Category Archives: publishing

Dealing with series

Leave a reply

Some days, I hate series. Not in a bad way, but in the manner that I have to work my ass off to cover them. Jessica Keller came out as I wrote it, which took several years. Lazarus (almost done) required me to bounce back and forth several times to complete, all in a short period, so I could drop them sequentially. The Dominion books, like Lazarus, covered a long arc of novel. I get burned out by the end.

All well and good. Right now, I got back comments from the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ about the third Hunter Bureau novel. I solved one big mystery, uncovered an even bigger conspiracy, and set #4 up to go there. She wants me to drop them back to back. Kinda messes up the winter publishing schedule to pull something out, but I had space. Really twists my writing schedule around from what I had wanted to do.

As we’re talking about that last night, I realize that the ending of the third First Centurion Kosnett book probably also demands a fourth, so they can come out boom-boom. One (Encounter at Vilahana) and Two (Consensus at Aditi) will drop in the fall October/November. I just finished #3 this morning, and went all in with an open-ended finale that makes me write #4 and drop them.

Fans used to be more forgiving, but Trad Pub has burned them too often. And I shouldn’t ever cliff-hangar unless I drop the next one right behind it.

However, that exacts a toll on me. I always need to take a break between novels, and explore some other place. From Space Opera to maybe Adventure, or Post-Apoc, or Dieselpunk. A lot of the short fiction I’d written this year was to let me shift out of one into another. I have an Arcane Detective Historic written. It needs some cleanup, and I have to slot that time. Maybe a week. But it isn’t on any schedule but my own need to clear out that backlog of “other” stuff that isn’t Epic Space Opera.

That’s why the Gunderson Case Files just came out. Hardboiled PI set in an alternate 1955 in Los Angeles where gods, aliens, dames, and trouble might walk through his door.

Or the erotica I write as Cole Braddock. Completely different from everything else to the point that it needed its own penname. (Erotica is generally the one case where multiple names are beneficial these days, as opposed to the old days where TradPub insisted because of reasons.)

I even have some straight up Urban Fantasy that needs to be published, just to get it out there and out of the trunk. Gotta edit that.

Weirdly, I have had to slow down my writing a little this year. I had been pushing, but the goal this year is twelve months of around 117,000 words (Pulp Speed Three, according to the old system or 1.4M words/year). I had been above that, but have other things to do this year that don’t count as well, such as an RPG we’re writing, or the musical lyrics for Elton.

Fortunately, other than pissing and moaning, I can pivot around and write the next novel in a series because I need to write it, as opposed to chasing the muse. The stories are all there, and I love what I write.

(I had a conversation with a group of nitwits that were convinced that they were supposed to hate everything they ever wrote. If you do that, you stop enjoying it. When that happens, your fans stop enjoying reading it, and stop buying. As self-fulfilling prophecies go, that is a great way to end your career and never understand what happened.)

Love what you write. Internalize that you are having fun. I do. I just bitch occasionally because I don’t get to wildly hare off after some new idea. (I do, but they have to be short stories I can write in a day or two, rather than weeks spent on a novel right now. My Patreon folks have seen a lot of that. You should join to see it as well.)

So mostly, this is just me whining today. And I admit it. Finished the third Phil Kosnett book. Ambassador Kosnett has had a chance to read an early e-arc of #1 before President Biden replaces him and Phil retires. I expect seven books eventually, and my goal is to have my own set signed by Phil, once he retires.

Turned around a couple of hours later after driving into town to hit the Japanese grocery and started the fourth Hunter Bureau novel as well. Had something else I WANTED to pursue, but it has to slide backwards a bit first. Gimme 2-3 weeks to finish Hunter #4 and maybe I’ll start Kosnett #4 around July 1.

Then there is all sorts of interesting fun planned for 2022. Hope you all enjoy it.

b

How do you make it stop?

Leave a reply

I was chatting online with a younger writer the other day and she had a moment of utter frustration with her current project, so I had to explain that what she was feeling was a good sign.

When you go to a con panel with writers, there is inevitably some youngster who stands up in back to ask the most banal of questions.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

I can tell such folks have taken the idea of writing [insert Pooh Bear here] extremely seriously. They’ve had college or MFA programs designed to make them authors. Mind you, I just used the word authors rather than writers. Authors, to me, are those folks who want to be famous. To get that seven-figure book deal and have the Randy Penguin spend enough marketing dollars to land them atop the New York Times bestseller list.

(A hint, that list is a mark of how many copies of the book were bought in about two dozen or so bookstores on the east coast, extrapolated out for the entire nation. It had almost no bearing on the rest of the world. There are folks who have figured our how to spoof the system. USA Today bestseller list is a little better, but folks are spoofing that as well. Adding that to your resume doesn’t usually impress me, unless I know you actually earned it. Few have.)

Getting back to young authors, they think that there is a magic handshake they can learn that turns them into pros. That’s why you see them buying every book on writing that they can. Or taking workshop after workshop and taking copious notes.

Looking for the magic handshake.

There isn’t one. What there is can best be described as work ethic. Those of us who have had some success largely owe it first to working our asses off by writing a lot of words. From there, genre matters, as navel-gazing autobiographies about how someone hates their mother only sell a lot of copies if your marketing budget it big enough to spoof the NYT. Or to get you on Oprah.

Most of them sell dozens of copies, not millions.

