So I want to finish up my planning stages for Novel 8 before I jump back into the edits for Novel 7. Couple reasons for this, but the main one is that I usually deal better with following one thread to its end rather than trying to keep four or five things going simultaneously.
I am many things, but a good multitasker is not one of them.
Problem is I was having difficulty planning the heist itself. I want it to be epic and exciting, but it needs moments of release as well, and all this requires a degree of planning I don’t usually engage in. But that’s okay! I realized that I was doing myself a disservice by planning the heist in the same way that the characters would (step 1, then step 2, then step 3, etc…) whereas I have the advantage of being able to plan the heist backwards (ie: I know where I want the story to be on Step 4, so that means I need to start the heist at step 1, but then Step 3 will be this thing going wrong, which means I need to set that up in Step 2, etc…). Basically, not having to stick to a linear progression in my plan’s plan (if that makes sense) makes my life a lot easier.
So I’m going to crank that out in the next few hours, and then dive into Novel 7 edits because yay! Novel 7 is almost done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
New Novel Soon!
It may be hard to miss (but absolutely possible, of course), but I put up the cover and new page for the new novel!
Well, most of the cover. The way this website clips images means you only get to see about 2/3rd of the cover, but the rest of it is a generic ice planet and my name, so you don’t really need to see that part until you buy the book… which should be available in the next week or two! Woo!
I got my edits back from my editor, and I’m going to dive into those shortly (after I finish the layout for Novel 8, which I am this close to finishing). And, good news, this time I finished the physical version of the book at the same time as the digital version… I hope.
Haven’t actually tried it out yet. It should be pretty straight forward, I hope, but won’t know until I submit it to ye olde Amazon, so fingers crossed and all that.
Anyway! Very exciting news. My first (of hopefully 4) novels for 2021. As a reward, I bought a bunch of sci-fi novels that I’m excited to dive into (a John Scalzi crime sci-fi called “Head On”, a few giant robot stories, and a steampunk novel I’m really excited about called “By Fire Above” by Robyn Bennis… the original, called “The Guns Above” was the best steampunk I’ve ever read… oh, and the sequels to “The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet”, which I am so excited to read!). It’ll be a few weeks before they show up, though, so lots of time to write before I dive into the other half of my job… reading all the things!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
When is Enough Worldbuilding Enough?
Ah, the lead-up to writing a new novel. Something that is, if you will excuse the obvious pun, quite novel for me. Normally I’m 90% pantser, 10% planner, but this time I am aiming for closer to a 60/40 split. I think it’s important for a heist that the plot and all the beats hit exactly at the right time and point towards the “surprising yet inevitable” ending that I already have somewhat fleshed out in my mind.
But for this particular story, I’ve already roughed out a bunch of tech for warships and starfighters and stuff like that which will, in all probability, have nothing to do with the novel. I don’t think any of it (except for maybe the ending) will actually take place in space. It’s going to take place in the city at the base of a space elevator (ooh, I should name it… I think “Beanstalk” is probably my favourite name for a space elevator ever, but it is firmly taken by the good folks responsible for the “Netrunner” IP) and in the city hall of that city. Or possibly one of the big, fancy hotels… a nod towards the occupation of Paris, when the government was housed in hotels around the city. Anyway, I can figure that out later.
But at some point you (or in this case, I) have to stop crafting a world and just start writing. And normally for me that’s shortly after naming the protagonists and giving them basic physical traits (which I normally don’t mention in the book itself), and getting some concept of what the antagonists are, and then, bam, fingers on keyboard. This time it’s a bit more… but that’s okay! My novel notes are always living documents that are updated as they go along… in fact, it was one of my favourite things about Scrivener, when I used it to write stories, that you could easily track plot, character points, and all that independently within the document.
Unfortunately, actually using Scrivener was a bit of a nightmare for producing books… for me. I’m sure others out there use it very effectively! But not I.
Anyway, I just figured out what the heroes are going to steal, and I am super proud of myself because it is really clever. Yay! Okay, back to work for me!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Figuring Out the MacGuffin
For those of you unfamiliar with the term a “MacGuffin” (sometimes McGuffin) is a thing that you are attempting to acquire or achieve. In “Into the Spiderverse” (possibly the greatest superhero film ever made), the MacGuffin is called a “Goober”, in “Pulp Fiction” (a film that exists) it’s a glowing suitcase, in the MCU it’s normally one of the Infinity Stones, and so on and so forth.
