So about a week ago, I got back from a Master Publishing Workshop. Seven days of three sessions per day, high-end information about what used to work in publishing, what works today, and what might work tomorrow. Enough to make my brain melt. Took a whole week just to digest everything. And I have fifty pages of notes, and three pages of to-do list to get through yet.

One of the things I will need to do more of next year is more and more-targeted advertising. My sales have been good (better than I expected, actually, so thank you to everyone in the sound of my voice) so far this year, and have hopefully left me poised to step up a level over the next year. I dropped the fourth Jessica Keller novel (Goddess of War)  three weeks ago. At the same time, we dropped the price on Auberon to $0.99 (Hurry and tell your friends, the price of Auberon goes back up on November 1) in an effort to boost the whole series and get exposure to folks that only want to buy cheap books.

(Personally, once I get you to read book one, I’m pretty sure I can get you to read the rest. I can compete on story-telling with professionals, which has been a psychological breakthrough for me this year.)

So the month of October has been a success on that score. I look at Amazon, and all four of the Jessica novels are currently in the top 200 in the Hard SF category, and selling really well, day over day. Hopefully, I will have made enough new fans that I can sustain these sales through the winter. There will be a coffee table art book for Jessica, coming out early next year. Then book five, Flight of the Blackbird, in the late spring.

What’s coming next in our world? There will be a newsletter with more details and a prize, going out in a few days. But for those of you not on the newsletter list, a few hints and peeks as a teaser to go sign yourself up.

One of the topics that got my attention at the workshop was the growth of audio books. They are about to do what ebooks did a decade ago, namely explode. The process will be slower, mostly because a novel requires so much effort to read and edit, but this is a whole new revenue stream available.

For my part, I have found a woman to do Auberon as an audio book for me. She’s hard at work, but I have no idea when she’ll be done, since she has her own life (she just got back from Europe last night), and I want her to be happy enough with me to want to do all NINE Jessica Keller novels.

At the same time, I used to do training video things, as well as work on stage when I was a wee lad, so I am going to do some of my own audio work on a few projects. The initial expense is not that extreme: a recording device, some software, rearranging my office for audio tone, and time. (I have no plans to do my novels–leave those to the professionals.)

I think I have mentioned elsewhere that I have six volumes of poetry stashed in a hard drive. The Desert Ring, The Blacksmith’s Song, and The Forestal are only bits I have ever published widely, but I have lots more. My plan is to record small pieces (poems) to learn the new technology, and put them up on my website for free for people to enjoy. Later, I’ll assemble them into longer pieces and put them up for sale, as rings, as stories, and as volumes.

It is the future, and I can do anything I want.

One of the things I took home from the workshop is that the only limits to my career are my imagination.

My imagination?

Y’all are f@#$%^g doomed!

The goal is not to become a USA Today or New York Times bestselling author. That would be nice, but Kim Kardassian and Snooki both hold that title, so it’s not that impressive any more. And I have read books by people on how to game the system to do it.

What I want is the money. I want to grow up to be Bernie Taupin, the most famous person nobody knows. (Bonus cookie if you can identify him without looking the man up first, but that just proves my point.)

To do that, I am going to experiment in a variety of places, each of which will hopefully generate me a steady supply of nickels. I don’t want my career eggs to all be in one basket. Right now, most (nearly all) of my money comes from Amazon, and more specifically, space opera on Amazon. I am going to expand outside of that category. (Spoiler alert: WAY OUTSIDE.)

I don’t expect that all of you will come with me into new fields. That’s not why I’m doing this. I want to get more fans, from other genre, who might be willing to buy stuff in their one interest, without pressuring them to cross over. But if I put enough octopus tentacles into enough places, I will have a nice, stable platform of interest and revenue to get me to the place where I can afford to build myself a castle on an isolated bluff over a quiet lake, way the hell away from civilization. (Never dream too small – Dean Wesley Smith)

So what y’all could do to help me over the next year is tell your friends about me, especially if one of my new projects is something they would find interesting. Plus, let me know when you think something works really well, or fails. I succeed as a writer by producing stories and things that people like you find worth the money invested, to the point they want to spend more.

Nickels. Lots and lots of nickels, but nickels and not hundred-dollar bills. At least, not yet.

You are a much better judge of how I’m doing than I am. I plan to throwing wet spaghetti at a wall all year, and hope that enough of it sticks to move me forward. Nobody knows what the hell they are doing. I learned that much from the workshop, surrounded by pros who support themselves with their writing.

But we’ll get there.

Reminder: Newsletter coming out soon with entirely different details. Sign up today if you want lots of other stuff not available here.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Heya,

Goddess of War is set to drop electronically in a few hours. This is your chance to also own a physical copy. For the next several days, there is a Goodreads Giveaway going here.

My way of thanking everyone for the support over the last few years. I really could not have done this without you folks.

And remember to tell your friends and pass the word down the grapevine. For all of October, Auberon (Jessica Keller, Book 1) is on sale as an ebook for $0.99, everywhere (Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, B&N, Draft2Digital, etc.). This is a good chance to catch up, or get your BFF hooked on the series, especially as I’m about a third of the way into Book 5: Flight of the Blackbird.

Cheers,

bd

So, as many of you know, I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I’ve had words (and that’s a long time at this point, but I digress). Recently, I was chatting with a friend of mine who teaches Theatre at a mid-western university. She mentioned that the school has been on her butt to do more small plays, because they have the space for it, but if they don’t use it, someone else might encroach on it and they might end up losing it.

I’ve known her for twenty years at this point, and she knows that I’ve written all sorts of stuff. So I mentioned that I had a bunch of old one-act plays I wrote a while back, sitting on my NAS awaiting entropy. (Or the heat-death of the universe, one of the two.)

