I’ve heard it said that obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the destination… which is ridiculous, of course (if you do or don’t see an obstacle, it is still in your way and needs to be dealt with… over, under, or around). But there is something to be said about the sheer volume of problems that seem to crop up when I forget about what I’m supposed to be doing and focus on what needs to be done instead.
What I’m supposed to be doing is writing. Telling stories, crafting worlds and characters, playing on new worlds and in new galaxies.
What I need to do is create a website, find a reliable RSS provider (service? Device? Program?), figure out if its worth all the work and expense to make my own mailing list…
But I don’t want to do any of that stuff. I want to wake up, write, and then eventually fall asleep. That’s what I want. Sprinkle in a few runs to keep my body in more-or-less shape and a good meal and that’s an ideal way to spend my life.
It’s not grand or huge in scope or anything, but I’ve never wanted that. I don’t want fame or ridiculous fortune: I want enough money to be comfortable in the knowledge I won’t starve to death if a sudden emergency happens, but that’s it. My needs are humble.
All this to say that I’m going to be putting more effort into writing again. There are so many stories I want to tell.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Thinking About Websites
I think I mentioned before that I’m working on a couple artistic products that fall outside the realm of what might usually be considered “a novel.” They are novel, in that they do not exist yet outside the confines of my skull, but they’re not “books” so much as they are stories.
And while I love storytelling in almost all formats, I’m not entirely sure here is where I should put my not-book stuff. Short stories, fine. Those are just, like, really tiny books or something. Novellas and so on, yes, all that can go here, and I’m even kinda okay with a few audio stories I’ve done. But I think I have to draw the line at movies, and that’s what I am currently working on. Or shows, I suppose? Whatever, a series of pictures stacked in such a way to give the illusion of motion.
Along with one of these projects (the bigger of the two, currently) I think I can also produce a pretty seamless and enjoyable audio listening thing. I hesitate to call it a Podcast, it would really just be the audio commentary to my videos, but it might resemble a podcast in the way one would download and consume it. So I need a home for that too, and I don’t know how Squarespace handles RSS feeds. It might very well. It might not at all. I dunno.
But all of this means other work in order to do my work. I stopped writing a script (already at 2K words I wrote today) in order to write THIS, which is me writing about other work I will have to do once I have written the script and recorded and edited it. I don’t want to think about that. I just want to make art. But that’s just not the way it works these days.
Anyway. I will figure it all out. Maybe it will be through this website, but probably not? I think the Venn diagram of people who are interested in both of my ventures (all three, fine) will have only moderate overlap? I dunno. Maybe more? I guess we might find out!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Reading Backwards
One of the hardest elements of modern novel writing is editing.
I think that’s been true basically forever. Editing is hard. Most novels have at least one or two typos… the novel I’m reading right now (“Promise of Blood”, a Powder Mage book that’s sorta steampunk-fantasy) has more than a few, and it’s a big name, “properly published” book. Nothing serious, a missing quotation mark here, a forgotten capital letter there, but the fact that even books with budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars can make these kinds of mistakes speaks to how hard it is to do editing properly.
And before anyone suggests it: AI makes things much worse, not better. AI editing is worse than no editing most of the time.
Which leaves me having to do the line edits myself. Now, I have an editor, and she’s fantastic, but she’s doing substantive editing: making sure the story and characters make sense and are consistent throughout the book. Think of it as “plot” editing. But the line edits… she does some, but that’s not what I’m paying her for. Were that I could, but editing is expensive, and it’s just not in the budget.
So instead I’m doing them myself. And the problem is that by this point in the novel I’ve read every sentence at least a dozen times. I know, in my head, how every line sounds, what’s coming next, what I wrote before. And therefore my eyes tend not to pay as much attention to what is actually on the page. The best advice I’ve found is to read aloud, and to start the edits from the back of the book and work forward. Anything you can do to jot your brain into actually reading the words, instead of skimming over them.
It’s hard! But I’m trying. I want as few typos in my novel as is possible… I take my work seriously, and I want the people reading my work to enjoy the story, not be distracted by silly mistakes I’ve missed a dozen times.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Edits Received!
