Category Archives: publishing

2021 Aspirations

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I am not going to call this anything silly like “Goals” because 2021 is likely to be even more messy than 2020 was. We went into this past year with the impeachment (remember those halcyon days of innocence?), and that brought with it an expectation that sales would take something of a hit, as people would be focused on the news instead of space opera or mystery.

From there, it would be a presidential election, and those are always good for a hit on the reading side for the same reason, running from about Sep 1 to about Dec 1. Every four years like clockwork.

And then…

I’m not generally in Kindle Unlimited. (Exception: we put the Star Dragon novels up as an experiment this fall. Slightly better than Meh results at this point, but I digress.) Folks were suddenly home a lot starting in March, as the world came to grips with an unknown disease and shut down to try to fight it.

On the plus side, people needed entertainment. On the minus side, they tended to binge on various television shows, to the point that they fought and often defeated the various level monsters at the ends of Netflix, Hulu, etc.

However, a lot of people were also out of work, or saw their hours cut, or had greatly heightened concern about income. Kindle Unlimited (an all you can eat service) folks saw a big jump in page reads, anecdotally, because folks could do that without spending any more money than they were right now. Same with the streaming services. GORGE yourself now. Save your money.

So my sales were down considerably for much of the year. We’d budgeted for bad, but this was worse, so we cut expenses to the bone everywhere. No more audio books. No more translations. No eating out, except that I dedicated a portion of my monthly budget to one of my favorite restaurants and got take out regularly to help them stay in business.

One bright spot was an email from the US Government’s Small Business Administration offering us a loan of up to $25,000 USD on incredible terms. We took out $9,000 to get the next two Science Officer books (3 & 4) translated into German. (Look up “Velocity of Money” sometime to understand why things like that are useful.) Those will be coming out shortly, and have helped with my German readers, as those folks like a good space pirate story and many of them are bi-lingual enough to step over and read my English-language catalog as well. (Germany moved up to my second largest nation in both sales and income in 2020, displacing the rest of the English-speaking world along the way, behind only the US.)

I did manage twelve novels published monthly. Plus a few others. Four issues of Boundary Shock Quarterly. Two episodes of Blaze Ward Presents. 1.4 million words written. Fifteen novels. Fifty-one shorter pieces of various flavors.

It was a good year for writing, because my words was something I could control. Had to put some projects to the side, either for economic, social, or psychological reasons. Hoping to cycle back to them at some point.

So now we’re endgaming 2020 and I need to look at 2021. I will talk about aspirations, but not concrete goals, because there is a lot of putting-back-together yet to do.

Staying on the one novel per month pace. About a quarter of the way into the seventh and last Lazarus novel. Those should come out Jan-Jul of 2021. Got a lot of other science fiction/space opera novels in the can right now, and will continue writing more on those series, as well as circling back to The Science Officer. And maybe even another Dominion book or two, depending.

I have the first two novels of a sword and sorcery fantasy trilogy written, taking place after the end of Rebels. In addition, I have a new sword and sorcery fantasy novel written for what might turn into a series at some point, but this book stands on its own.

All of those will come out off schedule sometime next year. What that means is that I will have science fiction every month, AND ALSO will drop other things as well, so everyone will just have to pay attention. They will be obviously fantasy and not SF by cover, blurb, and such, so anyone whining that they expected ray guns when the cover is an orc in plate mail with a sword in hand, well, they get what mockery they deserve.

In addition, I wrote what was very obviously Book One of a straight Urban Fantasy series a while back. It will come out on its own, and hopefully I will have the time and inclination to write more of them.

And then: I just finished an Occult Detective novel set in London in 1924. First person to read commented that I got all the tropes right and entertained the hell out of him, so that’s a good sign. Will write more about Augustus Dexter Derlyth next year, and put those out. Unlike the Urban Fantasy, the Occult Detective stands on its own perfectly well.

I even have some straight Action/Adventure. One set in 1977 qualifies as “historic” and the other was intentionally set in 2018 so I could control the timeline and take into account the pandemic when it hit.

From there: I have a crap ton of serial short fiction I have written. Kumiko. Yasmin. Peter Najjar. Pizzafarmer. Flight Officer Brannon. Etc. Some of those will come out individually. Eventually I will have enough to do series collections (my goal is always more than 40,000 words combined so it weighs like a novel.) Already do with Yasmin. The others might need fortifying.

I even wrote a Hard-boiled private detective this year. Gunderson. Set in 1955 and about as weirdly Spec fiction as it gets, as I intentionally set out to explore every weird trope I could get. Think Kolchak, The Night Stalker. Gunderson might be his dad or something. We do science fiction, horror, paranormal, fantasy, and even straight historic mystery. Let me put it to you this way, any sort of weird shit might walk through his door with a case, so we’ve so far explored Cthulhu, super heroes, aliens, Hellenic gods, kaiju, and I still have list of maybe twenty others to go after at some point.

Looked at a different way, I probably published about a million and a half words in the last two years, and wrote closer to three million (just on either side of 1.4m twice). That leaves a lot of stuff in the trunk.

Some of it remains in the trunk, mind you. Not every experiment works. I have a set of five short stories intended to be a serial, but by the time I got to the end of five, it was obvious I had a problem. The characters were solid. The setting deep. The problems obvious and fun. But the tone had shifted radically, from rather light and silly at the start to kinda dark and ominous by the end of the fifth one, which in no way was the end.

Trunked, but I like everything about it so much that I do intend to start cold with the whole mess at some point and do a hard redraft, playing for the epic scale of what I originally intended. It will be a fun series, but it also has to be novels, instead of serial shorts. Too much going on. And eventually I stumbled into the epicness of the core. Way bigger than I thought on page one, so I have already led my readers astray by page two, based on where I intended to go in the end.