Backstory: I was in Philadelphia, working on selling a new customer some software, back in 2005. I had been doing 3D graphic art with Poser and other softwares, but I didn’t have the skill to take the visions in my head and put them on paper. Patience, yes, but the tools were just not sophisticated enough for what I wanted to do, and the tools that were, were beyond my meager capabilities.

So I’m in PA on a sales call, and had a realization that there was a tool I could use to get those ideas out of my head. It was cheap, infinitely flexible, and I had a much greater mastery of it than I did Poser.

So I started writing again. It had been a while. I went most of the stretch ’85-’97 writing poetry. Some of it is even out there for sale and consumption, but there are about six volumes of stuff that has never seen the light of day. Might never. Don’t know.

Then I got my artistic fill by painting miniatures and designing RPG engines that my group played. Again, mostly never seen the light of day, but that’s because I would have to rewrite everything from scratch to eliminate all claim to IP from the asshole who was my partner for a few years, before he bailed on me and left me holding the bag.

After that, Poser and 3D art that was good enough to actually win me a few ribbons at The Puyallup Art Show. (And that’s serious art, people.)

But it wasn’t enough.

Went back to writing.

This time, I started writing plays. Don’t ask me why. Never had before. Partly, the result of knowing my friend and listening to her comments. Partly, looking for a new challenge. Whatever. It worked for me, for a while.

This was about the time my first wife was diagnosed with Stage Four Breast Cancer. Nothing they could do. Doctor gave her six months to live, back in summer of 2005. (She wasn’t done, so she held on for three years, but that’s another story I might tell someday. And I might not.)

She was still working, following an initial surgery to put a rod in her leg, and then radiation, but nothing worked. The Chemo was at best going to keep everything at bay, but would eventually be what killed her when it stopped working from tolerance issues.

Since I had an office job, and she was in retail, there were several nights in any given week when I would come home to an empty house. I used to paint miniatures on those nights. At that point, I started hanging out at a bar down at the bottom of the hill where they got to know me. They would let me sit at the bar, order food, and then write (longhand, mind you) for an hour or so. Turned out several cute, short, one-act plays of fairly poor quality (didn’t know what I was doing, but the dialogue was still pretty good). Mostly, just filling space in my artistic needs.

Later, I would learn writing screenplays with another guy, and never went back to the stage plays. Then I met the second wife and she got me back into writing, but fiction this time, with the understanding that I could publish stuff instead of having to deal with gatekeepers in Manhattan.

So I’m talking to my Midwest friend (the one who teaches Theatre) the other day. On a lark, dug up a half-dozen or so old plays and sent them to her to see if there was anything worth improving. God only knows, there might be. Dunno. Not an expert on Theater. Leave that to her.

But then I had a realization. “Because it is the future, and I can…” was the subject line of the email I sent her.

I can bundle all those short one-act plays up and publish them.

Her response was that normally a play had to be staged at least three times before they would publish it, but then she realized that I’m my own publisher (technically, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) has a publishing house, and I have a separate one that will start putting stuff out in 2017, good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.)

So I spent today committing techno-archaeology. Dug up a bunch of pieces and read through them for a light editing pass. According to my notes, most were last touched in early 2009. In the modern fiction business, we call those Trunk Stories. You have them, you like them, but you have to throw them in the trunk because you can’t sell them anywhere. Maybe too long, too short, wrong subject matter. Maybe they aren’t that good. Or not what New York TradPub wants.

Doesn’t matter. I can publish those plays. I can share with the world where my head was at in 2008-2010. It makes fascinating reading.

So then we went looking on the Amazons for how stage plays are published today. I have a shelf of old Samuel French booklets. Dull, boring covers with text and either no art or something vague.

Not any more.

One of my favorite plays is “The Lion In Winter.” It was interesting to see the covers that various people had put on it. The best was probably the two teenage kids, artistically nude, clenched, with her back to the camera and nothing showing.

I mean, come on, this is sixty-year-old Henry 2 and seventy-year-old Eleanor. But no, we get a couple that looks better suited to a cover of Romeo and Juliet (and no, don’t get me started on THOSE covers, thank you very much).

So guess what? I’m going to figure out how to bundle them up, and put them out there. Four Cisco plays (so far, might write more. Like that boy). Couple of monologues. Few other talking heads kind of pieces where I was (unconsciously, because I didn’t know any better) working on my dialogue as a craft. The conversations still hold up nicely, IMHO.

It goes back to the bakery. I have Science Fiction in a variety of flavors. There’s fantasy to consume. Got some poetry for folks. And now, I’ll add Theater.

It also inspires me to either write more Cisco plays as an ongoing thing, or turn him into a genre hard-boiled punk kind of character. Probably both. It’s more fun to just let dialogue rip, and not have to deal with inner thoughts, because many of these characters work better as ciphers.

If you get inside their heads, you lose something. I always prefer my writing to keep some element of burlesque to it, making you work to fill in some of the gaps with your own damned imagination instead of me having to spell it all out.

So watch this space for more news. Right now, trying to decide if I should drop them individually, or as a bundle. The plays all run about 30-35 pages, so maybe 40 minutes if staged. They are all discrete, but series (Gosh, me? write a series character, even then?) The monologues, while shorter, are also much denser. Probably 20-25 minutes if staged.

Opinions?

99c each for a bunch, or $4.99 for a whole block together? I prefer the latter, but that’s because I make more money at $2.99-$9.99 than I do above or below. Let me know your thoughts?

shade and sweet water,

BD

West of the Mountains, WA

but aren’t we all?  😉

Extreme Sci Fi bundle runs out in a few days. After that, you’ll never have the chance to get this collection of writers together in one place again. (Well, maybe Kris and Dean and Kevin J, but they play in a much bigger league than I normally get to.  Hopefully, all this work will impress them enough I get to do this again.)

