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!
Back to the Cold
There were a few days there that were downright pleasant outdoor temperatures. Which, considering I am fundamentally a cave goblin who only wanders outside into the cruel, cruel sunlight under great duress, you would think I’d be immune to such whims of weather.
And yet.
It basically boils down to the fact that my writing and art room is downstairs in the basement of the house, and it’s very cold most of the time. When it gets sufficiently warm outside I can open the windows and let warmer external air in, resulting in a net gain of temperature and that results in a net gain in my quality of life.
Sadly, when it gets cold outside, the basement gets quite miserable. I do my best with space heaters and blankets and thick sweaters, but all of that just kind of makes the environment less-miserable, as opposed to actually pleasant. And now the temperatures have plunged back to subzero (Celsius, of course)… well, I am not a happy camper.
But the work waits for no one, so cold or not, I’m back down here. I’ve managed to get the novel over 10,000 words, which is a good first milestone (3 months to do that is too long, granted, but I can’t complain too much about the pace when it is mostly in my control). Happy about that at least. And with some luck, this current cold spell won’t last much longer.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Giving Up on Advertising?
I’m really torn. Amazon has been draining my bank accounts for almost a decade now, and while it has resulted in book sales, it’s always been at utterly atrocious returns on my money. Traditionally it was a good month if I sold $1 worth of books for every $12 worth of advertising… and that’s just not sustainable.
I mean, it is if you have a lot of money and nothing else to do with it, I suppose. I do not.
I’ve managed to get that ratio a lot closer to $1 in sales from $5 in advertising, which is significantly more reasonable… but still a losing calculation. That’s a lot of my money going out into the void… and while I’m positive I have a significant number of repeat buyers (people who buy, say, Caitlyn Morcos, who then go on to buy Desperate Path), even including that as a possibility isn’t a good showing for my advertising.
I’ve mentioned it many times before, but I’m not an ad guy. I don’t “think” in ad-speak, or how to sell my books. I’m a writer, I want to write stories, not sell stories. But if people can’t find my work, they won’t read my work, no matter how good it is.
But I don’t know. Money is getting increasingly tight, and after a decade of trying to make the ads work for me… maybe it’s time to just throw in the towel for ads for a few months at least. Maybe until the next book releases, give me time to save up money for editorial costs and cover art…
Anyway, something else I’ll have to grapple with. Because, obviously, I don’t have enough on my plate already.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Warm Weather
It’s a silly thing, but the weather here in Southern Ontario has turned warmer. Not “warm” just yet, but definitely no longer sub-zero, which is a pleasant change of pace.
I’m curious how long it will be before the wildfires start. Last year they were pretty bad, a few days where it was advised to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary. I don’t remember there being massive wildfires in my youth… but of course, back then I might have just not paid attention. Who knows.
Anyway, one of the upsides to warmer weather is that it’s a lot easier for me to write! My office at home is cold… like, really, really cold… during the winter months, which makes it very unpleasant. But in the summer it’s actually really nice. I always love writing, but when it’s warm outside, it’s also very enjoyable. Doing things you love isn’t always fun, but sometimes? Sometimes it is.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Writing Chatter!
I’ve called this little section of the website “Chatter” for as long as I’ve had this website. This isn’t my first online blog, but it is by far the longest lived… my previous efforts were aimless, often just a temporary outlet for my creativity during periods of time that I had no other way to deal with the world.
They weren’t good. Don’t go looking: you will only be disappointed.
Anyway, that’s not what I’m actually talking about here. What I am talking about is a particular brand of chatter that I now need to write a lot of. Specifically the type of chatter you get between athletes before boxing/MMA matches, and the kind of chatter that announcers and reporters need to maintain while covering such events. My current audio story podcast (I say “current” but I mean the one I am currently working on, it’s not live yet) is a sports-thing, and I am not a sports-guy by default. I used to watch a fair amount of hockey as a way to bond with my father, but he’s moved on to F1 and I’ve moved on to not-having-time-or-money-for-watching-sports.
