So I tend to write in a lot of genres, but a common, overall theme is adventure. One of the things about adventure writing is that everybody doesn’t have to be murder-hobos. I watch too many movies where they seem to measure the gravitas of things by the body count. And heroes aren’t really heroes in the classic because they calmly go about killing everybody they run into without mussing their hair or tearing a seam. Or even feeling especially bad for having a running firefight on a crowded street.

“Richard Stark” taught me a much different way to approach things with Parker. (I’ve read a number of those books, but not all, because nobody ever gets rid of them at a used bookstore and I’m WAY too cheap to pay the sorts of prices that TradPub thinks they can get for a series of books that are older than I am. First pub 1968, by the way.)

Parker lived by a different code in a different era, even though he could be a son of a bitch. From Wikipedia: “A ruthless career criminal, Parker has almost no traditional redeeming qualities, aside from efficiency and professionalism. Parker is callous, meticulous, and perfectly willing to commit murder if he deems it necessary. He does, however, live by one ethical principle: he will not double-cross another professional criminal with whom he is working, unless they try to double-cross him. Should that happen, Parker will unhesitatingly undertake to exact a thorough and brutal revenge.”

In one book, he gets the drop on a man who might report him and undo everything that he’s just managed to do to get even with the people who set him up. Parker points the gun at the guy and directs him to drive. In modern books or movies, the driver of course lunges at the hero at some point, they have a fight, and the npc gets killed. Or forces the hero to shoot him in self-defense.

Parker pulls to the side of the road when he gets where he’s going and gets out, telling the guy to keep driving and forget all this. Minor character, completely irrelevant to the overall plot, but neither Parker nor Westlake see the need to kill him casually or callously. The driver just left and that was that.

I have written some bad characters. And some good characters doing bad things. I try to remember that it is not necessary to kill every peon NPC that you run across. They can run away. They can go home at night. They can live.

Similarly, in the movie The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010), there is a scene where Affleck’s gang are getting away, dressed as nuns with masks. They come around a corner and park the getaway car as they are about to escape and there’s a cop, sitting there in his patrol car, eating a sandwich. One man with a pistol, against four guys with assault rifles and the drop.

What does he do?

The cop very obviously turns his head the other way and watches the scenery, pointedly ignoring the criminals.

They don’t kill him. Everyone recognizes what would have happened had the cop gotten stupid, so he doesn’t. Honor among thieves, sort of, but the man got to go home to his family that night, instead of dying pointlessly.

I’m writing a novel now with a villain who’s not a scenery-chewing sadist. Just a dude, doing what he thinks it right within a fairly twisted cultural matrix. (Soviet Central Asia, 1938, Samarkand, Uzbekistan.) The hero and his sidekick would both kill the guy if they had to, but I’m struck by the realization that everyone might actually get out of this one alive, because nobody has gone to that step where everyone has to go murder hobo.

I wonder what we as a culture have lost over the last however long, that just defeating the villain and throwing him in jail is no longer enough, like it was in the comic books when I was a kid. You can no longer just stop the supervillain from poisoning the reservoir. You must execute him in gory detail to keep him from ever trying again.

We have lost the concept of human redemption, in reducing everything to simply black and white.

Parker was all about gray. I try to keep that in mind when writing Finn, Duff, or Rob. Yasmin. Brannon. Any of the others.

I used to say “they can’t beat me, they can only kill me, and that is an admission on their part that they cannot beat me.” We don’t do that.

Batman in the old days never killed, Michael Keaton notwithstanding. Why is it acceptable now?

What do we need to change so that we can return to the Golden Age where we could defeat someone, and then give them the chance to be redeemed?

A dead man is just dead. He cannot be redeemed. Ever.

What have we become?

So it comes up from time to time, but not everyone hears it, or remembers it.

There are regular and generally accepted “rumors” that publishing on Amazon on a regular rate (“The Pulse”) helps with your overall author ranking, as well as your placement of books in “Also bought” and “You might like” as a way to reward regular product. (And books are just another product on Amazon.)

If you publish something in a genre (preferably in a series) every 30 days, you will get rewarded by the robots in control. I drop something on the 10th of every month. Sometimes more than one thing, depending on writing and editing speed. I have seen the rewards.

There also purports to be a slower pulse, running every 60 days, as well as another one ever 90 days, but my understanding is that they step down in effectiveness quite a bit.