Fairchild, my novel in the bundle, was something I had wanted to try for a while. Hard Science Fiction with a real sciencie bent to to it. I have no idea how those people travel between the stars. It’s not relevant to this story. Maybe later I’ll figure it out. What I wanted to cover was a place where this girl is using physics and math and motion in her everyday life, intentionally solving problems without resorting to the sorts of hand-waving, techno-babble that always drives me crazy in (bad) SF.

I get Chekov’s Gun. If you are going to use it in Act 3, it damned well better be on the mantle in Act 1, and discussed by the characters. Too often, I feel that SF forgets to set up the toy that’s going to save the day later. It just becomes a McGuffin to be pulled out of their…pocket at the last moment, that just happens to save the day.

Deux ex Machina, if you will.

For Dani, the suit is her way to sticking it to the man. Of sticking out. Everyone else either wears a normal flight suit with everything built in, or relies on the ejection seat to have everything packed correctly in an emergency.

She sees the suit as an extension of her own self. And counts on it and her own training to get her through any situation. It doesn’t help that she’s a little crazy, but that’s why she has Eleanor to keep her on the beam.

She can play these games, this Extreme Science Fiction Athlete, because she isn’t normal (and boring). She can fly by free-gliding on winds and thermals. It is part of who she is. She can jump down an inclined cylinder of air and play a racing game of pistons (a sport she will invent when she gets back). She can pretend to be the mutant offspring of an anglerfish and a shark and scare the hell out of Chike.

The tech exists, and isn’t that much beyond what we can do today, so I have no doubt that it will be available on Amazon.earth one of these days for you to order when you get home.

At the same time, I didn’t want to get too wrapped up in the tech and extreme, and lose sight of the people at the heart of the story. Because this one is about people.

Every story I write is generally baked into a much larger universe before I commit words. That is my planning technique, personally. World-building on a grand scale, with lots of notes and prep. I grew up reading comic books, so I tend to write stories that are part of a much longer, much larger thread. I’m not going to spoil the surprise and drop any useful details, but I already have a second and possibly third novel in mind for her. (We’ll see after I finish the next Jessica Keller novel.)

The other thing I wanted to do was do science fiction scientists. And not the exotic kind you see on television, where they have access to all data ever recorded at their fingertips, and the bleedingest edge of technology handy. Or turn into modern tomb raiding thieves.

Real science.

The boring stuff, where you go out in the field, in the rain and cold and hot, to put out sensors, or look at rocks, or measure weather patterns. Slow, laborious grunt work that the PhD’s will pawn off on the grad students, who will in turn make the freshmen do the actual labor.

You don’t ever make a grand discovery in a 42 minute episode, especially if you have to fight off monsters, murders, or plague along the way. You spend years in the field, publishing tons of obscure and arcane studies of no interest to anyone outside your field (and your tenure board).

Excitement is when something goes wrong, and the characters have to fall back on their plans to fix it. It gets more fun when we consider the aliens in Fairchild’s universe: the Elder Race.

Total mystery, to even prove that they existed in the first place, except by extrapolation of probability physics. Proving, as it were, that the dog didn’t bark.

Spoiler alert: They aren’t going to just land one day and introduce themselves. I’m not sure what happened to them, but it was slow, rather than fast, and deliberate, rather than accidental. Like good stewards of the universe, they took the time to leave nature better than they found it.

So now, you have to add xeno-archaeology to the mix of hard science one must pursue. Digging in the soil for artificially-made artifacts, and not just weirdly-shaped rocks. The adventure happens around the characters, because of them, if you will.

So like I said, you only have a few days left until the bundle goes away forever and you’re back to paying full price for everything.

On a vaguely related note, there is about a week left to pre-order Goddess of War before it goes live on Oct 11. This is the fourth Jessica Keller novel. I’m about a quarter into book five now: Flight of the Blackbird, and busily plotting out books 6 & 7. TBD

And, I’ve been off-line for a long weekend, but I got a small greenhouse built. Now I don’t have to bring the citrus inside for the winter, with all the bugs that come along. Got a Meyer Lemon, Bear Lime, and two blood orange trees in pots. Now they have a lovely, little 8′ x 4′ home with plexiglass walls on two sides and roof, and it gets warm in there. Plus, I ran a gutter across the front, and plumbed it to irrigation drip lines to individually feed each pot.

Hopefully, I can largely ignore them all winter and they won’t die on me. When Global Warming gets far enough along, I plan to plant them with south-facing sun and let them just survive, but I have to build a much larger, permanent structure, in-ground green house to do that.

Copious spare time. We’ll get there.

As always, I look forward to your comments, thoughts, ideas, and dirty jokes.

shade and sweet water

BD

West of the Mountains, WA

It’s finally Fall around here.  Harvested all the grapes and pressed them. (Got about a quart of juice all told, because none of the vines are fully mature yet. Probably two years for everything.) Got all the apples and most of the pears. Will harvest the last few boscs this week. Getting ready to bring the citrus trees indoors for the winter.

It is the time of year when things slow down. But I need you folks to speed things up a little for me.

Right now, we’re in the mushy middle doldrums on the Story Bundle: Extreme SciFi. It has sold fantastically well, but the line has flattened out. Thank you to everyone who got out there and bought it early. (Some nice reviews of Fairchild in places like Amazon would be good, too, ya know.)

Right now, I’m talking to those other folks. Those of you who saw it and said to yourself that you’d get around to getting it. Now would be a good time. We’ll be starting down the ramp to the end in a few days, and then the bundle will be gone forever and you’ll have to pay full price for the books if you want to get them individually. You should get yourself an early Halloween present and buy the whole bundle.

