Experiencing controversial things

Last summer I was getting out of my old habits and experiencing electronic music on a brand new level. It led me to some insights on how humans achieve transcendent states without chemical assistance, and I saw parallels between two-day EDM festivals and the vision-inducing rigors that ancient hermits inflicted on themselves.

Let's take that in a different direction. If you haven't heard it yet, any author who wants to write about guns ought to take an opportunity to handle them in person. I recently spent a weekend with the Appleseed program, a .22 rifle, and some paper silhouettes.

I don't have any interest in guns outside of their practical details. The Second Amendment is not something I'm interested in arguing about in this blog. However, guns exist, they are tools which can be used for good or for evil, and personal experience will always give one more insights than reading somebody else's account of a thing.

I spent sixteen hours, over two days, loading magazines, making my rifle safe, and shooting at increasingly small silhouettes on paper. A .22 has very little kick, but a sore spot developed on my right collarbone. I've never been so glad that Cobra Pose in yoga comes easily to me, or that I've learned to hold a position for a long time while breathing slowly and steadily.

There were frustrations. I couldn't get a cheek weld with the stock. None of the seated firing positions work for me. My eye had a lot of trouble focusing on the targets. Actually, you're not supposed to --you focus on the front sight -- but it meant I was firing all but blind sometimes.

For some, shooting is about becoming absolutely still, like a statue. Stillness is absolutely a part of it, I agree, but aiming is also about knowing the rhythms of your own breath and muscles. I was finding the right moment in the natural movement of my gun's sights to strike.

There's an instinct there. Humans are predators, after all.

Guns can be controversial, more so than EDM festivals... and there are more controversial, unorthodox or outrightly dangerous experiences one can have than firing a rifle. We can't go out and try everything that might give us a completely accurate picture of what our characters experience (I've never experienced zero gravity, though if I had the chance I'd jump at it) but if it can be done safely then I don't see why a writer shouldn't.

Safely, ethically, legally, that is. If I were writing Dexter I wouldn't take up serial killing.

Have you done something new just for research purposes?

Structure in paranormal thrillers

I went looking for a decent monster movie.

That's a tall order, unfortunately. A lot of monster movies are action- and horror-formula killfests with precious little introspection. To make matters worse, I didn't want alien monsters or scientifically created monsters. I wanted magical ones. Cryptozoology, if you prefer. Which shortened the list even further.

I wanted something to prod me into thinking about how people react when confronted with something they've long believed was mythical. Aside from reaching for a weapon, that is.

Out of necessity, I started moving toward what might be more accurately called paranormal thrillers. They were more thoughtful and more focused on the characters. I also started to notice structural similarities.

1. Gadgetry & denial: The main character arrives in a state of denial. Science is called in to explain the initial situation. Gadgets are deployed, tech-speak is thrown around, and surely science will save the day. 
2. Facile solution: Spooky things happen. A rational answer is found. The question seems to be resolved. We're done here, right?
3. The hook: No, we're not done. Something inexplicable happens that touches on the character's tragic past. More on this later.
4. Confrontation/Acceptance: Science and logic are abandoned. The main character starts reacting emotionally and/or intuitively, and the paranormal reveals itself. As a result, the character relives the past trauma and changes internally.
5. Fallout: Objective reached, the paranormal withdraws or is conquered. The main character has to deal with the emotional and practical consequences. 

Best of the three, IMO

The one thing I particularly noticed about the three pretty-good paranormal thrillers that I watched -- The Awakening, The Mothman Prophecies, and Oculus -- is that the main character in each is wrestling with the death of a loved one(s). Central to the paranormal revelation is the ending of the grieving process in which the character has been "stuck" for however long.

Interesting that being touched by death seems to be a prerequisite for being able to properly confront the paranormal. Having to face our helplessness against death preps us, perhaps, to face something else that's outside our control and understanding: the paranormal. Something which science can only do so much to stop. So in a way, stories about the paranormal are be stories about helplessness... which can be terrifying.

Naturally, having seen a pattern in these stories, I want to mess with the pattern. My character has already faced the death of a loved one (this is a sequel story) so he already partly fits the mold. I had not thought about this story in terms of his grieving process, though.

So maybe I succeeded in prodding my brain despite the deck being stacked with awful B-movie fodder.

Seen any good paranormal thrillers recently?

Real world sales numbers, part 4

It's time for my twice-yearly update on self-publishing sales numbers by those of us who don't shoot into the stratosphere of popularity! Last time, the lingering questions were how will my novella with Dreamspinner impact sales and how will finishing my fantasy series impact sales?

The final part (#6) of Disciple went on sale in March, quickly followed by the Omnibus which collects the whole thing into one nice doorstop. I ordered a paperback copy of that just to have it on my shelf. :)

Hawks & Rams went on sale December 31, 2014, and I have gotten two royalty reports from Dreamspinner since then.

Let's see how the sales graphs are looking:

Sales by title, per month

Total sales, per month

• Date range: October 2012 - April 2015. 
• H&R sales are reported quarterly, so to avoid a huge spike I divided them evenly over the three months of the quarter.

