February 25, 2019 sort of marks the one year anniversary of no longer having a day job. Last day at work was Friday Feb 23, 2018. Recovered for a day, then started the new job Sunday morning.

I no longer get up at 0400AM, take a shower, and get out of the house by 425. Into the office building at 0500 when the garage doors open. Fix coffee and heat my breakfast while reading the news and catching up on my comics.

No longer sitting in the kitchen writing for two hours before I have to walk over to my desk and pretend to give a flying f@#$ about my corporate overlords. My last boss was a nice kid. And he was 20+ years younger than me, so I can call him a kid. Worked out of the Toronto office of the company that owned the company where I worked.

In the last 24-odd months I worked there, I changed bosses seven times. A, B, C, B, C, Q, X. B and X were the only two I’d ever consider working for again. Still send Boxing Day Greetings to X every year, just to say hi.

But I don’t have a real job anymore. And I’ve gotten into heated discussions with folks that thought I should treat full-time writing as a job. (They’re wrong, but don’t get it.) It is not a job. It is a hobby that somehow makes me really good money. If it was a job, it wouldn’t be any fun, because I would be taking orders and dealing with fools and hitting impossible deadlines.

F@#$ that noise.

I got the greatest hobby in the world, instead. I make shit up for a living. And it is a good living these days. I write lots. Publish lots. Have happy fans.

Today, we are celebrating No Pants Day. And let me tell you, going out to breakfast in a kilt in 40 mph, 26 degree winds was oh so much fun. But me and Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) sat and geeked out over the future of TradPub, IP valuation logic, Hollywood interactions, and tulip mania for a couple of hours.

We’re like that frequently when it’s just the two of us. Nerdy as hell.

It helps that she’s deeply in touch with the tradpub model, while I have a long background in corporate office politics (she worked from home for decades, so missed all those adventures). And I have friends on the Hollywood side of things who like to bemoan the fact that “the world has changed” and that their old methods of doing things just aren’t working any more.

Sound familiar?

Trying to get my buddy “E” to write me a book about how IP makes its way to Hollywood these days, because he and I spent an hour on the phone a few months ago and I was simply blown away at how little of the old models still hold.

Babe and I were also talking about some of the organizations that service the TradPub model and how they fail to meet my needs.

She’s a life member of SFWA, because back in the old days, she could pay a one-time fee. I’m not a member for a couple of reasons. For one, I was a best-selling author in Indie, making a nice living, before I ever qualified for my SFWA bones. Seriously. And I only qualified because Cat Rambo finally got the old shits to change the definition to include folks like me. (Folks you idolize who have publicly called what I do “Vanity Press” by the way. Next person who says that to my face gets slapped out of their chair. The only question then will be if I use an open palm or a chair. But that’s another topic for another day.)

What I have never been able to identify is anything that SFWA membership would do that would benefit me. I don’t write into the trade magazines. (I might actually, accidentally, publish something in an anthology one of these days, but that was because I wrote something after their deadline, based on the inspirational words of the editor at a post-deadline meeting. Showed it to her and she said “I want this.” Dunno if she’ll actually keep it, but that would be my first professional sale, if it actually happens.)

I don’t want an agent. I’m not planning to ever submit anything to TradPub. Too big a rights grab, too little return on investment, and total loss of equity. When I see SFWA sponsored workshops, all too frequently they make a big deal about having some big-shot editor or agent there to teach you how to better market your books to get a book deal.

So not happening. I make better money Indie than most of the “successful” tradpub authors I know, and that split will only get wider as I keep writing and building my audience and fan base. And some of those folks are writers whose books you have on a shelf.

As we were driving home, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were joking that what I would start, if I was angry enough, would be a competing organization to that did not focus all its energy on how to get a TradPub deal. I would focus on the business of how to succeed as a SFF writer.

The current groups teach you how to write SFF. How to get an agent. That sort of thing. Nobody, and I’ve checked, nobody teaches the business side of a SFF career. Kris and Dean have tried, and gotten ostracized by the old shits for their efforts because they were trying to teach people that icky commercial crap. (Their words, repeated as part of the story.)

They want you to have a successful career. The whole purpose of the Oregon Writers Network (or whatever it will be called now that they live in Vegas), is to get better at your craft, but at the same time to get better at the business side of things.

I would like to find an organization focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy careers. NINC (Novelist, Inc.) is a broader organization, and was founded by Romance writers, so they have a different focus on things. SFWA itself is married to the dying TradPub model and will only service those declining number of writers treading that path. (Remind me to come back in ten years and review where they’re at to see if they’ve died yet, or managed to reinvent themselves.)

Babe and I do sort of have something along those lines, in what we call the Seattle Writers Lunch, but that’s a group of local, professional artists that meet monthly to talk more business and less craft. Again, across the whole genre spectrum, from SF writers like me, through the list, to poets and photographers. Artists, but with a professional, career mindset.

And no, I don’t have the time to create such a thing. Sure as hell don’t want to be in charge of it, because I’ve got better things to do with my time and energy. That’s one of the reasons I write Business for Breakfast books with my wife. “Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Maybe it helps you get farther along in your career.”

But that’s life. I am one year into a full-time writing career that entertains and energizes me. I’m celebrating today by not wearing pants of any kind. Henceforth, this will be Kilt Day. Spent last night working on various sewing projects, one of which is a second kilt that I will finish one of these days. (pain in the ass, lemme tell you.) Eventually, I’ll do a long, winter kilt for snowy days like this.