So I have science fiction/space opera aspirations in 2021. Lazarus 7 (Alliance) will be done close enough to count as a 2020 title. I have two Giles novels done (of five, I think). Three books in the Air Pirates of Cyrenaica (of five in this arc). Book One post-apoc “steampunkish” novel of a series. The first novel in a new Phil Kosnett series, set after Jessica Keller concludes in Petron. The first Kincaide novel (originally three, I already know there will be five, but book one clocked in at 165k and they will all be that heavy.)

On top of that, I have notes for an early 19th Century “Aeropunk” series of HARD sf. A new dark epic series tuckerizing Alison Kosnett (wife of the Ambassador) because she was feeling left out. (Turning her into a badass assassin chick.) And a couple of other series I want to undertake at some point.

There will be more Science Officer. (The response to The Bryce Connection and Alien Seas has been far in excess of what I expected, so thank you.) More Handsome Rob. More Greyson Leigh.

Sometime in the spring, you will see the first part of a sequel to Fairchild. Background: in 2018, I went to the Fiction River Anthology Workshop, like I used to do every year. I didn’t participate, because those things were an arms race, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ always did. That year, one of the themes was “Dragons,” but the editor specified that she wanted stories where the dragon was a character, and not just a villain/menace/monster.

[Hint: she was not entirely happy with the results.]

I always sat in the back of the room in the evenings, learning how to be an editor from a cast of industry experts with more than a century of combined experience. Listened to her ranting about things and how unhappy she was with the outcome, but she did manage to make it work eventually, mostly by moving things around and editing her own theme call to cover more of the stories. They weren’t bad, just not what she wanted.

I got inspired, listening to her. Went home the next week and wrote a short story called “Strawberry Dragon.” It was the next Fairchild piece, originally intended to bridge to the next novel. Sent it to that editor (a personal friend) with the email subject line “This is all your fault.” and explained how the story had come into being.

Two days later, she writes back. “I want this for my anthology!”

Uhm… Okay? Sure. Yours.

Would have been my first professional sale ever.

Past tense.

As with everyone else, the world fell out from under Fiction River, and they reverted all the stories. Or rather, she asked Fabulous Publisher Babe™ to publish Dragons on bundle rabbit as a royalty share, if the writers were willing. Enough of them were, and my story was included. It will come out in the spring as the next “Cutter’s Final Cut” (I also had a story in Unlikely Heroines, from the same source, but that was me filling in with a story when she had space, rather than being part of the original.)

So, fast forward. I went ahead and just picked up the story from the end of the short and wrote the rest of it into a novel. Strawberry Dragon. Will come out in the summer, probably next after the Lazarus series completes. So August, I think. Don’t hold me to that, as these are all aspirations, and not concrete goals.

“Always write the publishing schedule in pencil.”

So that’s where my brain is coming up on the end of 2020. Got lots of stuff to publish. Even the start of a schedule, but nothing set in stone. You’ll get what I can do, and I’ll keep writing like mad to try to get all these stories out of my head and onto paper.

You will have something like 16-20 novels to pick from. Four Boundary Shock (already have three of the stories written). One Blaze Ward Presents (going to annual now, instead of semi-annual for reasons.)

Stay tuned here and on my newsletter. Listen in on my Monday blog post on Patreon as I discuss the nuts and bolts of my week.

And have a lovely holiday season.

The Hero’s Journey VERSUS Seven Point Plot Structure

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So I never intended to be a writer, in the way of many of the folks I know. They were all in on English, literature, creative writing, etc. I actually wanted to take a speech class for my last semester in High School, but the lovely bitch assistant principle explained that if I wanted her signature on things, I would take a creative writing class instead.

[Archaeological background: I started college when I was sixteen, so getting official signatures for approvals on variances in education factored heavily into a lot of my life until much later. To this day, I can’t be sure that “adults in the other room” didn’t have a conversation when I wasn’t around, intended to push me into the field of art. It failed. My undergraduate majors were Political Science and Philosophy, with a Minor in Geography (which was a nice way of saying I have a map fetish).

In college, I took one creative writing class that was so wonderful I stopped writing entirely for several years afterwards. (Vicious woman who hated all men. I had been warned that I could not get an A from her going in. I was very obviously her favorite student, and got a B+ from her, while almost every female in class got an A. Interesting, huh? But it reinforced that I could write poetry and needed to skip all that other shit and get an education so I could have a financially-rewarding career.]

All the above is to say that I had a weird relationship with the English language as a kid. Never learned a lot of the rote tools they taught, because of reasons. I learned more about the technical structure English by studying Spanish, German, and Latin than I did from any of my English teachers along the way. But that’s a story for another day.

Recently, I went deep into that thing called the Hero’s Journey, looking at it from the standpoint of several different folks, all of whom had officially-recognized opinions. I’m familiar with the pattern, but at the same time I was reading up on that topic, I came across a news article with much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Tolkien and Lewis had once set up a program at Oxford specifically to teach people how to write fantasy as we have come to understand it in genre literature (Epic or one of the sword and sorcery variants here). The program apparently ran from 1931-70, but the folks it had trained were now all retiring and the writer was furious that so much would be lost. So I dug in to what he was demanding we teach.

Tolkien taught something like the classical Hero’s Journey (more later) but shaped everything around an extremely narrow range in time and place, as a sort of 12th Century, Anglo/French world upon which everything was built. If you read his stuff or any of the innumerable folks slavishly mimicking him, they ALL BLEED TOGETHER.