Last time I posted, I had just had an October of zero sales. As you can see, they've bounced back well. The trend (red line in the bottom graph) is definitely upwards. March was my best sales month ever. H&R's sales have definitely made a difference so far.

One question I had as a self-publisher was how a small press would compare to my own efforts.

Sales by retailer

As you can see, despite the big spike in Amazon sales when I dropped both Disciple, Part VI and the Omnibus, Dreamspinner has been an excellent sales channel. 

So am I making a living yet? Well, let me put it this way: in 2013, I earned about $207 from my book sales. In 2014, I earned about $305. 50% higher! 

Is that awful? Well, in 2012, half of self-publishers were earning less than $500 a year. It's hard to say what that number is these days -- there's a lot of sketchy information about self-publishing out there. 

I don't mean for this to be discouraging if you're thinking about self-publishing. I'm just trying to show you that when we say it's hard, slow, and difficult, we aren't kidding. How would my numbers be different if I published four books a year? Ten? (I can't write that fast, it's not physically possible. But some people do.) What if I was writing in a hotter category than epic/gritty fantasy?

Who knows. Your self-publishing story will be different, I know that for certain.

Got questions? Feel free to ask.

Finally free of the WIP...

I finally finished my WIP. I've been working on it since October, so it's taken me the better part of five months to write this thing. That's unusual for me. It's called Airborne at the moment and it involves a new cast of characters, a new universe, tackles new genres (for me) and wanted to be told from a new POV (for me).

Having said that, maybe five months isn't so bad after all.

"Omniscient" POV
I posted a sample scene from Airborne and got a little feedback on it. One of the aspects pointed out to me was that the POV is omniscient. The critiquer mentioned that omni needs to be done "really, really well" to work and didn't care for it in this sample.

OK, she didn't like my omni voice. That's fine. What nagged at me was that is has to be done "really, really well" -- for some reason, I've heard this un-useful bit of advice a thousand times -- and avoided like the plague otherwise.

How in the heck are you supposed to learn to write omniscient if you "can't" unless it's "really, really good"...? We all need to practice. We all need training wheels. And it's not like you have to sound like a 19th-century author if you're going to use an omniscient POV. What does 21st-century omniscience sound like anyways? (I'm willing to bet it sounds like social media.)

I have shelves of "how-to-write" books just like anyone else, though I'll admit I haven't cracked one open in years. The questions of what omniscient is and how it's done is sending be back to the shelves. Should I have done that before I wrote Airborne? No, I don't think so. Better to revise a shitty first draft than to analyze yourself into paralysis before writing it.

Misrepresentation?
The critiquer also pointed out that I billed Airborne as an "urban fantasy medical thriller" but there's nothing medical or thrilling going on in the scene. True. Guilty. But it is urban fantasy, at least. I'm fairly sure I got that part of the novel right though the rest is open to debate.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure where this scene should go in the story but it does need to be somewhere near the front.

Promotions, or Why Self-Pubbing is Such a Slog

So I'm finishing my Disciple series (yay! woohoo!) after two years of hard work and I want to make some noise about it. Like most other self-publishers, I've arranged many a blog tour myself over the years and this time I thought you know, I've got a little cash and it would be nice if someone else could do the work and get me into some new blogs.

Because let's face it: if we're all just posting on each other's blogs all the time that makes for an incestuous little neighborhood. How many fresh eyeballs really get in here?

So I Googled. I found a list of "book blog tours that accept self-publishers". Bearing in mind how unimpressed I was by the blog tour I purchased waaaaay back when I published Disciple, Part I, I set about vetting some blog tour services.

How do you "vet" a tour service?
Step 1: Get a fresh drink, this is going to take a while.

Sample blog tour page

Step 2: Tour services will list current and past tours on their websites. Click on some and try to find a book that's similar to yours in some way. Scroll down to the list of tour stops and start opening the hosts in new tabs.

Step 3: Try to answer these basic questions about the host site

• How long has this site been active? (does it have a substantial archive?) 
• How active is it? (how old is the top post, how many posts per month?)
• Does it have followers? (check sidebar for listings) 
• You'll probably see blog awards -- a lot of these are given by friends to friends and don't mean anything. You may also see a list of tour services that this blog is a host for. Those are worth noting.

Step 4: More advanced questions

• Click on their Twitter and see how many followers they have. This is a judgement call, but I consider anything under 500 to be useless. 
• Do they tweet about books? Sounds like a no-brainer, but some of these are spam mills.
• Likewise for Facebook. How many friends? What do they post there?
• Do they post reviews to Goodreads? Amazon? 

Work your way through six or eight blog stops and see how many of them look genuinely worthwhile vs. just another dark corner of the internet.

You're being mean!
What right to I have to dismiss small blogs, given how tiny my own blog is? Look, I've been doing this for years and I know how tough it is to run a blog. I know that real people live in small blogs and they work hard and love books too. But we're talking about advertising here and advertising is a numbers game.