How can you take advantage of this?

Some of you write a lot of short fiction, while others are into novels. If you write short, consider putting together a series character and dropping a new mystery/case every month. In my case, I write science fiction, and tend to write shorts that are parts of a much longer novel, but are not just serialized. Instead, I tell each little piece self-contained as a short story and then will assemble them when I have at least 40,000 words and bring some section of a story to rest.

My Patrons got the first seven stories of Yasmin of the Desert in April. (Technically, they were only supposed to get the first three, but I screwed up and sent the wrong file, so when they noticed I sent them a new novella for May and will find something for June.) Those seven stories will be “Volume/Book One” when I get there. I’v already written #8 and will get through a bunch more over the next year.

If you write novels, my suggestion is that you take a few days a month and dedicate them to some short fiction. Seriously. I appreciate that I write at crazy fast speeds compared to many writers, but I also know several folks who make me look like a slacker. 3-5,000 words will reward you, and you should be able to do that, if you really want to be a writer. (I cannot want this more than you do.

Write a short story every month. Put it up for $0.99. Put them into a collection later, or edit them into a whole novel so you can resell the whole thing, or let people have paper copies.

Why?

The pulse will boost you as an author. I don’t do much advertising on Amazon. Instead, I let the machines put me in front of people. If you get on the pulse, Amazon also sends out email reminders to your fans fairly regularly, letting them know you have a new book and “here’s a link to buy it!”

Free advertising, targeting people who are already following you on Amazon. $0.99 short stories won’t make you rich, but as you build your catalog, it will hook new fans. Especially if you are telling a whole long arc of stories about a character or group. They will get invested. And want to give you money.

I hear regular conversations that people tell me that they cannot get any traction unless they spend a lot of money on advertising. It might work. It might not. I built a lot of my success on the pulse instead of the ad spend, so I wanted to give everyone else options they maybe didn’t know about.

It doesn’t have to be a novel every month. In fact, I’m hoping someone sets down to prove me wrong and writes a twelve-short arc and drops them every month for a year. I’d love to hear your results. And hopefully, you end up with more things generating money.

No book is going to make you rich in the modern age of publishing. Traditionally-published books are dropping zeroes of the back of an advance from 20 years ago. Chances are that you will not be the next JK Rowling or Susan Collins.

Instead, you want to create an entire catalog of books, each earning nickels and providing new entry points for people to become fans.

Let Amazon do the work for you, and then find all the ways you can turn a handful of short stories into more revenue streams by collecting them later.

You can beat the machine.

So I have a patreon. And on the second of the month, I send out something to my people. Last month, what I was SUPPOSED to send out was the first three Yasmin of the Desert stories. Then this month I would follow up with 4&5, and in June they would get 6&7. 8 is done, but I needed time to catch up. Plus 1-7 is a novel-length collection that will come out one of these days.

All well and good.

Except that when I uploaded last month to bookfunnel, I grabbed the wrong file. The 7 file and not the 3 file.

Whoops.

Got an email from a confused patron a little while ago asking what he had screwed up. Wasn’t him. Grabbed the file down and opened it and “well, shit…”

Fortunately, I write a lot. So I sent everyone an apology email.

Looked around and flipped a coin in my head for what I would send out instead. Like I said, deep trunk to select things from.

The goal in 2019 was 20 novels. (Novel being single arc of story 40,000+ words). Did that. Most of them have not come out yet. Last December, was in Minneapolis visiting family and staying in a hotel. I write. That’s what I do. Started a story, but damnit this was NOT going to be the 21st novel, so I deliberately chopped it at 18,000 words. Nice solid novella as an origin story for a 1970s hero in a new genre we’re going to call Discopunk.

I had even done a cover for it, back when I was teaching myself such things under the tutelage of the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and it’s not half-bad.

So I hopped up from my leisure, grabbed the Mac, and got to work.

I love vellum. Import a word file. Import a front-matter doc that is already set up. Tweak a few things. Fill out the title information. Add the cover file. Tell it to format the document into epub, mobi, kobo, iBooks, and print.

And done. Pretty, too.

Then I uploaded it to Bookfunnel and got a new download link for my patrons.

Sent them a second apology email with the background of the story and the new download link, and looked up at the clock.

The first email had hit my box at 17:02. I hit send on on the replacement email at 17:38.