That’s fine if you’re into that exact story, but I find that it you have read one, you have read almost all of them. The only thing that changes are the names of the characters and the kingdoms. It’s almost like Romance in that way, where things are on rails. Hard rails you can never deviate from.

So back to Hero’s Journey. There are a long set of steps that must be followed, in order to tell this story. Lovely. Good. In science fiction, we call most of that stuff setting.

However, the thing that jumped out at me was the critical importance of how the character must be shown in their native environment, being utterly mundane before something terrible happens that causes them to leave home forever for some grand adventure.

In deft hands, it can be done masterfully, but most of the folks I have ever encountered in the field of epic/sword fantasy are probably hacks. You end up with several chapters of the characters mostly standing around and doing nothing, so you can show just how terribly unremarkable their lives are. I grow bored, because nothing is happening. ONLY MUCH LATER does a plot actually happen. Theoretically.

After digesting that maybe this was the reason I had such problems with fantasy, I went and looked at my various bookshelves.

People who knew me in the wayback can tell you that I used to have a lot of books. As in, 30+ bankers boxes, just of books. Most of those paperback. After Donna died, I flipped my life and decided that I needed to pare things down. Ballpark, I got rid of about 3,000 books over the next 7 years, before I moved out to the farm. Every month, 10% more stuff had to leave the house than came in. Half-Priced Books, Goodwill, and the dump. Every month.

So I went looking through the 300 or so books I still have left. More than half are reference/research. Non-fiction. Of those that remain, less than a dozen are fantasy. Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need. Russell’s Initiate Brother. Both duologies.

I do have the complete Eternal Champion by Moorcock, because I got those in fancy hardbacks with jackets in the early 90s when they came out. A little David Drake, but I’m not generally a fan of his fantasy stuff so I got rid of the Isles hardcovers.

No fantasy. That surprised the hell out of me.

Conversation with Fabulous Publisher Babe™ brought all together. In the act of spending those chapters at the front being unremarkable, you lose me. Bore me.

Once she showed me the Lester Dent Seven Point Plot Structure (see my Business For Breakfast book on the topic), I just immediately gravitated in that direction. That was early and I never looked back.

Character, in a Setting, with a Problem. That’s the first five hundred words of your story, by the way, short or epic novel series. And in those first five hundred you should have only a sentence of problem, but that can be enough foreshadowing. (Pulse Pounders tend to start with a bang and a problem, and all of chapter one is a high octane race until you slow down a little later.)

Luke Skywalker is the hero of Star Wars and the two sequels. (R2D2 is the protagonist, by the way.) When we first meet him, George Lucas SPECIFICALLY made him a whiny punk, to show how later he grows up and becomes a hero. Go back and listen to his first line of dialog, and note the delivery. Now compare that to him tossing aside his light saber aside and mocking Palpitine at the end of Jedi.

How do you handle your mundane opening? How much time do you spend wallowing in nothingness before an actual story comes along?

One thing that writers often do until they learn better is to “slow walk to the story.” That’s where the editor looks at your manuscript and says, “Okay, and on page five we finally got to the plot.” Back in the Anthology Workshop days, that was a frequent refrain, but it taught people to hit their openings. When I took the Strengths Workshop, that was Dean’s advice. The practice was to start a story and stop writing at exactly five hundred words. Nothing more.

You had to have your character, your setting, and your problem there.

The way Dean teaches it, you have to grab hold of your reader by the throat on page one, and drag her to the bottom of the lake, never giving her any opportunity to escape you and surface, because if she gets away, she might not come back. Every break gives them a chance. Any time you “kick someone out of the story” by getting something wrong or telling things out of order, they might escape and not finish your story.

In the case of that long, detailed, mundanity of an opening, I might not ever make it deep enough into your story to actually discover that you had a plot. Like Dean, I’m always looking for a reason not to finish a story, unless it hooks me. I have better things to do with my time that settle for pedestrian fiction.

Lucas had you in Star Wars, even with Luke being a mopey teen, because he hooked you on page one with one of the greatest openings of all time. Tell me you didn’t shiver with excitement as the camera pans down into the middle of a space battle coming right past you at point blank range, followed by the battle in the corridors, followed by bad ass in black armor with a light saber in his hands walking through the smoke.

I rarely ever follow the classically-delineated Hero’s Journey opening because I start the story at the moment when something interesting is about to happen. I have four hundred of those first five hundred words to show the character and the setting being as normal as its going to get before all hell breaks loose. After that, you might slip away.

The same goes at the end, when people seem to want to have a dozen epilogues showing how everything returned to normal and lived happily ever after. I only ever use an afterthought like that to advance the story past the “ending” of the thing. Jessica Keller ended <<<SPOILER ALERT>>>with her decision to negotiate instead of burning the whole galaxy down.<<<SPOILER ALERT>>>

From there, I resolved the stories of many of the interesting characters, so that you got their happy-for-now moment, but also setting things up for other things to occur And each of those did not show a return to normalcy. They gave you some important bit of information about “how” things were resolving. (Hint: it never returns to normal.)

So when you look at your intended story, how much time have you spent noodling around and not actually telling me anything useful at the opening? How long does it take for the adventure to begin? How many dwarf Bollywood numbers are necessary BEFORE the plot occurs?

And how much more interesting would your story be if things happened on page one?

I Can Never Fail

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So Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I have the Anti-Stodgy Campaign, where each month we consciously try to do something new. Something fresh. Something we’ve never done before.

I will be the first to admit that it doesn’t always work out, but the whole point is the newness, not the potential improvements to efficiency. She and I got to talking the other day and I made the comment that “I can never fail.”

