So, last week, Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ and I did a writing vacation on the north shore of Lake Quinault on the Olympic Peninsula. The cabin we were in (Angeles) had a topographical map on one wall, showing the high end of the long river valley, and an area called the Colonel Bob Wilderness.

Seriously? What kind of name is Colonel Bob Mountain?

Turns out, it was named for famed, 19th Century politician and orator Robert Green Ingersoll, aka Colonel Bob. So I had to look they man up. Really fascinating dude.

From the wiki:

Ingersoll was most noted as an orator, one of the most popular of the age, when oratory was public entertainment. He spoke on every subject, from Shakespeare to Reconstruction, but his most popular subjects were agnosticism and the sanctity and refuge of the family. He committed his speeches to memory although they were sometimes more than three hours long. His audiences were said never to be restless.

Wow. In addition, he was a lawyer who did some interesting representation, as well as raising the 11th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Cavalry for the Civil War. His unit fought at Shiloh.

He’s also famous for apparently bringing back Thomas Paine, after the man had largely been forgotten:

(More wiki) Susan Jacoby credits Ingersoll for the revival of Thomas Paine‘s reputation in American intellectual history, which had decreased after the publication of The Age of Reason published during 1794-95. Paine postulated that men, not God, had written the Bible, and Ingersoll included this work in his lectures on freethinking. As the only freethinker of his time with a wide audience outside of the unbelieving circle, he reintroduced Paine’s ideas to a new generation.

He’s also buried at Arlington.

(More wiki) In 2005, a popular edition of Ingersoll’s work was published by Steerforth Press. Edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page, “What’s God Got to Do With It: Robert Ingersoll on Free Speech, Honest Talk and the Separation of Church and State” brought Ingersoll’s thinking to a new audience.

After reading that whole wiki entry, I had to buy the book. It will be arriving in the next few days, so I’ll be reading it and expanding my mind. Y’all ought to read about the man as well.

He was impressive enough they named a mountain after him. How many other people can you say that about?

That was the view from the window of the cabin where Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I spent the week last week. We were on the north shore of Lake Quinault, over on the Olympic Peninsula. Lockaerie Resort is a half-dozen cabins built in the 1920’s and subsequently updated, but quaint and cute just describe them.

If you look closely, Rain Forest, where folks do the writer’s retreat is on the right edge somewhere, so that should give you some idea of where we were.

That’s the view further left, showing the top end of the Lake itself. We were just at mile marker 4, and the lake is barely longer, but it was gorgeous and serene. You can also keep going up the North Shore Road for a ways, and then cross a bridge to South Shore Road, and the whole round trip to the little town of Amanda Park (right at the point where the Quinault River exits and heads to the coast) is a little more than thirty miles, if I remember right. And you have to take it round, because if you keep going up either road, you eventually end up at trail heads.

I looked, but there are no roads that go over the top and through the center of the Olympic here, or I would have driven that. I don’t mind Aberdeen and Hoquiam, but they’re cities. and I prefer the view of the countryside.

Each morning we wrote, because that’s what we do. In the afternoon, one day we took a drive that ended up passing through the Quinault reservation and emerging on the coast at Moclips. Heading south along the coast (instead of going up to Taholah on the reservation), we enjoyed the drive, but at one point passed into the twilight zone.

There is this “town” on the coast called Seabrook that honest to God looked like something you encountered in a horror movie. I kept expecting to look back in the rear-view mirror and either the town would have vanished, or we’d see a mob of Stepford Wives pursuing us. Seriously, big, boxy houses with a fully planned community being constructed.

We talked to some locals when we got home and they had the same opinion. Stepford land. But those folks are aiming for people from Seattle and Portland (and maybe the East Coast), to buy a vacation home and then rent it out most of the year when they aren’t around.

I’m not trying it, but you’re welcome to try your luck. 🙂

The other neat place was Amanda Park, right at the bottom end of the lake. Two restaurants, one of which is an “internet cafe” where the computer in the main room was running Windows XP. The other was a Mom and Pop place that kind of had everything on the menu, including pizza.  Post Office nearby, as well as fully-automated gas station/pumps. A little convenience store in the middle that had some fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as other things, like videos for rent. Small town corner, in the middle of nowhere.

The High School is right there, as well as a really nice library that is part of the Timberland Regional Library. Small, but the ladies there were lovely people. We ended up going in three days, just to get out of the cabin and to do some heavy lifting on the internet.

Let me put it to you this way: Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I are talking to some other writers about maybe getting the big cabin or several, next May, and doing a writer’s retreat with a large group. The week was that good, and the people we met were that awesome. (If you wanna join us, send one of us an email for details.)

What else new?

NaNoWriMo is going to start next week, and hopefully some of you are going to participate. the annual NaNo story bundle is still available, and has lots of useful books for authors at every stage of their careers, whether you are just starting out, or have just started your twenty-first novel, like me.

The Year of Production continues. This year, I’m not working a day job, so I’m producing a lot of novels, most of which won’t come out until next summer, give or take, when you’ll see the flood gates open. As part of the craziness, two weeks ago I got contacted about putting a novel into a military SF bundle, but I didn’t have anything immediately available. However, I was also at the end of a novel, so I could transition quickly and push a little.

