On Saturday I ran a tournament for the Battletech wargame at a local charity event. We drew in 18 players, which is honestly about 12 more than I expected.
It was a long day, lots of rules questions and organizing and herding of metaphorical cats. Sadly, no real cats… that would’ve been amazing, but twas not to be.
But such events are supposed to be fun. And running such events decidedly isn’t fun… I mean, it’s fine, it wasn’t the worst way to spend a day, but I had really hoped to get a bunch of writing done while at the tournament, and unfortunately I was just too busy. I didn’t get anything done.
Well, almost anything. I did a few edits to a short story. But that was it.
Still surprising to me how exhausting it was. And this was a low-stress, friendly tournament with nothing really on the line besides glory and pride (valuable things, certainly, but of no material worth one might argue).
Anyway, it’s going to take me a day or two to recover, get my brain to brain in the correct way again, but apparently everyone had fun. And it gave me fuel for the podcast, so certainly not a waste of my time!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Banner Question
The marketing guy who is helping promote my books (or, I should clarify, will be helping me promote my books, as currently he is in the process of starting to start thinking about maybe helping me promote my books) mentioned that a banner across the top of my website might be a nice touch.
It might! I honestly haven’t put a lot of thought into it… my website, such as it is, exists because it’s an expectation of the writing career. This place exists, not for me, but for everyone who wants to find my work or likes my books and wants to help support me and my endeavors.
That’s cool, and all, but it means I don’t think of it as an “arm of my writing career” or whatever. It exists by necessity, and because of my particular mix of neurochemicals, that means I’m going to do it well. Because I don’t half-ass things… like… ever. I don’t know if I’m capable of half-assing. It’s whole ass or no ass.
But that stated, having someone who is trained in such arcane arts as “marketing” and “A/B Testing” and whatever is very useful because I don’t think about that stuff. Marketing and advertising are firmly in the “no ass” realm of my life. They’re intimidating and byzantine, and so I’ve avoided them.
Anyway, all this made me realize that I also don’t really have a clean way to link my podcast here… something else I’ll have to think about. But the banner… I’mma have to give that some thought, especially because now I have other technical doo-dads linked in with these pages. Ugh. Unraveling the decade worth of work I’ve put here could be tangled.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
75th Most Popular Sci-Fi Podcast!
… in Sweden. And I can’t actually confirm whether that’s true or not, but it DID make me smile.
As most of you are probably aware, I released a new Battletech-themed short story podcast last week. You can find it right here if you’re curious and I’m quite proud of it. But a few days ago I received an email stating that some podcast-analysis app that I’d never heard of (and certainly never signed up for) claiming that my new podcast was currently the 75th most popular podcast in the Sci-Fi category for Sweden.
I mean… hey, I’ll take it. It’s a very, very niche genre I’m preparing content for, so it’s possible that there just aren’t that many people in Sweden listening to podcasts (in English!) about science fiction. But it couldn’t have been more than one or two people who downloaded it… last week I only had a few dozen downloads total, and I’d be stunned if many of them were in Sweden.
Although, I suppose, it’s not strictly impossible. It would be surprising.
Anyway. I thought it was a funny claim. The podcast hasn’t hit 100 downloads yet, but it’s still young and I’m certainly not doing a tonne of effort into promoting it. I’ll see what the numbers are for a few weeks, and then consider trying to get the word out more widely. Maybe. Either way, I’m having fun.
75th most popular podcast, baby!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Back to the Novel
I’ve started working on the novel again. I mean, I never really stopped… I just switched priorities.
It’s a weird thing to explain to people. I don’t ever really stop writing. In my head, I’m always working on dialogue, situations, plots… it’s always churning. Sometimes on the novel, sometimes on the podcast, sometimes on stop-motion movies that I still really want to shoot but don’t have time for… but always working on something.