I need to break that down for the folks playing along at home. I can fail, but it doesn’t matter. Just this afternoon I poured a half-gallon of hooch down the drain because it just didn’t work out. Coffee intended for turning into wine, but it really just ended up being all the bitterness of coffee with the astringency of alcohol. Nothing worth pursuing, because we drink for the taste and wouldn’t go after that taste.

But the rum worked out and I’ll make it again. The coffee mead is still brewing, and hopefully that works. Again, not worried.

I cannot fail because I am not trying to succeed. Or rather, I measure success in the “trying something new” not in the outcome.

Recently, I got contacted by a musician who picked up on my usual comment that I wanted to be Bernie Taupin. He needed a lyricist and asked if I was interested in becoming his Bernie.

Well, hell, that sounds like fun. Never written lyrics, but I have written a lot of poetry in my time, so I’m used to breathing the words and finding the rhythm of the thing. So we met for coffee and hit it off. He’s a fun guy.

I went home and finished one of my instant expert research books on the shelf, related to writing musical lyrics. (I have a weird library these days.) I read the lyrics section and skipped the composition part because I cannot write music. And skipped the business part because the book is twenty years old, and so everything is likely badly out of date. But writing lyrics and score does not change, except to get easier as the tools evolve.

I wanted to experiment with lyrics. So I did.

In the last week, I’ve written lyrics to three songs. I have no idea if they are any good. I’ll let Elton take a look in a few days and pronounce his opinion. I trust that he’ll have useful opinions that I can turn around and use to make my writing better, because he’s been doing this for decades.

The best job review I ever got was broken down into “Do more of this. Keep doing this. Do less of this.” It was fantastic because I could work with that. (When I started dating again, his sage advice was “Be less you.” and I understood that. Didn’t need it in the end, because I found a woman who was enough of herself to handle me, but that also worked. Haven’t worked for him in 14 years and we still talk occasionally.)

So my approach to writing lyrics is that I cannot fail. I mean, hell, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Someone likes them enough to record the song and I hear it on the radio? Gosh.

I cannot fail, because I tried something new. Anything new. That was the success.

You can’t fail, if you intend to do new things and become a newer/better you. So go out and try some new hobby.

Personally, I try to keep a list of twelve things that I want to pursue at any given time. Then, on a regular basis (frequently June 1 and Dec 1), I chuck one or two out so I can try new things. Lyric writing replaced something else. Okay. If it works out, we’ve do more. If not, I’ll mark it down as a REALLY useful learning experience and move on.

I tried something new. I succeeded. When you try something new, you succeed.

In fact, for me, the only way to fail would be to just keep doing the same thing for the rest of my life. Eat the same food. Listen to the same five albums. Wear the same clothes.

Yuck.

Stodgy. Don’t do that.

Try.

That is the single most important lesson anyone ever taught me.

Strive.

What new thing have you done lately?

OryCon 2020

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I did a Con

OryCon has always been one of my favorites. For the last several years I have even been lucky enough to be on panels, talking about what it means to be a writer in the modern age.

OryCon is even moving into the present, however slowly and painfully. For the longest time, all of their writing track panels were aimed at how to get an agent and a book deal, in spite of the number of us making a living Indie. (Hell, the most recent rumblings from Industry Insiders suggest that traditional publishing, as it has been known, does not survive the pandemic, and that all the big houses will shake out and largely collapse into places where only the biggest names get book deals, but many of us are not surprised. Reach out direct if you have questions.)

This year, the con had to be online and way cut down. Instead of the old days where there was a filk room, a crafting room, a kids track, and maybe thirty rooms with panels going on at any given moment, that was reduced in the end to three channels. And all online.

So Friday, Fabulous Publisher Babe™ had her first panel at 1pm. It went well. She and I were on a second panel together at 2pm, with the ever-wonderful Josh Vogt, discussing “Creating Your Own Anthologies, Bundles, and Magazines.” It was the usual talk about vellum, BookBrush.com, and BundleRabbit, and how those allow the Babe and I to put out twelve anthologies a year (although we’re cutting that down some in 2022, depending on how things go). The world has changed, and you really can do it these days, and on the relatively cheap, as well.

After that, she was done until Sunday, but I had two more.

I went straight into “Can You Really Carry That?” with Guest of Honor A. Lee Martinez and podcaster Remy Lerner. That was a hoot, talking about armor in fantasy versus literature and role-playing games. How much is too much for encumbrance, and how the hell do you really loot that many gold coins from a dead dragon?

Finally (and we’re talking three hours in a row here) “Do I Really Need an Editor?” with EM Prazeman and Joyce Reynolds-Ward. I’ve known both ladies for many years, so we had a fun, wide-ranging talk about all aspects of the things that happen AFTER you have finished your manuscript. Why you should learn to write clean first drafts. What are the various kinds of editor you might hire. Why the editor you get recommended might not work out, which turned into a discussion of Voice, both the character and the writer.

I’m sorry that I didn’t get to do “Military Rank Structures and their Functionality” because I would have taken that shit entirely sideways. Anyone who has read my science fiction understands that I put a lot of time and research into military ranks, trying to make them completely original and more than just the exact same thing everyone else does based on how the US Army worked from 1990-2005.

At that, I had been “On” for three hours, sitting in Vintage Coffee in Maple Valley, WA. That’s the closest non-corporate spot, and I needed to use somebody else’s wifi for that many hours of heavy lifting. Even wore my mask for the first two, but after that the place emptied out and I was a little more confident without my mask on. Not entirely, because Washington State goes into mandatory lockdown tomorrow, but the numbers in my immediate zip codes haven’t been too bad. (I expect that to change.)