The result was a new Handsome Rob novel (the first, following Can’t Shoot Straight Gang in Boundary Shock Quarterly 003). There has been some weirdness around the actual date of the bundle, as it was supposed to go live in about 4 days, but has been pushed back (not my fault. Yay.) The novel itself will come out in November, replacing a few other things I had originally planned to drop.

Past that, hard at work reading the stories for Boundary Shock Quarterly 005: Boneyard of Lost Dreams, coming out in January. Thanks to everyone for the support thus far, and remember to tell your friends.

cheers,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

So, I haven’t exactly been slack lately, but I have been trying to spread out my news a little, instead of dropping everything on everyone at the same time, like happened to me.

Today, a reminder that Issue 004 of Boundary Shock Quarterly is now available at all major vendors.

This issue is entitled Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My.

The theme I challenged the Syndicate to explore was a fun one: “We can make her better than she was. Or build a better one to replace him. What does it mean to be Sentient? Human? Or even alive?”

What I got was the biggest issue yet, over 94,000 words of fiction and essays ranging across everything, from slapstick to sadness, from almost every one of my authors.

Because our future is electronic, unless we manage to gack ourselves back to the stone ages in the next few decades, we wanted to explore where we were going.

Michael W. Lucas gave me a fantastic story about what cyberware might mean to the future of business. Duncan Ellis went there, but did so in a way that makes you think about what a truly “fully-functional-android” means and how we need to handle it. Joel Ewy, mostly on a dare, wrote me a computer program that he swears will compile, and claims to be the Try/Fail/Else loops necessary for the first sentient machine to bring a human to orgasmic bliss.

There are also two essays in this issue, from Robert Jeschonek and Joel Ewy, looking forward and backwards at the pinnacle of technology we may have reached, and where we need to go.

As I write this, I am nearly done with reading all the stories for Issue 005: Boneyard of Lost Dreams, so I highly recommend that you sign up for the Boundary Shock Newsletter so you never miss an issue. Also, if you have missed one of the first four, go open another tab and order them while you’re thinking about it. I’ll wait.

Back? Signed up so you never miss an issue? Good.

Enjoy the fun. My story, Dancer, is the beginning of a whole new cyberpunk universe, and I have six other short stories already written, just waiting for the time to write the first Kumiko novel. As I have talked to the others, they are doing the same, exploring characters and new worlds and deciding they need to write more in those places as well.

I hope you have enjoyed, are enjoying, and will continue to enjoy all the fun that is Boundary Shock Quarterly.

We now return you to your regular programming.

So it’s been a busy couple of week, between NINC, the NaNoWriMo bundle, and stuff. And OryCon 40 is coming up in a few weeks, as well, and I’ll be down there paneling again this year. Stop by and say hi.

However, I wanted to point out something for everyone, before it got lost in the noise and shuffle. Audible approved the audio version of Queen of the Pirates (Book Two in the Jessica Keller series) and it is now available. As always, Melissa rocks, and I’m given to understand that she’s getting ready to dive into Book Three shortly (Last of the Immortals) but I have no idea how long it takes to actually record a novel. There will be more announcements when we get there.

Am looking forward to digging into all my notes from NINC. One of the takeaways this year was the importance of audio, and now there are new companies in the market place competing with Amazon/Audible to do this, so I might be able to afford to hire some voice talent to do the two new series that are coming down the pipe soon. Awaken The Star Dragon is a Book One that was originally intended to come out next summer, but I was able to put it into a story bundle this year, so y’all got a sneak preview. Already have 2 and 3 done, and there will be five or six of them next year, dropped month over month probably next summer.

Also have two other novels done in a whole other universe, but that one doesn’t have a hard cap for length, as they are more adventure and less space opera. (Each novel does not need to up the scale, risks, and rewards from the previous one, like a good, epic space opera does, for comparison.) In that, it is more like the Perry Rhodan novels, letting me just have a cast of characters who have ongoing adventures, wherever the story takes me and however long it takes to get there.

Because, as many of you might be aware, I like to write in long series, with characters that grow and change as time passes. (Horrors, I know.)

So next year, there will be some serious audio effort given. It is a growing market, but a slower and more complex one to exploit, because you have to rely on a team now, where I can just write damned novels and publish them once they get edited. And no, I don’t really want to do the whole “author reading their own work” audio books, even though I have enough background in theater to have awesome radio voice (something someone at NINC pointed out. And he was a pro). Time spent not writing, and I suspect you’d like more material to read.

So audio. If you like it, make sure you pick up Auberon and Queen of the Pirates. Plus The Science Officer and all the other things out there.

There will be more news soon. Stay tuned.

Woo-hoo!!!!

Just a little while ago, a new Storybundle went live for NaNoWriMo. For those of you who aren’t writers, that stands for National Novel Writing Month, and is a project that comes about every November, where the goal is to write a 40,000 word novel in the month of November.

This year, I got selected to participate, and my Business for Breakfast: Pulp Speed For Professional Writers is included in the bonus materials.