I want to maximize my chances to get eyeballs per dollar spent -- because no, there's no guarantee that any dollar spent will get me any eyeballs (let alone a purchase.) The hard truth of advertising, especially when you're a small fish, is that there's no guarantee it will get you results.

But that doesn't mean I'm just going to throw my money away. I'm going to choose my gambles as wisely as I can.

Does this page offer promotions on its own?
Some of them do. See if there's a tab for reviews, promotions, or running ads on the blog. If there is, more questions:

• What size ads? How much per month? Where exactly will it be posted? (I ask this because so many people browse from phones now. You don't see sidebars on phone browsers -- but they might see a banner.)
• This is important: do they give any site statistics? Most importantly, how many unique visitors per day/week/month? (FB friends, Twitter followers, etc., don't matter here. Your ad isn't going to appear there.) 
• Can you buy a review? If you've been doing this long, you know how risky that is.
• Are they spammers? One site I saw bragged that my book would be promoted every 2 hours through all social networking channels. No thanks! 

Overall, you could save some money and target your advertising more precisely by promoting at individual sites rather than buying a blog tour.

What's the verdict? 
Jury is still out. I've gleaned out a couple sites that I might target individually, but so far the overall tours are still only looking marginally useful. Better than nothing? Maybe. We'll see.

What's your experience with blog tours been?

"I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must"

Feel free to grab this image and use it 

I don't particularly like Salman Rushdie. I haven't been a fan of crude, crass satire since I outgrew MAD magazine. But there's tremendous danger in keeping silent just because you aren't the immediate target.

Censorship is one of those things that can creep in on little cat feet. The nasty, rude, and badly written stuff on the fringes is easy to object to. It offends just about everybody. So it's easy to tell them to shut up, go away, you're just cluttering up the landscape.

Then the questions start about whether the better written satires are in poor taste. Whether offending anybody, or the chance of offending anybody, is a bad idea. Whether those offended people have guns and might kick in your door.

Jihadists? Maybe. Or maybe it will be governmentally sanctioned door-kickers.

Censorship is alive and well in the United States, of course. I first became aware of it as a comic book fan through the work of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- why does such a thing even need to exist? Because the fringe stuff in the comic book world is nasty, rude, badly written, and offends just about everybody.

Does it have a right to exist? Absolutely. Should the creators be called out on their rudeness, use of awful stereotypes, misogyny, and bad writing? Absolutely.

And on a more personal note, I've been mildly censored myself. Self-publishers may remember the purge of incest, under-age, and other fringe pornography from the ebook shelves a year or two ago. In the midst of all that, Kobo.com quietly threw my Disciple, Part II out of their store and blocked it. They never said why. I can guess, but why bother? I took all of Disciple out of Kobo and I won't do any further business with them.

Fortunately, I can do business elsewhere. But as I said, censorship can creep in quietly. It doesn't take masked thugs with guns.

Just some thoughts. What have the Charlie Hebdo shootings made you think about?

ETA: the CBLDF is brave enough to post the images -- bless them.

The case of elusive mojo

And so this is the closing of 2014. It's been a good year for me on the whole, but there are parts I'm not wanting to repeat.

It's said many times, many ways: a writer must write. I've blogged about how important a writing habit is, whether daily or weekly. 2014 reinforced the truth of that for me.

My daily word counts get tweeted and I track my progress in the sidebar of my blog. Down at the bottom you can see word counts from previous years. My peak year was 2012. I blamed the drop-off in 2013 on time lost to self-publishing and promotions.

This year I simply fell off the bandwagon. Yeah, I can blame personal drama and late editors but it comes down to: I didn't write. As a result, I didn't even break 100,000 words this year.

(ducks thrown tomatoes)

Everybody's different. I wrote 95,800 words in 2014 and for me that's discouraging. A project that felt like a major undertaking was stillborn. I spent too much time waiting for things.

On the up side, I self-published two volumes of Disciple and sold Hawks & Rams. I did finish the story I was writing at the beginning of 2014 -- Callisto's Ghost -- and my current WIP has surprised me.

Will 2015 be better? worse? I have to wonder whether I am in a slump or if the years that I was writing Disciple were unnaturally fertile. That sort of question does not have an answer, since I will never be the person I was in 2012 again (if I have anything to say about it.) Whoever I am now, I need to work on my writing discipline as much as I ever did.

My old word counts still stand as proof to how much you can get done plugging away with less than a thousand words a day. That's right, even at my best the daily average works out to less than you'd think. Less than it takes to win NaNoWriMo.

Update

My novella Hawks & Rams will be available starting the 31st from Dreamspinner Press (their page • Amazon) and I will be having a posting party at their blog on January 1st. Once I wake up from the New Year's Eve celebrations, of course. I will also be chatting on their FB page on the 4th.

I will be posting the map and character index for H&R over at my book blog.

If you're on my mailing list, look for an announcement about Disciple, Part VI's release date. :)

I've been keeping my head down and writing all month. After what a bad year for writing it has been, it seemed risky to divide my focus... though if you've been following my daily word count at Twitter or watching my sidebar here at the blog you can see the progress starting to pile up. I hit 35k on my WIP the other day and it felt good.