Luck is also a factor, as you have to somehow have the right story at the right moment for a lot of readers, and convince the advertising robots to put your name in front of them. Again, I know folks who spend $10,000 or more a month on their advertising. Their sales numbers are impressive, but only as gross income.

They get really pissy when I ask what their net income is. Frequently, its not much better than mine, when my monthly ad budget is usually $250-$400. They are running in a treadmill trying to make it, instead of building something slowly so it is durable. If they stop, they get flung off the back of the machine like in the cartoons.

So luck and hard work are the minimums necessary. Write a lot of words. Make them good ones.

Also, write a good first draft. I can’t tell you how many times some deluded fool explains to me that the only -right- way to write a novel is to spend the entire first draft wandering around and trying to figure out what story they want to tell. Then they go back and redraft the entire novel a second time. After that, maybe two or three more tries, slowly polishing it until every word sparkles. (Elapsed time measured usually in years here.)

The problem is that they have ripped out all the emotional content in the process. Pretty words. Dull book. Can’t tell you how many of those I’ve seen.

I’d rather have your first draft, warts and all, than your sixth. We can fix a few things in #1 and it will drip with anger, sorrow, or anguish. Won’t be pretty. It will be real instead. Readers react to that more than they do pretty words.

Which circles me back to the young lady complaining. She was working on a project, and all these other projects kept popping up and wanting to be written too. We call those ideas popcorn kittens (google it for the video when you have some time to giggle), because they are like active kitties, popping up to look around and then wandering off.

The question she asked wasn’t “Where do you get your ideas?” like most of them do when still filled with grand dreams of a beret and a coffee shop.

She asked “How do you make it stop?” with true anguish.

Young lady, that’s how you know you are a writer. Everything those college courses taught you was wrong. Genre fiction is where you make money. Your professor was a failed novelist writing about hating her mother and nobody wanted to read it. I’d rather read about that submarine pirate captain who is secretly a werewolf and spends all his time trying to hide it. That sounds like fun. Sounds new.

Professors don’t want to have to grade papers, so they would rather you spent your life on the same paragraph, over and over, instead of blasting out a novella every week for class.

Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt. Nearly thirty-five years later, I still remember that vicious [redacted] of a professor and how she went her entire academic career without a male student ever—EVER—receiving an A in her creative writing course. That’s some pretty impressive sexism there. She believed that only female units could be authors.

If she wasn’t dead these days, I’d drop ship her some of my successful novels, just to be an asshole. But even Amazon balks at delivering anywhere guarded by three-headed-dogs.

So for the budding authors out there, remember just a few simple thoughts.

  • There is no magic handshake. Butt in chair, fingers on keyboard. Nothing else matters.

  • Genre is what you write if you would like to make money. Literary wins awards and then you go back to your job at the call center or the bookstore.

  • You can’t make it stop. What you do is ignore them all as best you can. The bad ideas will eventually recede, and shouldn’t be written. The good ideas will circle back time and again until you do write them.

  • Keep notes, but don’t become that fool who hangs out in a coffee ship with a notebook of ideas and never actually writes. Those are poseurs.

  • Writers write. If you are not writing, you are not a writer. If you are, you can call yourself a writer.

  • Anything you write is valid, even if nobody will ever read it. I have six volumes of poetry in a trunk that won’t probably ever see the light of day. I have failed novels where I realized as I got into them that I lacked the skills to pull it off, or it wasn’t as good an idea as I originally thought it would be.

So write. Given the state of modern traditional publishing (shrinking monthly if not weekly), learn how to indie publish. A $5.99 novel on Amazon nets you about $4 per sale. How many such sales do you need to replace your current job? TradPub pays about $0.10 per unit sale. You won’t ever get rich. You can win awards and accolades, and hopefully have a spouse who will support you. Or a job at the call center you can stay at until you die.

Because you can’t make it stop. Not if you are really a writer.

Nor do you want it to.

Legacy

Leave a reply

Lazarus 5 came out over the last twelve hours. Hopefully y’all have downloaded it and it’s high on your TBR file. I had a lot of fun with this series. Originally, it was supposed to run six novels, but as I got down to the end of five, I realized that it would be seven, just because I had so much ground to cover. Hell, it could have been ten easily, had I really wanted to wallow in certain aspects of the universe that didn’t get as much coverage as they might have otherwise.

I won’t call it short shrift, because they weren’t the key elements.

The Lazarus Alliance is about found family. That’s a fairly common theme in my work, because that’s the sort of life I’ve chosen to lead. I am not entirely estranged from my family, but close enough. Mostly, we just live such radically different lives that all we really have in common is the weather and gossip, little of which I’m interested in pursuing.

Because I have a found family. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ has a fantastic extended clan. Two brothers, one of whom is an ass but the other is wonderful. Eight nieces and nephews, plus some of them have spouses. A dozen grands so far, aged 4-14 and all great kids. We’ve had a Sunday Dinner Zoom call all through the lockdown, and will continue it, because that clan is in Washington State (us), Minnesota, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles.

They just adopted me immediately, and keep me around, whereas my own family seems happier not to have to deal with me. Sad, but we’re all adults.

This was my first Mother’s Day after mom died, and she was kind of the last link I had to large chunks of my own family in Kansas and Missouri. I have mostly ridden off into the sunset, now I might simply fade away.

Not that I’m going anywhere, mind you. My mom was 79 and died of brain cancer. My dad just turned 81. Both sides of my family live a long time, and I’m in better shape and healthier than any of the older generations of relatives I ever met. One great-grandfather lived to be 96, dying in 1980. After smoking his whole life. He used to take the bus down to the Masonic Lodge every day to hang out with his fellow masons. In his nineties.