I went home and crashed: emotionally, mentally, physically. This introvert had had enough.

But for the whole Con being online, it went well. Each panel had a monitor who’s job was to kick out jackasses who couldn’t behave, and I only had one of those. Mar got rid of her quickly and the rest of the day went well.

The think I did miss was being able to just hang out with folks I only see as con buddies. At least these days I have social media, so I can stay in touch, but not everyone does that, so there are folks I only see at OryCon. Those are the ones I look forward to seeing. We used to do a massive group breakfast, in the old days, when we could reserve a table for a dozen folks, and then get twenty as people came and went over the course of a morning.

That’s how you build good friendships, sitting around and arguing politics and nerdiness with people you like and respect. Didn’t get that this year. Hoping that by this time next year, COVID has turned into a seasonal flu kind of thing, with a vaccine you can get that works and keeps most people from catching it.

The problem has always been that a spike fills the ICU beds at the hospital, and then anyone who comes along with ANYTHING is out of luck. So being at home and zooming in from a coffee shop is a price I find worth paying.

Hopefully the folks who attended the con had fun. I’ve already gotten a new Patreon patron from it, so that was wonderful.

With any luck, the world is coming back to something like normal, but that won’t be until February, based on the math of the current pandemic, so everyone be careful out there, because I need you supporting my lifestyle.

More summer weirdness

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So I’ll go into greater detail in the newsletter coming tomorrow, but I had a summer cold last week. (Just a cold, with a lot of panic.) Lost two days of brainless sitting on the couch. Way behind on word count and not really feeling the need to make it up because eventually I have to break my streaks, so I might as well let it happen now and be done with it.

But this week I have a fantastic guy out restaining the interior and exterior of the house. So the place is torn apart and everything covered with plastic. Sleeping over with Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) for now. Gotta stay around the house, in case the painter guy needs anything, so I’ve basically just written on the back porch for three days.

Had to put the Lazarus novel aside, because it is in a bright and exciting phase of the arc and I’m so not there. Partly, summer. Partly, overt fascism as certain elements of society decide that they would rather burn it all down than be arrested for their crimes. (And they are crimes. I hope that people get extradited to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes when this is all done. That’s the scale of evil we’re facing.)

But I’m a writer, so I write. That meant two new Gunderson stories in the last three days (SF Private Detective set in 1955) because those are dark, plus a quick short on one of my other projects. Last night, was sitting down counting and realized that I had written 20,000 words in those three days.

My normal pace lately had been 4,000/day. I was running 7,000 this week. Shit.

Instead of being completely off pace from being sick, I had actually managed to catch up, to the point that I think I needed to write 4300 words today to zero my counter out.

At this moment, I’m not sure if I will, or if I will consciously push back and goof off instead. Last December, I wrote a novella because I had written all the novels I was going for in 2019. Just cut the story down enough that it came in at 18,000 when I could have EASILY pushed it to 40,000.

And at the very end of the year, I was at 1,394,500 words. Over that last week I could have pushed and hit 1.4M. Really didn’t want to. Might just hit it this year, if I stay on pace. Dunno. Not today’s problem.

Streaks are good, but I don’t live or die by them. As I have explained to many people, the only person I am competing with is Death. She’ll come for me long before I run out of stories to tell and things to say, but if I write more, I can get more done.

The goal at the beginning of the year was 14 novels and 40 short stories.

Then 2020 happened.

I have 6.8 novels complete right now (Lazarus 5 is 40,000 of about 55,000 when I stopped). I have also written 31 short stories. Through July. Fortunately, if I combine some of those shorts into a single volume as a “novel-sized collection” then I have three more novels done so far this year.

But it has been a 2020. I’m fine with not hitting my original goals. I have had to put aside several projects because my mind was not in the right place for them. Gunderson was there for me instead, when I wanted/needed to tell gritty, dark, hard-boiled private detective stuff. And of course it is science fiction, because that’s what I do, so you have Godzilla, aliens, Cthulhu, spandex, and Medusa as themes/styles. Because I can.

But they are dark. Hard-boiled falls on a spectrum, with Cozy mystery at one end and horror/noir at the other, depending on how much blood and violence you have, plus how corrupt everyone else around the PI is. Gunderson lets me dive into some of those dark corners and tell stories that are likely to make some of you uncomfortable.

I’ll get back to Lazarus soon. 1-4 are at first readers right now and coming out Jan+. I have time to write the rest of 5 and then cap it off with 6.

But first, I really needed some darkness to match my summer and my soul.

Ugly Summers

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I’ve had a cold for the last several days. (Only a cold. Been paying attention to symptoms.) Haven’t gotten hardly any writing done, because there just wasn’t brain there. Decided that July was going to be a month I broke my daily average streak, just so that I didn’t have it lingering over me. Still going to make 100,000 this month, but not 120,000. That’s okay. Spent Thu/Fri looking at coming books and art books, just kinda refilling the brain with creative juices.

Another thing I’ve found is that the crap going on out there is finally starting to get me down. Angry, as opposed to depressed, but I had a chat with Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) this morning that I might have to put the current novel aside for a bit and write other things. I’m deep into the fifth Lazarus, and getting ready to wrap this one up and head into #6, which will culminate the series.

Except that these tend to be brighter and cheerier than I feel right now. One man fighting against a corrupt system, but he’s to a point where you’re starting to see the momentum swing his way.

I don’t see that when I watch the news. I see echoes of Augusto Pinochet and his thugs taking to the streets with truncheons and tear gas. I saw a picture of a water-cannon bulldozer heading north to either hit Portland or Seattle shortly. I see a small fragment of this country that are calling for troops to just start shooting protesters in the streets. (Finally lost one of my oldest friends over this. That was his solution. I can’t help you if you have decided to actively worship evil.)