What are you doing to celebrate the exciting and fun milestones in your life?

Preface: I own about six acres of mostly trees, sitting on a hill, overlooking a pond, but otherwise landlocked on all sides by neighbors. Way the hell out in the Cascades.

Elk don’t care.

I didn’t grow up with elk. I’m from Kansas, originally, the the most we had was deer, so it’s always a treat for me to look out the back window and see a dozen or score of the big critters walking by. (Even more interesting when you drive up, park, and realize that they haven’t moved from the septic field, that you drove by them at a distance of maybe twenty feet, and they are now eyeing you from a distance of about thirty yards as you decide whether or not to make a break for the front door, because they aren’t leaving. It was a weird day, but that’s another story.)

We got a crapton of snow up here over the last few weeks. One of my neighbors clocked about 30 inches in three big storms and one small one. Tuesday night, we got maybe another inch or two. I know because Tuesday day I had broomed all the cars clean finally. The driveway’s too deep for anything but an old Ford pickup to get down, and I keep having to dig it out to make it back up the hill, so the cars have not moved in two weeks.

As a result, we park the truck at the bottom of the driveway on the cul-de-sac. Wednesday, with a fresh layer of powder, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were walking down the driveway, where there are tracks from the truck, and some more from a neighbor’s tractor, where he was hauling feed up to my other neighbor even higher on the hill for her horses and chickens.

And then I see a deer track, crossing from the left, over the driveway, and meandering over by barn before she comes back and heads into the trees. Not unexpected. I have a couple of families that live in the area and I keep salt licks out for them.

Then I seen BIG tracks in the snow. Solitary elk has wandered out from the trees where they were bedded down. Walks along the middle of the driveway. A little while later, another one emerges, walks next to the first one, and they go all the way to the bottom of the driveway. (It’s maybe 200 yards long, give or take.)

At the bottom of the driveway, the one elk that had been walking in the heavier snow turns left and heads down to the pond, and maybe the neighbor’s house (dude who owns the tractor).

The other one just kept going straight. She got to the bottom of the driveway and went right down the middle of the street, leaving footprints in the snow (that’s about how much we had down there by late morning.)

At some point, her trail disappeared, because truck tracks ran over them and erased all sign, but she had just been casually ambling along, all by herself. Mind you, the last time I saw the herd a few months about, I counted eighteen butts visible in the open or tucked back one layer in the trees.

Nope, she was off for a meander.

Snow’s the worst in 40 years, according to more than one of my neighbors, about half of whom have lived out here for that long. (I’m the gentrifying generation, and the first of four houses that have changed in the last 3-4 years. Whole neighborhood will probably turn over in the next five years, as these folks are all generally 65-84 now.) The critters around here have had to work at it, to eat and be safe.

I’ve gone through about two big bags of birdseed in the last two weeks, just opening the back door and chucking handfuls onto the back porch and nearby snow to feed everybody. Kitty remains entertained when she’s over in the main house, like today.

I am not an ornithologist. But my wife plays one on television, so she can identify most of the birds. I have had a bunch. Spotted Towhee. Variegated Thrush (if I said that right). All the usual suspects, mostly the little attitude problems. Wife has two kinds of woodpeckers (big and medium sized, one of them “Hairy Woodpecker”) over at her suet feeder.

Gang just came back and is feeding as I write. They had a frantic morning. At one point, half a dozen of them slammed off the sliding glass door, about a couple of hours ago. When I looked up, all the little birds are gone, and there’s a hawk just landing. Not a species I know. Light brown back, smooth-colored chest that looked darker than salmon and a little more pink, but I just got a glance before she turned and chased somebody into the trees.

I don’t remember ever seeing hawks around here. Tried looking her up, and could not find a good picture, but apparently a bald eagle is considered a hawk, according to some of the websites I consulted, so that’s a thing I learned today. Always thought eagles were a thing. Or maybe I misinterpreted a larger group of collective raptors. Ornithological experts welcome to chime in.

But the elk have me laughing the most. I can only imagine me coming down the street from town, to the dead-end that is my driveway, and seeing an elk standing in the road, probably waiting for me to drive around her. Deer are at least polite enough to move to the curb, and have.

What’s things like in your corner of the world today?

There is a fine split in the world of writers, between those who outline and those to write by the seat of their pants. There are about ten thousand degrees of gradation between the extremes, but you’ll find proponents willing to declare holy war to defend the particular facet of planning that they undertake as the “only right way to do it.”

Which is a load of horse shit, but not why we’re here tonight.

Had a long week. Been snowed in since Monday (This is Thursday 9pm local now). Have gotten 24-28 inches of snow since noon Friday. Just got warm enough today to move my truck around, but not enough for me to try the long, sloping driveway that I can use to get out. Will save that for tomorrow.

But the long week has me in a weird place, so I’ll inflict it on you. Got a lovely glass of port sitting next to me, slowly disappearing. Laura Anne Gilman gave it to us as a present. Fantastic stuff. Had a long bath because I spent too much time outside shoveling snow out from under the truck so I could try to move it.

Got to thinking about writing.

I’m towards the tail end of a novel tonight. About 50,000 words done on WinterStar now, and it feels like it will come in around 60-65,000 when I’m done.

I normally write into what Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I call “dimly lit hallways.” I come from a theater background, and before that I was a poet. I know what genre I’m writing before I start, so I work out the important 3-5 characters in enough depth to get started, toss them into a problem and let them tell me the story, with a pretty good idea how long it will be and where it is going. Dimly lit.