But that means that there is usually one project that is the priority. That when the churning in my brain has to translate into words on the page, that’s the one I go for first. Sure, I might still work on a short story or two (I am, in fact, working on one right now), but by default I sit and work on the primary focus. And for the last month, that was the podcast… but now? Now it’s the novel again.
Which is good! I still want to finish it in the next few months to get off to my editor. 2026 is rapidly disappearing (we’re almost at the halfway point!), so I gotta get on that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
New Podcast!
I’ve mentioned it… I’ve muttered and mumbled about it… I’ve outright talked about it, but now… it’s finally here!
Well… technically… it’s over THERE… but the idea is more metaphysical than it is physical.
I have a new podcast! It’s a story-focused thing, where every week I will publish a new story set in the Battletech universe. Some of it will be lore, some gladiatorial ‘Mech combat, some of it will be different stuff! But I really like doing silly little things like this, and it gives me a way to work on my audio editing skills in a low-stakes kinda environment.
Plus, I think the stories are pretty cool, honestly.
So! Go check it out! One episode is up already, and the next month of content is already lined up to go out like clockwork, make sure I don’t miss a week!
With that… I’m going to go back to editing the next couple episodes before I get back to writing the novel! There are days where it is good to be me.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
This is Where the Fun Begins
I kinda like audio editing.
Which is not to say I am particularly gifted at the craft. It is something I have dabbled in as a rank-amateur for many, many years… I’ve certainly gotten faster with the process, and there are elements that I can do now that would’ve felt like sorcery to me ten years ago when I started doing audio editing.
Was it ten years? Lemme check real quick… November 14th, 2013 was the first audio podcast I ever published. Thirteen years… crickey. I can feel that in my knees. Anyway! Back then the entire podcast-thing was rudimentary in the extreme and there were a lot of things I barely understood about the process. These days I have a System… is it a good system? No, it’s as good as possible as I can make it. The end results are definitely better than they were! And more consistent… there were a few times in the old podcast where episodes would just be lost due to digital glitches (usually caused by 3rd party recording software), and that took hours off my life.
Back then, I had hours with which to re-record. Ain’t nobody got time for that these days.
Anyway! All this to say that I’m having a good amount of fun polishing and preparing to publish these stories. I hope people find them as much fun to listen to as they are to record and edit! More, even!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
"Good Enough"
One of the curses of being a creative is that there is no real objective “finish line” for any of your projects.
There is almost always a temporal line. “You must be done by September” or “Published this year” or what-have-you, but that’s independent of what I am talking about.
It’s very hard, if not impossible, to look at any creative output and say “Yup, that’s where I want it to be,” and not be lying at least a little. There are always ways to improve, always things to work on, always new tricks and new tools that you can use (or not use!) to make your work better. But despite all that, at some point, you have to say “Yup, that’s good enough.”
“Good enough” are extremely powerful words in English. Is my short story perfect? Gods no. But is it good enough that I can send it to my editor? Yup! And then when she sends it back, is it going to be perfect? Nope! But it will be better, and that’s almost as good as good enough.
All this to say that the audio stories I’m creating? I think they’re good enough. The one I am going to spend today editing will be better than the last 4, but it won’t be perfect. But I’m still excited about releasing it! |
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Short Story Draft Finished!
For once I managed to hit more-or-less my word target on the first draft. That’s a little unusual for me, I normally overshoot and then cut out a bunch of words in editing, but this time I hit a lot closer to the mark.
Granted, this is only the first draft. I still have to let it sit for a little bit, percolate for a day or two, and then read the whole thing out loud to figure out how it “sounds,” but then it’s off to the editor.
Still! It’s nice to have it finished to this point, and I’m quite proud of its current state. So that’s one more thing off the checklist, and more time for me to pump back into the novel! It’s sitting at 10K words at the moment, which is about halfway to where I want it to be by the end of the month, so gotta get those words in there!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Small Website Revisions
So you might’ve noticed that the front page now prominently features a quick link to received a free short story. Send me your email, I email you “Pit of My Stomach,” a short story set in a new sci-fi universe with new characters.