My next novel is going to be a cyberpunk-inspired heist, a halfway point between Oceans Eleven and Rogue One, but I haven’t figured out what the MacGuffin is going to be. And in this case it definitely matters since a lot of the story is going to hinge on my band of merry misfits fighting against an already victorious empire (think “Mistborn”, sorta… the bad guys have definitely won already, and the heroes aren’t trying to defeat them so much as rob them afterwards because if big evil empires have anything, it’s more loot than they know what to do with).
Anyway, that’s where I’m at with the story. I might just leave it nebulous for now and then figure it out when it comes up in the novel (or worse, just do that thing where I flag that I haven’t figured it out yet, write the whole novel, and then go back and edit in a MacGuffin which is surprising-yet-inevitable).
Also: how is it almost the end of April already!? That’s crazy, man. Where did the month go? I’m going to pull my bike out of storage tomorrow, get it ready to ride to work again this week, and hope that the temperatures stay above freezing. We will see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Vaccine Appointment!
Tomorrow I get my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
I don’t know which one, and frankly I don’t care: I’ve seen enough of the science to know that all of them are more-or-less equally effective, and the risks in all cases are vanishingly small, especially compared to the risks of NOT getting the vaccine, and especially-especially considering that my job continues to require me to see and interact with the public (less of the public these days, granted, and in a safer way, but still… way too many of them and way too often for my tastes).
So this is a HUGE weight off my mind. Not perfect yet, since I won’t get the second dose for another few months at least, and even then it’s 2 weeks past that point, but that’s okay! A very, very positive step.
In other news, I have started work on the next novel! This will make Novel 8 total, and the second novel for 2021. It’s working title is “Something Spacey This Way Comes”, but that’s definitely not what it’s going to be called. It’s going to be a heist story, mixed with a little cyberpunk and a little military-sci-fi… I’m excited! The world building and character outlines are coming along well, and I expect that I will be able to start writing the story itself, if not today, by the weekend! Woo!
Hope everyone out there is staying healthy and safe!
Cover Art Purchased
I’m always a little nervous when I buy covers for my novels. I’m a writer, not a graphic designer, and so the selection of a visual element for my book is always a bit weird.
Add to that a very shoestring budget, and there’s a lot of pressure on the choice. It needs to look unquestionably sci-fi, ideally use the colour red very prominently, and tie into the story somehow if possible… and all this with the added wrinkle that it comes from a pre-generated book cover artist.
I have a guy I really like (hi James!), and so I’ve used his service basically exclusively since I started self-publishing my work. Considering the (rock-bottom) price of the covers, he actually does really good work… I think you can tell from the covers I have selected that they’re not really “professional” covers, but they’re pretty good, and since a professional cover costs about 20-30x as much as I can pay, I have few complaints.
This new cover I’m getting is more blue than usual, but the starship that features very prominently is pretty cool looking, and that’s important. Cool-looking spaceships above a cool-looking planet… a good combination!
Anyway, I just want to be ready for when the book goes live, and that’s one more thing off the list that I don’t need to worry about.
Now, if I can just get my English exam finished…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Novel 7 is with the Editor
Phew! One book down, 3 to go for 2021. That feels real good, I gotta tell ya!
And I’m really happy with how the story turned out thus far. I mean, it will still need a level of polish and improvement, no question, but the story itself I think turned out really well!
So now with the book in my editor’s incredibly-talented hands, I am going to finish my English exam (due next Monday, but I’m not waiting until the last minute for it), and start shopping for a cover. The last few times I looked I couldn’t find any really good ones, but a few were okay. Hopefully there are a couple new options when I check.
Oh, and I have to see if I can think up a slightly more elegant title for the book. The working title was awful (they always are), but the title slapped on it before sending it to Christine (my editor) is better. Might be a touch long, but we’ll see.
Anyway! Good news from my little corner of the universe today, at least, so that’s something.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Can't Talk. Writing.
No time for a full post today. I am THIS CLOSE to being finished this novel and sending it off to my editor.
THIS CLOSE. Picture my finger and thumb so close that you can’t slide a piece of paper between them. THAT CLOSE.
So. Gonna go do that, and then maybe write a full post tomorrow (or, at worst, Wednesday).
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Unexpected Expenses
One of my (three) cats has been having some tummy problems recently. It’s more annoying than really anything else (and somewhat smelly), but it still means a lot of trips to the vet to try and figure out what’s wrong with her.
Today’s visit was on the more expensive side. She (Donut) had to have an ultrasound to see if they can find evidence for what’s causing the problem. At first we thought it might be diet (doesn’t seem to be), and then bacteria (no luck there either), so now we’re just hoping that there’s nothing wrong and it’s behavioral, since if they find anything on the ultrasound it might mean surgery, and that would be even more expensive.