Raw docx file formatted, generated, uploaded, and delivered to my patrons in just under 45 minutes, and I wasn’t even pushing that hard.

That’s what I’m talking about, when I tell folks that the tools these days are THAT EASY. There is an investment in time, hardware, and prep, but once those are sunks costs, the rest is easy.

That’s how I can afford to do Boundary Shock Quarterly or Blaze Ward Presents. Or just put books up on my website shop for cheap so people can give me money instead of giving it to the 900 pound books gorilla.

So that was how I spent the last hour of my Sunday night. Might yet get around to watching a silly movie, but right now, I’m going back to goofing off.

How are you taking advantage of the tools of modern publishing?

🙂

So I generally write space opera and space adventure. (Plus some dieselpunk that also qualifies here, as you’ll see once you read that series.)

One of the interesting things about this sub-set of genres is the importance of the vessel transporting your crew of misfits wherever they are going. Star Trek TOS had this lovely, elegant heavy cruiser of a ship, which meant they were going in harm’s way and confident that they could make it out the other side safely.

Han Solo had his hunk of junk that had it where it counted.

Etc.

Been thinking about the topic because I have a couple of new series spinning up, and in each the ship itself is a character. This is a useful way to think about it, because in Private Detective fiction (usually the hard-boiled variety), the city is also a character. Same with the old-school urban fantasy, when it was more Jim Butcher and less shifter-romance, like today.

When you read Marlowe, Los Angeles is a character. Same of Spade and San Francisco. You can’t just pick them up and put the story anywhere else and have it work.

So where my wife (the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) ) builds new magic systems every time she starts a fantasy series, I spend my time designing starships.

It took a different form when I started the Jessica Keller Chronicles, because the original RAN Auberon was a Strike Carrier. I’ve mentioned before how I played Star Fleet Battles when I was a kid (up until my mid-20s when I lived in Los Angeles). And my homage to that universe was basically taking a number of those designs and filing off enough serial numbers to include them. I even had the SSD books open when designing new classes, and wrote down all the relevant weapon stats and firing arcs when I did, so that I could keep things consistent.

But Jessica was EPIC space opera. Original CVS got replaced by a design roughly equivalent to a Fed SCS from Commander’s SSD Book #6, or maybe a B-10V variant (I can’t remember where I saw that one and not worth digging through all my old books to find it right now.) From there, up to the Heavy Dreadnought design, which is basically just using X-Tech and Type-4 Phasers on a warship.

But now I’m writing much smaller scale stuff. The Pizzafarmer stories take place on a smaller ship (Pizzafarmer), a fast freighter that wraps like a wishbone around a single cargo pod and is designed for a crew of 2-3. Got three of those stories done so far and an cut-down version of #1 will appear in a month or so in the new Blaze Ward Presents. “Bad Habits: A Nuns With Guns Anthology” I have two more that follow Wilson’s story, and space to go a little nuts with the whole wild-west element of things.

I’m in the middle of a new epic series of novels and decided I needed to rough out a floorplan for that ship (Ark Royal for other reasons). As I hacked several thoughts together, starting with riffs on the original Constitution class, writer-brain decided that what I really needed looked an awful lot like a D-7, with the bridge shifted around a little bit, but that same gooseneck design, with the Crew Section being the aft hull, where they could shield folks against warp-spawn while leaving the woman who is the Engine forward and exposed. I went an bought a table-top D-7 that’s about 9cm long by 6cm wide. It’s sitting on my left flying around the counter as I type.

The other new new series I just started involves the rough equivalent of finding a djinn in a lamp and asking for a wish. The main character is marooned on a planet and trying to survive when she comes across an ancient computer system roughly god-like in age and tech capability. The computer is at tech level 9, while Brannon comes from a culture midway through 6. The problem there is that the planet itself was abandoned thousands of years ago and marked “Previously Inhabited” (the name of the first story).

The machine will build her a ship to escape, on the understanding that Brannon and her sidekick never tell anyone else the truth.

Brannon’s culture would come back here and bomb the shit out of such a demonic thing as an Aware computer system, but this one is already several cultures old (20,000 years+), and willing to wait for the wheel to turn some more, retaining ancient human knowledge for whoever comes along.

So the machine will design and build a small-ish ship for Brannon and Hawny to escape in as part of story #2. And she’ll need to down-tech it to a point where it doesn’t upset the galaxy’s power balance overnight. And doesn’t summon killing fleets to her home.

