So the interview with the writer (Victor Santos) and artist (Agustin Graham Nakamura) went pretty well. Not my best work, but they’re interesting guys and I think we had a pretty engaging discussion about their new graphic novel.
Victor started out as a self-published comic book artist and writer, and that was a bit encouraging (although he’s been doing this gig now for decades) because maybe there’s hope for me yet… Agustin works corporate primarily and then transitioned into a full-time artist. Either way, it was a nice chat. I think it goes live next week, so I’ll see about linking it here if anyone is curious.
I also sat down with a local reporter to chat on his podcast (putting me on the other side of the mics as the guest rather than the host), and that was neat. We were talking board games, mostly as a result of my paying job as a game store specialist. It was a fun, engaging little talk, and Marshall (the reporter) and Sarah (his co-host) were a lot of fun to talk to. They invited me back to chat sci-fi writing at some future date, and that’ll be fun as well. I doubt I’m going to see much in the way of sales from it, but it was nice to be an expert in something.
Anyway, I have a lot of writing to get done before the week is finished (still have to edit and send off this novel! Gah!), so I should get back to that. Hope everyone is doing exceptionally well, as well as staying safe and healthy!
Talking with Professionals
So I am a contributing member of an Infinity-the-game themed podcast called “White Noise”. I write short stories for them (both free ones and paid), and I occasionally get behind the mic to talk with notable Infinity personalities… great gamers, or sharp strategists, or interesting people.
Tomorrow, I’m going to have the chance to talk to the author and artist team behind the newest Infinity graphic novel, “Betrayal”. Not a direct sequel to the earlier graphic novel/manga (let’s not get into the discussion about if/why those two things are different), the previews of Betrayal look great and the writer is the same from the previous comic (Victor Santos). The artist, Agustin Graham Nakamura, is different from last time but seems to have adopted the same artistic style as the previous edition very well… although sadly I didn’t manage to get my own copy secured before the interview, so a bit of the interview will be baseless speculation.
As a scientist, I’m okay with a bit of baseless speculation, as long as it eventually is replaced by factual extrapolation, of course.
Anyway! I’m excited because I get to talk to two industry professionals who are about the same age as me (a year or two older, I believe) who have been working in the industry their entire lives rather than code-switching twelves years after they entered the workforce. The language barrier is hopefully going to be small… they’re both Spanish-speaking primarily, as far as I know (Nakamura in particular is fascinating to me since he’s Argentina-Japanese living in Brazil… fascinating!), and my Spanish is awful. I’m usually okay with Spanglish, and we’ll see how it goes!
Either way, it should be an interesting talk! I sent my questions along to them already, so hopefully they have a chance to prepare some interesting answers!
I’ll report back on Wednesday about how it goes… fingers crossed!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Snoring Cats
I am blessed to live with three cats these days. Donut is the oldest, Bean in the middle, and Koko is the youngest. All of them are Tortoise-shell cats (dark brown, orange, and light brown in swirls and stripes), which makes them a little hard to tell apart in the dark, but they all have their own distinct personalities.
One of them, Bean, really likes disturbing me while I work. Normally she sits on my keyboard or between my arms in such a way as to make it very difficult to write (sometimes even nibbling on my hands to let me know I should be petting her and not writing). It’s adorable, but distracting. But I can’t say I really mind… she’s very warm and compassionate most of the time and likes spending time wherever I am.
At this moment, she is sitting next to me on a pile of blankets on a chair next to me, placed there specifically to draw her away from my keyboard and let me write. She’s snoring, in a way that is both adorable and very hard to describe. A wheezing, purring sort of sound. Like distant thunder mixed with squeaky wheels.
Like I said, difficult to describe.
But it’s funny. If I were to write this into a story, I would probably just write “gently snoring cat” and leave the reader to fill in the specifics of the sound itself. No need to Stephen King the situation and spend a full page on a small detail that everyone either knows what it sounds like (even if it sound different from my Bean) or don’t care what it sounds like unless it’s critical to the story.
Maybe one day I will write a story that hinges on the specific frequency of cat snores… until then…
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Other People's Arms
There is a quotation somebody sent me once that I really like:
Writing is really difficult, like forcing your arm through a meat grinder. But some days it’s easier, like forcing somebody else’s arm through a meat grinder.
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of meat grindering (it’s a word shut up) of my own arms, today included. I’ve only written about 500 words today, which would be fine for a usual week day, but since this is one of my dedicated writing days is at least 1,500 words too short. Thankfully, the day isn’t over yet.