Frequently, I work up all these notes well ahead of time, planning about 2-3 novels out so I can finish one and start the next without any measurable gap. Or rotate through series back and forth.

Didn’t happen this time. This novel wasn’t even an idea five weeks ago. And when it was, it was a superhero story, straight up spandex. Tried several of those, but nobody buys them but completists. Not generally worth my time to write them for the return on the time invested.

But this story had an interesting kernel I wanted to pull out and pursue. And the four story points that would have been my lights in that hallway all fell early in Act Two. Seriously.

So I have to trust my craft. I will occasionally start with a blank piece of paper and commit literary graffiti upon it, but usually dimly lit hallways.

Not this one. I wrote the first three chapters just feeling out who the characters needed to be, because I knew what would happen to them in Act Two, but I had to get everyone there. Got everyone past that and it was only when I hit about the 46,000 word mark that I even figured out that there WOULD be a Book Two (and mind you, I write natively in long series format, so that surprised the hell out me that I might only have the one book and done with these characters).

Recovering from shoveling snow tonight, me and my sweetie were snuggling in the couch and I finally figured out how Book One even ended. And mind you, I’m not more than a few days from that end, so I need to be wrapping things up now, bringing the villains to the stable so we can have a rumble. Or something. I can’t call it hard SF, because most hard SF stories tend to be long on technically correct jargon, and short on interesting, Andy Weir notwithstanding.

I write stories about interesting people with human flaws, dropped into strange problems and trying to find their way through. Long on weird science hand-waving, usually, because trying to describe how an FTL drive even works is silly. It works. It gets you there. It has certain rules and issues that cause it to not be perfect, but force you to adapt to things and cause plot trouble when I need it to.

Whatever. Don’t get in the way of my storytelling by demanding that I explain how a technology works that nobody has yet to describe the underlying physics for anyway.

And I’m writing into darkness. Total, freaking darkness. Lay down at night and let the backbrain unhook so it can explore what we’ve done so far today and where we need to go in the morning. That’s about the limit of the planning this novel has allowed me.

I’m at 50,000 words and the damn thing finally told me who the villain was. The other villain. We’ve met one who’s a long arc villain, now that I know this is actually a series (learned that TODAY). Killed another one, but his death in Act Two was what kind of sets up everything else, and his metaphorical ghost will haunt everything. (And I’m not sure if he comes back to life, either. Writer-brain hasn’t told me. Probably not for several books. Maybe. Something.)

Dean Wesley Smith frequently writes into darkness. He trusts his craft to just generate story as he goes. If he’s in one of his universes, like Poker Boy, he already has the world and such.

Yesterday (YESTERDAY!!) I posted a cry for help from my nerdier friend to help me calculate the apparent gravity you feel on a spinning space ship, since these folks are too poor to afford gravity inducer fields (more hand-wavium). Found a website called SpinCalc that lets you plug in numbers. So now I know how big WinterStar needs to be to do the things I’ve had going on for twenty chapters.

When I get to the end, I’ll have to go back and add some real physics, and correct a few places, because the science was wrong enough to annoy someone nerdy, but not going to material impact anything more than changing something like three sentences. And I know which three.

But it is WEIRD, writing a novel so totally into darkness that I’m making up main characters as I go, rather than having that element hammered out ahead of time.

What methodology is your default?

So I don’t normally move a lot of product on Kobo, but my goal in 2019 is to change that. To that end, I’ve been signing up for various promotions on their site.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS ONLY: There is a huge sale on Science Fiction going on!

All sorts of stuff for you to read, and you can get it really cheap.

For example: the Science Officer Omnibus #1 is $0.99. Yes, seriously. Trying to build a fan base here, so please tell all your friends all over the place so they can get hooked too.

Sale only lasts until February 18^th, 11:59pm EST, so get your butts in motion, people!

Tell everyone, or go buy it yourself and get started on the craziness that pretty much launched the Alexandria Station universe and introduced the galaxy to Suvi, everyone’s favorite goofball AI.

🙂

<Spoiler Alert>

Well, not really, but if you don’t want spoilers from the end of St. Legier (WHAT? You haven’t already CONSUMED it? Heathen! Heh), you should probably skip this post and go read the rest of the Jessica Keller books to get caught up. Start with Auberon.

So we have reached the end of First Severnaya Zemlya and have flow back into the darkness, battered and hurt, but ultimately successful in Jessica’s war against hearts and minds. (“They must fear me more than they do their god.”)

And something goes wrong.

When I was writing earlier books in the series, I had a plan. I’ve known almost word for word what Two Bottles of Wine With a War God would be like, almost from that scene in Queen of the Pirates where writer-brain first told me about this place that would eventually turn into Buran.

But the CS-405 trilogy was still a surprise as I got all the way up to actually writing the second half of St. Legier. I knew I wanted to do something along those lines story-wise, but I had originally wondered if I would end up having to write ten Jessica novels to cover everything. When you count up the trilogy (Queen Anne’s Revenge, Packmule, and Persephone), it comes in at about 140,000 words, or another long Jessica novel that would have made Winterhome #9 instead.

But those are Jessica’s stories. As I was wrapping up Petron, it became clear that I had to simply leave parts out that I had always intended to write, because they would distract and subtract from emotional arc of bringing Jessica Keller to a close. And that was how it had to end: wrapping up Jessica’s story.