My editor has finished with her most recent pass through the novel! This is a very exciting time… this means the novel is finally almost finished!
She still had a few changes I’ll have to go through, but nothing major this time. Tweaks, rather than overhauls. And some cleaning up to do… apparently there are several typos I need to catch. Always tricky, especially at this point in the writing process. I’ve read every sentence at least a dozen times, and so my brain substitutes what it thinks is there, rather than what is actually on the page. I’m going to try and read it backwards, see if I can weed out the last few mistakes.
But regardless… yay! It just needs a cover and to be converted into an e-book… looks like it actually will be published in August!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Stuff Around the Creative Stuff
So I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m working on other creative projects in addition to my novels. My novels are my love, they’re the soul and spirit of what I do. I love writing (not crazy about editing, but it’s part of the process and so I do it with joy as well).
But “writing novels” these days involves a LOT of not-writing-novels. Writing blog posts, for example! I don’t mind this, although it was occasionally a real struggle to remember to do it (which, if you look at my history of blog posts, you will see from weeks I’ve missed posting). But also creating and maintaining a website. And a social media presence. And converting documents into ebooks. The dream one day is to be successful enough that I have people who will help with this stuff (the ebook stuff in particular would be amazing to hand off to somebody else), but for now I’m doing it all solo.
Which brings me to the other creative projects I’m working on. Several of them are going to be on YouTube, but that means I’ll probably need/have my own website for that side of things as well. I don’t want it clogging up my novel website, after all. And there’s a podcast in the works (I’m a white man, of course there’s a podcast in the works), which means an RSS Feed and hosting for it as well…
Just thinking about this stuff exhausts me. I want to do the creative stuff, the stuff I love, and I don’t mind the work that surrounds it, but it’s just not a passion. I wake up every morning excited to learn more video editing, more audio editing, more ways to write scripts and books… and I drag my feet through the mud of learning website hosts, or how to create a newsletter email list, or if it’s worth posting on Facebook or Instagram or whatever.
But it’s part of the job. And so because I do truly love creating, I guess I’ll do it.
I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Passing of Our Cat
Yesterday I had to say goodbye to our 18-year-old cat, which had been a foundational part of our home for the last 17 years.
Little Donut. She was a regal old woman, and a tiny little kitten. She was poise, and proud as any noble, but sweet and kind. She spent evenings snuggling up to me or my partner, making sure we always knew that she loved us, and cared for us.
On her last day she purred for us, snuggled into my arms. She was a great cat, and she will be dearly missed.
I’ll get back to creating soon, but for now I am going to sit with my grief and give it the time and space it needs to fill the hole her passing has left.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Names, Names, Everywhere are Names...
Coming up with names is honestly one of the hardest parts about writing novels.
The hardest part is the silliness that you have to do to self-publish a novel. Advertising, writing ad copy, converting into e-books, all that stuff. That’s really hard.
But after that, coming up with a name that’s punchy and catchy and not too long and still descriptive… it’s tough! I envy the hell outta authors who can drop names like “Snow Crash” or “The Interdependency” or “Ancillary Justice” and walk away like there’s a slow-motion explosion behind them. Not for me, each book title is like wrestling with an alligator.
I haven’t even started dreaming about a title for Novel 9 yet, but it’s definitely too early in the process for that. But I decided on the title for Novel 8 (“A Desperate Path Through the Stars”) about three weeks ago, after the novel had been mostly finished for over a year. Originally I named it “The Trojan Stars,” but those are actually a thing that had nothing at all to do with the story and I didn’t want to confuse people.
Ah well. I’m working on naming a few shorter projects right now, and that’s causing me all sorts of issues. Hopefully something will come to me soon!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Waiting is Hard!
My next novel (the one with the big “Coming Soon!” banner on the front page) is waiting. Waiting for editorial feedback, waiting for a cover, waiting for me to convert the whole thing into an e-book and release it into the world.
I hate waiting.
I don’t know why I hate waiting? I’m perfectly capable of it as long as I have something to do. A good book or two, my phone in a pinch, a sketchbook to doodle in, or one of my single player board games… I have lots of things to do while I wait, and therefore if I have to wait usually I don’t mind.
