News Update, Round 2: The next Goodreads Giveaway (Queen of the Pirates) starts Tuesday 11/10 and runs for a week. After that, a set of giveaways for Last of the Immortals that will begin just after the book itself comes out on Nov 17. As usual, available for pre-order everywhere that allows, plus everywhere after that.
I looked at the pre-order numbers last night for Immortals.
Thank you.
Just that. When Auberon came out, I got a couple dozen pre-orders, which shocked me. Queen was good for over one hundred, which I found amazing. Immortals is very close to three hundred last I checked.
I get to write it, but I couldn’t really do this without you. I have fans that buy my books. Who leave me nice reviews places telling me how much they enjoyed the book and look forward to the next one. That actually leave me nice notes here on my boards, encouraging me. And you do.
So thank you.
In other news: Words.
It’s been on my mind for the last few days because I woke up with a touch of a cold and sore throat last Friday. Called in sick to work. Went back to bed. Let my body sweat it out and then did laundry and put down new sheets. By mid-day was feeling mostly human. Weak and brainless, but human.
Didn’t get any words done.
Saturday, headed into town to the Starbucks, because my laptop was not liking to connect via (really, freaking slow) tether to the interwebs. (Remember, I live WAY out in the boonies.) Couldn’t connect at Starbucks either.
I’m a fairly nerdy IT guy, and I was stumped. Knew what it felt like, but not how to undo it.
Fortunately, was having some friends over for a Guy Fawkes dinner and (would have had had it not been raining) bonfire. One of them, Steve, is my go-to-nerd for computer issues. (I have wonderful friends who can probably solve any problem across the group, or they know a girl who can.)
He was stumped. Tried everything he knew, and hit the same wall that had left my head bloody.
Eventually, he forced it to revert to “last known good state” which was middle of last week. (I keep all my writing on a thumbnail that I frequently back up to a NAS, and not on the laptop, so utterly safe to do that.)
That did it. Apparently, the hardware maker and Microsoft both pushed critical updates that stomped on each other and everything else in their way. It was a Godzilla kind of weekend.
Did finally manage to get back to zero on Sunday (it’s Monday as I write this). Between being kinda yucky and kinda computer-yucky, got only a few words done over the whole weekend. (Did other things that did not require brain, like burn the scrap for the bonfire, and unpack several more boxes of books and arrange them, and make the new house generally more livable.)
But I got to thinking about Words. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) asked if I wanted something like a FitBit(tm) for Christmas to track daily exercise. I said no, thank you, because I don’t track that on a daily basis. It is the same with my words. I don’t track those daily, or even weekly. And in this month of NaNoWriMo, where everyone is supposed to write a novel in a month, I don’t bother to participate that way.
I count my words across an annual basis. That way, when I have a bad, brainless weekend, I don’t feel bad that I got nothing much done. What matters is this: How am I doing against the year target? (Slightly ahead of target, possibly within striking distance of Second Stretch Goal, having made #1 already.)
My feeling is this: Why save up for NaNoWriMo and blow it all in a 30 day stretch? Why aren’t you that committed EVERY day? I’m not sprinting here. I’m on a super-mega-ultra-marathon that will finally defeat me when I die of old age, hopefully in fifty or sixty years. If I never had another original idea, I’m pretty sure I’d never get to the bottom of the current list of ideas I have written down, even then.
So write, write daily, count them, tally the words against all the words you’ve ever written, and not against everybody else.
Like I said at the top: Lots of Words.
And not all of my words are going to be for all of my readers. And I mean that in a good way.
I’m 20k into the next novel. It is a lovely, little New Adult-type story about a young woman who sets out to get revenge on the man who killed her sister, by becoming a costumed super-villain. And it is very literary. Single Point of View. Slow to build in the way that literary is, rather than slow to get to the story. (You know right at the top who, what, where, and why. How is the only piece yet to come, by the end of Chapter One.)
Fans who love action might not like this story. It is not car chases and gun fights every page. And that’s okay with me. I hope I communicate well enough to people with cover and blurb and notes NOT to expect another Jessica Keller action piece. There will be more of those. I have 10k words of planning encyclopedia for Jessica Book 4 (Goddess of War) and figure I’ll go after that early next year, when I finish the first draft of Miss Kai Di Peng and her adventures. (She’s got a trilogy coming, eventually.)
So Words. Lots of Words.
The third Javier Aritza story is coming out in December. The Gilded Cage picks up pretty much at the end of The Mind Field. It technically makes a trilogy for Javier, but I expect Season One to run eight or maybe twelve episodes. (I did discover last week that I can do a special “Boxed Set” edition of books from one of the printing companies I work with, so I’ll probably do a mega box of Javier when I hit the end of Season One. Jessica will have to wait until I finish ALL of them, which will be nine novels, at current planned arc.)
Hopefully, you enjoy the words. And continue to come along with me for the ride. As always, I enjoy the comments. If you have questions, drop me a line or comment on something. I’ll get to it fairly quickly, presuming no more Godzilla events.
See you at OryCon, or Powell’s Books shortly.
bd