But here, by splitting CS-405 off into its own trilogy, I could do something new and fun. I could look at the same sorts of settings and places from a wholly new set of eyes. I could ask questions that Jessica would never really care about. And I could introduce a new cast of goof-balls and let them have their SAG cards, which makes me happy.

A side note: When I name characters, I have a couple of tools I use. Random 1d4 for gender (the other website has 4 options). Random 2d63 for culture, picking two. Hop over and generate a name at fully-random. Maybe I don’t like the first hit, and take a second or third, especially if it is too close to someone else. Then I look up what the names mean and let that help give them a personality.

Didn’t do that with the boss of CS-405. Or the XO.

There are very few of you who will know where I got the name Phil Kosnett from. (And if you do without having to look it up, let me know, ’cause you’re my tribe.) His back story was fun, because I’ve gotten to use him as a foil before. But now he’s the central protagonist. He has help, and luck, and skill (He is The Professor, after all).

And I got to come up with a whole crew of RAN sailors. His XO is loosely based on a former co-worker who was one of my favoritest people in the world when we worked together. The rest came to me randomly, and we ran with it.

“How would a Scout Corvette, with four Type-1-Pulse and a pair of sensor arrays turn pirate?”

Ya gotta be damned sneaky to pull it off. Those of you who’ve already accidentally read Queen Anne’s Revenge can attest to that. It keeps going, because Phil Kosnett’s not about to back down. In book two, Packmule, an even better question comes up, and let me take advantage of all that college I did in the way-back machine days.

For those of you unaware (which is most of you, I’m guessing), I double majored in undergrad. Political Science (specialized in Military Theory, but never served) and Philosophy (specialized in Epistemology, or Theories of Knowledge). Grad work was in International Political Economics. I love building whole star-spanning cultures, because everything that humans can understand has pretty much been tried by now, somewhere, so I have notes and ideas as to how successful it might be.

When you have a deathless god in charge, you can run a very interesting culture. But you also have a very specific set of problems, when said god must deal with the barbarians of the galaxy.

Packmule and Persephone explore that in greater detail.

In a few hours, Queen Anne’s Revenge officially goes on sale, and I’m expecting a number of you to log in and give me nice reviews everywhere, after all the notes you left on Two Bottles when it came out (sort of). Once we got the issues sorted out, the response to the book itself was good.

I think you’ll like all three, and then be ready for Winterhome to come out in May. And then Petron to wrap it all up in December.

Because today, CS-405 begins.

Wasn’t going to blog today, but I also wasn’t planning to spend the day indoors watching more snow fall. Started mid-afternoon yesterday. I’m sitting there writing to catch up because we spent the night at a friend’s house after the annual wine and chocolate party my wife throws. (One of her best friends hosted it for us Saturday night and it was a smashing success, so thanks to everyone for coming out and helping us celebrate winter. Or chocolate.)

So we got up Sunday morning and did the brunch at Pomegranate in Redmond. I even found some things to eat, once I explained to the wonderfully patient waitress that I was allergic to onions and mushrooms. Pomegranate has an “onions in everything including dessert” kind of chef, apparently, so I couldn’t have my first three choices, but breakfast was good and she was patiently awesome.

Got home and got to work late, since I normally write first thing in the morning.

Snow.

Are you f@#$% kidding me?

Look at the thermometer on the back porch as the sun is going down and it reads 44F. And snowing. That’s ALWAYS a bad sign around here. Means a front is coming down from the mountains on me. Monday night, was supposed to meet with a writer I’ve only ever met online, so we can talk business and stuff, but she smartly canceled ahead of time. Will take a snow check on this one.

It snowed the rest of the afternoon Sunday while I wrote. And into the night. At 7AM Monday the power went out. Didn’t even bother to get up, just pulled up an extra blanket and snuggled closer with Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm). Kitty came in and announced her desperate hunger around 9, so we finally crawled out of bed and got dressed.

Because the wife lives in a separate house half the week, she has her own composting toilet that does not need power. She went over first, while I fed the starving beast and cleaned her litter boxes. (Certainly, starvation was IMMINENT, don’t you know?)

I made it halfway across the front yard when the Babe yells that power is back on so I turned around and headed back to the main house. Hot shower. Hot food. Get my shit mostly together, but there’s no way I’m going anywhere unless I have to. Had about 6-8 inches accumulation already this morning, and it’s been blowing flurries all day, so maybe another inch  or three of snow has fallen Monday.

I am so glad I no longer have to put on pants and go into the corporate world, although I’m sure I would have just been able to do my old job from home, if I did that. I don’t miss them. They don’t even exist as a company anymore. We’ve all moved on.

Still got a much better gig these days. Coming up on the anniversary of not having a day job in about three weeks. Gonna celebrate the first day of writing, instead of the last day of working.

Still snowing outside, as I look. Temps are down to 27 or so, last I looked, and still falling. Probably light a fire tonight and relax.

Seattle folk don’t know how to drive in snow. Too many folks came up here from California in the old days and Texas more recently, so they never needed those skills. (And don’t get me started on them in rain, either, which they should have learned by now.)

Hanging on tonight. Fixed beef short ribs left over from the last quarter cow we bought, but I wasn’t pleased. If anybody has a good recipe for beef ribs, I would be happy to know it. And give you credit. Still got one more pack to cook at some point.

I’d show you all a picture out of a window, but its just white with a little green.