But at the same time, I’m the youngest of my generation on either side, save for one distant cousin two years my junior. The older group of Publisher Babe’s nieces and nephews are on either side of forty now, so just a decade or so younger than me, with another set around 20 (long story). I’ll hang out with them and theirs.

This is on my mind because I know a lot of writers who don’t have kids. (I have steps and extended, but none by blood that I am aware of at the present time.) I was mildly arguing with a couple of other writers over the weekend. They have books, novels, whatever.

Intellectual Property. When they die, it will vanish, because they have made no plans for their estate. I’m tempted to tell them to write a simple will assigning me all their publication rights on death, just because I plan on training up some of the kids to handle things.

My novels will remain under copyright for 70 years after I’m gone, at least under current law. Disney might extend that before I need it. I have a twelve-year-old grand niece who is a budding business tycoon. Her great-grandkids will be dealing with my estate, if I do it right, earning monthly income.

Think about that. Her great-grandkids. She’s just a kid now. But I plan to be around and writing for at least another forty years. Call it 90 even for sake of discussion. I was born in 1969, so that’s 2059. My copyright would expire in 2129. 2129. Hell, let’s say she has kids starting at 25. And they do the same. And they do the same. Her first might be born in 2032. Jump out twenty-five years to 2057. Jump out twenty-five more to 2082. Her great-grandkids might be forty-something when Blaze Ward finally stops generating them exclusive copyright income.

Kinda mind-boggling, when you think about it. Most writers do not prepare their legacy worth a shit. Publishers like Wordfire Press frequently come in and just buy a full literary estate, because they know how to handle it. My heirs might do that. I hope they get good money for it. That’s what this is all about.

What kind of legacy I am leaving for them? And mind you, they are all found family.

I occasionally chat with a young woman we’ll call R. She is my second wife’s oldest brother’s second wife’s ex-husband’s daughter from his second family.

And she’s family.

If you are a writer, what are you doing to make sure your kids, heirs, and found family are ready to keep making money from your books, after you are gone?

Matt Buchman is a good friend of mine. When he was putting together his book on estate planning, I handed him a copy of my will, because it has some weird and complicated bits dealing with my first wife’s art. (Donna was a fantastic artist and I have some, but most of it is finally in her daughter’s hands, save for a few pieces I kept. They still get to claim them when I’m gone.)

If you are a writer, you have a literary estate. Plan and organize your shit, so people know how to exploit it.

https://www.amazon.com/Estate-Planning-Authors-Strategies-Success/dp/1945740256

2129 CE.

How far out are you planning?

Social Media Inflection

Leave a reply

We might be seeing the impending death of social media, as it has come to define much of American culture over the last decade or so. Some of you found me on places like Facebook. I’m not planning to deactivate my account anytime soon, but over the weekend a number of friends hit their own, personal inflection points about staying.

Used to be, people could say a lot of things on those platforms without trouble. Over the last six months, the fascists in charge of the biggest one went all in on their politics. I’ve had friends who had never gotten put into social media jail suddenly start racking up time. Then more time, when the folks moderating started going back months and years and dinging them for stuff that had been acceptable then.

You will note that one party never seems to face any difficulties on that platform.

I’m not shutting down, but in the last 72 hours many of my author friends have either made their last post, or announced that the last one is coming soon. They’ll keep the account so they can talk with certain folks that they can’t reach any other way, but won’t be around much in the general conversation.

What we are seeing is the movement away from a common, public square, and back into silos of the internet. Some of you are old enough to remember the era before good search engines. Yahoo used to be a great way to find things. Then search engines let you find everyone.

The first real social media platform (MySpace) was adequate for the tools of the day. Then the other one came along and turned into a place where you could find lots of people. Complete strangers in other countries could become what we might call con-buddies. These are folks you only ever used to see at conventions in the old days, and then nothing until the next year.

D**, S**, and T** are tired of being flagged and jailed, but recognize that it is a private platform, and the fascist in charge is free to cater to his fascist friends.

They are leaving. I hope that Liker comes back. It was intended to be a left of center sort of place, but the big gorillas ganged up to try to destroy it. (I’d love to see an investigation into conspiracy to commit computer crimes, which I suspect would be fruitful.) It claims to be coming back in May 2021. We have hope.

In the meantime, my friends are leaving, and going back to their blogs, rather than posting things on the billboard at the square. Fragmenting off, so you and I will be back to rss feeds (you old enough to remember those?) and emails about blog posts from our friends. The world will be a little sadder, but it became inevitable when the bald android went all in on supporting the Trump platform and helping him attempt to overthrow the government.

What does this mean to you? I have been thinking about communications this week, after sending four different newsletters on the 1st. Seriously. FOUR. And none of those were this blog.

As folks move away from that hive of scum and villainy, my best way to reach folks will be newsletters and blogs, but coming entirely from www.blazeward.com.

I control that platform. I get to say what is acceptable behavior. I get to police your vocabulary and politics. Since I don’t generally allow much dialogue, what you’ll see is more of my monologuing, and occasionally approving comments in order to foster conversation.

But not a lot. I don’t have time to police my boards for content, and I am not making enough money to hire someone else to do it. Plus, I have to spam a half-dozen comments a day across all of my websites, just because robots out there crawl around and try to sell things.