If you’ve already signed up for my newsletter… which, since I know everyone on that list, I am quite confident you haven’t… then it’s the same story you received then, although the formatting is a little nicer and cleaner. Bit easier to read.
I’m proud of that story. I’m also proud of the short story that I’m writing right now that is almost finished… I’m at the climactic scene, and I just need to wrap everything up in a somewhat satisfying way to call it a day (for the first draft, of course!).
I’m also looking for a cover artist for the next book… gotta line these ducks up in advance, make sure everything goes smoothly once the rubber hits the road.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Missed a Post... and Two Teeth!
On Wednesday I got my last two wisdom teeth removed. This is about… fifteen years after I had the first two removed? Those ones I absolutely didn’t have a choice, they were causing constant pain and suffering.
These two were a bit preemptive. The dentist said they will cause pain and suffering if I continue to ignore them (as I had for years and years), and it was getting to the point that they might also skyrocket in price.
So out they came. And now for the last three days I have eaten nothing besides applesauce, yogurt, and pudding. Whee.
Tomorrow I’m allowed to resume eating soft foods (mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs) which is a dang shame because we’re going to visit friends who are extremely talented cooks and I won’t be able to enjoy most of it. But such is life, sometimes.
The real downside has been the pain has kept me from writing. I really want to finish this story I’m working on… I think I may, in fact, finish it today if my jaw responds well to pain meds. We will see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Finishing Touches
There is always a risk in any artistic endeavour to never finish. The hurdles never stop coming… it is hard to start writing a story, it’s hard to continue writing a story, and it’s particularly hard to finish writing a story.
That final hurdle looks like one issue, but it’s really a few dozen issues all crammed together in a trench coat. Adding one more line here, removing a few more words there, tweaking the layout, modifying the chapter headings, revising the introduction to cut unnecessary stuff, fluffing out the end to make sure the ending is satisfying… the inclination to polish the product until it gleams is powerful.
But at some point you do have to finish. Or at least I do, I know plenty of people who don’t, but they’re not writers or artists. At some point you have to push the baby bird out of the nest, and whether it flies or not, you gotta start working on the next clutch of eggs.
I say all this because the audio story podcast I’m working on is within spitting distance of being ready for release, and I’m currently mired in the desire to polish it more. To add more stuff, to change the audio levels, to work on it until it is as close to perfect as I can make it… but the reality is at this point I’m just adding polish to the polish. It’s almost ready, and soon I’m going to push it out into the world and hope people like it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
I Love My Job
I mean it. I love writing. I love creating new things out of the weird, misty recesses of my mind. I love crafting stories that people enjoy.
I don’t love everything about my job, of course. There’s a lot of work that goes into creating the stories, and a lot of not-writing that is involved in writing. These days a fair amount of that is marketing, and I really don’t like marketing. I don’t have the mind for it.
But writing? Oh yeah, I love writing.
So it’s good that right now one of my priorities is to do a whole lot more of that. I want to get two short stories done by this weekend (at least the first draft of both). One is about half done, the other I haven’t started yet, but the nice thing about short stories is that they are, by definition… short. So I should be able to handle the first draft pretty quick.
Editing them will be a pain in the butt, as short fiction is always harder to focus, but that’s a challenge I enjoy as well. But first… we write!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Few Small Changes 'Round Here
The bright-eyed among you are going to see a few small changes to the website in the coming weeks. Nothing revolutionary, no big sweeping shifts or anything like that, but a few small steps towards helping people find my books.
One of the big ones is that Amazon is making it harder and harder to buy books. I don’t know why… the process used to be relatively seamless, but these days? There are seams, man. So many seams. So as a result I’m putting in a few things that will help streamline the process, and make it easier for interested people to actually get my books into their hands.
Shouldn’t be so complicated, but here we are.