Hopefully, y’all are home and safe and enjoying a fire and maybe a little spiked cocoa tonight. I’m hoping that things get warm soon, because I have a pear tree patiently waiting in my dining room. Bought it the other day, and didn’t get it into the ground (that was Monday’s plan before a foot of snow intruded) in time, so we’re all just watching the snow.

And writing. Got to push a little in February, to maintain the pace. Every time I think I can’t hold it for one reason or another, a burst of speed and I get caught up.

This is a new novel in a new series, because I didn’t have time to got back and read the first three Longshot books before attacking #4, and all five of the Star Dragon novels are done and being edited right now. There’ll be more stories to entertain you soon, if you can hold on.

Queen Anne’s Revenge is actually coming out next week, for those of you who haven’t accidentally read it.

What’s the weather like at your house?

I check my sales regularly (daily), just because I want to know where things are and what the trends are. I don’t often dive deep, settling for just counting the sales, but Amazon reports things with an ebook/paper split so I can see when someone buys a print books (and it does happen occasionally).

However, this month a few of you have caught on to an interesting facet in the Amazon pre-order system (and my laziness). When we put the CS-405 trilogy up for sale for ebooks, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) asked how soon before the books went live she should include the print editions. Amazon has a pre-order system for ebooks, but once the paper clears their review, it goes live. This isn’t normally an issue, because we only put things up a month ahead usually.

But CS-405 is different. All of them are up for preorder. And I didn’t want to deal with craziness after the mess we made of Two Bottles, so I just asked her if it hurt anything to put the print books up now. Doesn’t.

And a few enterprising souls realized that, so over the last few days, I’ve seen people ordering the three paper editions, which you can get now, for all three books.

• Queen Anne’s Revenge
• Packmule
• Persephone

Heh. Yes, they are all live. Which means you can read them in about two weeks (depending on the speed of the printer) rather than waiting for April. And that’s fine with me. I actually make a better profit on the ebooks than I do print, but I’d rather not have to deal with calendar issues later.

So enjoy. Some of you have apparently already somehow already managed to read Queen Anne’s Revenge (ha) so this is also your chance to see what happens to Phil Kosnett and the rest of his crazy crew. And Lan and Kiel.

I’m in the process of doing final edits on Winterhome (Jessica 8 that technically follows the events of St. Legier, but weaves in things from Two Bottles of Wine With A War God). Persephone actually reconnects with the main story about midway through Winterhome, and helps set things up in such a way that I can wrap up all three stories together.

Winterhome itself comes out on May 10, and should be available for pre-order in another month or so. Once I finish those edits (and remind myself what the hell I was doing), then it is time for me to go back through the finished draft of Petron (Jessica 9). I need to add a chapter or two as I wrap EVERYTHING up, but I’m done.

Or rather, as I mentioned in an earlier blog: Jessica Keller’s story is done. There are other things I could do, like follow up with Stunt Dude or the Bartender, but those are different series, and I’ve got too many things in front of them right now, so that’s not anything I’ll even look at until next year.

Petron is scheduled to drop Dec 10, just in time for Christmas. Consider that your present this year, but feel free to treat yourself to a little dessert first, by reading all the CS-405 books in paper right now.

🙂

Wow.

Just finished putting the final words on the draft of the fifth Star Dragon novel: Awaken The Star Dragon. Will go back later and polish it some, but the core is done and I’m happy.

Sometime this summer, it will be rebooted as “Birth of the Star Dragon” in keeping with a naming standard for the rest of the series.

• Birth of the Star Dragon
• Flight of the Star Dragon
• Call of the Star Dragon
• Shadow of the Star Dragon
• Trial of the Star Dragon

This is the benefit of ramping up my speed a year ago when I went full-time. I had been writing at a 450k word/yr pace before, and then I bumped it up to something like 1.2M/annum. Pulp Speed Two sustained since May and holding steady. I can write a whole series of relatively short novels (all around 45k) and then publish them once the series is done.

Actually, the series isn’t “done.” I already know what the title of book VI is, but it will be part of another five-novel arc, and I won’t attack it anytime soon, as I have several other projects I need to compete first.

But the weird part is realizing that Trial of the Star Dragon is my twenty-fifth novel. And I’m using the Hugo definition here, so it must be above 40,000 words. All of The Science Officer Season One stories run 24,000-33,000. When I pick up for Season Two (#10, with #9 being an collection of shorts that take place after #8), I expect that those will also be short novels, as I seem to have hit a good pace for telling a story at 45,000 words and I plan to stick with it.

Part of that is that upping the word count from my old novella length lets me add in a whole sub-thread to the story, rather than just telling one story fast and hard and cramming it into 30,000 words. I also am working on my depth, telling richer stories by going into detail better, and not leaving so much of the wallpaper blank.

I spent a good chunk of time before this writing plays and screenplays. In that medium, unless a detail is critical to the plot, you leave it out. For example, what the main character is wearing will depend on the director and the costuming department. I only need to speak up if some detail needs to be there, like the gun the character is carrying, or the bottle of wine she needs to have when the door opens. That sort of thing.

Learning to write those details is why my more recent work is so much better than my old stuff. Look at early Jessica versus later Jessica, and its painfully obvious to me. And no, I’m not planning to go back and “fix” Auberon, although at some point I might do a definitive “cleanup” where I try to add some of those details in, just to improve the flow of the storytelling.

Maybe.