I already write faster than 40k/month, but that’s a recent thing for me. These are muscles you have to train, just like you don’t go out tomorrow and run a marathon on your first attempt. I had to work up to it, and the book is chock full of lessons I learned as I moved to what we call Pulp Speed Two (100,000 words each and every month). I’m set to more than double my writing speed from the beginning of 2018 to the end.

It’s more than speed, too. My book covers health, both physical and mental, because you’ve got to take care of both your mind and body if you want to be able to spend 5-8 hours writing for years and years (and I do).

More importantly (at least to me), there is a section on the modern economics of writing, where we go into the fact that while it might be possible to actually make a decent living writing short fiction, you are much better off going long (read: novels), because the returns are better, and the world more forgiving.

You, the kid (I don’t care if you’re 80 here, as long as you have the desire to become a writer) who always wanted to write a book, this is your opportunity to get a bunch of different books from some amazingly successful authors. There is no single RIGHT way to be successful, nor is there one way to write. What you need is to figure out your way of achieving success and embracing it.

“You are responsible for your own career.”

Kristine Katheryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith have pounded that lesson home for me over the years. You must take charge. I can’t want your success more than you do.

There are tips in this amazing bundle on how to write novels, and do it fast. (Dean’s nuts, by the way, but we love him anyway.) How to take an idea and turn it into a book, and later, into an extended universe series. How to be successful in the new world of Indie, and how to survive the freelance world that comes with it. Even how to write in teams (Rebecca and Kevin). Editing and bundling are also covered in fantastically good detail, so you can find the help you need to move past the end of NaNo.

One of the things they don’t tell you about NaNo is that at the end of the month, most writers have a decent chunk of novel written. Maybe they have finished it. Maybe not. Maybe you will finish it in December. Maybe you’ll be polishing it. But you’ll be writing, and that’s the important part. Take charge, and find your success.

There is something here for every writer, including me. That’s the best part of the exciting new world of Indie: You will be surprised at how friendly and helpful other writers are. They will offer suggestions and answer questions. We’ve all been there, and want to give back to the next generation of writers coming up.

If you are planning to do NaNo this year, I highly recommend you grab this bundle while you can. As with all of them, limited time offer to get so much awesome material, covering so much of your future career with ideas and help.

You don’t have to do it alone, you know. There is a whole world out there, so you should take this opportunity to join us and write that story that has always been at the back of your mind, demanding to be told!

The 2018 NaNoWriMo bundle. Treat yourself, and then go out and write us a spectacular novel.

🙂

Those of you who pay attention will note that I almost never broadcast when I’m leaving town (for all the obvious reasons, of course). That being said, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I just got back last night from an entire week in SW Florida at a writers conventions known as NINC (short for Novelists, Inc.).

Very small fish in lake filled with very big sharks, but everyone there was generally very friendly and helpful. The point of something like this is two-fold. A bunch of major industry players try to come to meet people and announce interesting new bits, and a bunch of highly successful writers get together and compare notes about what they’ve been doing for the last year, what worked and what hasn’t.

Through some good friends, I got to be invited to the big kid’s table more than once, so I probably learned more than your normal first year freshman. I’m also not subject to Impostor Syndrome, so I don’t panic at the thought of being around people making eight figures a year in sales. I got a different career than they do, and a different path to my definition of success.

At the same time, in my spare job as Marketing Troll, I’ve tried a lot of things that many of the others I ran into (frequently also n00bs like me) had not considered, so I was able make some suggestions that hopefully helped. For example, I always have business cards with me. Several flavors, depending on the situation, but at least three with covers on the front and blurbs on the back.

“Oh? What do you write?” is frequently a topic, so I pull out one of the cards to hand to someone. In advertising, the general consensus is that you must touch someone’s brain at least four and possibly seven times to get a sale. So they touch the card and put it into a pocket or wallet (1). Later, they pull it out and look at it, trying to remember where it came from (2). Eventually, they’ll put it on their dresser for safe keeping (3). Then they’ll see it three weeks later and pick it up again (4). At this point, they’ll either toss it or register that it is a book they have been meaning to read, so they’ll go buy it.

I met several people with personalized pens (the clickable, writing kind) that had their website and tag line on the side, but that does not work for me. Anyone who has spent any time around me knows I chew pen caps, so I prefer Bic pens or the ones with black, plastic caps that make good chew toys. Metal pens pass through my hands without trace. Plus, they are hard to stash in your pocket or wallet, unlike a business card.

Similarly, you can get weird cards printed now that are half as tall as standard, but just as wide, usually with rounded corners. Pretty. Oh, so pretty, but they don’t stay in my wallet because they can slide right out. Poof, I’ve forgotten you by the time I go to empty out stuff from my wallet every month. (Receipts, business cards, cruft, whatever.)

At one time, beeping someone with Near-Field Communications on phones was going to be the future, until everyone realized how easy it would be to transmit electronic diseases that way. Similarly, I’m a guy, so I’m not about to ask any woman I don’t know extremely well for a phone number, but a business card with an email address is a good way to keep everything on a professional level with a paper trail, so hopefully she’s less nervous about me. And there’s always that.

