about what I produce next.
In another week, or so, I'll release Episode 3, and in a few days I'll have to pick whether to push "How to Train Your AI" or "Starconvoy" to publishers and agents, while the other is polished for self-publishing. In the meantime, I've resurrected a bunch of my backlog of work so that I can finish it up, and then I have a dozen short stories I'd like to try and get published.
It's a lot of work to keep on top of, but hey, it's the life I've chosen, and I do enjoy the majority of it!
Anyway, happy reading! Tuesday I get feedback on an old fantasy story I submitted to a contest years ago and now what to maybe sent out to some fantasy magazines... might throw it down here instead! We'll see!
Tintian Episode 2 Available Now!
Mentioned it yesterday, but Episode 2 is now available on the Amazon ebook store:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MQ07Q5S
Also, as a head's up for my readers: Episode 1 will be going FREE tomorrow for the 5 day window that Kindle lets you offer a book free. Want to read the first 10 chapters of an awesome, epic space adventure for the low-low cost of nothing?
I'll post the link tomorrow!
Thanks for reading!
Monday's Efforts
Hello, gentle readers. Today I'm working on polishing up my short story "Black Box". The feedback from my writing group was extremely useful, and a lot of it focused on the ending and suggestions on how to tighten it up.
Today I'm also posting Episode 2 of "Tintian and the King's Claw" on Amazon, and reducing the price of Episode 1 to "Free". We'll see if that helps get a bit more traction for the story... I'm really proud of it, and the reviews I've gotten so far have been good, but all for naught if I can't get more people to read it! Ah, the trials and tribulations of the small self-publisher!
ANYway, I should get to it! I hope all of you are having great Mondays!
Double Digits!
I know this seems like a silly thing, but I've now sold more than 10 copies of Tintian and the King's Claw (11 copies as of this morning!), and I'm actually really happy about that!
Milestone complete!
So next let's see if we can get it to 100 copies! Thank you everyone for your support!
Three little mistakes!
So about 8 of you have now purchased Tintian and the King's Claw. A humble start, but a start! Of those 8, 5 of you will have small little errors in your edition of the book.
They've all been fixed now (so anyone who buys in from last week onwards will see a completely corrected version), but I somehow missed the chapter heading for Chapter 4 (oops!), and there were 2 small typos (both missed by myself and my editor. It happens).
Oh, and a few "m/s2" with the 2 not being in superscript. Fixed those as well.
Still, frustrating that I only found these out from feedback from one of you lovely readers. I really, really appreciate the email they sent me, pointing out the errors, and I quickly corrected them for future readers. Just a perk of being a small self-publisher, I suppose! Either way, will try harder to avoid those problems for the next book!
Speaking of which, "How to Train Your A.I." is coming along slowly, but surely. I'm rewriting the first 3 chapters (again!), and then reworking the majority o the body of the work, but the framework is good and the story is strong, in my opinion. And tonight I'm getting feedback on "Black Box", so we'll see about that one too!
Lazy Sundays
So yesterday I had a bunch of friends over for games, food, and general frivolity. I managed to burn the chicken but did a passable job on smoking the pork (thereby saving the meal), and we played several of my favourite "light" games (Monikers, Codenames, RoboRally).
Today I have a podcast to edit for a few hours, and then I'm going to write a few thousand words on my third novel ("How to Train Your A.I.") to try and get it up to snuff before the end of the month.
Hope everyone is enjoying their weekends!
Heavy Revisions. How I Loathe/Love Thee...
So for the next week (or so) I'm going to be working on an old story (well, "old" as in "I wrote it in March"). It needs some pretty heavy revisions and a few more chapters to flesh out the universe and setting. It's around 50,000 words right now, and I won't be happy with it before it hits 85,000 so that I can trim it down a little.
Problem is that heavy revisions are the bane of my existence. Revision, I can do... mostly cutting, occasionally trimming, editing, that sorta deal. I can do that. But adding in whole chapters, or cutting whole chapters to then add bits and pieces of them throughout a story is really rough.
But, gotta get done! And I do really like the story itself, it deserves to be told, which means it deserves to be properly edited and written.
Wish me luck!
Polished Up, On to the Next!
So "Tintian and the King's Claw" is now available on both Amazon and Kobo, and I've cleaned up 2 errors that somehow snuck through the formatting changes (Chapter 4, for whatever reason, didn't show up as a chapter, and I managed to put the superscript on a "2" in m/s2). Minor fixes, but vexing that I missed them in the hours and hours of editing and formatting work I did.
Regardless, all fixed now!
I also finished writing "Black Box" (weighs in just over 5,000 words), and submitted a short story to SFReader ("Joys of the Colonies"). Tomorrow I think I'm going to start working on the revision work I need to do to "How to Train Your A.I." (working title), since it needs some pretty hefty rewrites, and I'd like it to be edited by December so I can decide to send it or "Starconvoy EH-76" (also working title, which I'm less enthusiastic about) to agents and see if I can drum up some interest.
So good news! I can write again! Yay! After over a month solid of not-writing, that's a very welcome change.
Boom! Published!
And just like that, I have my first 2 books on the Amazon bookstore. Incredible.
I won't say "easy", since it was a metric tonne of work (writing, editing, revising, sending out for professional edits, more revising, learning enough HTML to format the story, more revising...), but it was at least somewhat seamless.
And now my book is out! Which means I get to split my time between all the writing I'm doing, all the not-writing I'm doing, and now promoting my book so that people buy and enjoy it! One more task for the list, but hey, at least I'm doing what I love.
Thanks for joining me on this journey!
Next up is finishing up "Black Box" by tonight to submit for revision before it goes off to Asimov's. Work, work, work!
Happy Turkey Day!
Okay, I pulled the trigger: both Episode 1 and the Omnibus of "Tintian and the King's Claw" are awaiting review and publishing through Amazon. I've done everything I could (I hope!), and now I just have to wait for Amazon to give me the thumb's up that they're available.
I think that's it for today. It's Thanksgiving in Canada, and so I'm going to hang out with friends, eat ramen, and try not to let the dread that I messed something up overwhelm me.
We will see... we will see...
Happy Turkey Day to all of you!