But we’re having a little celebration today. I woke up the kitty because she was squeaking. I just finished my twenty-fifth novel, which sounds utterly amazing, until I realize that I want to write twenty just this year. Might. Might not. Depends on things outside my control, but I plan to generate 1.2 million words this year, if nothing goes terribly sideways on me. At 45k per, that would be around 25 or so, which works, when you consider the short fiction I write for Boundary Shock Quarterly, or the longer things like Jessica.

And I have a plan for an epic space opera trilogy sometime soon. Three books, each about 180,000 words. Doorstops. But they’ll be fun. I wasn’t a good enough storyteller to do them justice when the idea struck, so I’ve kept notes. Lots of notes.

But writer-brain can be a pain in the ass, so I’m shifting shortly to finish out a scheduling conflict wherein I need a total of six Dave & Valentinian novels (got three done now), plus a whole new batch of weirdness in its own universe, inspired by my recent research on the history of Central Asia, for the rpg I’ll get back to when some of my current craziness abates.

And a couple more B4B books, these focused on basic and advanced marketing tips and techniques for the beginning and intermediate Indie Publisher. (Things I’ve done or learned, in a world where I make enough income from my writing not to have a day job. So while I’m not a whale, I’m also not a guppy either, and I know lots of folks that could use a checklist of how to take themselves to the next step, as they move to embrace the Indie Revolution.)

So, deep breath. Maybe a little sake tonight, when I go have some sushi.

Because I just hit a milestone of awesomeness by completing my 25th novel, and I’d like to celebrate my 50th next summer, Good Lord Willing and the creek don’t rise.

Yay, me.

🙂

I’ve caught a lot of grief from folks who have fully drunk the kool-aid of traditional publishing, and got into this conversation sideways with a fellow writer I know and like, so I thought I would post some thoughts on modern publishing. Some of you will roll your eyes and stick pins in your voodoo dolls at me, but I don’t have a day job and support myself fully from my writing, and I don’t know many TradPub folks who can say the same.

First caveat: If you have a little more, it is better to build a longer table than a higher fence.

That’s actually my corporate mission statement, right there in the incorporation papers themselves, to remind me that while I’m somewhere in the middle at this gig, there are people ahead of me who have taught me useful things, and in turn, it is my job to help teach the folks who have not gotten here yet, so they can determine where they want to go with their career.

Second caveat: You are responsible for your own career.

My career is not like yours. That’s okay. What worked for me might not work for you, and things you do might work spectacularly for you that I couldn’t get my head wrapped around. Go, you.

Third caveat: The world has changed.

We are in the middle of the seventh revolution in indie publishing. SEVENTH. Every 18-30 months, something so completely upends the galaxy of indie press that much of what you might have done even two years ago is now outdated, or wrong, or can be done so much easier now that you would be a fool not to transition. Example: Vellum on a macbook air. I can take a properly formatted word document and turn it into epub, mobi, pdf (print), and apple books in less than 15 minutes. And done. How many hours are you spending fighting your old software or techniques to make one book pretty? Now appreciate that I plan to publish roughly 20-25 novel-length project in 2019.

Okay, so now let’s talk about your career options. There are no more mid-range career writers in TradPub. New York got rid of them over the last decade or so. They are starting to get rid of the best-selling authors now as well, by offering them advances that knock a zero or more off the contract. (Think $100,000 last time turns to $10,000, or even $5,000 for the next book. It is happening to people whose books you own. They are frantically trying to reinvent their career, because the old money is gone. And never coming back.)

If you are lucky enough to be that one person over whose debut novel a bidding war erupts, congratulations. One of those happens about every year. ONE. How many of you are there out there competing for that one slot?

What happens then is your first book has to sell gang-busters IN THE FIRST WEEK. You read that right. It hits the shelves at B&N and wherever else. If you don’t sell enough copies from Tuesday to Monday (the traditional publishing week), you won’t get a contract for book 2. None.

I’m sorry, but that’s the current state of Traditional Publishing, in early 2019. Whatever you learned ten or twenty years ago is no longer relevant. Not just wrong. Irrelevant.

So you can embrace the future, or drown with the past. Again, I’m sorry, but your chances of ever getting a book deal again go down every quarter.

Fourth caveat: I’m 100% Indie.*

• – I got a single title outstanding that might qualify for “traditional enough,” if the editor decides that she needs it in her anthology, sometime in the next year or so. TBD.

In the old days, you wrote stories and sent them to the magazines. They bought them, or rejected them with letters that you should learn from. Eventually, maybe you got to be good enough and well enough known that you could put together a collection of short fiction, maybe some of it award winning (Yay!!!), and find a medium press to publish it. ( know a few still in that business that I can introduce you to.)

Eventually, you wrote a novel. Shopped it to agents until you found one, who in turn shopped it to the Big Five. (Or Big Twelve in those days.) If you were lucky. Maybe they took it and gave you an advance, against which you had to earn out, with all sorts of expenses, to see your first penny.

My SWAG is that a contract these days might pay you ten cents on a book sale. Not ten percent. 10c. Maybe less. More if you were already famous and had a following that would move books and put you on an important Best-Seller List (I’ll take this rude moment to remind you that Kim Kardasian and Snookie are both NYT Best Selling Authors).

And you will never get those rights back. (You can, but you have to wait decades and file on the right date, or you’re out of luck, and most authors forget or never knew.) In the old days, you might get rights reverted to you when the book stopped selling, rather than go through a second printing, but today, ebooks are never “out of print” and don’t cost anything to keep up. You will never get those rights back.