Unfortunately, I still have half a lawn to mow (our front lawn has been replaced with a no-mow lawn, which is great… lots of local plants and flowers, very green and pretty), and so the time I theoretically have is a bit more fluid than just another 5 hours or whatever. But that’s okay! Difficult days are okay. Just have to not give up.
Speaking of which, I enrolled for more courses for September. Not a fan of the distance learning thing, but no choice at this time, so it is what it is. Shakespeare Histories and Tragedies… not sure if that will ever really be useful to a sci-fi writer like me, but hey, won’t know until I try. And maybe I will find a new appreciation for The Bard after this… My Love is a Fever longing for that which longer nurses the disease, and all that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Vacation!... For Other People!
My editor and my partner are both on vacation this week (not together… although that would be cool). My editor is taking a few weeks to relax in PEI, where she lives (I believe), and my partner is doing a relaxing staycation, watching “Elementary” and “Scandal”.
This gives me some breathing room, and some time to finish the novel I’ve been trying to finish for a month now (has it been that long, I wonder aloud? Yes. Yes it has).
I’m stuck around 45k words, in a scene that has Tintian in the medbay of her ship, the Prosperous. She’s reeling from the realization that she may have just gotten her closest friend killed through what she considers negligence and by her drive to uncover a decades-old mystery. Something she feels personally responsible for, even if it may, or may not, be her fault.
I want to have one of the other characters come in as a sympathetic ear, to listen to how Tintian feels about the situation, but I don’t know if it actually serves the story. Still, it’s been tying me up in knots for the last few weeks, and it really isn’t that important a scene… so much so that I may actually end up cutting the entire scene and just have it discussed in a line or two. But by the same token, it feels important to me, as the author, to listen to what Tintian is going to say, to get a glimpse into the character I’m not so much writing as I am following around. She has a life of her own, and it’s my job to chronicle it more than it is to shape it.
Anyway. I should get back to it. Nice to have some breathing room, and nice that those around me can have a few days of relaxation in this difficult days.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Family Support
In the grand scheme of things, I have been extremely fortunate. That’s not to say I haven’t encountered difficulties, of course, but it is to say that things could’ve been much, much worse. I have a good support network, and my family is pretty supportive of the whole “writing” thing that I’m doing.
Well, mostly supportive. My father doesn’t really understand what I’m doing, but he’s a scientist and respects science more than any form of fiction. That’s fine. My mom is more artistic, and she’s been better about being helpful, and my partner is extremely supportive. All in all, it more-or-less balances out to a generally positive environment. So I really can’t complain. Sure, there are artists that had much, much more support, and money is always going to be an issue until (hopefully!) one day it isn’t, but that’s okay.
Anyway. Progress on the novel continues. Editor took a few weeks of vacation (richly deserved!), so that gives me a bit more time to work on this, and I intend to use it. Speaking of which, I should get back to it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Advertising Dollars at Work
Just a quick aside here. I don’t spend a lot of money on advertising my books… to do even the modest amount that’s usually recommended for independent authors is way, way out of my budget. I try to save the money I do have to devote towards my work for editing first, and then art assets second, with advertising a distant and terrifying third.
Now, if I were a businessperson, chances are pretty good that those numbers should be flipped straight on their head. Advertising first, because it doesn’t matter how good your book is if nobody reads it, art second because it doesn’t matter if people see your book but are immediately turned off by an ugly cover, and then editing third because once they’ve bought your book who cares. But I’m not interested in being a flash-in-the-pan. I want to be doing this for decades to come, and that means people need to know I make good products, and that I deeply care about how the finished product looks and reads.
I want people to like my work and to want more of it.
Anyway, what this means is that my monthly advertising budget is usually around $20. Most months it doesn’t hit that amount. But that’s okay, because in order for it to hit $20, it should really be selling at least $20 worth of books, and that’s equally rare… these days I only sell ten books or more on a week that I release a new book.
Small potatoes.
But regardless, important ones I suppose. Hopefully the things I learn by running these small (tiny, really) advertising campaigns will eventually let me be somewhat successful if I have to do it for a thousand dollar campaign (which, again, is the minimum I have seen recommended for independent authors). And last month I sold $15 worth of books, and the advertising only cost me $10, so that’s pretty much a win.
Now, if I could just multiply all those numbers by a thousand, I would be so happy…
August... already?