The other thing you could do would be forward the link to all your friends with a good note. If you’ve liked my stuff up until now, those are the sorts of actions that get me closer to that day when I don’t have to get up and go to work in the morning. Seriously, every little bit helps. There is a very specific number of books I need to sell on a daily average. We’re nowhere close today, but getting closer. When that day happens, I expect my productivity to double pretty quickly, which means more things to entertain you with. (Because God knows, I’ll be dead at my keyboard long before I run out of stories to tell.)

So let everyone know they should go buy the bundle and read Fairchild. And help a whole slew of writers all get closer to that day as well.

In other news, a reminder: Goddess of War is up for pre-order everywhere. As many of you will remember, I did an offer with my most recent newsletter that everyone who responded would be put into a drawing. (You are on my newsletter list, right?). I reached out to the winner on Friday with the ebook package, so by now, it is possible that a fourth person has read Goddess, behind me, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm), and Nerdy Editor Babe(tm).

The e-book will go live on Oct 11. Interestingly, the paper book is already live for real-time order on at least Amazon, if you can’t wait two weeks.

Meanwhile, I’m hard into the fifth Jessica novel now: Flight of the Blackbird.

Goddess of War was the longest thing I’ve written so far at 110,000 words, plus a few. (Auberon was 75k. Queen 95k, Immortals 88k). Blackbird feels like it will be at least that long, maybe longer.

To me, all the practice this year seems to have added detail and depth to the writing. The story is still there, but I’m trying to add setting with a trowel as I go. Places where I used one sentence before are getting a short paragraph. Minor characters are all getting at least one memorable line as they go. It makes for more words, and hopefully better ones. You’ll have to be the judge. Book should be out late spring 2017, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Not much more to say than that. I’ve been political on my other feeds and don’t feel the need to hammer on some of those points here.

I am who I am. I won’t convince people to change the way they think, except by example and Socratic method. And many of those folks I would talk to are too wrapped up in themselves to even consider how they appear to the rest of humanity. Because Blaze Ward is an overtly public figure, I think about how I want to be thought of. Or rather, which sets of people I want the good opinion of.

This year has been rough on everyone. I try not to alienate fans. God knows there are a few writers who will never get another penny from me, based solely on their viciously-bad political views, but that’s my choice. I have reached a point where I don’t want to talk politics with you. Or religion. Or much of anything else.

Instead, I’ll stick to Moirrey’s two favorite topics: glitter and unicorns.

Because, you know, unicorns.

shade and sweet water

BD

West of the Mountains, WA

With every writing project, long or short, I try to explore some new facet of my craft. That might be wall paper, it might be Voice, it might be a new Theme. With the most recent novel, Fairchild, I was pushing the envelope on what we might call truly Hard Science Fiction.

It is a new novel, in a new universe, one I spun up for a story bundle in which I got invited to participate. (see earlier blogs for more details about the timing and stuff.) The theme of the bundle was Extreme Sports SF.

For me, that meant Dani as an extreme athlete, doing the sorts of crazy stunts that rush junkies do to skirt the edge of death. Things like surfing 30 meter tall waves, or Class Stupid whitewater, or running marathons on Earth’s moon, or BASE jumping.

Things where mistakes mean death, not just embarrassment.

In this particular story, she’s flying a shuttle while also wearing her free-glider, a body suit with a built-in low-grade life-support system and flying squirrel membranes. She’s got air, heating/cooling, and electronics, and expects to be able to live in the suit for days at a time. Her own portable spaceship, if you will. Useful, when your shuttle suddenly dies mid-flight, at low elevation, in the middle of an electrical sand storm.

The situation got me to thinking about long-use space suits. Science Fiction tends to kind of skip over all the bio-break bits. You might see a character eat, if it advances the story, because lots of good things happen between people over food or booze. However, you almost never encounter the rest. (Exception: the gratuitous shower scene in many 80’s and 90’s SF movies, just so the hot, female lead could be seen topless, but I digress.)

At Worldcon this year (after I had delivered Fairchild, mind you), there was a panel on such things, and they listed all the sorts of bio-break things fantasy and SF hand-wave away. And suggested some interesting themes and scenes where you could incorporate them in your next story.

Here’s a thought experiment on personal waste elimination: Tomorrow, keep a running score of all the times you go to the bathroom, from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep. More than you thought, huh?

Now, imagine you spent that entire time in a body suit. You’d have to be “plugged” into at least two different systems to process everything, and those systems would be radically different for boys and girls, due to the nature of the plumbing in front. (We’ll presume the rear system can be generic, for now.) The processing will be the same, but the attachment mechanism would have to be different, and pretty customized for the wearer. And we’re not even talking about the skin layer that absorbs sweat.

Now, let’s go one extra step. Because I could, I wanted to explore a woman having to deal with all the usual crap, plus that time of the month. (This topic required interviewing Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) extensively for timelines and stuff. Hopefully I got it right. I am assuming that since both First Readers are females, they would have corrected me if I didn’t.)

One could presume that in a distant future, there would be a shot a woman could get, or an implant, or something, that would completely suppress her monthly cycle. We’re on the verge of it right now, and every female I’ve asked would be all over it, right up until the point they were ready to start a family. And this is not just a birth-control device, but a “I don’t have to bleed messily for days every month? Sign me up!!!” device.

Sign them all up.

But, as with all things medical, there will be some people for whom it does not work. Most, but not all. Dani is one of the unfortunates. She still has to have a period every month.

How utterly barbaric…

Now, couple that with a life-support body suit. One intended for hostile environments, or outer space. You can’t just take it off, when you reach the point where the egg passes and the uterine lining gets ready to follow it. No, you would have to have a system for handing it.