Keep writing, friends. Slow and steady can win the race.

Becoming a crossover author

Back in May, my novella Hawks & Rams was accepted for publication at Dreamspinner Press. Up to now, I've been a self-publisher so naturally I wondered how different the process would be with a publisher.

My novella is coming out December 31st (check it out!)... And here's the story so far:

Editing

The process was strikingly similar to going through multiple rounds of beta feedback. To be honest, I was expecting more conversation and some sort of comment on the changes I made, the new bits that I wrote. In general I agree with "no news is good news" but the process did leave me a bit uncertain about the final story. 

Blurb

I had to explain my story to the blurb department and they wrote based on that. Guess I should have known they weren't going to actually read it? Either way, they sent it to me for feedback and it was pretty good.

Cover

I had to explain my story to the cover artist. This, I can understand more why they might not read the book. I gave a couple rounds of feedback and I'm happy with the result. 

Strangest thing

I realized this a couple weeks ago and double-checked my correspondence with Dreamspinner... Aside from some generic compliments they gave me, I have no idea why they wanted to publish Hawks & Rams. I assume somebody enjoyed the story, liked the characters, found the sex steamy or something, but I have no direct evidence of that. 

I suppose I could ask, of course, but that seems odd as well. 

So overall, working with a small press publisher been similar to self publishing but I haven't had to pay anybody. There's the release and promotions yet to come, though. Stay tuned!

Real world sales numbers, part 3

It's been six months again, so let's update how self-publishing sales numbers look for people who aren't hugely successful. (May's update here)

Click to enlarge

• Definitions: "units sold" includes both ebooks and paperbacks, across all sales channels (except Storybundle), for a given month. The graph starts at October 2012, when I released Disciple, Part I. Since Oct. '12, I have sold about 245 books in total. (Damn, it's been two years already!)
• The spike in sales of Part II and Part III was a result of briefly getting Amazon to give Part I away for free and buying an ad promotion. Part I has been free for several months now, which is why it isn't registering sales anymore.
• The Half-Omnibus is not free but it hasn't been selling either, which is disappointing. The only overhead that went into it was its ISBN, but it hasn't even paid for that.
• Yeah, this October I had no sales. Ouch, it's been a while since I got a flat zero. 

As you can see, my graph is getting more and more complicated as I add more volumes. It's turning into a tangle of lines bouncing around, and it's getting hard to see the general trend. So here is a simpler graph: 

This is all my sales, by month, with an added linear regression so that I can see there is, in fact, a mild upward trend. Which is nice.

Am I making a living? Not yet. I have paid for all of the production costs (about $1500 per book) through a combination of Kickstarter campaigns (for two books), sales through regular channels, and my graphic design freelance work. So far, my business income has covered my business expenses. I'm grateful for that because I live on a snug budget, but no, it isn't putting money in my pocket yet.

To ask the same question as last time: am I thrilled? Well... it's still encouraging. I'll admit that I'm starting to feel the wear after six volumes. The Disciple series is almost finished. Then I'll be facing the question of: what to publish next? I've got other books in the hopper -- are they ready? This also hasn't been a productive year for me, so will I run short at some point?

Look for my next sales update in May, when there will be a new factor in play: Dreamspinner Press is publishing a novella of mine in December. What will those sales look like? Will there be any carryover to Disciple? Stay tuned...

What the universe gives you, part 2

I've been to Shangri-la and I need to go back.

Sometimes people ask writers/artists "where do you get your ideas?" In my opinion, if you can't see the constant blizzard of ideas around you then you aren't cut out for art. But some places are more conducive to ideas than others, to be honest. It would be easy to say that Bhutan is an interesting place because it's beautiful. It's more complicated than that, though.

I had no explanation at first as to why I got choked up in the airplane and shed tears as we flew out of Paro. The beds were miserably hard, I went to every meal ravenously hungry, and it was easily the most physically draining vacation of my life. I should've been eager to leave.

But...

Well, for the moment I will just post some photos for their visual inspirational value. Why this trip was important to me has a lot of factors, of course, several of which are more personal that I want to get into on this blog. I'll try to talk a little about the people and the culture in a later post.

Lots of clouds? Yes. The average day in Bhutan is "partly cloudy with scattered afternoon showers and rainbows." Yes, rainbows are pretty much a daily sight in Bhutan; it makes the place even more magical.

What the universe gives you, part 1

I like to say that the universe will give you what you need for your art. By which I mean, look at what the universe has brought you and say: this is what I need for my art. The challenge is to figure out how it fits in.

I went on my trip to Bhutan and Nepal looking for these things. Needless to say, ideas and inspiration came in a blizzard.

Bhutan is so beautiful that it defies reality simply by existing. More on that later.

Kathmandu, Nepal, isn't the idyllic little town it used to be, though. Nepal suffered a long civil war in the 90s/00s, and thousands of refugees piled into the city. It feels a lot like an Indian city now: over-crowded, smelling of rotten trash, beggars on every corner.