And many of you will know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when: one of your themes is “sticking it to the man.” This last summer, we launched Boundary Shock Quarterly, because I’ve always wanted to, and the cross-promotional possibilities were awesome, and the tools make it easy now. It was so much fun, I wrote a book that detailed all the things I did, from inception to issue 003. Where the sticking it part comes in was that I was able to talk to some of these lovely folks about the magazine, and suggest that they could do the exact same thing in their own genre.

This is not pie. You don’t get a bigger slice of the pie at my expense. You help me create more readers, which means a bigger pie that everyone gets to share. And some of your readers will look around for more things to read, and eventually find me.

So last week, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were able to chat with folks, and send them a copy of the book so they might could start their own genre magazine. Western, Sweet Romance, Military/Political Thriller, and a couple of others that currently elude me because I’m still recovering my brain.

And on the ride to the airport yesterday, we shared the van with another Military Thriller writer, so I’m going to hook him up with the other guy looking to maybe start his own magazine, so that they have a bigger and more robust Syndicate. Something like Boundary Shock requires a big fan base, so I recruited (and will continue to recruit as widely as I can, because if I run into a (temporarily) stranger in my genre who is interested, I might be able to find all their fans.

And I’m greedy that way. I’m willing to stand my stories up with anyone for entertainment value. Maybe I don’t write the prettiest words that will win awards, but you’ll still get bang for your buck.

The key with NINC is that these people are major players. I only barely qualified this year, after they tweaked some rules that allowed me to count my Science Officer novellas against their overall sales requirement rules. So I was learning (and continue to learn) from the best. I have a massive puddle of notes, and a list of fifteen projects. About half of those are things I can do over the next few months without adult supervision, and then me and the Babe will prioritize our combined lists and pick three we can achieve, with some stretch goals.

Watch this space for more news, and some changes that I will be making going forward.

All Ahead Crazy!

I blame my damned, hippy wife, as many of you know. She’s the one that got me to eating far healthier than I used to. Didn’t eat bad before, but I don’t keep much in the house these days that she can’t eat. For example: eggs. She’s horribly allergic. I eat them when I’m out, but don’t have them in the fridge any more. Do keep some cheese, but only for burgers (and the only bread in the house right now is a pack of burger buns.) Keep nutritional yeast flakes instead, and all them when cooking and need the flavor of cheese. Nothing I cook she can’t eat.

I’m going to publish a new Business for Breakfast book in October. Pulp Speed Writing for the Professional Writer. I know lots of pulp speed maniacs, like Dean, but many other people have a self-imposed set of blinders they inherited from Traditional Publishing that says anybody who writes fast must be writing crap. (Which really just tells me what kind of a writer they are. My stories come out amazingly clean, so I don’t have to spend months or years re-writing to make it not crap, like they apparently do.)

But as part of that book, I talk about ergonomics (setting up your writing space so you don’t hurt) and nutrition. You can’t write if you’re sick. Period. And almost all of your health issues are probably at least exacerbated by your diet, if not caused by it. Science is beginning to unlock some of the diseases that have been affecting people, and tracing the cause to bad diet choices.

You cannot outrun your fork.

And yes, I’m aware that some of my readers will be rolling their eyes and spewing profanities at me that they are special snowflakes and can’t do anything about their particular issues. The more my wife studies diet and health, and the more I learn, the less I am likely to believe you. I have known a number of women into middle age who suddenly (FINALLY!!!) got a doctor to look at their thyroid and suddenly they melted and had so much energy that they didn’t know what to do with it. Magic, right?

Or the folks that drink lots of diet soda, but can’t ever seem to lose weight, while eating bread and other things. (I remember fields of Russian #2 Red Wheat when I was kid. The stuff today is a different creature, and some people are allergic to the weed-killer on it. That’s why so many people have gluten issues. It’s the glyphosphates(sp) in it, not the wheat itself.)

Ya lose the bread, or even cut it back, and the weight drops, and the energy improves. More magic.

There are things you can do to be healthier, but you have to actually want to become a different person, in order to try them. I can’t want it more than you do.

For me, I never used to eat breakfast. Maybe a little coffee in the morning, but that was it. Lunch and a big dinner instead. Then I read something that the best way to keep a healthy weight was to breakfast like a king, lunch like a knight, and sup like a peasant. These days, I rarely eat dinner, and if I do, it is because I knew to skip lunch instead. Two meals per day is my rule.

But what is a healthy breakfast was a question I needed to address. When I decided to do breakfast, I was still working a day job.

My schedule in those days:

• 4:00AM – up and shower
• 4:20 – gone
• 5:15 – arrive at work (yeah, 40 miles each way, so I had to do it early, or it would have taken 2-3 hours)
• 5:15 – get upstairs and into the kitchen at work. Fix breakfast and coffee. Read the news on my computer.
• 6:00 – start writing
• 8:00 – go into my desk and start coding.
• 5:00PM – go home

I used to get these frozen sausage and egg biscuits from Jimmy Dean. Two of those in the morning. I am not a sweets-for-breakfast person. I ate a pancake the other day for literally story research, because it had been so long since I had eaten one.

All well and good, but I wasn’t getting any vegetables or good stuff in my diet, beyond a men’s multivitamin. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) was moving into a hard keto/Wahl’s Protocol diet, which meant she ate 6-9 cups of various veggies each and every day.