We discussed a number of options, she and I, from vacuuming, to bidet, to whatever. As the resident expert, she figured that a simple cotton-based tampon would probably be the most effective, most elegant, simplest mechanism for dealing with the mess. But you’re in a sealed environment.

Solution: The Harpoon Gun, as Dani likes to think of it.

You need to add a very small, specialized, air lock-type device to the groin area of the female body suit. The Harpoon Gun gets loaded like a crossbow (or a springbolt, in this particular instance), and locked into the airlock. Normally, I would expect this would be done by the female while lying down on her back, but I’m not trying to design it for the engineers here.

Activation would entail deploying the tampon through the inner airlock, and positioning it correctly internally, while maintain the cord back out through the air seal for manual extraction at a later time. Thus: harpoon gun.

I’m sure it will have a much more boring title, and a variety of trade names, when we get to that point, but Dani’s kind of a goof, and she’s under a tremendous amount of stress, and wondering if she’s going to die on this planet. And she’s got to contemplate using the harpoon gun in the field, which just fills her with unmitigated joy (sarcasm warning).

So when was the last time you encountered the messy, biological bits of your daily life in fiction? When was the last time the bad-ass chick in plate mail had to strip nearly bare in order to deal with a similar situation? When was the last time you included even a thought along those lines? I try to, because it makes my characters more alive for me, making them more human.

For example: Jessica Keller, considering getting more coffee, but realizing that at this point in the day, it will just make her have to go pee, and she’s not in the mood to get up and deal with people or the world.

We are all human (well, you understand). We pee, we eat, we poop. There will be farts in deep space. The gratuitous sex scene in zero-gravity will require an effort to clean up the mess. (And probably a variety of interesting tools.)

We edit out these sorts of things, not (just) because they interrupt the flow of the chase (presumably), but because Americans have a tendency to be extremely squeamish about all things biological or sex-related. You can mow down hookers in your car, or shoot people by the score, but you show one boob and the world might end. And the suggestion that a character might actually pee seems almost pornographic to some people.

Whatever.

Science Fiction is an exploration of what might be, given a set of assumptions about the way the world will change between Point A and Point B. Worlds and cultures change. You can make it more real for your readers if they get to experience the full range of emotions with your characters, and not just the near-failures at the end of Act One and Act Two, nor the climatic final battle. All the little things in the middle.

Extreme Sports athletes still need to fart, you know. Keep that in mind.

On other note, before I forget again: The fourth Jessica Keller novel, Goddess of War, is now available for pre-order on all the usual places. Delivery date is October 11, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. And I’m already well into book five: Flight of the Blackbird, which will come out sometime in the late spring, I think.

As always, lemme know your thoughts on things. I enjoy the conversation, and usually learn things.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

And if not, why not?

Let’s fix that.

Starting today and running for the next three weeks, I’m in a StoryBundle called “Extreme SF.”

We talked about the project previously, and how it kinda snuck up on me over the summer. Here was a chance to be in a bundle with some some folks I really like and admire, and who I had a bunch of their books on my shelves from before I became a writer myself.

And for me, it was the chance to do something totally new. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I sat down on that Sunday and said: what story could I tell?

I knew I could hit theme and length in the time I had allotted. And I know I can tell a good story. But could I entertain you?

And this was all about extreme sports in the science fiction future. How do I go there?

In the end, none of my current series did the trick. Javier Aritza would have been closest, but those are all going to be shorter. Novellas (personal decision until at least such time as I need to tell the end of series one, in which case I might double up and stretch the story over two episodes with a cliff-hanger between them).

So Dani Cooper was born. When we first meet her, she’s a rush-junkie woman-child who has never really bothered to grow up. And then she gets in over her head, and has to use all her skills, all that time practicing her games, all the finesse she can muster, just to survive, while her own people, back at base, are desperately trying to save her on an alien world that has just gotten more dangerous than anyone ever dreamed.

To top it off, I wanted to try something new. Every project, I try to explore some new facet of craft, be it a theme, a story-telling technique, or a voice. Dani was going to be even more interesting, because literature (and especially SF) tend to ignore all that icky body stuff. When was the last time you read a book where a woman had to deal with her period. And I don’t mean a story that centers around it, but one where, oh, by the way, pardon me for ten minutes while I run off to the bathroom. I’m starting to bleed. Be right back. And then we can go save the universe.

The fun for me, when writing this story, was trying to get all those details right on what goes through a woman’s head on that particular day each month when the neuro-chemistry goes sideways for 12-24 hours and shit can get dark and oppressive in there. Those made for interesting conversations, interviewing the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and walking slowly through the process, the feelings, the changes. My notes are weird.

Because Dani is a flawed person. Broken, in many ways. And she knows it, fights against it, tries to overcome it. Here, she’s up against the wall, and that little bitch in the back of her head keeps whispering darkness, reminding her that there’s always an easy way out.

All it takes is a few kilos of pressure on that trigger. And all that darkness can go away.

—-****SPOILER ALERT****—-

She finds a way to survive. I won’t tell you the interesting bits, but it sets her up for a series of new novels that explore some seriously Hard Science themes and motifs, rather than some of the silly, popcorn space opera I normally write with Jessica and Javier. And this is space exploration with a bunch of academics. Nerds instead of lantern-jawed herostuds and their buxom, alien princesses needing to be rescued from their virginity before its too late.  😉

——————————————-

So, StoryBundle. Down at the bottom of the page is the relevant information, for those of you who have never done this sort of thing before (and need to be rescued from their own virginity). You pick the price you want to pay. For a base price, you get the first five novels: Dean, ML, Kevin J., Dan, and JR. For a higher price, you also get me and several others: Kris, Mike, more Dan, and an issue of the fantastic Fiction River series: Risk Takers. You can pick how much of the money goes to us, and how much helps Jason keep the lights on at StoryBundle. And you can even allocate some of your money to charity.  What’s not to love?