On the other hand, I have a couple of short story series I’ve been working on that do fit my mood. Dark. Ugly. Not horror, but bad. Hard-boiled Private Detective stuff, set in the mid-1950s where all the science fiction you see in the movies was real, and he has to deal with it. Just finished one with Cthulhu overtones. Got more in mind.

I can’t really write about heroes overcoming the obstacles until the world changes. 2020 was always going to be an ugly place. Anyone who knows me has heard me talking about it since the late 1980s, after studying Kondratiev and Long Cycles. Mix that in with the Boomer generation starting to die off, after dominating US culture for fifty years. They don’t want to surrender power, and many appear to be willing to burn the whole damned country down rather than admit that they are done.

So I’m writing dark stuff right now.

This blog post is for the rest of you. I understand why I’m having issues and how to solve it, but y’all need to realize that you can do the same. If you are not happy, you can’t write happy. If you are angry, maybe you need to put everything to the side for now and paint. Or knit. Or write horror. (Those of you who write horror maybe need to write something bright and cheery as a mental break.)

This whole nasty year will not be getting better for a while. Possibly for a long time, depending. People talk about civil wars, and we’re closer now than we’ve been in nearly a century.

Take care of yourself. And drink a lot of water. You’ve still got things left to say.

You are responsible for your own career…

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Or, nobody else has any better idea what will work than you do, so listen to what they say, absorb it, and then do what you think it right. After all, the only limits are MY imagination? Y’all are DOOMED!!! Just thought I would share that thought with everyone, as I move into the fall, at least mentally.

Twice a year right now, we have been doing Blaze Ward Presents, a type of open call anthology where everything is royalty share, I don’t ask for right other than publication, and we leave them up forever to earn a few nickels for everyone. None of them are going to make us rich, but I continue to do it for two major reasons.

First, I’m having fun. Simple as that. I know of a handful of folks where that issue was their first ever publication that actually paid them anything. And I have met a number of folks that I didn’t know, because the call got shared wide enough that they found me and submitted.

That takes us to the second reason we do this, which is for the marketing element. You’ve heard me talk about how for Indie Writers the biggest problem is discoverability. We don’t have New York publishers buying ads in various magazines or newspapers to show us off to potential readers. What we have is the hustle.

When I do something like Nuns With Guns, I have a pool of nearly twenty people who are going to tell all their friends about it, and some of those folks will buy the issue. From there, my hope is that they will start reading everyone else and discover me and the gang. If they like me, I have an entire catalog of books they can buy, and I am a good enough writer to hold my own, if your tastes align with mine.

So we do these, and we have fun and get silly. For the first three issues:

An Interpretation of Moles

I Like My Science…Mad!

Nuns With Guns

I gave everyone a month. Seriously. Mad Science was announced October 1, 2019. Submissions closed November 1. I published it December 1. I’m used to folks from the Oregon Writers Network, for whom having a whole month to write a story is slacking. They’ve had to write six short stories, one per week, as part of the old anthology workshops. Dean would send the theme Monday at 0000 and you had to send in the story Sunday by midnight. Six weeks in a row.

So they can write me great stuff with a month. Plus, you don’t have time to revise it fourteen times and rip out all the emotion when you’re running that hard to complete it. That means I tend to get stories with more raw emotion. I can fix spelling errors and grammatical fuckups. I want power.

But for the next issue (Fall 2020), I wanted to get a little weird. Weirder, maybe.

So I reached out to several musicians and artists and asked if they wanted to play. I still won’t tell all the writers until much later, but music and visual arts require a longer lead time if I want quality.

Yesterday, I got my first submission of music, a guitar rip that felt like a revolution happening in my ears. It was lovely. And the guy is also a writer, so he’s going to write me a story that goes with it. Double win.

The goal is that we’ll put his sheet music in the anthology, along with a link to where they can listen and buy. Because I want a multi-sensory experience, and so do you.

So if any of you are musicians and interested in writing me some music, reach out for more details. If you do visual arts and want to do me 6-10 pictures (pencil sketch up to whatever, but they’ll go into a B/W book, so plan accordingly), I can also line you up for a share, and I don’t want exclusivity on music or art.

I want to expose you to all my fans. I want you to bring all your fans over and have them read me and my friends and discover lots of other folks

The future began yesterday. What are you doing to keep up?

Setting

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Setting

Putting on my editor hat today, because something that I take for granted turned out to be a lesson folks occasionally forget.

I was talking to Fabulous Publisher Babe™ last night about one of the projects I am currently editing. (Hint: I always have SOMETHING in process these days, with various timelines across Boundary Shock Quarterly, Blaze Ward Presents, side projects for friends, or larger one-off things.)

I had gotten about halfway through a story and found myself bored. That’s NEVER a good sign in your editor. Means you messed up somewhere.

I described the story as mechanical. That’s as opposed to emotional, so let me break it down into clearer details.

In this case, we had a really interesting idea for a story. Truly out there, which are the best kind of things, because that means that the writer wasn’t going for low hanging fruit. Wasn’t playing it safe.

At the same time, they were just giving me thesaurus lists of adjectives and adverbs as descriptive details. Dry. Mechanical.

Boring.

Setting is more than just a description of the scene as you enter the room. To be effective, it has to have emotion behind it. Feeling. Setting is the character’s opinion of what they see, rather than just the catalog.

You don’t tell me that the walls were a yellow. Tell me that they were the color of that mustard that grandma used on sandwiches she made for you when you were a kid. The kind you always looked forward to and missed now because it wasn’t the same with someone else making them.