It is indeed already August, and I’m still not sure how that happened.
I’ve been struggling to get the novel finished, not for any particular plot point related issues, but just general-life-stress issues. It’s hard working a full-time job and then having to be creative in the nooks and cracks between.
I actually had somebody who read (and liked!) my first novel tell me that at work. He’s a full-time game designer and said that he’s glad he can be because he couldn’t imagine having to work a different job and then be creative afterwards. Adrian, I feel ya man… it’s rough as hell, and I really wish I didn’t have to. But for now at least, I do. Hopefully not for too much longer, but we’ll see… that hinges pretty heavily on my ability to finish novels, of course, which I am at least three weeks behind in doing!
Gah! But of course stress doesn’t help me write better (quite the opposite), but it’s gotta get done, but that’s putting pressure on myself and I already have tonnes of pressure from sources outside myself… and so on, and so forth. All I can do is my best, and I think that’s what I’m doing.
Gosh, I hope that’s what I’m doing.
Anyway! Going to get back at it. The novel is so close to being done, I just gotta carry it over the finish line, kicking and screaming if that’s what it takes.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Still Plugging Away
Somebody famous said something about writers aren’t people who find writing easy, but rather are people who write despite writing being very difficult.
There are definitely days where the writing comes easily and flows quickly. And then there are days like this last week where it felt like I was pulling teeth uphill in a blizzard to try and get anything done… AND I managed to lose 500 words because my computer decided to do a mandatory restart. Whee.
Oh well. I’m not a writer because it’s easy. I do love it, even when it’s hard.
Today I’m going to try and finally finish this novel so I can send it to my editor (who won’t have time for it for a few more days, but that’s okay!). And then probably collapse in a heap and moan softly for a few hours as a method of recovery.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Rainy Days
It has been raining sporadically all day… there was a period of about an hour that I managed to sneak a run in (which I can’t say I enjoyed, but I did finish it, so there’s that), and since then it’s been 15 minutes of rain followed by 5 minutes of sun followed by 10 minutes of rain followed by 30 minutes of cloudy-but-not-rainy and so on. Weird weather.
Managed to get a couple of my courses sorted out for September and January… hopefully I will pick up a few more courses later, but for now I’m okay with 1 per semester until the pandemic is over and I can attend classes in person again. I just don’t learn very well online… so I’m taking courses I’m not interested in but are prerequisites for my degree (specifically “Shakespearean Histories and Tragedies” and “British Literature I”). Get ‘em finished, move on to more stuff I’m actually excited about when I can talk to professors and TAs and classmates and actually wring some knowledge-juice from the knowledge-fruit that is university.
Anyway, I gotta finish this novel. Still haven’t found a cover for it, but plenty of time for that after I finish writing!
Hope everyone is safe and healthy!
The New Normal
So I’m getting pretty used to wearing a mask at the game store I work at to pay for my editing costs. I can’t say it’s pleasant, and I’m washing my hands about 20 times a day (without exaggeration… lunch alone is 6 hand washings minimum every day) and disinfecting them with hand sanitizer at least another thirty or forty times, but I’m getting used to it.
Not to say I won’t enjoy being able to go biking without having to wear my mask someday, but for now, that’s a very small price to pay.
I don’t mind going grocery shopping only once a month. I’m okay with only having a certain number of customers in the store at a time (maximum 6 people per aisle and 15 people in the building). I miss my friends, but again I’d rather us all be safe than risk making any of them sick because some of the customers in the store are not particularly careful (my favourites are those who feel the need to specifically lower their mask when they talk… don’t do that, that’s the whole point).
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a pretty far-cry from ideal, but all things considered, I can’t complain too much. Do wish I had more time to write, though!
Speaking of which… back to writing!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
July Release Pushed Back to August
Well, my editor is booked for the rest of the month, so this month’s release has been pushed back until August. That’s fine, since it gives me another week to work on the 2nd edit, and I think the story will be improved by an extra layer or two of polish. I’m happy with how it’s coming along, but it can always be better.
I think that’s an important thing to realize, in the grand scheme of things. Stories can always be better, but at some point you have to stop working on them and just move on. In my case, that means self-publishing them in the hopes they can a bit of traction out in the world, and eventually I have enough supporters that I can do this writing gig full-time. In other people’s cases, that means putting them down and working on other projects. No judgment, personally, but I think it’s important to know when to stop and move on, ya know?