I saw some things that I thought might be of interest to my fellow writers, though. Let me be the universe that's giving you what you need, for a moment. Take a look at the cremation platforms on the banks of the Bagmati River.

Hindus cremate their dead, usually within a few hours of death. They believe that this frees the soul to re-enter the reincarnation cycle, so it's important to them.

The body's wrapped in a shroud, carried around the pyre three times clockwise by the bearers, and laid down. River water is poured in the mouth. I'm sure that various prayers are said -- I was across the river, so I couldn't hear.

Our tour guide said that no death certificate is issued, but they do keep track. Suspicious deaths get a full investigation before the body is cremated.

The smell? Mostly charcoal, because it takes a lot of wood to burn a body. There's a slight hint of meat, but it's far less than at your average barbecue.

Only those of the untouchable caste can oversee cremations. Castes are built into the Hindu world-view and touch every aspect of life -- the platforms in these photos were for ordinary people. There were platforms for higher caste folks just upriver.

When the pyre has burned down, the platform is cleared straight into the river. 

Our tour guide said that when he was a boy, this river was crystal clear. It's only since the population explosion that it's become filthy. Dumping cremated remains didn't have much impact on the water quality.

On a different note, I also saw bowls made from teak leaves for sale in a local market. They're held together by little bamboo pins, so they are 100% biodegradable and renewable.

Pretty clever, I think.

Seen anything unusual lately?

Surprise cover reveal!

Hawks & Rams

Heathric never wanted to be a thief, but his cousin’s scheme was the only option left. Crossing into the neighboring kingdom, stealing sheep, and getting away with it once — that was luck. The second time, trouble follows them home; the local Ranger squad won’t let thieves terrorize their people, and the Rangers cross the border in pursuit. 

Heathric still aches from losing his only boyfriend. One of the Rangers has all but given up on finding a lover who truly wants him. Opposite sides of cross-border banditry is a rough way to meet that perfect match.

2014's been an odd year 
The above is the query letter I sent along with the Hawks & Rams manuscript. Apparently it was good enough to get the editor at Dreamspinner to keep reading.

Hawks & Rams will be my first release with a publisher -- it's due out early in 2015. And the cover art is great! H&R is a fantasy m/m romance with plenty of action and tension. There's some steaminess too, but it's not the focus.

Going through the publishing process with a small press, after having done it myself so many times, has been interesting. I'll try to blog about it after I get home from my trip.

What trip? The trip of a lifetime: two weeks in Bhutan and Nepal as companion to my parents. I've been looking forward to this for months, of course, and now it's functioning as a dividing line in my year. Things will need to be different after I get back.

It's been a tumultuous summer for me. It's also been a more difficult writing year than I expected -- as you can see in my writing progress sidebar, my productivity is in the toilet. My writing discipline has slipped and I need to get my focus back.

For now, the good side of the story: Disciple, Part V is out. Part VI is with the editor already. You can still get Part I for free most everywhere or pick up the Disciple Half-Omnibus if you want the first half of the series in a nice chunk. I have several writing projects to work on and ideas to develop.

How has your 2014 been going?

Problematic horrors

Innocence and isolation
I've heard it said that the cornerstones of horror are innocence and isolation. The innocence aspect is supposed to encourage audience sympathy, but personally? I know I'm no innocent and I'm not invested in protecting innocence the way, say, a parent might be.

It seems to me the "innocence" aspect leads to a tendency of horror being inflicted on somebody just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time: they moved into a haunted house, their car broke down in the boonies, etc. I have never found that particularly compelling because the story is not about the characters, it's about a series of horrible things that happened.

Isolation can be physical, social, or psychological and ensures that the hero/ine faces the enemy alone. Often, they are outgunned by the villain(s) as well. This can lead to Bambi vs Godzilla syndrome, in my opinion, and solutions being handed down by the god in the machine (the author). Those aren't satisfying endings, since the heroine did not "earn" anything in the story.

This may be why I'm not a fan of horror -- on top of any additional writing problems manifesting in bad dialogue, illogical plot lines, and cardboard characters. Horror is as prone to those problems as any genre. Or perhaps it would be more fair to say that any genre is as prone to that as horror is.

A proverbial virgin being chased by a serial killer, or haunted by the angry ghost of some old house? That's just a cosmic misunderstanding. An oversized pain in the ass.

Darkness
In my opinion, a dab of gore will do ya in most situations. If you've read my stories you know I'm willing to get explicit and horrible when the characters are willing to do that. Horror as a genre is a different beast, though. I'm treading closer to it than usual in my current WIP, which is turning out to be a dark fantasy.

What makes the story dark, in my opinion, is not the gruesome things that happen but why those gruesome things happen. It's also the hero's temptation to let those whys infiltrate him and lead him to begin inflicting horrors himself. The drama of resisting corruption has a particular attraction to me.

If you were going to write a horror story, how would you make it compelling to yourself? What makes you shudder?

Seeking new experiences, for a writer

It's been almost a month since I posted, and I apologize. June 2014 has been pretty crazy for me. I've been out experiencing new things, to put it simply.