So I started making stew. Sort of. It has evolved, but I had to explain it to someone this week, and that got me to thinking about talking about healthy eating, and so I’m gonna subject you to some thoughts.

I start with all the vegetables in the fridge or freezer (I keep bags frozen. Leaf veggies like spinach crumble well that way.)

• Spinach
• Kale
• Mustard Greens
• Bok Choy
• Parsley
• Carrots
• Cauliflower
• Broccoli
• Red Cabbage
• A beet mix I get at Safeway
• Cucumber
• Zucchini when I can get it
• Sweet peppers occasionally
• Whatever else we might have (most of this list is always available, plus a few season things, like the odd avocado.)

Next, two or three kinds of meat. I originally started by using cans of corned beef hash, but that has too much starch and such from the potatoes, so I eventually just got Corned Beef instead. A can of tuna is always good and lasts a long time. Maybe some spam, or deviled chicken. Something.

Then I discovered that my Safeway has a section of meat just past fresh and marked either 30% or 50% off, so I look in there for things with a lot of fat, because I can always freeze it and then cook later, and there will be a lot of cayenne involved in the final pot anyway. Lately, I have taken to getting pork shoulder bone in. End of summer and the idiot administration has pissed off the people we export pork to, so prices have been collapsing.

Chuck all the above into the crock pot. Add red wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, and balsamic. A generous helping of Olive oil. Maybe some water if the fluid level is too low.

Now we move on to most of the spices. Seriously. Salt. Pepper. Garlic. Smoked Salt. Cayenne. Organic Chili Powder (no onions). Dill. Bacon Salt. Ginger. Kelp & Dulce.

Crock pot overnight and let cool. Pull out bones and if the meat is still chunky, it is now pulled pork, so break it down with your fingers.

Pour all that into a casserole trough, cover, and chuck into the fridge. Every morning, cut out a piece and microwave for 90-120 seconds covered.

My morning coffee includes coconut oil, coconut milk, collagen powder, and honey (local for allergies).

Healthy shit, Maynerd.

So yesterday, my damned, hippy wife leveled my breakfasts up. Big time.

We’ve talked about me adding liver. She makes pate, but not that often. so we went to the grocery specifically to get chicken livers that I could freeze and then use. While there, they had tiny lamb chops with bone in. Seriously, small enough, individually, to fit in my palm, about 2 inches thick. Six of them. Marked down. Mine.

Then, when we looked for livers, we saw the most amazing thing. (Those of you who believe fat is evil should look away now.) They had chicken fat. Seriously. Ya pull the skin off a chicken breast and previously they had thrown it away or something, but were now selling it. All that collagen and nutrients (What do you think makes chicken soup so damned healthy, bubbles?)

So we get home, and Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) gets to work. Six freezer bags. One of the lamb chops in each. Plus separating the liver (and a few hearts) and the chicken fat. Throw in a couple of chicken feet because she just got a bunch at the co-op. Don’t know what else, but the next time I need to make breakfast, I already have a secondary bag of fat, nutrition, and stuff available, to go with some of the pork and beef I have leftover. drop it in and crock.

I figure I’m getting at least 2 cups of mixed vegetables each morning with breakfast, considering the eventual size of the chunk I eat, once it has cooked down. Plus several meats. Plus all sorts of different kinds of fats and other good stuff.

And I’m probably healthier than you are. Any of you. And I plan to outlive all of you by a significant amount, thank you very much.

I’ll be fifty next year, and I don’t have a spare tire around the middle. I don’t hurt or hunch over. I get mistaken for forty, only because I have a little gray in my beard now, but Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) knows I’d be mistaken for her boy-toy if I shaved it all off. (I am, but that’s a different story we won’t go into now.)

What are you doing to insure that you have a healthy life? A long one? That you can live pain free?

This is the future. You can do things to lose weight and live better. And that’s not just walking more, but you need to do that, too.

Go get healthy. You cannot write in pain or sickness. Do something about it.

Got back late last night from Portland. Rose City Comic Con was an awesome experience. Really well-run con, in terms of all the little things. All the kids stuff was together at one end of the hall. All the artists were at the other. Comic book and toy vendors were on one side. We will kinda in the middle with other book and comic and stuffff folks, right behind the Ninkasi Beer stand, so we had LOTS of traffic through our area (yay).

For those that missed out, we had a corner booth book store, with eight of us (mostly from Portland and Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and me down from Seattle). I can be an outrageously charming flirt when I turn myself on and put on that mask. It was a weird experience, because it has been so many years since I needed to, but I spent Friday morning basically shifting people into someone who loved to talk to people and stand in the middle of the crowd like a carnival barker.

It went like this: I’m sitting there listening to the music in my head (yeah, don’t ask) and smiling at everyone who walks along. If they look my way or smile, I say “Morning” and many of them smile back and say morning back to me. A few stutter step because it’s afternoon, but they aren’t Buddhist, so don’t understand that the first time I see you in a day is always its beginning.

But then they look over, and see we have books. Or they were already looking at books when I talked to them. I have now deflected their entire gravity field and caused them to stop and wander over.