(I have found a couple of better plug-ins for wordpress that supposedly cut down on spam commenters. Hopefully, they work.)

So you should sign up for my newsletter. (Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef on the 1st. Publishing News on the 15th.) It still feeds out a few places, but that’s just because I’m too lazy to cut the cable on a few of them. If they fray on their own, I won’t miss them.

You should sign up for my blog here directly, so that you don’t miss anything, because obviously I need to spent more time here and less over there, as much as it might cost me in the short term for being accessible to fans and friends like you.

If anyone knows of a social media platform that is to the left of Adolf Eichmann, I would be interested in hearing about it, because the Overton Window has moved far enough to the right, thank you.

Failing that, there is always the chance that someone creates a word-press microplatform where folks can log in and chat with one another, instead of me having to navigate everything. There are a few, but they are a pain in the ass last I checked.

In my various mastermind groups, we try to anticipate what the future will look like, so we can prepare the ground to take advantage of it. We’ve talked about the end of FB as a central place, but couldn’t figure out how or when it would happen.

MySpace got bought by an Australian fascist and promptly got abandoned, because the other options weren’t immediately funding the founder of Fox News. (That came later.) The current platform is even worse, but only got there over the last two years or so.

I’m not sure that any one place will ever replace it. At least not until the government breaks up all the big players (which I doubt, considering the money available to buy politicians) and requires a better platform.

Private enterprise might go through a “Thousand Flowers Campaign” kind of thing shortly, but we all know how that worked out.

So for now, expect a lot of writers to walk. To pick up their marbles and head back to their own URL that they control. Make sure you find out where they are and sign up for their newsletters and blogs as well, because they are likely never coming back. Not in any format you’ll recognize.

Hopefully, I won’t lose to many of you as I pull back, but I can see that avalanche starting to rumble. As people on the left abandon the platform, it will move harder right. Harder than it is today.

You can imagine what that will be like.

Professionalism

Leave a reply

So here’s the scenario: I put up a semi-open call for the newest Blaze Ward Presents anthology about a week ago. I only post them on FB, because that’s the only social medium I pursue beyond my own newsletter, but that newsletter is for readers, not writers. (Got a different one for artists, if you want more information.)

I immediately got several submissions, because a number of folks had been told ahead of time what the theme was going to be. I’m okay with that, as I’ve worked with all of them in the past.

One gentleman (we’ll call him Mark for now) sends me a note that I had sent something in. In the fracas, I lost track. If you send me something, I will reply when it arrives. Even something as simple as “got” just so you know I saw it.

Mark’s never came in.

About a week later, I am responding to other folks that have questions and see his original note. Check my notes and realize I have nothing from that person, so I ping him and ask him to resend.

According to his response, he does. About an hour passes, and I see nothing, so I reach out via DM and send him my email, just in case he wrote it down wrong. He sends me his, so I send a direct ping email. You can never really trust email these days. Especially not if you are through a crappy isp like comcast.

So far, so good. I’m conscientious here. Trying to reach out to someone and let them know that there seems to have been a problem at my end and can we resolve it? I’d like Mark to submit, if he has something. Even if it ends up being slush, I try to send back rejection notes that are more than “pass.”

Mark replies on FB with “Sounds like it’s not worth it.”

So, lemme tell you how rude that comes across to an editor. I might be overreacting a shade with the particular profanity that emerged, so I replayed the conversation with Fabulous Publisher Babe™ just because it can be a “measure twice, cut once” kind of thing, but she had the exact same reaction.

A professional works with an editor/publisher who is asking for help. Mark snapped his fingers in my face instead. I’m sure the grapes were already sour, as the old saying goes, but Mark here did something extra special today.

He moved himself into that special (and pretty damned short) list of artists with whom I will never work again. As he intended, suddenly even reading his emails became “not worth it.”

Not that I expect him to learn anything from the subject, because after stewing for a few hours, I just went ahead and unfriended that punk and blocked him. You don’t ever get unblocked. I just presume that I had a damned good reason to block you in the first place and would need a long and cogent apology from someone after they had begun to show public evidence of having grown up and wanting to act like an adult. (“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”)

Telling an editor that it’s not worth working them is a mark of juvenility that rubs me the wrong way. And it cuts both ways. If that’s your idea of professionalism, you and I will not be working well together at any point in the future, so we should just ahead and cut to the chase now.

And cut we did.

I won’t work with Mark. There are a lot of folks out there trying to present as professionals with whom the original response would have been somewhat less antagonistic. But unlike Mark here, I don’t believe that my shit doesn’t stink. I make mistakes. I admit them and try to make amends. That’s why I tried several times to establish a direct line of communications with the guy.

He decided that I wasn’t worth working with.

Okay. Strange response, but I’m willing to honor it. Will make sure not to work with you in the future.

Ever.

For the rest of you folks out there as accidental bystanders, I have found that starting from a presumption of innocent mistake is a much better spot. I get that folks are stressed out after a year of this shit, but in vino, veritas. If you are an asshole to a random stranger on the internet (and I have no idea who the guy is, other than he found me at some point), then I’ll assume you’re just an asshole.

It goes back to how someone treats the waitstaff at dinner. Doubly so if a mistake has been made. Do they explode in righteous indignation, or chill and remember that shit happens if the person is apologizing?

Bridges are pretty easy things to burn. Especially with me. I’m not a confrontational person. Especially with total strangers. More than a few folks have blown up in my face over the years, only to discover that the blow-out argument that they had apparently been hoping for wasn’t the outcome they got.