The barn isn’t red. It is a scarlet troll, perched on the hill over a valley full of cattle like a shepherd tending his flock, poised to charge out against a wolf.

Gimme emotions. Gimme impressions. Show me a side of the character watching the scene, rather than just dig out the big words to describe it. I want to know about the person experiencing the impressions as well.

For a lot of newer writers, they don’t hear that lesson often enough. They think that having more adjectives automatically makes it a better story, but that only works to a certain extent. Eventually, I need to know what you think of the thing you see.

The bottle of apple juice from the fridge isn’t refreshing, it is the nectar of the gods, pressed and distilled down to recharge your soul for the coming afternoon of battle with the hay bales. It is a sweet sip of pure electricity, bringing you back from the dead after a morning of Sisyphusian toils. (The yardwork is never done, you just drive the monsters back for a time, until you have to do it all over again.)

The grass isn’t green, it is a field of emerald soldiers creeping stealthfully forward to reclaim the garden and plant a flag of conquest among the spinach.

Again, this is me with my editor hat on. I don’t always write like that, but that’s because those sorts of details also serve to slow the story-telling down some. To draw you in and drag you to the bottom of the lake, holding you under water until you have no choice but to keep reading until you come out on the other side.

A wise mentor has more than once reminded me that the opening five hundred words of any story (and sometimes every chapter) should be all setting. All impressions of the scene, with sensory details that establish how the character feels. It isn’t a hot day. It is that last day of summer before you have to start school again tomorrow when you were a kid, and you were going to suck every drop of fun out of it that you possibly could before Mom yelled at the kids to come eat dinner.

In those first five hundred words, you should maybe include a sentence or two of plot, just to whet the reader’s appetite more than anything. After that, you transition to the action, always remembering that opening details are good, but you shouldn’t slow walk to the story.

You have the opening paragraph to catch their eye. The opening page to draw them in and hit them with all the feels.

That long, and no longer, because if you let an editor escape, they might just toss you onto the rejection pile and move on to the next story. We read a lot of stuff, and are always looking for a reason to not finish a story. Hell, that same mentor used to be able to reject a story before he had even gotten it out of the envelope, just because the front page was one giant wall of text, paragraphs six or ten sentences long. Slow and laborious to read. Boring.

As a writer, your job is to craft tight prose, but it must evoke an emotional response from the reader, or you have failed. Simple as that. Grab them and pull them under water quickly. Never let them escape.

That will give you a story that will be memorable.

The Firehose

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That’s a term we use when we encounter a writer just making the transition out of the old Traditional Publishing mindset and starting to think about going Indie. There is so much to learn that it ends up being something like trying to drink from a firehose.

And it’s not for everyone. I’m not about to stand up here and say that this is the only way to go about your career. Nope. YOU are responsible for your career.

But there are people willing to help.

And a firehose.

Overwhelming, I know. Requires a lot of patience and note taking early on, because the first step is enormous.

In TradPub, you complete a manuscript and then an agent handles everything until somebody buys it. Then you work with an editor who tells you what to change. Book comes out, you get famous.

Or something like that.

Or maybe you you’re sending in short fiction to bigger and bigger periodicals (in terms of pay and prestige). They’ll either take it or they won’t. If not, you keep trying until finally it finds a home or it finds the trunk.

Done.

In Indie, there is so much more you have to know. To learn. To understand. To keep up on, because it will change at some point and what worked today stops working.

Change. We use that term a lot, because the world goes through periodic revolutions, mostly technology-driven.

Thus, the firehose.

Around the various masterminds in which I participate, the goal is to start learning, so that you can move forward.

To be successful is to be a small business owner, and not just a writer. Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone can. Sometimes you get lucky and have a spouse that can carry some of the load, or at least support the household financially while you try to do your thing.

But you have to commit to learning. New vocabulary. New technology. New world

Completing your manuscript? That’s the first half of the value chain, and the easier part, because in Indie, you get to write the story you want to read. (We’ll leave off those folks writing to market in a segment that they don’t read for pleasure. Won’t work long.)

I like to remind people that I’m not better at any of this, especially when working with a new writer. Just further along the track. But mine will be a different path up the mountain, anyway.

You can do it. That much you need to understand right at the beginning.

It looks like a lot of work, but none of it is so esoteric as to be unknowable. We’re not talking non-Euclidian Geometry, like Lovecraft loved to describe.

You finish the manuscript, then there is a list of questions for you to answer. Different for every writer. Different for every career. Different sometimes every week, but that’s partly the 2020 pandemic speaking.

Andrew Yang posited that we would see 10 years of social development in 10 weeks.

Been 10 weeks. Not done yet. In fact, just about to get worse. Another 10 weeks puts us at Labor Day, the end of Summer traditionally in the US. Now we’re talking about 20 years social development. That’s a whole generation. That’s the world as it existed in 2000. Remember those days?

But that level of change is going to occur before 2021.

If you thought it was a firehose before, it’s about to get worse. We’re about to enter the ugliest, brutalest presidential election in your lifetime. Whoever you are. 1968 is going to be a distant second. A warm evening roasting marshmellows over an open fire.

Watching the news will just fill you with greater dread, as it seems like the whole world is burning down around you. (And I don’t care what your politics are when I say that. Nobody will be immune.)

So, firehose.

Lots to learn. Information coming at you impossibly fast, and changing sometimes weekly.

You will need to surf this. It is a Kondratiev Wave that can be ridden.

Prepare. And breathe.

Everyone is going to be going through the same thing. Old rules that used to work for years are gone in days. Nobody (and I mean nobody, including me) has God’s Truth about what is coming next, so approach any prophet you encounter with a grain of salt and don’t, as Don Henley sang, end up follow the wrong gods home.