Personal Note (and where I get to blush some this morning)

Here’s what the curator of the bundle had to say:

When you need fast-paced hard science fiction adventure, Blaze Ward is your man. This might be why I have yet to read one of his tales that I didn’t immediately love. Blaze’s fast, no-nonsense voice effortlessly marries the best of Golden Age SF with the characterizations that modern audiences demand. When I asked him to come into the bundle, he didn’t just say yes, he used the theme to hand-craft a brand new adventure with a kick-ass lead heroine. Trust me—you don’t want to miss this one. – J. Daniel Sawyer

So go buy the bundle, and tell all your friends. (And tell them I sent you. I’d like to be invited to more bundles in the future.)

You have three weeks from today to get the job done, and then this bundle goes away forever, and you have to pay full price for everything.

Questions?

(Mind rant warning)

A question came up the other day, in regards to the post I did from WorldCon where I watched the dipwad from NY Publishing talk about Amazon and Indie publishing in the vein of being a “vanity press.”

He didn’t get it. Many folks wedded to the idea of New York Publishing™ don’t get it. But a significant part of their problem lies with what I frequently see as two different definitions of success: Money and Fame.

As a rule, prestigious journals (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Alfred Hitchcock, Strange Horizons, etc.) pay six cents per word. Figure a story that runs five thousand words published, and you are making three hundred dollars US. That’s it. And six cents per word is a fairly recent increase, roughly 2014. Before that, the rate went from three cents to five cents in around 2004.

There is upward pressure to increase that number, but it is still not keeping pace with inflation. Not by a long shot.

Warning: Math Nerd Ahead

If you look at the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in January 1946, it sat at a rate of 18.2. In January 1966, it stood at 31.8, so not quite a doubling of overall prices for consumer good in the course of twenty years. The 70’s saw a huge burst of inflation, for those of us old enough to remember it, or the stories. In January 1976, the rate had doubled in ten years, up to 55.6. In 1986, we’re at 109.6, so another rough doubling of consumer prices in a decade. In 1996, 154.4, so inflation has cooled some, but still going like hell. In 2006, the rate stands at 198.3. This last year, January 2016, the rate was at 236.9.

Math Nerd over

What does this mean? It means that in the old days, at a penny per word, you could make a nice, middle-class living, by churning out 3-6 short stories per week and keeping them all out at the various magazines (and there were a whole bunch more magazines paying professional rates in those days). Lester Dent did it quite successfully. So did a number of other writers. The problem is, there are fewer magazines out there these days paying standard rates. And more writers with the skill and craft to compete.

One of the reason behinds there being fewer magazines is the explosive growth of the Indie Press over the last ten to fifteen years, driven in large part by the success of Amazon and the creation of a standard, easy-to-use marketplace, both for readers and for writers.

In the old days, Traditional Publishing saw itself as a gatekeeper of quality. If a story was going to be published, it had to meet certain standards (and occasionally also bizarre themes), set by the editor. Those standards relaxed as you went down the ladder of prestige and importance, but there were still many more stories written than ever got published.

(We call the leftovers “trunk stories” indicating that you tossed them in a trunk and forgot about them. If you got famous, maybe the publisher put out a collection of your short stuff that was otherwise too “something.”)

So that’s what we’ll today call Small Press Publishing.

These are periodicals and publishers still wedded to the way things have been done for the last century. Writers submit a story. Editors judge them and keep the ones that best fit. (Not the best stories, mind you, but the ones that hit a set of monthly themes best, as determined by the editor.)

Writers get paid up front at the going, professional rate, or some lesser number indicating their willingness to take less money at a lesser magazine, in trade for the publicity of being published. Of “being someone,” as it were.

That is the path of prestige, such as it is. If you publish a story, as we covered above, maybe you get a check for $300US.

How many of those would you need, monthly, to cover all your needs? How many stories would you have to write for every one that actually made the cut and earned you money?

I’m guessing the numbers don’t add up for you, either.

On the other side of the coin, you have Indie Press publishing.

The only filters on Indie Press today are those limits imposed by ebook reader devices, which require a fairly sophisticated, technical format. One that is easy to hit, once you have learned the nuances.

I can put out any novel, novella, or short story I write. Any length. Any theme. Any idea, as long as I’m willing to sign my name to it and have you judge it.

I have First Readers and copy editors that I pay to make sure the quality of the story and the coherence of the words is better than it first comes out of my mind, but they are not in a position to say “you aren’t allowed to publish this, it is the wrong (length, theme, gender, genre, socio-economic thesis, etc.).”

If I want to write stories about a pre-cognitive ant nest exploring outer space, that’s my prerogative (Hive 3 will be going off to the New Yorker for standard rejection in a month or so).

I just got a “complaint” from reader yesterday that she loved Queen of the Pirates, but (SPOLIER ALERT) was pissed at me that I killed Warlock. She understood why, and loved the story, but wanted Jessica to have a better ending. I could end it the way I wanted, because I don’t have an editor telling me the story I have to write, if I want it to be published.

The fourth Jessica, Goddess of War, is, in many ways, radically different from the first three. I can do that. I just started the fifth one this last Saturday, Flight of the Blackbird. It will be even more different. I can do that, too.

I get to tell my story.

Why?

In many ways, the modern writer frequently has a rather stark choice to make. They can pursue the prestige of being published in a major magazine. They can hone their craft over years of occasional short fiction publication, until they feel they can undertake writing a novel. Then they must find an agent, and either write the novel, or build a proposal package sufficient to entice a publisher. That’s the traditional way. Tried and true. Old School.

With luck, they get a novel deal.