I’ll just walk. I do that. Communication is a two-way street, but only if I believe that I am working with an honest broker. Sour grapes don’t cut it.

Hopefully, this little PSA makes you stop and think about how you treat the folks around you. Are complete strangers left seething at your words, or thankful?

Simple as that.

Are you acting like an asshole?

We won’t find out what excuse he wants to give me if and when the emails suddenly start working, because he has become an unperson.

That’s what folks call consequences. Your behavior has them, even if you weren’t paying any attention.

Chesterton’s Fence

1 Reply

Got a bit irked or maybe inspired this morning by a friend. They had a complaint about a fairly common saying that made no sense to them and went off on a rant that turned into a tirade by the time they were done. I won’t mention the topic, because that would out them too easily, but it got me to thinking about why they were so upset.

I’m pretty sure, without asking, that the subject was a colloquialism that didn’t grow up around here, wherever here happened to be for them. But the tirade was the interesting part.

I put a lot of it down to that late stretch of things when the pandemic is (hopefully) on the downhill slope. Folks are starting to get vaccines that work. The worst part of 2020 might be over. At the same time, it is not yet wise to toss your mask into the trash and go back to where you were two years ago. In Washington State, I am on a list, but I am in the LAST category that will get their shots. Before, that meant maybe as late as fall, but not it means that I ought to be able to get my shots by June 1, if all goes well.

There are still a lot of folks falling ill. And a lot of folks dying. The numbers are down, but not zero. There is time yet we have to deal with.

So folks are stressed. Stay stressed. And it comes out in frustration with the way things are now, when people see how they could be so much better, if only…

And that leads me to Chesterton’s Fence. President Kennedy liked to quote the man and his fence.

G.K. Chesterton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton) was a giant of a man, physically as well as intellectually. He is best known, however for his fence.

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”

Translated into a more modern vernacular, it deal with folks that want to change everything, because they don’t like the way it used to be. In this case, my friend was frustrated at a lot of other things, but ranted on this topic mostly because I don’t think they understood the point of the saying that had set them off.

As a result, all things had to change, because obviously something was WRONG!

Wasn’t, but my father always told me to never argue with a fool because bystanders couldn’t tell the difference.

So when you encounter a popular saying that is extremely old, my immediate conclusion isn’t to “fix” it, but to understand where it comes from.

In the context of Chesterton’s Fence, to understand why it was put up in the first place. The saying was an old one. Popular, but not local to my friend. Didn’t mean it meant anything less. I grew up with the saying, but I also knew what it meant, whereas they hit it cold this morning and bubbled over with rage and frustration.

These are frustrating times. I get that. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but still have to walk there.

Something irritates you and you simply over-react.

Stop and breathe instead. Think about it. Ask yourself why the fence was built there in the first place, because somebody else had a good reason at the time. Doesn’t mean you can’t take it down, but you need to know what purpose it serves before destroying it and making things worse.

We all over-react.

However, the important lesson these days is to stop and breathe. I have told more than one person lately that each of us gets up in the morning and decides if we will be helpful or toxic.

When you got out of bed, did you decide you wanted to be nice and friendly to complete strangers, or an asshole to everyone you encounter?

You make that decision. And you make it every morning. Every afternoon. You chose to be an asshole. To be toxic. To explode all over someone who didn’t do anything to warrant your vitriol at all besides not popping you in the gob when you got mouthy.

(In the internet age, far fewer people are getting the sort of pop in the gob that would teach them better manners around strangers, but that’s another topic for another time.)

Who did you decide to be this morning? That’s what it comes down to. Did you see Chesterton’s Fence standing arrogantly athwart your path and go into a destructive rampage? Because now the cows are out and wandering all over the countryside. Did you think only of yourself, rather than stopping to ask if what you were doing was helpful to others?

Don’t let the frustration overtake you. I understand the clarion call of rage as a tool. (Oh, trust me, I truly understand that concept.) But you get judged by total strangers for it. It becomes your reputation, and then you don’t get to make a better second impression on them, because they already know you are a hothead with a temper problem.

The world will get there. Rome was not built in a day, it did not fall in a day. It fell because people thought more of themselves than of others.

What have you done today to make the world a better place? Or worse?

Mind Mapping The Future

Leave a reply

About a decade ago, I worked at a company that used mind mapping software (don’t remember which one, but I loved it at the time). When the company went away, I could no longer find anything at a reasonable price, because the licenses were all expensive and annual.

Got out of the habit of mind mapping.

Fast forward to 2021. I have a new laptop that I am breaking in. Xubuntu 20 atop a Wintel Core I3. Cheap, but good enough because I was installing my own OS.

For those of you who have never installed Linux on a laptop, it can be a right pain in the ass. The thing that used to be BIOS goes by another name now, and most major hardware manufacturers lock it down hard. I presume Microsoft is paying them a lot of money for this.

Eventually, I found all the places I needed to unlock. (There are TWO of them today. I expect 3-4 by the next time I do this). Got the OS installed, and then brought everything up to stable tips. Usually a wise idea with Linux. Not the bleeding edge, but most of the security fixes.

Then I went looking for things to install that are not part of the Core Distro.

As part of my wandering around, I found FreeMind for Linux. Installed it and then forgot about it for a month. Because I’m like that.

Tonight, I stumbled across the icon and decided it was time to open and try to use.