“So what kind of books do you like to read?” (I had a great spiel going)

The con goers were largely sword and sorcery fantasy (what most readers mean when they say “fantasy”) or urban fantasy. A very few were looking for science fiction, which was usually on the shelf right next to where I stood most of the weekend. Dragons were at the other end of that same unit.

So I would get them talking, and excited about books. So they would come into the booth to touch things. Or ask a question and I might have that author handy, so I would get them to come over and nerd out with them.

It worked really well. WE sold lots of books this weekend. Not a lot of SF, but I had several people come in and buy. Plus I was giving away copies of The Science Officer in print (30) and ebook format to anyone who liked SF. One woman took it home Saturday and came back Sunday to buy the full Omnibus in paper (both books, all 8 of Season One as I slowly get back to writing Season Two).

And I even found a couple of things to spend money on, including picking up the first two volumes of Salvagers from Source Point Press. Really nice guys. Not much into horror, which they had lots of, but also some nice looking SF.

Most of the rest of the con was spent people watching. My single favorite costume for the weekend was a little girl about eight or so. She was in blue as Stitch from Disney Except, her costume included a blue stormtrooper helmet with ears. It was the cutest thing.

But there were a lot of amazing costumes. And you can’t go wrong with cosplay, as long as you are having fun with it. And they were.

Something else that caught my eye. Or reinforced something I noticed several years ago.

At a couple of worldcons (Spokane and Kansas City) I noted that the median age of attendees on Friday seemed to me to be about 60. And on the weekend, it maybe got down to 50, once a few of the younger generation showed up.

At ECCC and RCCC, the median age on Friday seems to be about 30. On the weekend, that dropped to 20. I was at first shocked at the number of 12-year-olds I saw wandering around by themselves, but then greatly enthused. That was when I did my first con without parents, back in the stone ages (Encounter 10 in Wichita, if you’re old enough).

These kids weren’t there being drug around by old people, but came because they are FANS and could do this. And RCCC is a very family friendly place, so they could just go around and buy and see stuff, and nobody would bat an eye at them, except to sell them stuff.

This is the future of fandom, right before your eyes. At WorldCon KC (I think), I noted that they had something like 2300 Hugo voters that year, which was the largest ever and something like 30% above average, so your Hugos are voted on by around 1500-1800 people each year. That was why the Sad and Rabid Puppies thought they could game the system.

But the Hugos are in trouble, long term. Those 2 world cons had around 7000-10000 attendees. the 2017 San Diego Comic Con was estimated to have 130,000 attendees. The 2016 Rose City Comic Con saw 42,000 people, and I would guess were were about there this time as well.

For those of you wanting to see the future, go to SDCC, ECCC, and RCCC (on the west coast, they are similar on the east coast). And note that WorldCon tended to be a very white, very old audience. The Comic Cons are extremely (happily) diverse, and much younger. They will be your fans for the next generation as the old farts die off. (Goodbye, puppies.)

I had one young lady walk in and announce she wanted to read “kick-ass ladies doing stuff.” I’m guessing she was expecting to find one or maybe three titles she could read. She found fifty, and was very happy.

Had another girl walk in and listen to my pitch: What kinds of books to you like to read?

Her: “Science Fiction Fantasy Slash…”

Here’s she pauses as something has caught her eye and frozen her brain. So I point. “Science fiction. Fantasy. Slash.” (that latter at the LGBT SECTION we had.) She grabs her girlfriend (“We have found our home!”) and drags her over to the LGBT section to look and then her brain processes what I’ve said and both girls start giggling madly. And bought books. It was good.

Lessons:

• Good covers sell. Thorn’s By Earth has a great cover. People bought all 5 books for $50 without blinking.
• Dragons sell. We had several dragon covers on an endcap, opposite space ships, and I could say “We go from dragons to spaceships” pointing to both ends to say “Yeah, I got that.” It pulled them in.
• Putting a physical book in someone’s hands gets their attention and they’ll read it later. (You forget what half those business cards do by the time you get home, and lose them, but people like us treat books like holy relics.
• Having the authors handy helps, because we’re suddenly not an evil megacorp, but ARTISTS!!!!
• Being friendly helps. People seemed to really appreciate the smile. Hopefully, it brightened their day.
• Engaging people  as they walked by affects their gravity and makes them fall headlong into the black hole of a book store. Mission accomplished.
• Diversity of content helps a bunch. There were a few booths selling one or two books. Because that’s all the author had. Pretty books, but great, you’ve got me for a week, and then nothing. Bring several friends and 50-75 titles to sell.

Okay, enough silliness and brain dump. It was a good con. Had a lot of fun. Met some neat new people I hope to engage with later on. Maybe some business and marketing opportunities.

For those of you who were there, what were your thoughts?

So on Sunday morning, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I usually go to this lovely diner outside Enumclaw. Bit of a drive from the farm, but they’re lovely people and take good care of us. As in, we walk in and the Mom asks if we need menus as she pours me coffee. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) will sometimes eat, depending on how her stomach is doing, and sometimes not.

When she’s eating, they have prime rib on Fri and Sat night, and you can get it as a breakfast after 12 hours of extra marinating. But she doesn’t get the eggs (allergic) or the bread (allergic) or the hash browns (bad carbs). She just gets a slab of meat. And then a full sized side salad with oil and vinegar. When she’s not eating, she skips the breakfast and gets a box of meat to go straight from the kitchen. Like I said, we’re regulars.