Anyway, no luck on the cover art just yet (but now I have another 3-4 weeks before the novel can be published I’m definitely not in a rush). And the weather has been giving me really annoying headaches all week… I assume the storms have something to do with it. Hopefully it will let up soon!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Cover Art Shopping!
So far I’ve used the same company/artist for all of my covers. He does consistent, pre-generated work that’s inexpensive but looks okay. Since my budget is limited (with the vast, vast majority of each book’s budget devoted to editing costs), that’s always been fine.
Trouble is he doesn’t do a lot of sci-fi covers, so for the last two or three books the offerings have gotten slimmer and slimmer. And while some of his covers are quite good, many of them are inappropriate (not bad, just not thematically right or the wrong sub-genre) for the kind of books I write.
So I spent a little time yesterday stretching out a bit, seeing if there was anyone else who does good quality pre-generated covers. The answer is a resounding “yes”, but the price range doubles pretty quickly without really much visible quality improvements (I suspect the higher price point is due to many of these being designed for actual physical books, rather than e-books, so the resolution and colours have to be different? But that’s a guess).
Anyway, it was still neat to do some browsing, and I’ll probably do more today. Either that or dive into the 2nd draft edits, which I should be doing… any moment now… definitely…
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Finishing the first draft today!
The end is in sight, and it’s a nice sight! The novel is on the precipice of completion, and I can see the path from here to there pretty dang clearly. Almost certainly going to finish it today, and then take a break from writing until Wednesday when I dive into the 2nd draft.
The transition from first to second draft is an interesting one. I tend to over-write the first draft and then pare back to the best bits. A bit like a gardener trimming away dead leaves so that the plant can grow stronger.
(We watched a few episodes of “Big Flower Fight”, which is full of VERY arrogant people and that bothers me, but it’s been kinda neat to hate-watch)
Anyway, I should get back to wrapping up the story in a satisfying way. Finish line in sight, let’s get this done!
New Month!
Well, June is gone, and we’ve passed the halfway point of 2020. I suppose congratulations are in order for everyone… it’s be a helluva year, and it shows no signs of slowing down or improving in the immediate future. So good job everyone!
I’ve spent the majority of the day consuming a lovely little Canadian comedy show called “Kim’s Convenience”, based in Toronto about a group of Koreans. It’s light, and funny, and it speaks to both me and my partner in a very fundamental way as children of immigrants (although neither of us are of Korean ancestry). It also makes me miss Toronto in a very fundamental way… I loved living in that city, although we were always poor and really couldn’t afford to stay in the city (which is why we’re not there now).
We have a nice house in Kitchener, with a nice backyard, but man, I miss the city. But nothing I can do about that now… and certainly not with my chosen field! The odds of a writer being ever able to afford a home in Toronto isn’t even vanishingly small: it’s basically non-existent.
But that’s okay! I can miss the city and still appreciate everything I have.
Speaking of which, I really gotta get this novel finished so it can get out to all of you! Fingers crossed for late this month (but a big chunk of that will depend on my editor and her schedule).
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
A Few More 3k Word Days, Please
Wednesday I managed to write over 3,000 words. That’s not my best day by a long shot, but it’s my best day recently, and that’s nice. I need about four more of those to finish this draft, take a few hours to sleep, and then start editing it before sending it off to my editor.
I’m a little worried about the last few thousand words for this story, only because the source material I’m using (Tintin and Red Rackham’s Treasure) doesn’t have an awful lot happen in it. Some very pretty scenery, but not a lot of actual stuff. But I’ve mentioned that before, and it’s a hurdle I’ve tackled before, so I’m not really THAT worried about it. But it is on my mind (and today I’ll be diving into the deep of it, as well as Wednesday).
In other news, I went grocery shopping for the first time in over a month. I’m probably going to have to go again next week for fruits and vegetables (I got a massive stock of staples and non-perishables, but I left the fruit and veg until last and there simply wasn’t room in my shopping cart for much). I burned an entire week’s paycheck on that shopping trip… but again, hopefully this will last a month, so I’ll still be okay in the end.
This pandemic, man. So weird. Oh well! Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
When Two Books Become One...
So part of the joy of bringing the old Tintin comics into science fiction has been re-imagining the world through the lens of written stories, rather than the visual medium of comics. For the most part this has been a joy, and a lot of the scenes in the TIntian novels “feel” very comic-inspired to me. I think I did a respectable (if not exceptional) job on the first novel, and the second one is even better, if you don’t mind me saying so.