Kinda like riding a bicycle, but it took me about an hour to suddenly remember why I loved mind mapping in the first place.

Start with a central node. Give it a name that indicates what the hell you think you’ll be doing. Add subs off that. And that. And that.

About the fourth map I opened, I called it “Unpublished Fiction” and started organizing things. I recently put the first seven Beyond the Mirror Collections up on my store for $0.99 to see if they would sell. That’s part of what triggered this, looking at all the short stuff I have written over the last two years and deciding that some of it needed to come out.

I’ve had stories in Boundary Shock Quarterly that never saw the light of day elsewhere. There have been four Blaze Ward Presents so far. That alone is 20 stories right now.

Then I began brain dumping on electronic white boards. I love mind mapping because I can just node things as I need. And open new maps if one grows so big that I need to take it as a thing, instead of part of something else.

I have a lot of things to send out into the world. More than I was really processing. I asked Fabulous Publisher Babe™ if she wanted me to use a template, or just build the next three volumes of Beyond The Mirror (8-10 at this point, all science fiction). I might need four, once I start the process of organizing for publication. That’s a lot of stuff.

My Patreon (patreon.com/blazeward) fans have read some of it. If you read Boundary Shock, you’ll see some.

A bunch of it hasn’t ever seen the light of day. Mostly because I wanted to get that far ahead in 2020, before any of us knew what the year would look like. My goal was 36 short stories. I wrote 50.

Some of it is even for sale on the store right now, just because.

We live in a strange future. I can write it, wrap it up, and publish it, without ever asking permission of some twit in New York City. If it sells, I get to keep all the money.

It took a mind map to make me really visualize how much stuff I needed to get out. You’ll get it cheap in the collections, because otherwise I would sell it for 0.99 each. Here I can curate stuff for cheaper and call it good. Maybe push it out to the major distributors. Maybe not.

It you are a visual thinker like me, you owe it to yourself to look into mind maps. Yell if you need a quick primer. I am not an audio learner. I knew that in college, where I took complicated hieroglyphics for notes. Worse, my mom and I would take at least one class a semester together (usually upper level philosophy courses), and she would borrow my notes, study them, and then take tests. Took her a while, because I would write whole paragraphs on the fly without vowels, because I was in a hurry and we didn’t have laptops in the classroom in those terrible old days. (I was nerdy early, but still didn’t have a laptop until the early 90s.)

Mind map, if you can. I remember how well I stayed organized in those days, because it went onto a map, and then got moved around as I dealt with it, handed it off to the person who would deal with it, and then checked it off lists. (The joys of middle management, when you work with a pair of literal geniuses as peers, when your Director expects you to translate them into English occasionally.)

Expect new fiction soon. Expect more gushing about mind mapping. I have found a tool I lost a decade ago and forgot how much I loved it. Spent the last decade using Notepad++ as a poor substitute. Still have a document I first opened in 2011 that I use on a daily basis, if that gives you any ideas.

Y’all have fun. It’s snowing around here, having been 50F six hours ago.

shade and sweet water

blaze

West of The Mountains, WA

I Have Eight Spoons

1 Reply

It used to be ten, but we’re down to eight now.

I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, before you manage to pull your undies so tight that they cut off your circulation. It used to be that I had an amount of work I could generally accomplish in a day. Write all morning. Errands in the afternoon. Editing and publishing related stuff in the evening.

It worked.

Then the pandemic hit. I held out for a while and it was fine. I’m used to sustaining my end of things through hell or high water, because I had those kinds of jobs for a good chunk of my day job career.

But lately I’m finding myself worn out sooner. I hit a point in the evening where the brain just shuts off and rolls over. Out of spoons. Other folks have gone through it, but maybe didn’t have a vocabulary that let them express it.

Stress. A straight punishment can be survived because it is predictable. You develop coping and defensive mechanisms. (And God knows I’ve got a few from my past.)

It’s the randomness that knocks you off kilter. And me. The not ever knowing what to expect next. My last couple of day jobs used to be like that, because I was a middle manager type dedicated to hunting chaos down and fixing it. Boxing it in. Limiting it. I was really good at it.

I used to say “Chaos offends me.” but at the same time, I’ve always been good at surfing chaos. (Note the F, as opposed to the V.)

But at work, that was predictable chaos, if you could call it that. I had certain channels of stupid shit that would come across my desk. Or long lead times to identify solutions when shit was going to go sideways. And I was good at fixing it.

I don’t have control here.

I can write. I can publish. I can watch my income and sales numbers bounce all over the damned place to the point I wonder if I’ll have to go get a day job of some sort. Not going back to what I had, but part-time minimum wage kinds of things, just so I can turn the brain off for a while and use muscles instead.

Predictability.

Others have talked about their feelings of recovery, now that an attempted coup has failed and we’re left cleaning up the mess from folks who have no interest in discussing their part in attempting to overthrow the government of the United States. Or the years they spent up until now trying to break it.

I was not surprised that they tried. I’ve been expecting it since I wrote a political science paper in 1988 entitled “The Fall of the American Republic in 2020.” (Yes, I really did. He gave me a B+ on it, but I don’t feel like looking him up in his retirement (or he might be dead by now) in order to say “I told you so.”)

I’m glad they failed. And a little surprised for reasons I have talked about elsewhere and which will cost you beers to have me explain later.

I need to recover. The stress has been there, but I held it down. Would not admit it. Don’t know what it will take for me to slide past all this. Probably orange jumpsuits on a few of the fuckers who deserve it.