So I sat down last night with all my old SSD books and went through them, making notes of every type of box that could be marked off in combat. Cruisers, scouts, tugs, pirates, freighters. The works. Then I meandered through some really old (and silly) ship blueprints. Finally, I have the officially licensed Klingon D-7 Battlecruiser deck plans, and went through all of those.

The thing about most RPG maps is that that the kitchen (galley) for a huge starship is usually smaller than the kitchen in my house. (Usually just a replicator unit stuck in a pantry or something.) And there is NEVER anything like laundry facilities. But EVERY ship has a desperately-oversized med bay. One of them I looked at last night had four beds in the medbay, for a crew of eight people.

Never sure what the shipwright was working from when he did that, but I always start with bathrooms and laundry when laying out floor plans. (As a point of reference, when I designed my house, I worked outward from having a double-shower AND an oversized bathtub in the same room. I cut the two bedrooms smaller to fit the decadence I needed.)

Because the ship should be a character. The Millennium Falcon is fast and breaks down a lot. The Tardis can go anywhere and sticks out a little. Space 1999 has the Eagles. Jessica has her various steeds. Pizzafarmer has his courier.

Does anybody know a good place to lay hands on “real” blueprints for submarines? Both Boomers and Hunters? Those are the best bet for what a starship would really look like, when you get down to it.

I’m not sure yet what Brannon’s new ship will be like, but I get to think about how the technology will impact on her storytelling. If she just returns home, will the authorities confiscate it? She’s in their military and was escaping from a battle in a badly mangled gunship when she crashed on this planet in the first place.

I have some ideas for her that will make her not wish to go home immediately, but that makes her something of a deserter as well. So now she has to make some hard choices. And the bosses will have to also decide what they want to do about this woman.

The ship will be the third main character, after Brannon and Hawny. Similarly after Wilson and Sparrowhawk in those stories.

What can and can’t you do, as a result of the ship you put your heroes in? How does that impact on the stories? USS Enterprise NCC-1701 could take on all sorts of monsters and enemy vessels, while either Battlestar Galactica was a Space Control Ship. And an Imperial Star Destroyer (or a Super like Executor) didn’t back down from any task, but chasing a YT-1300 through an asteroid field was a bad choice.

How much time do you spend on making your starships characters? How much better/richer/deeper/funner would your stories be?

What are the limits to your imagination?

Backstory: A friend reached out because he has a cousin who is a writer and who got offered a contract by a publisher and could I take a look at it? Sure.

I’ve been making a full-time living as a writer for several years now. Plus, I have a background in legal research, going way back. And have worked in the field in a variety of ways. Am not a lawyer, but I could lay hands on a few that owe me favors without much work if I really felt the need.

Didn’t need them here.

It was a shitshow of a contract. And had very obviously never been put in front of a competent lawyer, because of the amazing number of typos I found with just a basic read. Some of said typos even rendered the contract not only probably unenforceable, but accidentally gave the author rights the publisher intended to assign themselves. (Really bad typos, but I won’t put them out there, in case those idiots here about this and fix it.)

The payment schedule looked good on first blush, but when read closer, they copy/pasted eight lines without changing the wording, so they ended up having to pay at the much higherfourth  rate than they should start out at, because they can’t read.

But the best part was the rights grab. I read for those. These rat bastards broke it into several pieces and hid them pretty well, but as soon as I saw the first one, I started looking for the other parts. I’m a rat bastard that way.

First, the author was supposedly assigning copyright “in perpetuity.” Do I have anyone in the house that knows ANYTHING about copyright law?

Second, she assigns to them license to use the Author’s name, image, likeness, and biographical material for advertising, promotion, and other exploitation of the Work and the other rights granted under this Agreement [emph mine]

[note missing period at the end of the previous sentence also. No lawyer has read this document.]

Third, she assigns them “the sole right to develop sequels or prequels, new or additional titles in a series, or related works using any and all such elements, and [they] shall be free to commission or contract with any other person(s) for the preparation of such sequels, series, or related works.”

Read that again. They can hire someone else to write more books in her series without her permission.Or paying her. And still slap her name on the front because she licensed them all her personal information in the process.

———————

Right about now, a couple of you are screaming “They would never do that!” at the top of your shrill little lungs and probably stamping your widdle feet angrily because YOUR editor loves you.