But you’ll note that all of those things allow me to do things while I wait. So I’m not really waiting, I’m just doing something else while this other thing doesn’t happen, until it does happen. That is my style: do things. Don’t think too much, don’t plan too much, just do the thing and then do the next thing and hope eventually one of the things works.
It hasn’t worked yet, but I have high hopes.
Anyway. All this to say that I’m anxious for the waiting to end so I can get back to doing more of The Things Novel 8 needs, so that I can put it firmly in the rearview and get stuck fully into Novel 9.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Prep for Novel 9!
I’m writing a sequel to one of my previous novels. This is notable because this is the first time I’ve written a sequel without knowing what specifically I was going to write first.
My Tintian trilogy I knew before I started book 1 that it was going to be a trilogy. I already had a rough idea where each story was going to go, where they were going to end, and what the overall arc was going to be. Plus, of course, they were each loosely based on an old Tintin comic arc, which meant that I even had source material for where the story was going to go before I got started. Made it pretty easy.
But for this novel… well, I always leave sequel potential in most of my books, but this is the first time that I’m going to turn that potential into an actual book.
What that means right now is a bunch of reading… and the most difficult reading of all: my own work. I’m very proud of what I’ve written, but it’s a weird feeling reading something you know you can’t really change any more. It’s no longer in my hands, it’s out in the wild. I might be able to squeeze in a few revisions, but I have to be careful that the changes I make don’t actually undo or make things worse!
Anyway. Mostly reading my story and taking notes to make sure that the characters, universe, and story all tie together neatly. That it feels like a Part 2, and not just another story that happens to use similar names or whatever.
I’m 30% done, and hopefully will be finished by the end of the week! We’ll see!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Cover Artist Secured!
I managed to find a cover artist! One I am very excited about. Their previous work (all human designed, human drawn, human coloured) is stunning. Making cool looking spaceships is a tiny bit outside their wheelhouse, but they’ve done a tonne of work making cool looking mecha and robots, and they’re confident they can do spaceships just as well.
I am also confident of that! I can’t wait to let everyone see the cover after they make it! Excited!
It’s considerably more expensive than my old AI-generated covers, but as much as I like James’ old work, the world has come a long way and I just can’t in good conscience continue to support AI-art for my covers. And with some luck this cover will make my new novel stand out just a little more. I have to sell about 100 copies to cover the cost of the art alone… hopefully I can do that in a few weeks (that would be a step up from my previous releases, but not a big step up).
It’s also just a weight off my mind. Cover is now functionally done, and I can focus on polishing the last few edits into the story and preparing the e-book for release. Phew!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Off To the Editor One Last Time!
The novel is now again safely in the hands of my talented, fantastic editor (the sublime Christine Gordon Manley), and so we play the patient waiting game for her to give it a final pass.
I mean, I hope. There’s always the chance that she will come back with feedback that requires copious additional work, but I don’t think so. I feel pretty confident about where the story is now in a way I didn’t during the last draft.
It’s interesting that sense you gain as you write more about whether a story is “done” or not. I think it’s done. I’m 98% sure it’s done, and that last 2%? That’s Christine’s job to give me the thumbs up.
Which, as I think I mentioned, doesn’t mean time off for me. No, no. “Time off” isn’t something i have the luxury of just yet. Maybe someday. Hopefully. But for now I’ve already started hacking out the next novel, starting to take notes about character and setting and all that good stuff to maintain consistency when I start actually writing.
Anyway, all that to say that I’m happy that the novel is hitting the next stage, and I may have a new cover artist. Progress!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Finally a "Coming Soon" Page!
It feels like forever since I’ve made a new novel available, but it’s been only a bit more than a year… still quite a while, I’ll admit, but soon that wait will be over!
The new novel is going through it’s last coat of polish, and I’m searching for a cover artist so that when I get the last draft back I can basically convert it into an e-book and put it online as quickly and as cleanly as possible. The process is somewhat arduous… and I’ll be honest, all this secondary stuff is definitely not why I got into writing. But it is an important part of the process, and therefore it is something that I take as much care as I can doing.
All that to say… new novel coming out soon! Yay!