“If more people went to prison for this shit, fewer people would go to prison for this shit.”

But I abide. Hopefully, it all starts getting better, now that we’ve passed a crest of history that will be the end of certain history books and the beginning of others.

I can survive on eight spoons, now that I have finally understood that I only have that many for now. It was the confusion as to why I was suddenly so tired all the time that threw me off. I already cut way back on the things I was trying to do, because there were certain topics I didn’t want to write about. Too dark. Too depressing. Too close to home.

Bad juju.

So now we are really at the dawn of 2021. The world gets to change again, and hopefully criminals and anarchists will be put in small, concrete boxes where we can laugh at them and taunt them like the losers they are.

There should be no mercy for attempting to overthrow the government. In the ancient times, the term used was “Neck or Crown” because if you tried to kill the king, you either succeeded or your life was forfeit. They should not get a stern talking to, any more than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did. In fact, that is the legal precedent for aiding and abetting enemies of the state, and I feel like we need to introduce a few dozen folks to it.

Not all thousand or so who really deserve it, mind you. Most of them are weak-minded fools who honestly just need better mental health coverage to get them the help that might spring them out of their delusions. But there is a hard core of folks that are evil, and need to be dealt with.

Permanently.

I can’t go out to eat these days because folks like that refuse to take the pandemic serious. I was at the grocery the other day, and half the people I saw were without masks, in a county where the mandate is everyone. The store could have been fined $5000 per infraction, and a few have, but those fuckers don’t care for anybody but themselves. Same with the coup. They didn’t want a country where non-whites might be granted equal rights, and were willing to burn the whole damned thing down rather than share.

And that’s why I got so angry, but I can’t express that anywhere but in my writing. I have to hold it inside and just smile. Just write. Just abide.

But that takes spoons out of me. “I can do this thing, but it will cost me” is a favorite phrase of an old acquiaintance, and something I have taken to heart.

They say pick your battles, and I try not to fight that many any more. Can’t.

Just don’t have enough spoons to save the world right now.

Not sure when I will.

After The Darkness

Leave a reply

I wrote a blog post yesterday, but realized as soon as I started that I was too angry to publish it.

Yesterday was the American Inauguration, and the end of the Trump Presidency. The third Wednesday in January of 2021, when the first one was an attempted coup and the second one was the impeachment for the first one.

I am not looking forward to next week.

But I also went ahead and posted it. Sort of. People wanted to read my vaguebooking, so I put it up on a download site with an expiration at the end of this month. Wasn’t expecting the number of folks to read and comment. Nor the support.

Couldn’t post it on FB. They would have read the inflammatory language and given me at least a 30-day vacation. Maybe longer. Didn’t want to post it to my wall back home, because that feeds out to Amazon, Goodreads, and other places eventually. Too public.

As a writer, I have to self-censor to some extent. Doubly so when I write in a category of genre (mostly space opera science fiction) where a good chunk of my readers are frequently to the right of me. Sometimes a ways to the right, but that’s me shifting leftward a little over the last thirty years as the Overton Window moved into deep right field.

I am a whore. We all are, at the end of the day, because we have to cash a paycheck dependent on someone else. Most of you work for some company that might fire you for your politics, if they could. I don’t have that sort of a boss. (I married mine and kind of slept my way to the top, but that’s an entirely different joke.)

Instead, I have fans. My job is to entertain them, first and foremost. To provide them stories that encourage them to keep coming back with money for me to sustain my lifestyle. Past that, I try to make them think. My stories are not generally running on rails, at least compared to most.

Or if they do, I try to have interesting and different characters trying to solve their problems. (And no Chosen One stories. I hate those, because the gods are always assholes.)

But you know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when somewhere, somebody is sticking it to the Man. That’s my politics. The Underdog fighting the bully.

Others bring different things to the table. That’s why fiction is so much fun and you can always find something to read, because we are all different.

But I was angry yesterday. And I bled it all out on paper. More than one person noted the visceral feelings I inspired, but I warned everyone ahead of time and made them jump through a few hoops to read it, so only my friends (and deeply committed deep-cover enemies, of which I probably still have a few) would read it.

Because I don’t want to alienate everyone. Sure, I have air-locked a couple of former fans over the years, but the guy who defends his right to wear his Klan hood to the grocery store as a political statement on wearing masks against COVID was just an asshole.

Better, he told me that he couldn’t be racist because he was born “white trash.” His words. Can’t argue with someone like that. (You can imagine how he voted in 2020, can’t you?) Hell, I’m pretty sure he bought one entire series of my novels after that (at full price) just so he could leave 2-star reviews on them. Somebody did.

You have to be deeply committed to your particular insanity to “show someone” like that when they throw you out of the party.

And I don’t do it often, but Confederate Apologists are bullies. And if you have read ANY of my stories, you know how I feel about bullies. The only fights I got into in grade school involved me stopping bullies from picking on other people. Including the time I beat up my best friend. (At the time, anyway. That went south quickly.)

So I write. And not all of it can be published. Shit happens. I’ll even share some of it, but right now my contribution to a more polite society doesn’t involve punching people in the face. Or rather, not punching some people in the face is my contribution to a more polite society, because they frequently deserve it.

We have reached an age where bullies are emboldened to abuse people. This is a problem because structural racism still lingers in this country. The BLM protests last summer and how they were handled, compared to the Capital Insurrection two weeks ago, tells you all you need to know about the police power structure in this country.