Makes me simultaneously grateful that my partner and I can afford these things, and sad because I can’t really afford these things. Today’s visit alone wiped out a full week of my paying job’s income, and it may not even result in anything. It does make me very grateful that we have a basic universal healthcare in Canada (I say basic because many aspects of healthcare aren’t even remotely covered, but can’t throw too many stones there since it could be so, so much worse).
Ah well. Upside: plenty more time to write today! Today the novel gets finished, I think… I have my last class of the semester (exam questions come out next week, and I still have a big assignment due by Friday), but other than that, just writing. Lots and lots of writing… I got almost 10k words done on Monday, and I don’t even have that many that I need to do for today to bring a close to the story.
Late, yes, but late and finished, soon. And then a little bit of polish and then off to the editor… where I will spend more money I don’t have.
Oh! And I have a meeting tonight to discuss the advertising budget I received for the writers group, so that’ll be good! Hopefully!
Anyway, I should get back to it. Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Today, We Write
I mean, most days I write. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but I write almost every day. But today… today I am going to write.
See, I’m about 30k words shy of finishing this novel. And I have about 5 days to finish that in… that’s 6k a day, minimum, but I don’t like leaving things to the last minute, so really it’s 10K a day for 3 days, and then a break day, and then a day of editing to polish it up. Which is a LOT. About 1k/hour, which isn’t unreasonable, but it is a lot.
So! Short post today just to say that I’m going to be doing a LOT of fingers-on-keyboard today and tomorrow (argh, and that doesn’t even factor in the stupid essay I need to have done by the end of this week… argh…). Hopefully all done by Wednesday!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and happy!
The Busiest Time of Month
The end of a month is always a busy time for me. Technically, it’s the start of the month that’s the big time-suck, but the end falls right before the beginning, and so there are a lot of things that kinda all stack up in the few days between one calendar month and the next.
One of the big things is planning on what I’m going to say to my Patrons over on Patreon, other than the usual “Thank you so much!”, which is always true and always worth repeating. Being a writer is lonely, hard work, but knowing there are even a few people out there who support me and my work and think I should be doing more of it is really, really important.
But other than that, it’s nice to have a chance to reach out to potential new readers/supporters, let people know what I’m doing (I mean, the answer is always “writing”, but what I’m writing is very different from week to week, much less month to month!). And there was that period of time that I released a whole series of videos answering what it’s like to be a writer for my educator/editor friend to use in a series of writing lectures… that was pretty cool (albeit a lot of work).
This month I don’t think… oh, wait! That’s not true, this month coming up I have the exciting news about the writers group that I founded and am working to maintain throughout the pandemic (never an easy task). So that’s something I can talk about, other than the novel.
Anyway, I should get back to it… class in a little bit, followed by all the writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Little Extra Time
So my editor was in touch recently, and mentioned that if I needed a little more time, she would be happy to push my scheduled time back a week.
This is great news. I still think I’ll be done before April, but I was going to have to crunch through some very long nights to get the novel edited up to my humble standards within that time frame as well. This means I can spend a bit more time preemptively polishing (and maybe tying up a few loose ends more tightly).
So that’s good news! I’m going to spend the majority of today working on the novel, and then finish it tomorrow so I have a week to add, remove, and generally polish the work. So… huzzah!
In other news, things are continuing more-or-less apace. I had a weird dream last night that featured an ex-girlfriend of mine very prominently. She’s a woman I haven’t thought of in a very long time (in my defence, we didn’t date very a long time, although it remains a very pleasant memory in a rough period of my life). Had one of those “Huh, I wonder how she’s doing” moments before I realized that I don’t remember her family name! Ah well… it was over twenty years ago, we can only hold onto so much.
Anyway! Back to writing about space pirates and spices! Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Missing Short Stories
One of the biggest downsides to my recent bout of extremely-being-busy is that I don’t have time to write short stories any more.
It’s not a format that I was ever terribly skilled at. Why use 100 words when 10,000 will suffice? But that stated, I did like practicing short stories, and I really liked polishing them up for submission. Sure, only one of my shorts ever sold, but I think it was a very, very good short story (one that I plan to revisit someday as a novel, perhaps). But as much fun as they are to write (and to provide free here for all of you!), they don’t pay the bills, and I don’t think they ever will, There’s just too much uncertainty in short story publishing… most of the time the magazines that publish them take too long to rely on as a source of income. Great supplementary sources, sure, and I am positive there are people who have figured out a way to leverage short story writing into careers, but those people are much better at the format than I am.