Such is life.
But I’m excited about this! It means I get to write a lot of little snippy lines in a lot of different voices. I’m going to try very hard to avoid stereotypes, of course, but I’m really excited to sprinkle in some variety into the characters and their dialog. I love writing dialog, and this is nothing but dialog!
I’ll keep everyone posted about how it goes!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Small Price Drop
With the price of everything getting higher, I figured I would do a tiny little bit to try and help. I’ve dropped the price of A Desperate Path Through the Stars to $4.99USD for the ebook, and $10.99USD for the paperback.
Most prices (CAD, AUS, etc…) have adjusted correspondingly. The rest of my books are already around the $4.99 price or lower, but they don’t sell as well as ADPTtS so it wouldn’t have had as much impact there anyway.
Small thing. Hopefully this helps a few people decide to pick up my work and get a few hours of enjoyment and escapism out of it. Like I said, a small change, but prices have gone up here for everything too, so there’s only so much I can do. But I do hope it helps!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Back to Writing
It feels good to be writing again. Sure, it’s not currently work on the novel, but that’s the thing about only having two hands and one brain… you can only work on one project at a time! And there are lots of projects I want to do, but focusing on each enough that I can actually get it done is pretty important to me.
I don’t want to have a hundred projects on the go. I want to have two or three on the go, and finish each in sequence. That’s the goal. That’s the plan.
I think I’m doing okay on that front. I have one more short story to write, and then switching back to the novel for the next sprint of writing which will probably take me into at least April, maybe a bit longer. And then audio editing on the side and painting because I can never do just one thing at a time. That would be crazy.
For now, my cat has decided to hang out in the circle of my arms while I work on this story, and that’s about as good as my life gets these days. She’s lovely, and old, and sick, but she’s still with me and being the sweetest, most supportive “person” I know.
Koko is great. I lubs her. On that note, I’m going to try and make her proud and get that story done!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Glitch Sorted?
Well, my website no longer thinks that my posts come from 1969, which is good.
There was a weird blip of traffic yesterday, over 200 visits from the US of A, but all direct (not searched for or directed to my website due to ads). Not unheard of for me, although this is the first time it’s happened from the US. Previously it was China.
Ah well. Hopefully nothing nefarious or stupid, just a blip.
Things for my next wave of audio stories are lining up. Not everything… never everything… and as is traditional, since I don’t have money I have to use time, sweat, and experience to compensate, but I am very excited about how many things are kinda lined up. Giddy, almost. I’m just waiting for music… which is somewhat ironic, because for over two months I was waiting on artwork. What I should’ve done is commission the artwork and music at the same time, but I wasn’t sure I would be moving forward with the project back in December… I wanted to, I was inclined to, but as always, money was extremely tight and therefore time to line things up was basically non-existent. But now things are sorta lined up! Just lined up without most of the music I need! And I don’t need a lot… but I refuse to use AI (obviously, AI “artwork” is an abomination) and therefore I have to wait for real humans to use their real experience and real emotions to craft something that will be a billion times better than anything I computer could mindlessly crap out.
Overall, worth waiting for.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Strange Glitch
At the moment, all my posts show as if they posted December 31st, 1969. Which is amazing, in some ways, because I’m pretty sure that predates the Internet?
My posts have existed longer than Apple Computers… ha. That’s funny.
I’m sure it’s a short-lived little bit of programming that Squarespace well sort out before long, but it was funny to see first thing in the morning. And I think it’s only showing up that way on the backend of the website… the forward-facing part still seems to show my more recent posts having occurred in this century.
Maybe my posts function as a weirdly specific time machine. Like a microwave you can use to send messages to the past, only in this case it’s a computer and it can only send messages to other time-traveling computers… in which case, hello fellow time travelers! Don’t go to New York city in 2001. Invest in Microsoft. Maybe arrange for an accident in a South African slave owning mining-corporation family’s children? Maybe?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!