Well, I have started novel number 9, despite some push-back from my mom (who begged me not to write another book) and skepticism tinged with financial concern from several other members of my family.
I mean, they’re not wrong. Each of these novels costs me a fortune (a small one, but considering my financial level, a small fortune is more than I have) to edit, and the response has been… warm, sure (I get good reviews, I have semi-consistent sales), but certainly not viable.
Trouble is that I don’t know what else to do. Nobody will hire me on my own merits (questionable as they are), so I scrape by, day to day, begging for enough to get me through to the next novel. Maybe the novel after that.
If you can do anything else with your life, do that. If you can’t do anything else, write.
There is some venom in those words, but the heart behind them I think is true. I don’t think I can do anything else with my life. I’m a storyteller at heart, and I have been since I’ve been a child. I keep trying to find ways to tell stories and not starve to death… haven’t found it yet, but going to keep trying.
Anyway. Enough doom and gloom. I got a 5-star review on the new novel (yay!), and I’m cautiously optimistic about the next novel. I have a good feeling about it, despite it being in the pre-planning stage.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Reviewed!
A good friend, Roger, has written a review for “A Desperate Path Through the Stars!” I am extremely grateful to him for the time and energy he put into it, and it helps that he seems to really like the book!
You can find his review over here on his blog, and I highly recommend checking it out in case you were on the fence about picking up my newest novel yourself, or if you want to read what somebody else thinks about my work.
The book has been selling consistently, and quite well relative to my other works. It’s still a small, tiny, insignificant speck on the tapestry that is modern publishing, but it’s another step along the road I am trying to travel.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Released!
Well, it’s officially out in the world. Sales have been “good” (good under the conditions of “sales compared to how often my books usually sell”), still way less than I want or need in order to make even a humble living from my writing, but that’s okay.
This is just a step. A significant step, granted, since this is probably the best book I’ve ever written.
It’s real good. Humbly speaking, of course.
But now it is out in the wild. It’s done, I have done all the polishing and cleaning and editing I can, and unless something catastrophic comes up (please no), I am putting this one in my rear view mirror and moving on to the next project… Novel 9!
Thanks if you’ve been with me this whole time, or if you’re brand new… hello! Nice to meet you. Hope you’ll stick around.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Final Editing!
I received the last batch of edits from my noble, hardworking beta readers, and all I have to do is make the last 10 chapters worth of changes, and then the novel goes out into the world.
Gonna try and finish that today. Because as soon as I finish this, I get to start on all the other exciting stuff I wanna do!
So no rest for the wicked or weary.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Weekend Activities!
I’ve been compiling a list of fun activities to do around the town I live in (Kitchener, Ontario). Just fun things like going for a hike, or joining a sports league, or whatever.
Most of it is probably unchanged from the kinds of things you could do twenty or thirty years ago in the region. Breweries, vineyards, coffee shops, museums… all pretty stock standard.
There are a few more recent inclusions. Board game cafes, escape rooms, indoor mini golf… some interesting options for a relatively small town (although the big tech boom a couple decades back probably had something to do with that… a massive influx of money and people who wanted to spend that money doing fun stuff).
As a general rule, I don’t get out much… the life of a writer is quite solitary and my budget is super tight these days. But it’s nice to have a list of things I could do, even if only theoretically.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Best Laid Plans...
I decided to have a chat with my older brother. He has lived a very colourful life, to put it mildly. During the call, we started talking about Canadian Prisons, as one does.
I don’t know if other families do this. My family certain does. We pick a topic, and we talk it into the ground. And the topic for today was prison.
The talk meandered to the topic of prison escapes. A topic I have a passing interest in from a scholarly perspective… I love heist stories, and a breakout is basically a closed box heist. But my knowledge of breakouts is purely media-fed. I know of prisons only from television and movies, but I haven’t studied or visited one. But my brother has taken something of a deeper interest in these facilities, and so we discussed a hypothetical situation about how one might exit a prison earlier than is strictly… legal.
It was an interesting bit of mental exercise! Me, with my purely media-fueled perspective, and his opinion which is better researched and thought-out.
The take-away was basically that if you really needed to escape a prison early, you could… but a lot of things would have to go exactly right, and it’s better not to find yourself in that position in the first place.
That stated… I might start my next novel with the hero in a prison. The seed has been planted…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Genre Hopping
One of the nice things about being a writer in the modern era is the ability to switch genres.
I mean, historically authors could (and did!), but since historic authors were usually beholden to a publisher who would refuse to publish anything they weren’t completely convinced would sell out instantly… I mean, don’t get me wrong. I would give my left leg to be a traditionally published author with a solid contract (sigh), but it is limiting.
Whereas I can write and publish anything I want! It just turns out that what I really want to publish is sci-fi.
But I was thinking during my morning run today (solid time, 3km in 18:20.22, which is very good for me) that if I wanted to write a sci-fi romance, I absolutely could. Which reminded me that I have written a sci-fi romance (albeit a short story) and it sold to a traditional publisher who paid real-world USD for it. Humbly, I think it was very good! I’m proud of that story.