In the meantime, I’ve started working on Novel 9! Because a rolling stone gathers no moss… I’ve just started hashing out a rough outline, trying to figure out the broad skeleton of the story. I won’t actually start working on it for a few weeks in earnest, but I’ll start the before-stuff now. Because that’s almost as much fun as actually writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It's Done! Almost!
Phew! I finally finished the 4th draft of A Desperate Path Through the Stars, and now that it’s done… gosh, that’s a weight off my mind.
It’s not done done, it still needs 1 or 2 more editorial passes, but these are just read-throughs by beta readers. I think it’s mostly if not completely done.
Now to find a cover… I had one a while back (over a year ago!), but I don’t think it fits any more. The tone of the story has shifted, and so I’m going to go hunting for a good cover that won’t cost multiple fortunes but will convey the ideas of “Sci-fi” and “space exploration” as quickly and cleanly as possible.
And then convert the document into an e-book… and then convert that into a Print-on-Demand book… and then start writing the NEXT book! Woo!
Gosh, it’s a good day.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Payment Changes through Amazon
As a bunch of you are probably aware (or maybe not? I’m a writer, and so I find stuff about the nuts and bolts of writing to be kinda important to my life since it is how I try to pay my bills n’ all), Amazon has recently changed their payment percentages for authors.
That’s bad. They were already paying basically nothing (I mean, not nothing, but considering the amount of work they put in per book versus the amount of money they make per book… you could make an argument that it’s criminal what they’re taking), so less of nothing isn’t that big of a hit to somebody like me who sells a few dozen books a month. If I was on the precipice of “making it,” if I was selling a few hundred books a month, it would be a Very Significant Thing, but as it is, it’s another sigh and another mile ahead that I will have to trudge to get to my destination.
It’s not ideal, is what I’m saying, but it’s not going to impact you, my readers, since I’m not changing my pricing yet. Yes, I will make a little less per book sold (about 10% less, although I think it works out even worse than that), but such is the cost of writing. The wages of potential happiness are paid now, in sweat and exhaustion and depression, to pay off eventually in… less of those things?
Like inverse seeds? I dunno, I’m too tired and sweaty to come up with good metaphors.
Anyway, just thought everyone should know. Work on the novel continues, I am now over 70% done the edits (by page number, so it’s actually better than that, since the major revisions were around the 40-60% point), and work will continue!
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Meeting Other Authors
On Saturday I attended a Battletech convention… a big room full of dozens of people all there united by a love of big, stompy robots. Like me! I love big stompy robots.
I’ve waxed previously about my love of Michael Stakepole’s work in the universe, and I’ve submitted a short story to them to see if it will get published (or, if not, if they can provide feedback to make it more likely I will get published in the future!). But it was nice to be around so many people united in a collective IP. Kinda like a Star Trek convention, but way more niche.
It also gave me time to do a bit of editing on the new novel (I just officially hit 70% completion!), and I sold a few more books over the weekend, which was a very pleasant surprise. This week is going to be taken up by reorganizing the basement room and setting up space for my future creative endeavors, but it was nice to have a bit of a break to just play pretend war dolls for a day.
But the reason I wanted to post this was meeting Randall Bill, one of the core “people” at Catalyst Games (the currently license holders for Battletech), and a prolific author. I’ve read a bunch of his work, and it was just really nice to shake his hand and chat shop for a few minutes. It was a nice reminder that even successful authors are kinda… just people. I need that sometimes, since it seems so insurmountable a hill to ever become a successful author.
Also, he has a great beard. Purple. Very cool.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Chapter 26!
I tend to be very inconsistent with my chapters. I’m sure there is an “ideal” chapter length… the general thought is that it should be long enough that an average reader will read it in a single sitting, but not shorter nor longer than that arbitrary measure.
I occasionally have very short chapters when the action is piling up and a lot of things are happening. I occasionally have rather long chapters where not a lot of action happens but a fair amount of story takes place. And usually a good mix of the two for most chapters that weigh in at a middling length.
Right now the chapters feel long, but that’s just because I am editing the heck outta them, and so they’re a bit of a slog to get through. But I am getting through them, and that’s the important part.