That’s part of why I write Science Fiction, because otherwise, I would have very strong opinions about the modern age and what’s wrong with it. We are corrupt, as a nation and as a society. We can fix it, but a lot of people profit from it and don’t want to give up their perks. Others would rather die or go to jail than allow the rest of humanity equality under the law.

And mind you, this is me much calmer today, so you can imagine what yesterday sounded like.

What contortions have you been forced into, in order to not be fully ostracized? I can list mine, but we’d be here all day.

I will suggest that if your friends make you do those things, you have the wrong friends. If your job drives you that crazy, it might be time to find a better place to work.

Change is coming, so things might get better. I don’t want to go back to what we had two years ago, because that was flawed and broken. I want something better. I want a world where nobody is hungry, or cold, or alone.

In science fiction, sometime I can even show you what that looks like.

The Lazarus Alliance

Leave a reply

So I have a new series coming out in January 2021. The Lazarus Alliance.

  • Escape
  • Return
  • Rebellion
  • Revolution
  • Liberation
  • Retribution
  • Alliance

Those seven covers us from January through July, and I already have other things coming out after that as well as during (non-SF drops in the spring, as it were).

This is a new universe, unconnected to anything else I have as yet written. Partly, that was a subconscious response to the Alexandria Station Universe. There are no true aliens in Alexandria Station. Other than Humans, the Sentients are the only creatures you will ever encounter.

I felt the need to dabble with aliens. In fact, at the time, I was making a list of every sort of mechanism of ground locomotion I could think of (since expanded), and then created species around them, including old testament angels from Ezekiel 1:16.

But the story really starts in a bizarre place for me.

Usually, I open a new word file and start piling in notes after inspiration hits. Build up the world, the setting, the math, the science. Then I move on to the people, adding heroes and villains as needed.

That did not happen with Lazarus. In fact, I was laying in the tub soaking and meditating one night, like I do, when the image hit, followed by the words. It would not let me go.

So I got up, dried off, and got dressed. Opened a new file on the computer and literally started typing. The first chapter of Escape as you will read it is not much changed from what flowed out of my brain that night. I didn’t even have a character, just an unstoppable need to write.

So I wrote.

It was only after a few days when I caught up with myself and realized that I had a book one of a new series.

A captain who is supposed to go down with his ship. Flying an experimental warship whose secrets must remain hidden lest the enemy get hold of them and figure out what he had done. Ambushed and afire, he orders everyone to abandon and plots a course into a nebula that he expects to kill him and destroy his ship.

Hell of a way to die, but necessary. That term comes up a lot in the series. Necessary. We do things because they are necessary, not because we want to. Because we cannot avoid the responsibility that comes with the uniform and the oath.

From there, I jumped back to aliens and tried to figure out what happened to my guy. Mind you, he still doesn’t have a name, but has survived what was supposed to be suicide. That’s when the name Lazarus of Bethany popped out of my backbrain. Jesus brought him back from the dead in John.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_of_Bethany):

The biblical narrative of the raising of Lazarus is found in chapter 11 of the Gospel of John. A certain Eleazer (whence Lazarus) is introduced as a follower of Jesus who lives in the town of Bethany near Jerusalem. He is identified as the brother of the sisters Mary and Martha. The sisters send word to Jesus that Lazarus, “he whom thou lovest,” is ill. Instead of immediately traveling to Bethany, according to the narrator, Jesus intentionally remains where he is for two more days before beginning the journey.

When Jesus arrives in Bethany, he finds that Lazarus is dead and has already been in his tomb for four days. He meets first with Martha and Mary in turn. Martha laments that Jesus did not arrive soon enough to heal her brother and Jesus replies with the well-known statement, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die“. Later the narrator here gives the famous simple phrase, “Jesus wept.”

This is a man who sees himself saved, and decides that there must be a reason. He must find out what happened, and solve it, so this is also something of a mystery.

From there, aliens.

A friend of mine has the opinion that the reason aliens have never visited us on earth is that we are big, violent, and insane creatures that should not be let loose on the galaxy. I do no disagree with him.

Face it, we’re space orcs, when most people expect pretty space elves out there watching us in utter horror, and probably placing bets on when and how we manage to kill ourselves.

Thus, Lazarus sees himself as an orc, and the people he finds do as well, because humans are taller, heavier, stronger, and more violent than any of the species that they know. And I had fun creating the people who will rescue Lazarus. They must be smaller and weaker. Must be more casual and less prone to violence.

For fun, I made them smugglers and now I have evil overlords to deal with, in addition to spies and enemies. Eventually, it turns into a war with five sides, which are always ugly, messy things.

By the time I was done with book one (Escape), I knew the overall arc of the series. There were only supposed to be six, but book six (since renamed Retribution) had so much ground to cover that I just gave up and chopped the story in half instead and beefed it up more than I might have otherwise.

Each of them runs from sixty to about seventy-five thousand words, with the whole arc running about four hundred thousand combined, just thumbnailing it from here. Not sure there will be other stories. I mean, as always I left it open ended but this one is truly Space Opera, so we’re shaking the pillars of Heaven by the time we end Alliance, and I’d have to go somewhere else if I wrote an eight.

But I had a lot of fun writing this. Hopefully, you’ll have a lot of fun reading them.

And stay tuned for all the other stuff I’m pulling out of the trunk in the spring and summer.

Blaze

West of the Mountains, WA