So, first point of wailing and gnashing of teeth: Do you want to be rich, or famous?

What do want out of your career, when I tell you that being struck by lightning is more likely than achieving both fame and fortune from writing? JK Rowling. Suzanne Collins and the Hunger Games. Etc. You can count them on both hands and be done.

If you want to be able to walk into a bookstore and see your name on a book, then you can do it, but you’ll probably never stop having a day job. I’m sorry, but I know too many people who went down that path, and that’s their current reality.

If you want to be able to not have a day job, the only way you are likely to do that is via Indie Publishing. And those rules are different. And different today from what they were two years go, let alone ten. After the conversation with my friend MD, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) took a lot of notes for me and I’ll be doing a new B4B on basic marketing things you should be doing with your career, from the perspective of someone who does not have a day job any more.

Or, as the joke went this morning: another day of not wearing pants. Powerful stuff.

Indie is not enough. You are competing now with a world where everyone is going Indie, because they have seen the writing on the wall, or already been kicked to the curb by TradPub.

You will need to be a good writer. I can’t help you with that, but work to develop a good voice and then learn to write clean first drafts with lots of voice. I know too many MFA-trained folks who rewrite so many times that what is left is vanilla pablum. Leave it raw, and learn to write it clean. I don’t rewrite. Ever, I write this one as well as I can, and then try to write the next one better.

Next: write novels. That’s what the audience demands. I don’t care how amazing a story you can tell in 3200 words. Start generating them at 40-80k. Novels. People want to read novels.

Finally: Series. Television has taught consumers of media to expect long arcs of stories, spread over seasons, returning again and again to these characters they have gotten wrapped up in. I just completed writing the Ninth (and Last) Jessica Keller novel (Tentative title: Petron). Those novels sell well, because I tell a good story, with interesting characters and a compelling universe, and you can binge hard on them.

The Science Officer novella series is the same way. Season One is eight novellas that tell an arc. And I’ll start Season Two this summer, maybe. Nine more. Long, happy arcs as these characters live their interesting lives.

Got all that? Bitch at me all you want, but you’re likely wrong. I’m sorry to say it, but that is the formula for success today. Note: TODAY. It might change again in a few years, and people will be back to wanting individual novels that are entirely self-contained, but I doubt it. Television has taught them otherwise. Look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where they’ve released 19(??) movies so far, interweaving story lines and characters.

That’s what you are up against. Serialized stories over long arcs. It’s been like this for a very long time in what we call genre fiction. Mystery. Fantasy. Science Fiction. Romance. Etc. Why did Doyle keep coming back to Holmes? Money. And readers wanted mre. Why is LOTR three books? Why are there so many other Tolkien bits and pieces out there?

Traditional Publishing will not make you rich. Unless you like being struck by lightning. All I ever wanted was to make enough money from my writing that I could make a living making shit up, without ever putting pants on again.

If you want to be famous, keep querying agents, and understand that you will probably end your life with a file folder of rejection letters. And never write your second novel.

For comparison, I’m about halfway through my twenty-fifth novel today. 25. (Plus about a dozen novellas.) And my plan is to write roughly 20 more novels in 2019. Just in 2019. I will generate a lot of product, because once I hook a reader, they will go buy all of my back catalog. Probably they’ll only end up liking 75% of it, but you cannot please everyone all of the time. You are not pizza. 🙂

I make a living from my writing. And with each novel or novella that I publish, generally my sales numbers eke up a little and don’t come down as far as they went up. But there are only two (I think) bookstores you could walk into, and have any chance of finding one of my books in paper. (One is always a maybe, and the other depends on the owner finally selling them, after he took them all home to read. Long story.)

In calendar 2017 (last time I did a full report) my paper sales were 0.3% of my total sales. Three tenths of one percent, not three percent. 92 paper/32,000 ebooks. I don’t care if I’m famous.

No, that’s not true. I want to grow up to be Bernie Taupin. (Bonus credit if you didn’t just have to look him up.) Nobody knows who he is, but he’s richer than you can imagine, and could walk into the coffee shop and sit next to you and you would never know it.

I made the decision very early on that I wanted to be rich. That’s my career arc. You are responsible for your own career, but you need to understand that the world has changed.

Good luck, and let me know what questions I can answer. We’re all in this together, and I’m trying to build a longer table.

b

Had this conversation with someone the other day, in regards to the new novella Two Bottles of Wine With a War God. The story hit him especially hard, but that was kind of on purpose. Not him, specifically, but men who have reached a certain age, a certain level of advancement in their life, where they can take a look back over their shoulder at what was, while wondering what might have been.

I’ve seen the stats on the “average American” and how they are born, live, and die within about a 50 or 100 mile radius. Never really spend time even in other American cultures, let alone traveling outside the US to see how the rest of the world works. It’s nothing but a kind of sadness at where you might have been, but for…?

I’m a bad person to compare yourself to. in between 1990 and 2001, I moved 17 times. Each of those moves was at least a zip code, if not a county. Three of them involved states and time zones. I can tell you when something occurred because I will associate it with a job, a city, or a period in my life that was short and sharply demarcated.

For example, college: Summer ’86 to Winter ’89. Then eight months working part time, goofing off and gaming part time, and preparing to move to LA for grad school in the fall of ’90. (I was driving cross country a few days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, watching gas prices explode with every fill up.) LA doing grad school and then other things until I got fed up and left SoCal in ’95. But you can include a 16 month stretch in the middle there when I was a bouncer at the Riverside Cowboy in Riverside, CA. (Long story. Good one, but long. Bring good beer.) The bar is long-since gone, but having a memory associated with it frames a pair of dates very tightly for me.