Plus, I like writing epics. I like getting to know characters and situations and universes. I like thinking about how the technology in this universe will be different, either slightly or drastically, from the previous universes I’ve written. Can be hard to keep straight sometimes (I have so many variations on “pocket computer” at this point it’s somewhat ridiculous), but it’s a challenge I enjoy.
ANYway, hopefully the world will calm down a bit, school won’t last forever, and I can get back to writing more short stories before too much longer.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Weird Blips
I’ve mentioned it before, but I was educated as a scientist.
A crappy scientist, granted, but I studied physics for a very, very long time, and a lot of that has seeped into my life in interesting ways. I can my educated hypothesizes about almost anything, I quickly adapt to new information to replace old incorrect data, and I am always fascinated by numbers.
To that end, I tend to keep a pretty close eye on the numbers in my life. My grades, certainly (81.5% at this point), my bank account constantly (enough to pay for editing for the next three novels, although I will have to start paying for my account fees again if things don’t change), and book sales (none in the last week).
I also pay attention to the traffic on this website. It’s not usually indicative of much, although often if the website traffic trends upwards I will land a few new book sales that week. And this week there was a day with twenty times more visits than normal.
Technically, twenty-five times more than normal.
That’s a big blip! And nothing I can see that would direct that many eyeballs towards my work (I don’t think I released any podcasts, that I’m aware of, or new videos of me other than my usual Thursday “talking about board games” that I do at my paying job). It’s weird… I even checked my advertisements I’m running, but no huge traction there either (which, honestly, was a little bit of a relief… my ads are still small potatoes, but that big of a swing in numbers if I had to pay for it would be remarkably pricey!). So I am left to wonder why a whole bunch of people, or one very, very determined person I suppose, showed up out of the blue last week.
It’s a weird business, being a writer.
Anyway! On Saturday (yesterday morning) I did a presentation for some funding from my university which, if successful, will let me do some good in my community. Provide funding for a couple artists, a secure deposit on a physical space that my writers group meets at, and provide subsides to the other members of the group (I think it’s only fair that I don’t receive any of the funding myself, since that would be a conflict of interest. But being able to help other writers is a reward on its own). I’m almost positive I won’t receive it, or if I do it will be staggeringly reduced in scope, but hey, miss all the shots you don’t take.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Hitting Halfway
Getting to the halfway point in a novel is a weird feeling. It’s hard to describe, but to a large extent it can be summarized as a combination of disbelief (I’m halfway already!?) and confusion (Wait, have I covered at least half the stuff I need to cover!?).
It’s a good feeling, certainly, but still weird. Add to that the simple fact that this half of the novel took me 2.5 months to get to (way too long), and the next half has to be done in the next 2.5 weeks… yeah, weird, complicated feelings!
Oh well. In the grand scheme of things I can’t really complain.
I’ve written a proposal for funding for the writers group I (used to) run locally, and while I don’t think I’ll get the funds, it was an interesting experience to consider the impact it’s had on me and my fellow writers. I’d certainly produced more consistently with the writers group, but that was in the Beforetimes and everything was easier back then. Looking forward to getting back to a sort of normal, at least! Hopefully soon!
Speaking of, my dad received his first dose of the vaccine, and my mom is on the list for next week, so that’s good news for both of them. I’m actually pretty jealous. I’m hopeful for sometime in the summer, but at this point who actually knows… regardless, there does seem to be a light at the end of this tunnel, and that’s definitely something worth celebrating!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Keeping Up the Pace
It is worth remembering from time to time that what I’m aiming for is long term sustainable writing. I want to do this for the rest of my life… wake up, eat breakfast, exercise, write, and then at some point eat dinner and go to bed. More or less just that, forever.
I love writing. It brings me great joy and great sorrow, it’s enormously relaxing and incredibly stressful. It makes me examine things I never thought I’d examine (for example, in the last two weeks I have studied the layout and manifest of the “HMCS Haida”, a Canadian WW2 destroyer ship, at least a dozen times… I still don’t know what the majority of the crew on a ship like that actually do.