I once asked and they loved us, so they’ll take the normal breakfast sandwich (sausage, egg, cheese on english muffin) and swap out the sausage for a chicken fried steak. Like her, I skip the hash browns completely and swap in sausage links or bacon, if I’m hungry.

Mom smiles, nods, and magic happens.

Today, we had to plan for the fall. I’ve been sustaining Pulp Speed Two now for a few months, and will try to continue (September I might not, because I have travels and cons and craziness, so I’m expecting to lose as many as 10 writing days this month).

But going backwards, I just finished my 17th (!?!?!?) novel Friday afternoon. That means that I have ten novels published right now, and seven in the can. (CS-405 trilogy. 2nd Star Dragon. 7th and 8th Jessica. First Dave.)

Craziness. We had to take a computer to breakfast with us, so we could both be looking at the three control documents we use to keep track of things going back and forth, because she came within a whisker of hitting Pulp One in August, almost accidentally. Lots of stories.

But at the same time, we’ve had to keep the entire thing written in pencil (“the schedule is always written in pencil!“) because it can change so much so quickly.

For instance, the first Star Dragon novel (Awaken The Star Dragon) was supposed to sit in the can until next spring. But someone asked if I had anything new they could put into a story bundle, so it came out in August. (Have you gotten your copy yet?) And I have the second one in the can right now. Flight of the Star Dragon (pub date unknown). The eighth Jessica is also done, but not even off to first readers yet (so don’t email me with bribes for a few weeks).

A week ago, I got a bug. Weird as fuck inspiration. So I started world building onto paper, like I do. Keep notes. Add details. The works.

Star Dragon is it’s own universe unrelated to anything I’ve written to date. In response to the Fermi Paradox (“Where is everyone?”). Read it to see how I answered that question. You’ll laugh.

But I had another one. I know how writer brain works. I have been so deep into Jessica’s world lately (The Red Admiral, plus #7, the CS-405 trilogy, and #8) that I needed a  mental and emotional break, but I don’t stop writing. (I cannot stop writing.)

So I just add worlds. Got a title I really love, but am not revealing yet, until other people with votes approve it. So we’ll call it “Dave” for now. Close enough and self-explanatory. #1 is done. Already know how #2 starts. And there is a whole universe to explore here, just like Star Dragon (there are currently six Star Dragon novels plotted out, plus some prequel stuff that you will see in Boundary Shock Quarterly Issues 006, 007, and 008, I think. At current plan. Something).

I’m writing a whole set of cyberpunk stories to serve as “Origins” for a novel I plan to write soon. Wanted all the characters worked out. What better way than to let them star in their own short story?

All Ahead Crazy. And now it is starting to catch up.

In Boundary Shock Quarterly 002, you had the first Carl and Deke story. In September, the second one comes out. Unintended Consequences. Dark present, as opposed to cyberpunk, but it has that same feel. Not sure how #3 will go. Will get there.

Coming in Boundary Shock Quarterly issue 005 will be the second Angus McIntyre story: Forgotten Paper Memories. (The issue theme is “Boneyard of Lost Dreams”). But first Daddy’s Girl sets up yet another SF universe I’m exploring. (Because I can, you already knew that.) So read this one immediately. #2 makes WAY more sense that way.

And finally, total freaking weirdness. One day, in a rpg gaming session, we wanted to steal a van. One of the mechanic characters was torn between transforming it into the A-Team van or the Mystery Machine. Then we asked what the actual Mystery Machine was, because its not obvious. Others have asked.

From the article

“An interesting side note is that if Scooby-Doo and the gang were a bunch of go-getter teens from a collective farm in the central steppes of the Soviet Union, a UAZ 2269 would likely have been the Mystery Machine, or тайна машины.”

Writer brain looked at that and said “Oh, like this?”

So I wrote a future, semi-post-apocalyptic world where the Russians got their shit together and kind of took over Eurasia when the EU implodes in about ten years. I did not include the dog, because I really didn’t want to figure out if it should be Magic Realism (nobody but the main character hears the dog), Urban Fantasy (talking dogs aren’t that uncommon), or cyberpunk (dog with enough cyberware to have intelligence). But it is SF. And a Mystery. And I’m hoping to write more, one of these days.

Phantom In the Factory. It reads like a Scooby-Doo mystery because I wrote it like one. On purpose and everything. Just not quite as corny. And Shaggy is a Russian Deep Cover secret agent. Think XXX starring Vin Diesel, maybe. Not quite, but you’ll get the picture when you read it.

It helps if you realize that this might be the same universe as The Rangers, and takes place half a world away. I’m not sure those folks will ever meet, but what the hell? Why not?

so that’s the news. More books for you to stay entertained. More novels coming in more worlds and spaces. More series planned, when I get some of these done.

What did you do with YOUR summer?

b

I’ve said this before, and it has become something of a mantra for me lately: The World Has Changed.

Last Summer (2017), driving down to see the eclipse a Joshie’s place, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I talked about how I had always wanted to start my own “literary” (read: genre SF) magazine, going clear back to high school where I edited the school’s annual literary magazine my senior year.