As a writer, I'm often trying to convey things -- events, situations, emotions -- that I've never experienced personally, and there's nothing unusual about that. I've never had to fight for my life with a sword. I've never stepped outside a spaceship in just a plastic suit. Because human emotions are the same for us all, I believe I can apply the few moments of genuine panic (when I realized I was skidding down an icy mountainside at 50mph) or awe (when I stood inside the gallery of the Great Pyramid) that I actually have experienced to what my characters are experiencing.

The tougher part is knowing which emotions fit the scenario and how they're flavored by the character's exact situation. Also, whether anything I've experienced truly fits.

I've been a shy person all my life. That's not unusual for a writer. I've been a homebody, but not a complete shut-in, who took a pass on having a crazy youth or doing anything too risky. But over the past year, I've been getting out more and putting the shyness, the worries, everything that's kept me from being wilder, aside.

Get out there. It's worth it.

And having been a little wilder, having survived and learned a lot from it, I wish I'd done it sooner. Both personally and as a writer. There really is no substitute for experiencing things yourself.

What you notice in the midst of those experiences, what stands out to you, is as individual as your fingerprints and that will only add to your personal voice as a writer when you apply it to a story. As writers, everyone we meet and everything we experience goes into our stories. Shutting ourselves away will limit our supply of those raw ingredients, in the long run.

So, my fellow shy, reclusive writers, I'm going to say get out there and do something this summer that pushes your personal envelope. Something new. Something that leaves you exhilarated, exhausted, and possibly ecstatic.

I experienced all of those on a whole new level when the Mothership 2014 tour came to town. Now, I love electronic music and I've mentioned before how I've been going out to hear it in small clubs. A six-hour dubstep festival on the lawn of a racetrack was something else entirely, of course. I had never been brave enough to go to one of those before, let alone work my way down to front and center in the crowd where it's all drunken college boys, crowd-surfers, and constant bouncing.

Scary? A little. I'm not small or fragile, though. What I took away was a new understanding of exhaustion. Of the role of sensory overload in inducing a trancelike state. Of the dynamics of a close-packed crowd of people jacked up on adrenaline and various intoxicants.

Was I really thinking that clearly at the time? No, but I've put in the analysis time since then. The memories will be useful in a variety of crowd-based situations and individual experiences of transcendence -- exhaustion and extreme situations can give rise to powerful religious experiences and also the sorts of extreme survival stories that come out of war or natural disasters.

I also briefly met a handful of colorful characters, needless to say. It's all good story ingredients, well worth the money, the time, and the emotional risk of going into such a thing trusting the universe to give me what I need. This was an instance of going out to find that, as I talked about in this post.

Get out there. Climb a mountain, take fencing lessons, go skinny dipping at midnight, whatever it is you've always wanted to do. What unusual things have you experienced recently?

If you're curious, I've found some videos from the concert I attended that do a fair job of conveying the experience when the headliner, Skrillex, took the stage five hours into the festival. You do have to imagine the bass pounding on you like you need CPR, though. iPhones completely fail to capture that.

Opening of Skrillex's set. First big drop is 2 minutes in. He gave us that long to catch our breath after Dillon Francis, lol. Another 18 minutes of the set. Jump to 12:15 for an especially potent buildup and explosion.

Eating the elephant update

I compared building a new story universe to eating an elephant, back in October. What I didn't mention, in hindsight, was that I was in fact sitting down to eat a new elephant just then. The muse had inflicted a large-feeling idea on me (the brutal muse) and I was just starting to put my teeth on it.

It's coming up on eight months later. Working on this idea (codename: Bloodmagic) has been squeezed in between other projects and has occasionally busted out and asserted itself. Things are getting to the point where I should start doing the writer's equivalent of 15-second sketches. If I were a mad scientist, I'd be watching the skies for the thunderstorm I'll need to jolt this monster to life.

Research
I love research. Over Thanksgiving, I read a couple strategically chosen books on the cultures that were providing a lot of the visual inspiration -- Aztec and Maya -- and tried to wrap my head around how such a culture becomes "normal" in the minds of the people living inside it. How does it mesh up with the reality around them?

There were also the ecology and technology aspects to work out. This will be a big change from the medieval New England world of Disciple and that's part of the elephant that I haven't chewed on too much yet. More research to do!

Trusting the universe
I've mentioned before that the universe will bring you what you need for your art. Lately, one thing that's been given to me is local music performed in small venues to small audiences. The DJ's know me as a regular, and they've often seen me scribbling down thoughts with pen and paper. For me, music is a shortcut to emotions and I collect those for each WIP.

I maintain playlists for my writing projects and yes, Bloodmagic's playlist did pick up some dark, hard-driving electronic music. It's turning out to be a dark story, so that's easy to understand. There are a few tracks whose reasons for being there isn't obvious, though. There always are a few of those. Keeps things interesting.

The universe also pointed me toward a couple horror influences: one old and familiar, and Hellraiser.