Oh, and I’m writing another short story that I’ll be offering for free to people who sign up for my mailing list! I’m actually going to be working on that today. The website stuff will be slow, incremental changes that will appear over the month, but the short story? That’s something I can do right now, and since I’m pretty good at ‘em (if I do say so myself), I intend to do just that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Incorporating Feedback
A critical part of the artistic endeavour… any artistic endeavour… is incorporating feedback at some point of your process. Ideally at several points in your process, but at least once.
For me, I usually send out my work twice: once at the end of the second draft (no mortal eyes save my own see the first draft, ever), and then again right before publication. This lets me do moderate course-corrections early, and then a final layer of polish right before the end.
The issue, of course, is finding moderate-to-major course corrections in that final layer of polish. Some seemingly small, “minor” change that snowballs into multiple chapters of shifting narratives, or completely changing character designs, or something akin to that. It’s a risk, certainly.
In this case, I’ve been receiving (and appreciating!) feedback on my audio stories, but this is the Final Polish stage of feedback in a sense. Because these are part of a whole “thing” I’m going to keep doing for a while, any feedback now will change my future processes to make things both smoother for me, and better for the audience. But it means a lot of front-loaded work… trying to get everything where I want it and where the people listening will, ideally, not know how much work went into it.
Things like… one of the recordings takes place in a bunker. For a few moments I thought about adding an echo (like you were recording in a relatively small room underground), but then I realized that I was, in fact, recording in a relatively small room underground (well, half-underground, my basement is a split-level) so I didn’t need to do that. But I could add, like, dripping water or the sound of air circulation fans. Or I could add the sounds of an audience during key moments, get involvement from the fictional crowd watching the same show that my actual, real audience is listening to. Stuff like that. And who knows, I may still! That’s one of the lovely things about doing a series… I can try out different things, see what works, what doesn’t. That’s the plan.
There are problems, of course. The big one is time… if I want to release these weekly (and I do), that means figuring out an entire process that I can complete quickly enough that weekly releases are viable. And I can’t do too much ahead of time… but maybe I should anyway? I dunno. I think about 6 weeks worth of “next episodes” should be about right? Just to make sure I can stay on top of things…
Anyway. Today I spend the day incorporating some feedback into the episodes I have already recorded, and trying to figure out good systems to keep that flow going for future episodes. Exciting stuff!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Uploading Episodes!
So I’ve uploaded the first two (very rudimentary) audio stories. They’re not “done” yet, although they are in final testing and polishing, which is pretty close to done. Exciting!
I’m going to send them out to a few friends (and one professional musician, who happens to also be a friend) to get feedback and suggestions before they are final-final, but it’s close! Very exciting, and as always, a little terrifying. I hope people like them!
I’d better get back to it… I want to have a third episode primed and ready to go (I actually want a BUNCH of episodes primed and ready to go before I pull the trigger… the hope is to be at least a month ahead of the current episode so I won’t miss anything! That’s the plan, at least… fingers crossed!).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
So Many Stories, So Little Time...
A few weeks back I bought a few books. Just some light reading, mostly stuff that’s released in the last decade that I haven’t been able to keep up with. Sadly, I haven’t had the chance to read any of them… I started Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future” and got about halfway through before I stalled out due to depression. That book is a depressing read. Prophetic in many ways, tragic in others, but gosh is it ever a bleak outlook on human nature.
I’ll probably finish it this weekend, if I’m lucky… but the moral of this story is that all the new books I bought? Haven’t even touched them yet. Mostly due to working on my own stuff… more short stories and audio stories than you can shake a laser sword at. All of it hovering around 85% done… the worst time, because it’s done enough that the inclination is to start the next project, rather than drag the current one across the line.
But I’m gonna finish these… soon, no less. The audio stories are closest, they just need a little bit of music and then a tiny bit of audio editing and then they’re done. The short stories need more work, but not a lot. And the novel… always the novel sitting there, waiting for me to finish with my little flights of fancy before I return to it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Talking Heads
I don’t know if this is an issue for other writers… the handful I know personally rarely mention it, although they have mentioned it as a problem they struggle with.