Which made me think that maybe for the novel after my next novel (I’m working on number 9 right now, so novel 10) I’d write a big sci-fi romance. It might be fun! And there’s no publisher (yet) to tell me that I shouldn’t do that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Positive Review!
I know I’m not supposed to care about reviews. I know my work isn’t going to be for everyone… heck, I’ll go so far as to say that my work may not even be for the majority of sci-fi readers (making the people who like my work an elite subset of an already elite subset).
But gosh does it ever feel good to know somebody out there read and enjoyed one of my novels. It’s… like a small confirmation that I’m not insane, thinking that I can write. I love writing, but just because you love a thing doesn’t mean you’re good at that thing (although it is often an indicator that you will be, if you stick with it).
All this to say that I sent out a copy of A Desperate Path Through the Stars and the reviewer let me know he really liked it.
He also sent me a list of four more typos and a couple misuses of jargon (I used the term “Mustered out” to mean “outfitted with people and launched” in one case, which isn’t a correct use of the term), so the next people who read the book may even like it more!
Gosh, I’m so happy. Relieved, even. The book edges ever closer to completion!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Review Copies Sent!
Today I sent out a few review copies of my novel. One of the reviewers (Roger) is one of my favourite people, and has given me solid feedback and reviews on my work before, so I’m excited to hear what he thinks.
Excited and terrified, but ya know, that’s how it goes in this industry.
I managed to get an ISBN through the Canadian Government (and they politely reminded me that I owe them a copy of the book, which I will absolutely have to get on), so that’s another tick done… I think the novel might be basically ready?
Ooh, I got chills writing that. It’s been a long, long time coming… but I feel good about it.
I sold a short story this week as well that I have a month to finish the editorial process on it, and that feels pretty dang good. Slowly, slowly, everything is coming together.
Oh! And I started work on Novel 9! I haven’t started the book itself, but I’m fleshing out the framework for it. With some luck I’ll be able to crush through it soon!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Conversion Almost Done!
I’ve done most of the heavy lifting to convert the book into an e-book, with the usual problems that crop up once again cropping up.
So, here’s the thing: I write novels in Word. I’ve used Scrivener before, and it was fine, but the process of taking a Scrivener file in 2017 and converting it into an ebook was like pulling teeth. It was great for writing, but as soon as you wanted to do anything with what you wrote it was pure hell. The program has been around long enough now that I’m pretty sure they’ve fixed (or at least improved) that part of it, but gods, it was hell trying to actually do anything with the novel after I was finished.
Solution? Easy. Just use Word. Then take the Word document, transfer it over to an html/text editor, do all the fancy HTML-things that you need to do, and poof, e-book all ready to go.
And I’ve done that!
But my most trustworthy and diligent beta reader has now gotten back to me with a few more typos (gods, save me from typos). Which means I have to edit 2 different documents: the HTML-edited file to be converted into an e-book (which then means re-uploading the e-book), and the Word document itself so that if I want to make a paperback of the book I have a clean version to do that.
It’s a lot of very careful edits done very slowly so I make sure that they’re correct in all the places the book will eventually show up.
But the important part: almost done! WOOOO!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Edits Done!
That’s it. Officially, I am finished the last, final draft of edits of my next novel, A Desperate Path Through the Stars. I’ve begun converting it into a proper ebook, with metadata and… things… like a cover… and… keywords… you know, all the digital stuff that has to happen to convert my Word document into an actual book that you can all get your hands on!
Woo!
I’ve asked two people to do a final beta read for me, just as a final effort to catch the last typos (of which I hope there are none!), and then I’ll publish it through Amazon (which usually takes a few days). Oh, and I’m grabbing an ISBN for it because of… reasons? I don’t actually know why my books need those, but the Government of Canada offers them for free, so I’m happy to nab one (or 10, because that’s what they make them available as).
Still, it feels surreal. The last time I published a book was 2024. I had to re-learn a bunch of the stuff to do with HTML and Calibre and all that, but it came back pretty quickly. I’m proud of this book… I hope it does well.
Tomorrow I have to decide on an advertising budget for it… bleh… but I want people to read it, and that requires getting people to know about it. Fingers crossed it sells well!
But I am excited! Almost done!
First day of September
The first few days of a new month are always a little weird. It’s a tangible confirmation of the passage of time, but it feels surreal in some way.
Like, I left my job working at a game store, where I had been for 8 years, almost 6 months ago. What!? It feels so strange… especially when I go back to the store (it’s still a great store!) and I catch myself referring to the products that “we” sell there.
What is time!? What does it all mean!?
Ah well. For now time means more opportunity for me to publish my books! And the next one is so close to being done… about 20K words of editing to go, or about 45 manuscript pages (they’re bigger than published pages). If I manage to put my head down and just work, I might be finished the edits today! That’s the plan at least!
It’s exciting, it’s terrifying… it’s all part of the process.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Cover Is Done!
The new book has a brand new cover! Very exciting!
I’m still trying to figure out a way to make it show up on the front page cleanly, but I am very excited about it!