I suspect the 15th, when I get around to writing it, will be fantastic. But this is the third novel I’m doing this with, and I continue to be happy with the process. Maybe someday I’ll write a sci-fi Asterix and Obelix, but until then, Tintian is a chunk of my childhood dreams made real.
But that’s not to say everything is necessarily easy. The biggest issue is one of length… trying to fill a novel worth of words with a comic that maybe has a thousand words across it is tricky. And in this particular case I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to collapse a two-part story into a single novel.
Specifically, “Tintin and the Mystery of the Unicorn” and “Tintin and Red Rackham’s Treasure” are 2 parts in the comics, and finish laying the fundamental groundwork for the rest of the Tintin comics in many ways. It introduces the last of the “major” characters in Professor Calculus (who I’ve already included in my 2nd novel, “Tintian and the Mysterious Meteor”) as well as the Captain’s ancestral home in Marlinspike Manor (which I am introducing in this novel). Other than the two major reoccurring villains in Tintin, that’s most of the fundamentals covered, really… and I’ve already built the foundations for one of those two villains in my work.
ANYway, what I’m saying is that the current novel is hovering around 35k words, and that’s just a bit shy of my usual novel length. Now Spielberg compressed the two (and added parts of “The Crab with the Golden Claws” to boot!) when he made the movie adaptation, so I’d be in rarefied air if I did the same… I just don’t know if it will make this novel too long if I do. But, all things considered, there’s not a tonne that happens in Red Rackham’s Treasure. A talkative parrot, some monkeys that steal a rifle, and a lot of submarine and diving suit action that makes good comics but I don’t know if would make a great novel.
Of course, one might say the same thing about the entire endeavour of writing works inspired by Herge in the first place, but that’s what I’m doing.
Anyway-anyway, I’ll decide in the next thousand words or so. I might even cut some of the stuff I’ve written so far, make sure the story doesn’t spiral away from me… we’ll see!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Words Count
Get it? Because words are important, but also because I have to count how many words I’m writing to finish a novel?
Hey, I didn’t say it was a clever title. Just that it’s a title.
A friend and I spent much of today doing “writing sprints”, just picking word count goals for an hour and then trying to hit them. I picked 1,000 word goals each hour, and have so far fallen short each time (although not by much, mostly landing around 750 words). I have 30 minutes left in the last sprint before I start making dinner and calling it a day… so far I’m 790 words finished, so at least THIS hour I’ll hit the target. Of course, I am lightly self-sabotaging, since I’m writing this post instead of continuing to work on the novel…
Regardless, I also have tomorrow (or most of tomorrow at least) to continue working on this. Which is good, because I’m a week and a half away from needing it to be mostly finished (minus second-draft editing). At this pace I’ll be fine, but that’s assuming I can maintain this pace… but I should be fine. It’ll be fine, right?
Right.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Nice to be Writing Again!
I mean, technically I never stopped, but there’s a big difference between academic writing and novel writing, as I’m sure everyone is aware. So it’s nice to be writing for work instead of for education, I suppose? Either way, it’s awful nice to be back at writing fiction.
My pace is going to have to pick up a lot if I want to hit finishing this novel by July (that is edited and published by July, of course). But that’s okay, I think I can manage that. I have two more lessons to take notes in for my class, which I will finish today, and then one last (little) assignment for the 22nd that I am technically already finished (just need to collate and submit a bunch of “conversations” I’ve had in the class Discussion forums), and then nothing until the autumn.
Which is good, since I need to have another novel done by the autumn before classes start, more or less! It will be nice to have that time back.
I realize that I am missing my weekly writing group since they were a great source of feedback on works-in-progress, but somehow we must soldier on. “Chapter Two” (the writing group) will get back together before long, and I’ll just have to do without until then.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Essay Done, Back to the Books!
Well, that’s the majority of my summer course finished (not all of it, but most of it). I still have a few short stories to read, but I should be done the whole thing tomorrow, and then I can turn my writing attentions back to the novel full time.
Which is good, because I’m hella-behind.
I mean, it’s not that bad, and as is typical I got the sudden urge to start a completely different story, but I’m going to focus on this one and get it finished in the 2 weeks I have until I have to turn it over to my editor (well, 3 weeks really, but one of those weeks is going to be just editing).
Anyway, nice to have most of the mental load for the course finished, and I hope I did okay in the course (I think I did pretty well on that last essay, but you can never really be sure).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!