Specifically, as a discovery writer, I often find myself putting my characters in a room and talking about what’s going to happen next or what’s happened to them.
Think of it as an episode of Star Trek: you gather your cast in a conference room around a strangely shaped table (designed to maximize camera angles but look super weird in real life), and they talk about what’s happened or what they plan to do. It’s a convention born of trying to fill an allotted air-time… you need 44 minutes of episode, and so you have a number of “Well, let’s slow down the pace a bit and really think about what we’re doing” moments.
I don’t think books need that. Or, at least, they rarely need to be happening in a conference room. There’s an efficiency of action we’re aiming for… two detectives can be in a car chase while they discuss the case, or two soldiers trying to get to the next trench while under fire, or whatever. Occasionally you do need to slow the pace down, give the readers a chance to catch their breath… but I have to be very conscious of my instincts to say “Okay, let’s figure out what happens next.”
Or you do what I do: you write those scenes in so that both the characters and the author know what’s going on… and then you cut them after the first draft.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
More Ad Stuff
Well, today I’m speaking with a marketing specialist about tweaks to the website and my ad systems to hopefully get more book sales.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m not a marketing person. I understand the importance of it, but I don’t understand it in the way some people do. So fingers crossed that this new marketing person (marketer? That sounds weird) can help a bit.
This will be the second specialist I’ve spoken with. The last helped me set up my Meta ads, and that’s funneled a fair amount of traffic towards my website, but it hasn’t resulted in increased sales. But still, a step on the path, and hopefully this second step will result in an uptick in actual book sales. I guess we will see!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Tried Speed Skating!
Title kinda says it all… on Saturday I decided to try speed skating for the first time.
In my youth I played a lot of hockey, so I am pretty comfortable on the ice, but speed skates have only a single blade (hockey and figure skates have 2 blade-edges, kind shaped like an upside-down U) which makes it a lot less stable until you’re used to it.
Also more dangerous. A hockey skate can make light gashes, sure, but a speed skate is fundamentally a dagger on your foot. Dangerous.
I was on the ice for about 15 minutes, and that was enough for me to confirm that it wasn’t for me. Neat, I get, but gosh are those skates ever painful. I think I had a size too small. And holding the low tuck position is really hard… it’s almost like the sport is difficult or something.
I might try it again (with better fitting skates, natch), but I didn’t instantly take to it. Kinda like swimming? I’ll swim if I have an opportunity, but I won’t go out of my way to swim. I just feel like I’m drowning over long, horizontal distances. In this case I felt like I was falling, but slowly…
But I’m glad I tried it. Neat experience, and a lot of fun to see other people who took to it naturally and easily.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Audio Editing
I think I’ve mentioned that I’m recording a series of audio short stories. I have a handful recorded already, and the goal now is to polish them enough for public consumption.
They’re all in the Battletech universe, a setting I have loved since the mid-80s when I was introduced to the Crescent Hawk’s Inception (a very, very old video game). The audio editing, which I think I will spend most of today doing, is non-trivial… there’s a lot of little tweaks and cuts that go into making even a modestly refined product. But the two I’ve done so far have been pretty satisfying… just waiting for music from a good friend of mine who is also a top-tier musician.
I also get to play around with doing some foley work, producing ‘Mech stomps and autocannons firing and lasers melting armour… that one is my current favourite, I used a modified version of bacon sizzling. Anyway, it’s neat work, and I hope I can get a bunch ready to go very soon because I hate sitting on an almost-done project and waiting. I am not good at waiting. I want everything done ten minutes ago.
So that will be my work today. Audio editing, a little painting to finish one commission and start the next, and then it will probably be bedtime. That’s the way it goes with creating art… you put your head down to get started and suddenly the day is over!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!