With even greater luck, theirs is one of the handful of novels that actually breaks out every year, and they get offered better novel deals and riches. A generation ago, you might be able to have several novels published as you honed your craft and found your audience. Today, you pretty much have to make your sales numbers out of the gate (and I mean in the first month), or you’re cut loose.

On the Indie side: I put out collections of short stories on Amazon, Kobo, B&N, etc., because we didn’t know any better. I would tell someone starting out today to just put up everything they have individually, and keep putting up short fiction as fast as they can. People who could save money buying the collection still go get the individual stories instead. (No, I don’t know.)

After twenty or so short pieces, I stretched and wrote a novella (24,000 words instead of 6,000, when my previous longest story had been about 16,000). And I can publish a novella, and people will buy it, as long as I price it right and look like a professional. After several novellas, Fabulous Publisher Babe™ told me I should try writing novels.

It is an interesting facet of writer psychology. There appears to be a distinct social hierarchy, as I have watched TradPub writers interact. If you are a novelist, you rank higher than a “mere short story writer” and I have watched them circle each other like wary hounds, sniffing at that difference. (Think sharks looking for weakness.)

The definition of novel, per SFFWA (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the main organization), is 40,000 words. That’s not really that much more than the 24,000 I had done several times previously, so I set out to write a long novella, by making sure I crossed 40,000 before I ran out of words.

I managed. And learned how to tell a longer story coherently.

After that, I did the first three Jessica novels back to back to back. (70k/90k/85k). It is a muscle you develop. My sixth novel is coming out in a little more than a week. Number Seven comes out in mid-October.

Where does that leave us? (aka tl;dr)

If I wanted to pursue Traditional Publishing, I would have to spend a great deal more time chasing leads, researching editor tastes, and keeping a number of short stories (3,000-6,000 words only) in the mail. As each got rejected, send it on to somewhere else. And it would be very hard to do, because you and I are competing for magazine space with a whole bunch more people that we did twenty years ago, to say nothing of fifty.

(That, by the way, is time I’m spending not honing my craft by writing.)

I might have even had some success. I think I’m a good enough technical storyteller by now to compete in short fiction, if I had focused on it. I know several people who do make livings these days playing the short game, but most of them are sending things out for the magazines a few times, and then just putting it up for sale on Amazon or their web site. For them, the occasional magazine title puts them in front of a wider audience and helps with discoverability. But then tend to make their money on their own fan base and cross-pollinating with bundles and anthologies.

If I had gone down the TradPub path, I would not have been in a position to be publishing my seventh novel, and starting on my eighth. Period. I don’t make enough money each year to be able to support myself entirely on my writing. I don’t expect to.

Yet.

There is a theory I have heard that somewhere around ten to fifteen novels not only in the same genre, but the same sub-genre, you hit a breakthrough in terms of reaching a new monthly plateau of sales, fans, and exposure. I’m not there yet. I’m not close. Jessica will be nine novels plus associated tales. Kai Di is a trilogy I still have to write two-third of. Fairchild will be a whole new series, but I will need at least three there as well to call it that.

I’m three to five years away, I think. Six of the nine Jessicas. All of Kai Di. Several Fairchilds. Some others.

But I can see it in the distance.

I will probably never be up for consideration for a Hugo, or a Nebula, or any of the major awards. Those currently tend to go to Traditionally Published authors. Folks who pursued prestige.

To date, I do not have a single “professionally-qualifying” publication to my name, since the few places I have put stuff out other than Knotted Road Press do not count to make my bones with SFWA. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I joke that one of these days, I’ll accidentally start my Campbell Award clock timer with something I send off, because “what’s the worst thing the New Yorker could do? Publish me?”

There is simply a major divide in the world these days, between those seeking prestige, and those seeking money. In the old days, you might be able to get rich if you turned out to be another Stephen King, or some brilliant writer like that. Today, there is less and less chance you will be the one who turns out to be JK Rowling or Suzanne Collins.

On the other side of the divide, I made good money last year. I will make good money this year. Not enough, but a stable starting point that helps me grind down the debts from building the farm, and get my monthly needs down to a point where I might make enough, one of these days.

Hell, SFWA even changed their membership rules over the last few years, to recognize that there were a whole bunch of people making a living without ever going through New York, and thus, not qualifying for inclusion. I would qualify easily, if I wanted to produce my sales figures from the last few years for them to review.

In another few years, I might even consider it, but only after some of the old dinosaurs who look down their nose at me finally die off. The ones who think doing Indie via Amazon and Kobo amounts to vanity press. The ones who make a small fraction of my annual writing income, and from whom the smell of sour grapes frequently wafts (or moldy paper, hard to tell).

As TradPub faces an ongoing existential crisis (see previous blogs about the 6,000 people who went to WorldCon versus the 165,000 at San Diego Comic Con), very few people are making the leap successfully. Wordfire Press (run by Kevin J. Anderson) is one. Kevin has seen the future, understood it, and adjusted. He’s acting like an Indie Press rather than trying to emulate the old model. And he is a big enough name that he might convince people. Those of us on the Indie side will continue to experiment with what works and what doesn’t, and adjust.

I want to have a career as a writer, and not just a one-and-done novel shot followed by barely making coffee money every month. If I have to be a complete unknown in Manhattan, that’s even better, as long as you people tell your friends, and I can keep making money.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

this is only a test. Had this been a real blog post, I would have put something useful here, instead of a filler message while I try to figure out why my posts have stop feeding to facebook.

If you see this on FB, you should take it as a sign that you’ve missed a bunch more over on bw.com.