Guided brainstorming
Another way to "trust the universe" is to look at whatever the universe brings you and find a way to incorporate it into your art. So, sometimes I decide that I'm going to watch/read/do something and whatever it is, it will inform my WIP. How? Don't know. I'll roll with it, however irrelevant it seems.

I don't remember exactly why Hellraiser became an influence on Bloodmagic -- aside from being a classic horror franchise. I've watched several of the movies now and its influence has trickled into far more than the obvious blood and gore.

Well, the good movies have. The bad ones were just bad.

Applying craft

Piles of ideas are all well and good but this needs to be a story. Beginning, middle, end, rising tension, climax, character development, the whole nine yards. Unlike real life, fiction is supposed to make sense, as they say.

So I also used some tools in eating this elephant. The outline got built alongside the universe and the core characters. I've got a sense of the character arcs and the central theme. I've installed an engine: that abstract central question that these characters are wrestling with on my behalf. There will be sudden gear changes and a literary flourish or two. It'll be fun.

Don't wait too long
When is it time to start writing? That's always a tough question, but I've found that sooner works out better than later. Writing always clarifies things, and when you start earlier in the process it contributes to the WIP's development rather than potentially conflicting with what's already there.

Have you been working on a new elephant?

Real world sales numbers, Part 2

This is a follow up post to the sales numbers I talked about in November. It's been about six months so let's see how things have been going for my Disciple series.

Does not include Storybundle sales. Does include both ebooks & paperbacks, across all sales channels

• Definitions: "units sold" includes both ebooks and paperbacks, across all sales channels (except Storybundle), for a given month. Starts with October 2012, when I released Disciple, Part I. Since Oct. '12, I have sold about 195 books in total. 
• In the last six months, I've added two new titles to the series: Disciple, Part IV, and the Half-Omnibus which collects the first three parts. 
• The spike in sales of Part II and Part III was a result of briefly getting Amazon to give Part I away for free. They quit before the end of January 2014.
• To ask the same question again, am I thrilled? Well, the spike was exciting and getting the royalty check for that was nice. Sales have been creeping back down, but they do that. I'm going to keep moving and get Disciple, Part V out later this year.

After a conversation I had where a self-publisher expressed concern about working with Amazon because of its 500-pound-gorilla-ness, I put this graph together from my data:

That is books sold, per week, broken out by sales channel. Start date is September 1, 2013 (when Part III was released). If you don't want to play with Amazon because they're getting too big for their britches or whatever -- you certainly can, but you're missing out.

As you can also see, Smashwords hasn't exactly been worth the trouble even though they do distribute me to several other outlets like Sony and Diesel. Draft2Digital hasn't exactly wowed me either -- they're slow and I don't like how their sales reports are organized. Then again, I haven't had enough sales to really look at...

I hope these graphs help my fellow self-publishers by giving them something to compare their own sales numbers to. There are plenty of stories out there focusing on the writers who've made it big in self-publishing, and those of us who are slogging along in the trenches don't get much attention. It's no mystery why: these numbers are not exciting. The income I'm getting from this is not a livable wage -- heck, it's an open question whether I can afford to produce Part V off this income.

Care to share some of your numbers?

Common cause with other artists...

I don't talk to much about my personal life, but a conversation at a club recently brought this up.

Since I've been living on my own -- about six months now -- I've developed a habit of going to clubs. Never did that when I was younger, even though I have always loved live music and the thousand flavors of electronic music in particular. I'm still a shy person, so I go alone. Strictly for the music.

But I've also made a habit of going to shows put on by local deejays. Young guys and ladies who are still building their reputations and a fan base. I can relate to that, as a self-publisher. I know what support from a non-family member means when you're trying to earn money as an artist.

Given that these are small-time deejays, they play in small clubs to small audiences and it makes for an intimate setting. They were quick to start recognizing me and always come over to say hello, which is very sensible from a self-promotion viewpoint. Being shy, I've never been good at that sort of thing.

That got me to thinking about the parallels between how different artists try to earn a living and what I could learn from these kids. I don't know a lot about how it works for new deejays, but I hear mutterings about unreliable bookings and slim pay. The struggle to find the balance between giving away free samples and charging money for your work sounds familiar too.

I also couldn't help recognizing the incestuousness of the scene: most of the people at the shows are either fellow deejays or girlfriends/friends of deejays.

As a follow-up to my post about visual artists, I'd like to expand that to include all fellow artists. Back in the day, I was guilty of using Napster and Limewire to collect mp3s. I limit myself to legit freebies now, and I support musicians by going to clubs, but I still don't pay much for my music.

We all know how hard it is to make a living off of art. I think we owe it to each other to be as supportive as we can.

What do you do to support the arts in your area? Do you find local musicians or bands to support? Dance troupes? Theater groups? Post something and maybe it will inspire another reader.

Be glad, as a writer, that you can get by with pen and paper if you must and don't have to drop hundreds of dollars on a mixing deck like the one in the photo. That's a smallish one, too. Yikes.