But the running joke in publishing is the same in sports: How do you make a million dollars in publishing? Start with a billion and lose most of it.

Most of them lose money. Badly. If they ever break even, it can almost be a miracle. And if you look at the distribution figures for the majors, they have been declining significantly for a very long time. Here is one of several I found when looking for “realistic” numbers to see what the world “used to be like” in the age before. This is a more recent snap-shot.

We (Modern Westerners) are not readers of short fiction, like we used to be. I never read those magazines when I was a kid, because I was into comic books first, and then into novels later. Frequently, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) will mention some story she read when she was a kid, and what a profound impact it had on her life. And I will look at her and go “Who?” But her mother made sure she read those sorts of things (short fiction in Fantasy and SF, plus others). I grew up in a different headspace.

So magazines are not dead, but do not even have the reach they did ever 40 years ago (which was a drop from 80 years ago):

“In 1980, Analog and Asimov’s each had about 100,000 (emph mine) circulation. That’s a lot for a print fiction magazine of any sort. F&SF ran about 60,000: still enough to make it one of the Big Three–especially since so few other magazines survived for very long (sigh: I do remember Galaxy and [Worlds of] If).

At this point, these three are mostly survivors of the pulp fiction era. By 2004, Analog was down to something like 40,000; Asimov’s to something like 30,000; and F&SF to something like 20,000. By 2009, those numbers were 26,000; 16,000; and 17,000 respectively.”

So why the hell did I want to start my own magazine and go broke?

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m not spending nearly the money they did. Any of them.

I’ve backed a number of kickstart or indegogo publishing projects over the last few years. But those look like a stupid amount of work, if I want to get paper into reader’s hands.

Recently, I’ve started ordering paper copies of some of the new comic books from indie teams that I have found to be fun in pdf form, because I want to have copies of them twenty years from now.

The world has changed.

If you have an idea, there are tools now that let you get it into other people’s hands and minds cheaper than you probably imagined. I’m going to get personal and talk about mine.

It was a combination of things, and I’ve talked about them before. BundleRabbit has bundling tools, but now they have Collaboration. That means an author just has to send me their final version, with edits. No formatting. No cover. No blurb. Nothing. Just the best story they can tell.

I picked up a used Mac Air, flattened it, and reinstalled everything, starting with Vellum. Drag and drop, once you have someone with some experience configure a few settings for you (Like 20 minutes work for them). I am not a complete and utter control freak that has to spend a lot of time, energy, and money using Adobe tools to get the exact print interior perfect. Vellum’s interiors are beautiful, and I don’t sell that much paper anyway, so well-formatted ebooks are critical. I get them.

I married a damned good cover designer, so I cheated there, but she does work cheap, if you wanna bribe her. Lemme know and I’ll pass along your contact info. I can write ad copy for the blurb.

So I could do it. I could assemble a magazine, fill it, make it pretty, and get Chuck to handle distribution and money.

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW NICE IT IS, NOT TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR PAYING AUTHORS EVERY MONTH!!! (’nuff said about how I feel?) Bundle Rabbit does that, and does it cheap.

So I give you Boundary Shock Quarterly, a speculative fiction magazine I edit and write into. Three issues are out, with the fourth coming on October 10th. (That one, by the way, will be Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My!) Watch this space for more news, or sign up for the newsletter over there for cover reveals, TOC reveals, and (if I can blackmail enough people) author interviews and shorts.

But there is a more important thing I want to blog about today.

You can do this, too. There is no secret sauce. No magic handshake. Just hard work and vision. And to help everyone, I have recently published a new Business For Breakfast book: How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers.

It walks through all the steps I followed, and believe me, I’m lazy when it comes to stuff like this, so I wanted to do everything just once and never have to deal with it again. And I included the exact pitch document I used (with typos preserved for posterity, so don’t tell me about them). I also included the contract I signed with my Syndicate of writers, spelling out what I expected from them, and what they got out of membership.

I have been in touch with other folks (named redacted to protect the guilty) who are planning to use book this as something of a template to start their own magazine.

YOU CAN DO IT, TOO!!!

Trust me. It requires sweat and vision, but that’s it. And if you want to be successful as an indie or a hybrid, you already know that. We all do this hustle. Mine is a royalty share project, so I make money when they do, rather than me getting paid first and them getting crumbs later. They make money as they pimp it and circulate the news to other readers.

Hopefully, I will continue to see a nice halo from their readers reading my stuff and liking it. I’m willing to trade my readers for yours. Simple as that.

Plus, we look like professionals (yeah, don’t tell my mother), so I recently was invited to include the first issue of Boundary Shock: Captain’s Log into a Story Bundle and make my writers a nice chunk of both cash, and exposure.

So I’m going to pimp my business book. Because I can.

That’s my other mantra, these days. “Because I can.”

The world has changed, yes, but the only limits on my success are my imagination?  Y’all are DOOOOOOMMMED now!

So if you ever wanted to be a publisher, pick up my book cheap, and then go see what awesomeness Chuck has waiting for you.

It will change you life. And you might be able to change the world.

We now return you to your previous revolution, already in progress…