I have about 100 pages of editing to go, so probably another… 10-15 chapters? I forget exactly, but I get that impression. We’ll see! Fingers crossed I can finish this (FINALLY) and get to work on other projects!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Competition
I am tired of competition.
I know this is a very First World Problem sorta problem, but gosh, in a world where we have such abundance that everyone can have enough (not as much as they want, possibly, but definitely enough), I hate having to jump through hoops and wrangle my body for enough to survive.
This is not a complaint about my new job. I quite like my new job! I’m still learning the ropes, but I think I’m getting better at it, and the money is enough that I’m unlikely to starve to death.
But it is to say that I would be so much happier doing this job if I could put more time and energy into my writing, which I absolutely love. There’s so much I want to do! So many things I want to… thing! And instead I have to constantly divide my attention between my passions, and my paying gig.
It’s frustrating.
But it is what it is, for now. Today I’m going to see if I can edit 10 whole chapters (about another quarter of the novel!), because I am almost done my unpaid painting commission (long story) and not quite ready to dive into my paid one. So that’s exciting!
It may not be perfect, but on days like this when I can really dive into the work, I can sometimes forget that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
My Nibling
Wednesday and Thursday we were visited by my brother’s first kid from all the way out in BC. Ali was making their way to Toronto for the Toronto Comics Arts Festival, since they are a very accomplished comic book artist.
Ali is kinda the other artistic person in my family (although my mother would be horrified that I don’t include her… I love you, mom, but I don’t understand your Spanish poems so I can’t comment on whether they’re good or not!). They’ve already been published by some major comic houses, they’ve maintained their webcomic Bicycle Boy for over twelve years now, and in general they’re just out there, constantly making and improving their art.
I’m unbelievably proud of Ali. They’re amazing.
So they decided to come to our end of the country, and so I hosted them for a few days, eating and playing games and trying to cram a decade of life into a few short days. I love Canada, but gods is it ever expensive to get from one side to the other, and both of us are artists, so it’s not like we have a lot of extra money kicking around to just travel with. The last time I saw them they and their partner were driving across Canada in an RV.
Crazy kids.
Anyway. It was lovely to connect with Ali and be reminded of how earnest and talented they are. It’s like basking in the glow of starlight. It makes you feel simultaneously small and inconsequential (their art is so good! They’re so many lightyears better than me!) and yet inspired and comforted.
I hope y’all have somebody in your life that can bring that feeling to you.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Cold May
I’m sure there have been snowstorms in Southern Ontario during May at points of my life. I’m almost positive of it… I know for a fact that they happen in April, but I seem to recall the occasional May with snow.
But gosh does it ever feel cold this May. Temperature always hovering around the low single-digits. As a result my basement, where I write and create my art, is particularly unpleasant to be in. It’s the coldest part of the house, and the house is usually kept pretty chilly.
Nonetheless, I have much work to do (the novel isn’t going to edit itself, sadly!), and this is the place where I can do it. And so I power up the heater every morning, give it thirty minutes or so to make the room more tolerable, and then dive into my work. Today I have about 10 models to paint and about 4 more chapters to edit. And I kinda have to get it all done today, because the weekend is a complete write-off to some extent. Lots of people to see, lots of places to go.
Argh I hate the cold. Oh well.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Spring Cleaning
I’m reorganizing my basement.
Technically, the basement is my office and workspace, so organizing it (and trying to keep it organized) is quite important. The end of this week (Friday) until mid-next-week, I suspect, is going to be completely absorbed by shuffling boxes, books, and shelves from one area to a different area.
The current arrangement of furniture was somewhat dictated by the people who lived here before we bought the house: they had their shelves on particular walls, and so I kinda followed in their stead. But after 12 years, I think it’s time to arrange the room according to my needs, rather than the needs of those who came before.
It’s not going to be easy! All the bookshelves are weighed down by massive numbers of books, and the desk and table are all moving around the room in one way or another. Hundreds of little paint bottles, my airbrush, my LEGO sorting drawers… all of it going from where it is to somewhere else that, hopefully, will make the space more organized and more useable.
And, critically, give me room to install a table specifically for my stop-motion efforts. Because those are all insanely overdue.
I’ll keep y’all posted! And I’m doing all this while still editing the novel (I’m up to Chapter 21!).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!