But at the same time I have to be very careful not to push myself too hard. The drive to write at all times, to consume every waking moment with writing, is strong, because I’m not making a living at this yet. At the rate I’m going, it’s going to be another 4-5 years before I do… and if I want to keep doing this for 4-5 years, or 40-50 years more likely, then I have to remember that it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
Anyway. All this to say that I’m not where I want my word count to be by a long shot, but I’m going to be much better by the end of the day (and even better than that by the end of tomorrow), so I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to focus on doing the best work I can, the best writing I can, and try not to stress too much about the little details. I’ll let you all know how that goes.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Only Two Things Are Certain
Ah, that lovely time of year when I get to crunch through taxes. My fantastic partner handles a lot of the fiddly details these days, which is nice because I was not a big fan of doing my own taxes.
I did them, of course, but yeah. Just a degree of specificity that I really struggle with. Especially if/when anything went wrong, and I had to know very specific details. Not my forte.
ANYway, this gives me an opportunity to review how my financials have been going for the last few years, and I’m pleased to report: better! That’s nice. I’ve been basically doubling my income from book sales every year (technically, more than doubling… around 2.2 times per year). The critical thing to remember here is that the numbers are so small as to be almost meaningless, but still, it gives a promising trend. At the rate I’m going, I should be able to be a full-time writer, capable of supporting myself and contributing to my partner’s expenses as well by 2026.
And that’s actually not bad! Five more years… I would struggle, but I could do that. And we’re talking a very small salary at that point, plus it doesn’t factor in expenses (specifically, each book costs me about 2 grand to have edited, which means that more books I publish the more I pay out to keep those books coming).
Regardless, that’s somewhat promising. And hopefully as my books reach a wider audience I’ll gain more Patreon supporters, because that’s probably going to be the only thing that actually lets me make a living at this for the foreseeable future.
So, positive thoughts and good news all around!
With that, I should really get back to writing this novel I want to release in a month…
Hope everyone out there is doing well!
A Nice, Quiet Sunday
It doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally I get a full day to myself.
Not “myself”-myself, since my cats and partner are still around, but I don’t have any big pressing plans, I don’t have events to attend (either virtual or in-person in the Beforetimes), and the day opens up before me like a flower spreading its petals to the sun.
I don’t know if flowers do that. I’m a physicist, not a biologist/botanist. Ask me to calculate an escape velocity for that flower, I gotcha, but anyway.
The moral of this is that today I have a full day to do more-or-less whatever I want. And of course what that means is writing. What I almost always want to do is write. I’m going to take a break in a few hours to fry up some rainbow trout and steam some veggies (tastier than it sounds, I assure you), but other than that… a whole lot of writing, occasional bouts of painting, and a lot of chilling.
Tomorrow I have a stack of reading to do (Marlowe, at this time… “Doctor Faustus”), but that’s a tomorrow problem. Today? Today I am looking forward to crushing a few thousand words and other things that I do to enjoy life as best I can.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Progress into Space Piracy
When I originally decided to start this novel, I was going to intentionally avoid too many “space pirate” parallels. For one thing, I’m not sure it’s ever been done particularly well (“Treasure Planet” is a great story, but it’s not really space piracy in a meaningful way). Piracy is a hard thing to translate into good sci-fi. I’m not saying it can’t be done, and I’m sure there are ways to do it, but a lot of the time it comes across as pretty… trope-y. And I wanted to avoid that.
However, that stated, there is a fair amount of pirate-like-activity in my story thus far, not least of which includes stealing a starship. “Commandeering”, I suppose, to use the nautical term. And as I’m continuing to write it… yeah, there is a lot of piracy, in the fantasy-esque sort of piracy. Fewer missing teeth and legs, but a fair amount of theft of property, buckling of swashes, and a love of freedom that borders on the extreme.
Anyway, I’m really enjoying the story as it is shaping up, but we’re about to hit the mid-story doldrums (ha, nautical term!), so we’ll have to see if I can maintain this inertia for the next several chapters! Fingers crossed!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
End of the Month
Well, I am not done my latest novel. By projection, I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s always a little disappointing to not finish as quickly as I would like.
That stated, I think February may be the single best month I’ve ever had for book sales, so that’s definitely a step in the right direction. Lots of books purchased through ads I’ve run (which is expensive), but also lots purchased without requiring ads (which is significantly less expensive!).
In other news, I’ve gotten a lot of stuff done around the house, I’ve continued doing pretty well in my university courses (although I also got my first “B” on an assignment… a small one, but still… since starting to study English), and overall things are going about as well as can be expected mid-pandemic.
Oh, and I installed a bidet on one of my toilets today, marking it as the most handy-man day I’ve had in the last 30 years. Hopefully I did it correctly! No leaks, at least, but that’s a pretty low-bar. We’ll see, I suppose!
Anyway, hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!