My goal in 2020 was always production, even before pandemic. We expected a messy political situation with the drawn out Impeachment and the aftermath. We expected revenge and payback, however that might play out. We expected the summer of 1848, and got 1968 instead, which was worse and its only barely started.

Come fall, everything will step up a notch as the election gets ugly. And it will get ugly. Memorable. Worst anyone will ever remember until someone tops it later, which might end the Republic. (Assuming we survive this one, mind you.)

But people will want to read. They will NEED that escape, because they’ll be facing a firehose of bad news and worse tomorrows.

They expect unemployment to go from 4% in January to 20% by the end of June and that’s with all the jobs that opened up at groceries and for delivery drivers as people stayed home instead of risking exposure and infection from an unknown killer.

So people will have to balance their reduced budget, if they’ve lost one or both household jobs. Maybe they lost health insurance, because the United States capitalist class has fought to the death to not let people escape their control. (How many people do you know have stayed at shitty jobs because the health insurance was pretty good? How many would skip out tomorrow if they could get it universal instead? Nuff said?)

I expected sales to be down all year. Shit happens, but we budgeted for it. Some folks will hit the right zeitgeist, and make bank, but they’ll be the exceptions, not the rules. Others will suddenly find that everything stopped working. All those little tricks and seams that they’d managed to exploit will close or be overloaded with everyone throwing wet spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

So breathe.

Write. You can’t control the world falling in, but you can control how you react to it. How much it gets to disrupt you.

I’ve put two major projects to one side because they were just wrong and too big for me to handle, on top of just writing. But I’m still writing. You can do the same.

Carve out the time. Writers write. That’s it. If you want to be a writer, you write.

For me (and many others I know) it is the drug itself. The writing high. If you have it, I don’t need to explain. If you don’t, maybe you need to rethink what you want out of life and 2020.

You cannot control the world. Even less so today than you once could, so don’t let it get you down. Understand that all this bad information is a firehose, and go back to when you first looked at Indie writing and decided to jump in.

If you’re at that point of just wanting to dabble, don’t lose heart. Everything everyone tells you will feel wrong, because we suddenly all are. No lies. Shit’s changed and we’re all flailing a little.

But you breathe and you write, because you are an artist, and the world needs your art.

Moreso now that ever, because the world feels like it is falling apart and everyone wants an escape. So commit art.

Understand that you’re facing an firehose of negativity today, like you did information then.

Writing never changes. The tools get easier, is all. The genres that are white hot change, but if you write what you love, you will find your audience. They’ll find you.

Each of you will think of the other as a life preserver in rough seas, and you can make it.

20 weeks. 20 years.

An entire generation of change happening in real time as you watch. A few will exploit it. A bunch will drown under it.

You need to surf it.

Breathe.

Relax.

Focus.

Surf’s up.

Militant Lesbian Tree Octopus Sorceress

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Akahana (Japanese, Feminine): “Red Rose/Beautiful Flower”

So I had this idea for a character in a fantasy setting based on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) who had been a familiar summoned by some wizard, but who had somehow managed to survive when he got killed.

I grew up playing D&D in the WAY old days. (Celebrating 40 years in 2021, for example) When a wizard had a familiar, it was always a risk, because they were easy to kill and could seriously hurt the wizard that they were bonded to. (Those rules got made much less painful in 5th ed, in case you were wondering.)

Then we had this running joke about a powerful magic item shaped like a brandy snifter and holding a goldfish. As a familiar. Weird and a little silly, but you get really bored, running the same combat dwarf, archer elf, or paladin human after all while, so you have to branch out and really go for the gusto with crazy roleplay ideas. (Ask my friends about some of the weird shit I’ve pulled over the years and campaign, okay?)

Except that the joke evolved, and the question was if the goldfish was really a god, and the character would become the familiar responsible for carrying him all over the place so he could do things on our world.

Put those two together and you have some serious silliness (not an oxymoron, by the way).

So I wrote about this tree octopus sorceress. Militant lesbian, of course, because when an octopus female mates, she lays eggs, protects them for several months while starving herself, and then dies. Screw that, Akahana was going to live forever.

But she had a problem. Somehow, all the evil had been ripped out of her soul somewhere along the way when her summoner died, and now she was kinda good. Whoops. So the goldfish god sent her on a quest, mostly to learn about herself, but also to help others.

One thing turned into another, and she ends up doing more favors for the guy, and growing in power and understanding about herself. Got three stories so far and thinking about a fourth soon.

———-

The Akahana stories let me explore some of the common tropes of Western European/Tolkienesque fantasy as the 20th Century really shaped it. (Dungeons and Dragons straight up steals whole chapters from JRRT and files off just enough serial numbers so as to not get sued.)

What is magic? What is evil? What things appear innocent on the surface of things, but underneath are really kinda icky, but we don’t talk about it or deal with it in polite company.

But my militant lesbian tree octopus sorceress can have frank conversations in between blasting seagulls and chipmunks on one hand, and saving the world on the other.

It is a radically different take on the genre, but hey, have you met me? Never write straight down the rails, because EVERYBODY does that, and it gets stale.

So I invite everyone to enjoy some silliness. I just put the first three Akahana stories up on my webstore. #3 is otherwise only available in an anthology that came out a while ago, and I know how many people actually bought copies, so most of you haven’t read it.

This is your chance to upend modern sword and sorcery fantasy, and really have some fun, while still dealing with some amazingly deep and complicated questions.

Y’all have fun, and maybe buy some other books while you’re there. Every little bit helps.