On the off chance that you're a fan of techno/house/drum & bass/etc., some links: the GLAS Mix Project crew here in DC. Also, Dancekraft. Specific DJs: Confetti, the house queen of Baltimore, Traxiom, who can put me in a dance-floor trance even when I'm alone, and DJ RND because I loves the deep house.

Exercising the voice muscles

I've been trying to strengthen the voice in McBride's Eight, my hard scifi novel, for the last few weeks. I posted a sample of the process over at Unicorn Bell. When I wrote it I didn't want to get into the characters' heads much. It's been a couple years and my opinion has shifted a bit.

Not much point in using third person limited for the narration if I'm going to stay outside the characters' heads. Might as well let the narrator be more omniscient and put that narrative distance to good use. But I didn't.

So I've been pondering how to differentiate voices within the general style that I use for science fiction. I do, definitely, have some genre-specific style habits for better or for worse...

Here's one: when a sentence has the same subject as the previous sentence, I drop the subject. Shen cracked open a fresh bottle of vodka. Poured himself a drink. There's a dozen correct ways to communicate those actions, of course, and a few dozen incorrect ways. That's how I do it in science fiction.

I also tend to drop articles at the beginning of a sentence. Barkeep would give him the friends rate, no worries. Bottle of Gunner's wasn't pricy anycase.

Kate, over in my fantasy series Disciple, would say something like I hefted the brandy carafe and tore the wax seal off; the unleashed fumes stung my eyes as I poured out a cupful. Shen would be on his second shot by the time Kate finished all of that. (It's amusing to imagine them sitting at a bar together drinking -- I wonder what they'd make of each other.)

Some people find my scifi style choppy or otherwise hard to read. Some betas have called it "twitterspeak," which may well be why I see words being dropped from sentences in the future. They're extra characters, and English is heavily dependent on context for its meaning anyways.

So how to separate out more than one voice?

Lena scanned the rack of vodka behind the bartender and spotted the Grey Nebula bottle. "Grey on ice," she said, pointing. Nice stuff -- that was champagne for someone on a beer budget. Day would come when she couldn't afford it anymore. 

Chickie ordered Nebula as Shen topped his shot off. Cute chickie. Vodka sloshed over the rim of his shot glass because he wasn't watching. He hissed a curse and she glanced his way. Damn.

Sentence structure. Word choice. A codehead with a formal education and a more "civilized" past narrates differently than some skank booter who grew up on a scrap heap and lost a few years as an indentured slave. (Sorry, Shen, they would've found out about that sooner or later.) They have similar accents, as it were, but his is thicker, coarser... more blunt. High class vs. low class. Even in the future, those will still exist.

How do you decide what the accent is...? Well, that's tougher to put your finger on. A post for another time.

Have you been wrestling with narrative voice lately?

In the self-pub trenches: timing a series

I chatted with Will Hahn recently about a collection of issues related to publishing a multi-book series like my Disciple. He asked great questions and it seemed like a good basis for a blog post.

The first four books [of Disciple] have come out on a fairly regular schedule, about five months apart, yes? Did you follow some established wisdom regarding that schedule? Was it related to the size or price of the books?
The spacing is mostly related to the production costs, and partly to the idea that keeping them coming regularly but not too quickly will keep attention on them.

There's also the factor of how publishing breaks up your writing schedule. I'm monogamous when it comes to writing projects, so you can see the hit that my writing output has taken since I started self-pubbing (2012: 289k, 2013: 162.6k). When I've got something on my editor's desk, I don't want to dig into a major project and have to put it down to revise my manuscript.

Spacing them out a bit gives me time to grind out another story in between. So far, it's been working out.

I note you priced the first book way down, as I intend to do. Was that from the start and will it be permanent, or did you put it on sale as the later issues came out?

Part I's initial price was $4.99, which in hindsight was probably too high. $2.99 would have been better, IMO.

Currently, it's 99 cents with occasional free promotions. I took it down to that price around when Part III came out. If you can price it in the impulse-buy range (currently 99 cents, sure to change with time) you'll balance cheapness with people who will actually read it.

Because free stuff gets snapped up because it's free. Not necessarily because it's interesting. When I gave away Part I for free around New Year's, I gave away a bit short of two thousand copies. That resulted in about 25 sales of Part II. Maybe there will be later sales due to people getting around to that freebie they downloaded months ago... maybe not. My follow-up rate for sold copies of Part I has been much better.

I also think it's not entirely wise to price a first book too low and here's why: it's a reflection of what you think the series worth, when that book's sitting alone on the shelf. Once it's not a "free-standing" book anymore, then its price becomes less important. Part I is a loss leader now, and its job is to hook readers.

If it's not prying, do you have the entire Disciple story locked and loaded from the first book, or are you continuing to write as you go?
I had the first draft of Part VI (the ending) written before I published Part II. I wrote the series straight through with minor breaks in between the parts. Yes, I jokingly say that it's because I didn't want to be like GRRM and string my readers along... truth is, I can't afford to do that. If I drop the ball, there's no forgiveness in self-pubbing land.

So I wrote Disciple straight through and I intend to publish it straight through -- continuity of energy both ways.