Back to flyover country, Sep 95 – Feb 97. Taught Junior college, among other things. Worked on a US Senate campaign learning database technology. (We lost so I ended up in Washington state instead of DC. Another long story.)

Someone asked me about a movie the other day, and when I came out. I said 1996, but he was sure I was absolutely wrong. However, I remembered who I went to see it with. He looked it up and was shocked at how old the movie was.

Seattle-ish, since early ’97, but now I can map things based on where I was working. A year here. Two there. Seven at this place, but we moved our office twice in that stretch, and I bought a house with the first Mrs. Ward. That was me landing from all the mobile in 2001, and not moving again until  2015, when I came out to the farm.

Job after that only lasted a little more than a year (the company went through implosion unrelated to my department.) Then a year at Microsoft. In that stretch, DJ got sick from breast cancer, and it killed her in the summer of ’08.

Did various and sundry other things. Like spending my 40th birthday on Trafalgar Square before driving upcountry and staying at a B&B outside Boston. Bought the land that would be the farm. Dated some, but none of them worked out, until one of them accidentally walked back into my life five years later and utterly disrupted it. (In a good way.)

What does all that mean? It means I’ll be 50 next summer, going on 5,000. At least it feels that way some days. Social media lets me interact, however vaguely, with the first woman I ever fell in love with, and whom I haven’t seen in the flesh in more than twenty years. In fact, a great many of the women I have ever dated as a grown-up I could ping on social media right now. Huh.

Yan Bedrov, to get back to the story, is a complicated man. A man who did stupid shit when he was younger, but managed to survive it. To grow up. And eventually to face growing old. We all do, but not everyone does so with grace. And men have a different path that women do.

I have been accused of pulling a Marty Stu with the Jessica books, because some people who knew me back in the bad, old, angry days assume that I’m Vo Arlo. I’m not, but I did study anger with a fine knife a long time ago. As the old quote goes: “Mistress, I understand evil. I’ve BEEN evil.”

But I got over it.

But yeah, if you wanted to accuse me, you’d be better off starting with Yan. He never wanted to be in charge, but to do his thing, his way. And he had to fight his way through the stupid shit and small people to get there.

Yan’s been divorced twice. I’ve been widowed once, and come close to other things that never quite worked out, mostly because I would have been a bad husband in those days. (I’ve been better housebroken since then and leave it at that.)

But I also understand what it means to be middle-aged, and alone, and facing a long rest of your life, wondering how you got there, and what you’re supposed to do next.  I’ve been Whippet, sitting at the end of that bar, looking back in despair at everything I had lost.

But Yan and I both shrugged, finished our drink, and left, walking back out into the sun and challenging the world to do its worst. (Stupid idea. Don’t ever do that. Trust me on this one.)

Yan found Ainsley. I found the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm). Both of us had to…not reform ourselves so much as reinvent ourselves as someone else. Someone who could be happy. Who could make sure that they didn’t turn into Whippet, having lost everything and everyone and still be wondering how.

My life is rich. No two ways about it. I have been working from home for myself for just shy of a year now, writing like mad and publishing hard and constant. It’s starting to show up in the numbers. I’m trying to trade up to better problems, once the mortgage and the bills are covered with enough left over that I can goof off.

But, and I’m as guilty of this as the next guy, men who reach a certain age, a certain milestone in life, have no choice but to look back and wonder What If? How might things have turned out differently had I…?

Most mid-life crises are caused by somebody deciding to chuck everything out today to pursue those stupid dreams he gave up twenty years ago for reasons he’s forgotten. To fight against growing old, rather than accepting it and looking on life as a challenge to be met, rather than a thing to be avoided.

To stay married, you have to communicate. Yan didn’t understand that when he was young. I did, but had my own reasons not to trust anyone enough to let them in. Even today, you don’t want to see the inside of my soul. You don’t have enough asbestos to survive it.

But I like me. I grew up in spite of all the crazy, stupid shit that should have killed me circa 86-97. I turned into a responsible, respectable adult eventually. Just don’t tell anyone.

Two Bottles of Wine With a War God is not Yan growing up, but how such a man as him (or me) might deal with something like the existential crisis brought on by walking into the Lion’s Den and instead confronting your own past, and your choices, rather than a Sentient Killing Machine.

Not everyone will get this story. That’s okay. I don’t expect to hit it out of the park, every time I commit words. But you have to be a man of a certain age, a certain temperament, to get this one. There’s not a lot I can do about that, except to promise you that this is one of the darkest things I plan to write, in terms of emotional manipulation. (Planning, key word here.) Got one other planned, along a similar vein, on dealing with immortality and how to not grow old and die, when everyone else you know has, or will.

For those of you who did get it, thanks for the nice things y’all have had to say this week. For those of you who don’t, hang tight, because the CS-405 stories (of which many of you have already read the first one accidentally) are a much sillier thing. Mostly. There are some serious elements there, too, but this is war, and war stories should be serious, when they aren’t complete and utter slapstick.

And Ben, sorry to put you through an emotional ringer.

But we’re getting close to the end of Jessica’s tale. I’m there. A few others will be soon. The rest of you still have Winterhome to experience, and all that comes with that story, before you get to Petron.

Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the ride as much as I have.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA