Escape from Slush Mountain!

My wife and I have been reading short stories for a trio of themed anthologies. All told, we had about 500 submissions. This translated into roughly 1,000,000 words. Keep in mind that we're a small press just launching into anthologies, without any social media when we launched. We're offering a penny a word, not terrible for a small press, but a long way from pro rates. It's safe to extrapolate from this that if you're submitting to a more established market, or a higher paying market, your story may be in competition with a thousand others. The editors aren't looking at a slush pile. They're looking at a slush mountain. 

How can your story get to the top of that mountain? 

For the most part, we read stories in the order we received them, usually a month or more after we got it. Whatever was in your cover letter? We've forgotten it. There's really no point in a summary of your story, or a long and elaborate bio. By the time we reach your story, we're reading it completely fresh. If you're story 300 in a sequence of 500 stories, your work isn't only judged on its merits, but by whether it's standing out from all the stories we've already read, and by whether we think it's likely to be better than any of the 200 stories remaining. It's a pretty high bar!

However, plenty of submissions that jumped ahead of others in the queue simply because the title stood out. Beth Goder sent us a story for Rockets & Robots called "Dinosaur Portal Mayhem." I trusted "Dinosaur Portal Mayhem" to be one heck of a wild ride, and it was! I'm excited it's going to be in our book!  

For every "Dinosaur Portal Mayhem," we'd get five stories with titles like "The Journey." I don't think we actually got a story called "The Journey," but too many titles are essentially brown paper wrappers giving no hint at what's inside. Sometimes, these unassuming titles sit above great stories. Still, I recommend swinging for the fences with your title. Win over the editor by showing what you can do with just three or four words. 

That said, a good title is never enough to keep the editor engaged for long. The keys to keeping an editor reading past your first page is a sense of urgency. By urgency, I don't mean cliffhangers or action sequences. I mean that you aren't wasting a single word as your story opens. Every line is devoted to telling us who we're reading about, where they are, and setting up the problem soon to arise. The editor will notice that you've got a story you really want to tell. 

To find out if you've got this sort of urgent, information rich prose, circle every noun on your first page. If you can read your list of nouns out loud and have them hint at the story without any further context, you're on the right track. 

I just sold a story to Asimov's called "Lonely Hill."  The nouns in the first three sentences include Buck Heglund, North Carolina, RV, generator, and flying saucer. A person, a place, a problem. Person, place, and problem are the mirepoix of storytelling, the flavor base that supports the real meat of the story.  If you have a list of mushy, bland nouns--girl, room, chair--get yourself better ingredients. 

Person, place, problem. Dinosaur Portal Mayhem.  Follow this formula, and you've got a real shot at escaping from Slush Mountain. 

Word Balloon Books Middle Grade Anthologies

Note: Concept covers. Final covers to be revealed. 

My first ever independently published novel was Burn Baby Burn, which I released back in 2011, under my own imprint of Word Balloon Books. I've gone on to publish or republish 23 of my own books, and have built up a healthy portfolio of skills in book design and marketing. Now, it's time to put these skills to use for new audiences and new authors. I'm pleased to announce that in 2022, Word Balloon Books will be releasing three anthologies of fantasy and science fiction geared toward middle grade readers. 

The titles we currently have planned are Rockets & Robots, Paradoxical Pets, and Beware the Bugs. We're looking for stories appropriate for readers 10 and up. Violence, sex, and language should be G-rated. That said, we're open to challenging themes and topics. We're also open to reprints! Pay rates will be at least $.01 per word, but we're hoping to improve that. We have no firm word count limit, but under 3k is preferred. Child or teen protagonists also preferred. We're open to any solid story that fits into our overall themes. 

The initial deadline for all books is February 11, 2022, but that will likely be extended for two of the titles once we have enough submissions that we can determine which one we'll be publishing first. 

Email submission to submissions@inorbit.com. Please indicate which anthology you're submitting to, and if the story is previously published. 

More on the individual titles:

Rockets & Robots: These should be science fiction adventures set in the future, in outer space, or on alien worlds. No fantasy! 

Paradoxical Pets: Looking for stories about unusual pets. They might be aliens, ghosts, mythical creatures, robots, or just a dog or cat with some weird power. Fantasy or science fiction is fine. 

Beware the Bugs! Think of 1950s B-movies where giant ants terrorize cities. Or, Lord of the Rings, where hobbits battle enormous spiders. Either science fiction or fantasy is fine, the story just needs to feature some enormous creepy-crawly critter! 

Dragonsgate: Spirits and The Map of the Drowned City

After some delays caused by medical difficulties over the winter (COVID, followed by my gallbladder quitting my body without a two week notice), I finally buckled down and finished the first draft of Dragonsgate: Spirits. The book came together nicely once I got my momentum back. 

Now, I'm launching into the second draft! There are still many months of work ahead before I knit my crazy tangle of plotlines into a coherent tapestry, but I feel like the opening is tied together sufficiently to start showing it to people as as standalone novelette, The Map of the Drowned City. This is sort of the "secret origin" story for Elspeth Howell, Commander of the Salt Fleet, who was a bit of an enigma in the first book. Her actions had a huge impact on the plot, but there were no scenes from her point of view. In Dragonsgate: Spirits, we'll finally get inside her head and see what she wants and how she plans to get it. Even if you haven't read any of my previous work, The Map of the Drowned City is still a rousing tale of a young girl battling a monster during a quest for treasure. Good stuff!  You can read it free with a link in my next newsletter!

If you eager to read this, sign up here to be on my mailing list! If you haven't seen the newsletter by July 9, check your spam filter! 

Dragonsgate: Spirits update

The sequel to Dragonsgate: Devils is Dragonsgate: Spirits. Bitterwood and Nadala team up to journey through underspace to find Zeeky and Nadala's kidapped (dragonnapped?) drake. They wind up in a world that follows different rules than the reality they are used to, and are swept up in a battle between three powerful queens. 

Anza, meanwhile, continues her journey out west, encountering dragon species she's never fought before and finding remnants of human civilization that have found new ways to survive in the wasteland. 

Finally, Hex has finally accepted his responsibilities as king, and his first act is the abolition of slavery. But his fellow dragons aren't happy about this, and the rebels of Dragon Forge, now led by Elspeth Howell and her mysterious companion known as Surgeon, have their own plans for the balance of power between men and dragons. 

It's coming together! I'm technically only 11 chapters in, but some of these are ridiculously long and almost certain to be divided into multiple chapters, so I've probably got at least 14 chapters of material hammered out, with probably at least 20 or 25 to go! It's going to be epic! I promise it will be worth the wait!  

Hearts of Frost & Flame Audible Review Codes Still Available!

I'm pleased to announce a new release in partnership with master narrator Jake Urry, Hearts of Frost & Flame! This is actually one of two Omnibus collections we're called "Dragon Duologies." Hearts collects the previously released editions of Greatshadow and Hush, and the follow up, Hell & Back, will collect Witchbreaker and Cinder. Since you can now get two books for one credit, this is a great deal for Audible subscribers. But, hold on! I've got an even better deal than two for one! I need reviewers, so I'll be happy to send you a free code in exchange for you considering a review on Audible.

If you've read these books in print before but never listened to them in audio, this is a great chance to revisit the books. Jake Urry was born to voice Stagger, and really brings the book to life. Don't the shy! Start listening today by signing up to get a code here.

Write! Daydream, Type, Profit, Repeat! Sample Chapter!

How to Be Original While Following Formulas

My favorite sandwich is a Reuben. Luckily, this is a pretty easy sandwich to find on menus anywhere I travel. When I'm on the road, I like to be adventurous, and if I see something really unique on the menu, I'll give it a shot. This is how I wound up eating a Belgian waffle covered in sausage gravy in a small restaurant in West Virginia. But, lots of times, the menus from state to state aren't all that varied. So, if I'm facing a page of fairly standard burgers and subs, and a Reuben is available, I'll give it a shot.

The standard recipe for a Reuben, if it's followed faithfully, makes a pretty awesome sandwich each time. It's basically five ingredients: Rye bread, corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Thousand Island dressing. The best preparation is on a griddle with some butter. A toasted Reuben is unsatisfying, and a cold, uncooked Reuben is an abomination. Properly cooked, the rye provides a slightly bitter note, sauerkraut brings acidity, the corned beef gives it salt and fat, which are complimented by the sharpness of the cheese, and the Thousand Island dressing adds sweetness to contrast with the other flavors. It's fatty, salty, sour, and sweet all at once, with a nice protein kick from the corned beef. It makes my mouth happy.

Just to put you at ease, I haven't forgotten that this is a writing book. I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

Readers want originality, but spend most of their money on familiarity. It's the same reason I'd like to order a different sandwich in every city I visit, but wind up ordering the same sandwich again and again. If sandwiches were free, I'd be more daring. These days in a bar, sandwiches can be ten bucks a pop. I kind of want to know I'm going to be happy with what I order. The same impulse drives fiction purchases. Sure, in a perfect world, they'd read anything and everything. Alas, time and money are finite quantities. If you found a type of book you like, it makes sense to keep buying that type of book, as long as things stay fresh enough to keep you hungry for it.

This is one of the biggest challenges for a fiction writer who pursues a long-term career. Repeat readers get hooked a certain story formula. When Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, he was following a formula established by Edgar Allan Poe. An eccentric genius solves baffling mysteries that thwart the best efforts of the police. There can be some variety; perhaps it's a murder, perhaps it's a stolen heirloom, perhaps someone has been kidnapped. The case will always be solved by the genius noticing small details others have missed, or else interpreting details correctly after the official investigators have leapt to the wrong conclusion from the same clues. In no case will the official investigators ever be allowed to solve the murder before the genius. They aren't even allowed to be useful except occasionally they'll be on hand to help take the criminal off to jail in the final scene. The criminal is always apprehended unless they are a mastermind who will serve as a foil in future stories, or sympathetic people who committed the crime for the best possible reason.

Subplots can exist. You might have a long running mystery about a crime that the detective failed to solve early in his or her career. You might have a love interest, or a series of them. Still, the formula of genius, oafs, clues, solution must predominate. If you break the formula, by just leaving out one of the ingredients, you'll have an unhappy reader.

Which happens with Reubens. Sometimes, I'll order a Reuben, and it's not on rye, but on whole wheat, or maybe sourdough. Neither are right, but they aren't necessarily a disaster. If any bread has been cooked on a griddle with a little butter it's going to taste pretty good. But, visually, the sandwich will be off. I can look at it and know that care wasn't taken in the preparation, that it was slapped together with whatever was on hand. If the bread is wrong, other things can be off. Sometimes, it's not corned beef, but roast beef. They might swap Swiss for provolone. Hey, they're both white cheeses, who's going to notice? I'll notice. The absolute worst "Reuben" I was ever served was on an Italian sub roll with no sauerkraut, just lettuce. I mean, at that point, why bother? Just tell me you can't make me a Reuben. I'll order something else.

The takeaway here is that breaking the recipe carelessly or thoughtlessly is going to disappoint me as an eater. Miss a vital ingredient in a story, and you're going to disappoint the reader.

Maybe you don't want to be a line cook, cranking out someone else’s recipe again and again. Maybe you've got all the steps down, but this isn't really your sandwich. The Reuben doesn't belong to you, no matter how well you execute it. You want to make a name for yourself, and improve upon what's already a perfect sandwich.

It can be done. I've eaten that sandwich. I was at a bar in Raleigh and spotted a "Far East Reuben" on the menu. The formula was a standard Reuben, except that the sauerkraut was swapped with kimchi. Brilliant! Kimchi and kraut are both fermented. They have the same underlying sourness, but kimchi adds hot peppers to the mix. Putting it onto the sandwich instead of ordinary kraut was genius! It respected the original recipe, while at the same time taking the sandwich in a new direction and making it especially rewarding. Whoever was behind that sandwich could break the formula because he or she understood the formula. They knew the role the kraut served, and found a substitute that fulfilled the original role and brought in something extra.

This is how you, as a writer, can express your creativity. Master the recipes, and understand the purpose of each story ingredient. Then, find a better ingredient to substitute. In my own case, I've twice created fantasy universes. A vital ingredient in any fantasy is the magic. Magic is the whole reason people pick up a fantasy novel. Magic serves to stimulate a reader’s sense of wonder. Magic also introduces a wild card into the plotting. Anything can happen! For my Bitterwood universe, the ingredient I chose to tweak was the magic. Instead of coming up with rules for a supernatural universe, I decided that all the magic was going to follow science fiction rules. Everything magical in the story could be explained by technology and chemistry and biology, with a touch of theoretical physics to spice things up. The science fiction still served the same purpose at magic, heightening the sense of wonder and building in the possibility of miraculous happenings that could provide unexpected plot twists. It also provided plausibility (I hope), and I'd like to think that some readers found themselves intrigued by some of the science fiction concepts and went on to learn more about reality, the way that watching shows like Star Trek inspired me to learn more about space.

After I wrote the Bitterwood books, I tossed out my own recipe and started fresh on the Dragon Apocalypse books. This time, magic would remain magical. What I substituted out instead was the cast. Traditional fantasies are built around certain character types. There's a great deal of variation, of course, but fantasy novels often put together teams of characters and you'll find people playing the roles of warriors, wizards or clerics, and rogues. I decided to swap out these traditional stereotypes for superheroes. Of course, no one in my Dragon Apocalypse books ever identifies themselves as a superhero, or would even know what the term meant. But all the characters have superpowers, most have code names, and most have costumes. By introducing characters who are physically invulnerable, or who fly, or who have super strength, I upped the stakes on the action, allowing me to write over-the-top action scenes that wouldn't have worked with ordinary human characters. Since many of my characters couldn't be harmed physically, that forced me to make most of the peril they faced be either internal or emotional. In sparing them physical pain, I was able to amplify mental pain.

It's yet another paradox of writing. You should love your characters and want what’s best for them. Usually, what's best for them is torment and suffering. A character not going through some sort of distress or turmoil is about as interesting as a cold Reuben.

Just as a chef needs to constantly analyze the food he enjoys to understand why it’s so satisfying, authors need to analyze the books they love and attempt to discern the ingredients, the purpose of these ingredients, and how they’ve been put together. Once you figure out the recipe for books of a given genre, you’ll understand which ingredients can be swapped and improved upon, so you can give your readers a book that is both what they wanted, and much more than they hoped for. 

Write! will be released in just two weeks! Order today! 

Dragonsgate: Devils Signed Copies!

With most of my conventions cancelled until 2021 at the earliest, and gathering restrictions keeping me for arranging for bookstore or library signings, I've decided to offer signed copies via mail. This is a nice, hefty book, 382 pages of story, that retails for $18 for the trade paperback edition. I'll sell it for the full $18, but won't charge additional for shipping if you live in the US and don't mind me shipping via postal media mail. I've got a limited quantity in stock but more on the way.

If you're interested, just fill out the form at this link!  I'll send you an online invoice when the book is ready to ship. If you aren't in the US and want a copy, go ahead and fill out the form and I'll get back to you with shipping costs.

I feel like I've been talking about the book non-stop for a few months now, but in case you're wondering, yes, this is a new novel set in the Bitterwood universe, yes, dragons do explore dungeons and fight dinosaurs, and yes, of course there's a moon-wizard. I promise it will be the best dragons versus dinosaurs novel you'll read all year!

Dragonsgate: Devils! The Secret Origin!

In the beginning was the nerd. I was that nerd. I was seventeen years old. I was a little short on practical knowledge, but I knew the secret identities of every member of the Justice League. I also could recite entire scripts of the Tom Baker Dr. Who episodes broadcast each day at 4pm on a PBS station in the next county. For those of you who never had the joy of climbing onto a roof to turn the antenna to stand at least a trivial chance of watching blurry images through bands of static, to follow the adventures of a guy with a long scarf and a robot dog, you don't know what you missed. Luckily, Star Trek was on a station actually broadcast in the county where I lived, so I had that to satisfy my science fiction cravings in a slightly less static filled manner. Don't ask, "Which Star Trek?" There was only one, and it's reruns were broadcast at 11pm on Saturday nights. Which was fine. Comic book collecting, Trekkie geeks who knew what all the letters in TARDIS stood for didn't get invited to a lot of parties.

And then, D&D. Dungeons and Dragons arrived at my high school in 1980. Comics and TV shows were mostly solo activities, but D&D required groups of friends. By the time I went to college, I had no reason to fear loneliness. I just posted a flyer on a bulletin board saying I was getting an AD&D campaign together. People showed up!

It was in one of these college games where I was the DM that I put together a team of evil characters to oppose my players. For weeks they'd run through dungeons hacking at skeletons and committing war crimes against orcs. Now, I wanted them to face a more formidable opposition, a group of characters with more skills and resources who were capable of working together to advance their evil plots. There was an anti-paladin, an evil wizard, a dark cleric, an assassin, and, to give the bad guys a bit of extra muscle, a red dragon named Ellison.

I'd had characters fight dragons before, but Ellison was the first time I really had to put myself into the character of a dragon. How did Ellison wind up working with these creeps? What was in it for him? Just what did dragons do with the treasure they hoarded anyway? Since dragons could talk, who did they talk to? Did they have families? Relationships? Were there entire dragon cultures hidden away in distant lands? Were the rare dragons that humans encountered outcasts from this larger group?

Dragons routinely slept on treasure piles filled with magic items. Ellison was smart enough to actually use the items he owned, including a wand of enlargement he used on himself in one battle to grow big enough to tear apart a castle. When he was hurt, he'd quaff down healing potions. If memory serves, I think he also had a ring of invisibility. Ellison was smart, he was often funny, and when he was finally killed by the adventurers who were hunting him, he was one of the first characters I'd created that I really hated to see go.

Fast forward a decade and I was still playing AD&D. After the games, my friends and I would sit around talking about the various computer versions of AD&D were never quite as good as the live games. This was before the immersive 3-d rendered worlds that followed games like Doom and Tomb Raider, so we were talking about how great it would be if someone could build an amusement park with giant animatronic dragons where you could go and get a real Dungeons and Dragons live experience. But, nerdy as I was, I felt like Disneyfying the dragons and monsters would be pretty disappointing, likely targeted at kids instead of edgy adults like myself looking for serious danger. What if, instead, you could use genetic engineering to blend together traits from existing creatures? Like, take DNA from a tiger, an eagle, and a alligator in order to get a big, agile, ferocious toothy predator? Wouldn't that be great? What could possibly go wrong?

And, "what could possibly go wrong," led to my original Bitterwood Trilogy, with it's genetically engineered dragons ruling over humans in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic America.

Still, it's been ten years since I wrapped up that trilogy. Why return to that setting and characters after all this time?

First, while I'd wrapped up most of the major plot threads of the original trilogy, there were still a few dangling strings. Graxen and Nadala, the sky-dragon lovers who'd been major protagonist in Dragonforge, had been banished from the kingdom at the end of the book. I kept wondering what had happened to them.

Second, I hadn't really ended the war between the human rebels and their dragon overlords. I'd ended the series with the conflict on hold. The dragons hadn't been able to defeat the humans, but humans had mainly spent the third book defending the territory they'd gained in the second book. There was no negotiated peace, only an equilibrium. The humans could hold off the dragons, but, realistically, the next step would be for the humans to expand the war. I wonder what Burke, the human leader, would do next. He was always planning and plotting. He wasn't going to be content holding onto one town. What was his next target? How would the dragons react once they were the targets of aggression?

Third, I'd hinted at creatures that lived on the other side of the Haunted Mountains. I'd said there were reptiles living there even bigger and more dangerous than dragons. I'd also established in my trilogy that the Bitterwood universe dragons knew all about dinosaurs, and regarded the thunder lizards as their ancestors. Were there somehow dinosaurs living beyond the mountains? Why? How did they get there?

These questions percolated in the back of my mind for several years. I moved on to other projects. I wrote four books in the Dragon Apocalypse series. Five superhero novels came out, a steampunk Wizard of Oz tribute called Bad Wizard, and two collections of short stories. As intriguing as it was to return to the Bitterwood universe, I had so many ideas to write about I just didn't see when I'd find time.