Riddle me this, Batman: If they would never do it, why did they decide to include it in a contract they created? This wasn’t something they just downloaded off the internet, except that in this case, it looks like that was exactly what they did, because nobody involved over there understands one damned thing about how contracts work.

No, they assembled this contract paragraph by paragraph. (I can still see most of the welds.) I’m sure they promise you they would never do that, but why should they need that right?

On the payment side, the reversions clauses were pretty good. Good enough that I’d say okay if not for the rights grab side. Author can revoke if the company goes into bankruptcy or if monthly sales fall below a pretty high threshold for a first book by an unknown author.

Standard language in place for an audit at the author’s expense, once per year, except that I’m willing to bet good money that the first hint of an audit request would trigger the contract termination clauses by the publisher, just so they didn’t have to open their books to scrutiny by an accountant legally required to report fraud to the authorities of the scale I’m pretty sure they’ll engage in at some point when the money sags. (Have known more than one author who threatened an audit and got everything back in days. Along with an NDA.)

Professionally offended, but I understand that a lot of old school writer organizations think that is how it is done. And how it should be done. Newbies are thrown to the wolves, because being a “published author” is the be-all, end-all dream of so many people. Reminds me of kids getting off the bus in West Hollywood with a suitcase and a dream, at the moment when the pimp walks up.

I’d publish her under better conditions and a cleaner contract, and I have never met the woman, nor read her book.

Can some of you people at least read the contracts these shitty, junior varsity houses offer you before you sign them? There are a lot of them out there, so it’s not like you couldn’t find a better deal if you walked, but too many kids will accept a shit deal, get utterly screwed, and then give up on their dreams, never to write another book again.

You can help prevent this. In writing, there is a whisper network of “bad agents/bad publishers” but nobody wants to talk about it out loud. If you take some of the old farts aside and buy them a beer or wine, they’ll tell you things, but nobody will own it in the light of day.

Whisper network.

You know who these people that put out that contract really remind me of at the end of the day?

Harvey Weinstein.

What have you done to make the publishing world a better place?

at 8 am every morning, I have a little doohickey on my phone that chirps to tell me if there is a birthday today or tomorrow. That’s my alert to get my ass to writing if I got up at the usual time, but today I slept in a little. First Monday back to normal in a bit, as Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is well enough to go back to her house and kidnap a happy kitty.

It just chirped. Looked down to see who’s day it was, because the coffee has not kicked in yet.

Perry Clark. 4/13

Very few of you will have known the man, but he was one of my best friends in the world 15 years ago. Even after he had moved to Atlanta pursuing a job and a woman. At one point, I bought him an airplane ticket to fly back to Seattle for a week and handed him the keys to my truck. Saw him twice, but he and I talked regularly and he was catching up with all the friends he hadn’t seen or emailed in a couple of years.  But that’s another story.

I don’t talk much about 2008. In roughly March, Sean disappeared off the face of the earth. Just gone. Emails returned “box full.” Phone calls went unanswered. As far as I know, he either died, cut everyone off, or went into witness relocation. Gone.

That hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as what was coming. In July, my first wife Donna died of breast cancer. That’s also a story for another day.

Late February of 2009, just under a year after my horrible year started, I got a phone call.

Had left Perry a couple of voice mails, but he’d not returned them. With him, it could have been anything, because he had a weird life from time to time.

But the phone rang. Had it programmed on my phone, so saw his name pop up.

“Where the hell have you been this time?” I asked.

Long pause.

“Is this Blaze?”

Oh, shit. (sorry, long break for a good cry)

It was his sister on the phone, but I already knew, just from the tone of her voice.

He had been at Church on a Wednesday afternoon, cooking for the congregation down in Atlanta. The man had had many jobs, just cooking was the thing he loved more than all of them.

So he’d been there in the kitchen, generating love for everyone and talking to the pastor when he’d told her that he wasn’t feeling well, so she had him sit down.

His lips turned blue all of a sudden and he died right there in her arms before anyone could do anything.

Phones didn’t have lockscreens in those days, but they hadn’t been able to find his charger by the time they got over the emergency. It was dead and it took his sister going through his apartment to find the cord so she could power it up and call me (among several others.)

To this day, I keep his last picture on the refrigerator, where I can look up as I type this and smile at him smiling back at me.

It’s been eleven years, and I miss him, because today would have been his 58th birthday.