🙂

Met up  yesterday with a group we call the “Bellevue (WA) Writer’s Lunch” to talk business. It’s a monthly thing we do (if interested in joining us sometime, lemme know, we’re not actually meeting in Bellevue these days) where a group of us get together and talk about the business of writing, rather than the craft. We’re all writers with years of experience in Indie Press, so we chat about what’s working, marketing trends, whether a cover works, etc. Mostly, it is an excuse to hang out with other writers and learn from them.  And it is well worth the time do to so.

One of the guys suggested that the optimum length for a genre fiction series was five books. I found this fascinating, because historically, a trilogy is the measure of a series, following the classic Three Act model of story-telling. So we made him explain himself in better details.

(CAVEAT: He writes generally horror, so I don’t know if the rules apply elsewhere, but here goes:)

From a marketing standpoint in Indie Press, where you don’t have a TradPub(tm) marketing department or budget behind you, he puts book one up as perma-free. (That is, free everywhere you can, and I think you can only go to $0.99 on Amazon, but I might be wrong.)

This is a teaser (the first hit is always free) designed to get your words in front of a reader and let them judge you as a writer. The second book he will also send you for free as an ebook, in trade for you joining his mailing list. This helps him build up a larger audience, hopefully of people that like his books and will pay for the rest. Books three through five will be up at the “regular” price and that’s where the money comes from.

His logic is that you basically end up not making any money on the first two books, and then recoup it later in the last three. We don’t talk money at these lunches, so I don’t know how successful he had been with this process. Hopefully, it works for him.

For me, I’m at an earlier point in my career as an Indie writer. My sixth (Fairchild) and seventh (Goddess of War) novels are coming out over the next six weeks. Fairchild is the first of what will be a new series of much-harder science-fiction novels. Goddess of War is the fourth Jessica Keller novel of what I plan to be nine core books and various associated ones. (Associated, because there will be some more like Siren and tied directly into the Jessica storyline, as opposed to stories in the same universe (Javier, Doyle, Henri, etc.))

As soon as I finish a small project for an anthology that will come out next summer, I’ll start working on the next Jessica novel, which will be the fifth (Flight of the Blackbird) and will come out sometime next spring, if all goes well. At some point, I expect Fabulous Publisher Babe(TM) to drop the price of Auberon , maybe all the way to nothing. I don’t know, because that’s her decision. It is her publishing company.

At that point, my series will look like this

Jessica: 4

Javier: 3

Doyle: 3

Additionally, the following are novels set up for series, but I haven’t written book twos yet:

Kai Di Peng

Rick Pine

Fairchild

After the fifth Jessica, I have several other projects planned. Certainly the fourth Javier. And either the next Kai Di or the next Fairchild, depending on how sales and feedback go over the rest of the year for those two.

Helpfully, while I was laying down a batch of mead for the Fabulous Publisher Babe(TM)’s wine and chocolate party next Feb, writer-brain helpfully popcorn kittened me with YET ANOTHER science fiction series of books I could write one of these days. I also got a might inspired to finally write the next installment of the dieselpunk books (Moscow Gold as book one).

I’ll never run out of ideas, but I will eventually die at my keyboard, I suspect.

Getting back to the top of this shaggy dog story, I also have several novella and short-story series in various states of multiple books. And over the next few years, I plan on greatly expanding the various series, both inside the Alexandria Station universe and across the others. At that point, I might end up dropping various book ones and first novels in price, but I will also have an entire bakery of things for people to read once they do discover me.

My goal, like his, is to make enough money from the writing to be able to not have to day job. We all have to put a roof over our heads and food on our tables. We would all love to be able to get up each morning and spend HOURS making shit up and getting paid for it afterwards.

In the past, in that mythical land we call TradPub, there were gatekeepers who saw their job as dictating who got to be read by the broader public. Hundreds of people spent their lives honing their craft in short fiction they submitted to the various genre magazines, building up a reputation and a back catalog.

After a time, they would try their hand at writing a novel. It is a skill, just like any other. Learning to write short fiction does not teach you how to write novels, but it does give you the tools to learn. From there, you would locate an agent eventually, who would use their contacts to get you a deal to write novels.

In the way past, you, the budding new novelist, would have a chance to write several novels, finding your audience and developing your skill.

That doesn’t happen any more.

You will have to hit a high sales number with that first novel, pretty much right out of the gate, to be offered a contract for a second novel. Many do, but many more do not, and are cast adrift. As a result, they never write a full series, especially since that first novel of theirs will remain the property of the publisher for the next thirty-five years, unless you negotiated some good terms in your contract to get the rights back.

If you do succeed, you will probably be contracted to write a trilogy, and then your publisher/editor will tell you what they want the next trilogy/series to be about. Your choices are starkly limited if you want to be published by them.

In the IndiePress world, I can publish whatever I want, as fast I can write it and turn it into something I’m not embarrassed to own. I can write several series, kinda all at the same time, in whatever order inspiration hits, as long as I communicate to you, the reader, what I’m up to, how far along I have gotten, and when and what they can expect next.

What I’m doing is far more messy than what my friend did, but he and I have very different ways of thinking. And we write different things, at different speeds, for different audiences.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer for things.

That’s not why we all go to lunch. We do it to talk about what we’re doing, and what seems to be working for each of us. And that answer is different for everyone.  As it should be.

Kai Di (White Crane, book one of Modern Gods) is the first of what will only be a trilogy, as far as I can tell.  It will be one long coming-of-age story. But there will be other stories in that same universe. The novella I’m close to finishing, for the anthology next summer, takes place in that world.

Conversely, Fairchild is going to be a larger series than Modern Gods, but not a sequential thing like Jessica Keller.

So, tl;dr: What are your thoughts? Do you prefer a single series being written and published at a time, or do you want to wander all over the cosmos with a writer who has too many ideas and too much freedom to pursue them?

Who are you, as a reader?  🙂

shade and sweet water

bd

finally back West of the Mountains, WA