So excited that, rather than talk about it more, I’m going to get back to editing the final 95 pages of the novel so I can release it! YAY!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Arguments
I don’t like arguing. I have done a lot of it in my days on this Earth, under that sun, but I don’t like it.
I just hate people being wrong ever so marginally more than I hate arguing.
Look, for the most part, for the vast, vast majority of issues in my life, I am a Live-and-Let-Live kinda guy. You love Kpop more than Jpop? You can’t stand onion on your hamburger? You think the Toronto Maple Leafs either will or won’t win that big cup thing? Give’er, you do you. I just don’t care.
But then there’s fundamental shit. If somebody wants to try and convince me that trans people aren’t people, yeah, I will stop whatever I’m doing and I will engage. You want to believe that some bearded white dude in the sky says you shouldn’t touch yourself, you go right ahead. You want to tell me that the same bearded white dude says homosexuality is a sin for everyone?
I will stop walking, smile, and we are gonna have a chat, my man.
I don’t know why I’m like this. My life would be easier if I were not (gods, how many times do I say that in a given week). But I am.
Last night I got into an argument about the nature of consciousness, which again, I don’t really care about. I believe that Free Will as most people understand it is an illusion, but other than the horrible ramifications that illusion has had on the justice system, it doesn’t really matter. But when the person brought up the possibility that there are things that exist and are not measurable… that got my heckles up.
All in all, a silly argument that should be of no consequence. Who cares what I think? I’m a self-proclaimed idiot. But it kept me up all night, and chances are very good that it will be weeks before I can forget the “Oh, I should’ve said this… and I shouldn’t have said that…” rerun reel I have going through my head right now.
Ah well. Such is life, sometimes.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Psychological Lengths
Today I went on a run. I try to go for runs 3-4 times a week… for most of the summer I was working towards a 5km run, which I accomplished about two weeks ago. Since then I’ve been doing 3km runs, because honestly? 5km takes too gosh darn long.
But yesterday I realized that I had been running about 2.6km instead of a full 3km (about 2 miles, for American readers). So I had to add a few hundred meters to the run… which I did today.
Those 400m (4 football fields, more or less) added over 4 minutes to my run. Which makes no sense! I was previously running about a kilometer every 6 minutes, and by adding less than half a kilometer I added way more than 3 minutes to my time.
But psychologically, it was a big addition. It didn’t add much actual range, but in my mind, it added an entire section to the end of the run, past the point I was mentally ready to be done.
I think the edits on the novel are a little like that. Every time I sit down to see how far along I’ve come, there’s a part of me that looks at the page I’m on and psychologically goes “Argh! Not even half way yet!”, when in reality I’ve done a tonne of work (writing it! Editing it four times already!), and this is just the last little bit that I have to get through to publish the book.
Anyway, just like with the run, it’s a question of putting my head down and just getting through it. Which I will!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It's Getting Cold Already
Gods, I hate the cold. As somebody born and raised in Canada, an ostensibly “northern” country with long, cold winters, you’d think I’d be used to the cold by now. And I kind of am, but I still hate it.
I mean, I accept that the weather will get cold. That I have a finite period of time every year to ride my bike and to go for runs outdoors. I get it… I just don’t like it.
This morning was twelve degrees. TWELVE. In August! Ugh. I had to wear long sleeves and pants when I ran. Not a fan.
Ah well. The one upside to the cold weather is that it makes me want to stay inside and write more, which is a statement of some weight. I already love doing that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Almost Covered!
The cover artist (the incredible, talented, brilliant Jackarais) is almost done with the cover for the novel, and I am excited about it. It is gonna look great!
The progress sketches to see how the cover evolved are neat, and it’s refreshing that Jackarais is so open to feedback. It’s been really lovely as far as processes go… and I hope the final result will showcase what a cool story I’m going to provide to the world.
Getting very close to release date! Final edits are still being edited, but I’m more than halfway through and I have squashed a few more typos… almost done, almost done, almost done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Book Funnel
I was listening to a podcast about indie publishing (and self-publishing, I suppose), and they interviewed a guy who runs a software company called Book Funnel. The basic idea is to help authors (like me!) get promo books out to readers (like you!) in exchange for signing up for a newsletter or whatever. You go on my mailing list, you get a free book.
I think this is one of those things that authors have been doing since self-publishing became a thing. I don’t have a mailing list yet, but it is something I’m looking into. The main reason I haven’t yet is because it costs money… and not trivial amounts. Enough money that if I’m going to do it, I kinda have to do it correctly.
Anyway, it made me think of the funnel in a general sense. There are a lot of readers out there, and I capture only a dozen or so a month. Those people are generally happy with my books (based on several hundred 4-or-5 star reviews), and I suspect that a few of them go on to purchase my other books afterwards. That’s kinda the funnel… Lots of people become a few people become even fewer people. But it’s there.
The goal isn’t to make that top tier huge… that requires marketing budgets and “teams” to do things, and I have neither. But it is to make it so that everyone who reads one of my books decides that want to read another of my books. Turning every single sale into 2 or even 3 sales… that’s the dream.
For now that involves making the best books I possibly can. So that’s what I’m gonna do!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Obstacles Along the Path
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!