Then, in February of 2017, I went on a writers retreat with fellow authors Stuart Jaffe, Gray Rinehart, and Edmund Schubert. The goal of the retreat wasn't to actually write, but to brainstorm and plan. We'd go in with undeveloped ideas about novels we might write, bat them around for a bit, ask hard questions, and leave with a clear concept for a book to write.

I went up fully intending to talk about superheroes, and maybe delve into a little urban fantasy. Instead, I almost immediately went into my pitch for a novel where dragons battled dinosaurs. I even had a vision of where the dinosaurs came from. In my original trilogy, I'd established a technology known as "underspace gates," that let people instantaneously travel through between remote points in space. But, if a gate malfunctioned, could it also permit travel between remote points in time? Once I knew the dinosaurs were coming out of some sort of portal, I knew the title, Dragonsgate, and I also knew it wouldn't be a single novel, but a new trilogy. The first book would be set in the Bitterwood universe where characters from the original series would have to deal with all these dinosaurs. The second book would take a core group of characters through the gate into the world beyond for an adventure in a fresh setting. The third book would, as a consequence of events that take place on the other side of the gate, lead to an ultimate, final resolution in the larger war between mankind and dragons.

Dragonsgate does continue the Bitterwood saga, but I'm not marketing it as Bitterwood books 4-6. It's Dragonsgate 1-3, and my current plan is for the subtitles to be Devils, Spirits, and Angels. I've got fresh and exciting character arcs that will play out for existing characters, plus a whole slew of new characters like Tellico the Swamp Devil, Zaline the Salt Queen, Commander Elspeth Howell, and a earth-dragon entrepreneur named Bigmouth. I need these new characters in part because a new beginning means that no one from the previous trilogy is safe. Whoever is in charge of carving tombstones near Dragon Forge is going to be making a very good living by the end of the first book.

I promise, if nothing else, this will be the best dragons fighting dinosaurs novel you'll read all year. And it's available now! The link that follows will take you to Amazon, but it's everywhere, man! Apple, Google, Nook, Kobo. Get yours today! 

Unwriting

The most important key on a writer's keyboard is the delete key. I'm currently wading through yet another draft of Dragonsgate: Devils. On my early drafts, my primary focus is to make sure every bit of information the reader will need to understand a scene is making it to the page. I'd rather give them too much information instead of too little. Too much can be tedious to get through, but too little means the reader is lost and confused.

Still, this philosophy means I wind up with drafts where I've got redundancies, flab, and distractions. It's time for my prose to go on a diet. My current draft isn't so much writing as unwriting. I'm weighing each sentence and deciding if it really needs to be there. I break up long sentences, merge shorter ones, and delete words, phrases, and entire paragraphs if they aren't important to the reader's understanding. The goal here is flow and focus.

Here's the previous version of a few lines from the end of a scene where Hex is trying to destroy the foundries at Dragon Forge. It's told from Burke's point of view. The old version is 342 words. It's perfectly readable. But, it's an action scene, where every word needs to be driving the action forward. Instead, I muddy things up. Here's the old version:

Hex was well clear of the impact zone as ball after ball bit into the bricks above. The cracks in the smokestack grew larger. Burke cursed as brick shards and cannonball shrapnel rained down on him. Then he cursed even louder as the iron ladder began to peel away from the smokestack, bending outward, carrying him into open space. Though he was preoccupied with not falling, he somehow kept one eye on Hex circling back around over the still semi-intact smokestack. The dragon had pulled a few grenades from the bandolier with his dexterous hind-talons. Three rings were snatched away, and three black orbs trailed sparks as they fell. Hex had excellent aim. All three balls went right into the chimney shaft. Burke heard them bouncing and banging against the walls. Then, with a boom muffled by the brick, all three went off at once. The cracks in the smokestack spread further as Hex wheeled back once more. This time, he drew up just short of collision with the chimney and kicked out with his powerful hind talons, their might magnified by his Atlantean armor. This was the final shove needed. The chimney shuddered, popped, and split down the middle before collapsing. The bent ladder Burke clung to was no longer attached to anything. 

Burke had cheated death quite often since barely surviving the rebellion in Conyers. The world had chewed up and swallowed him bit by bit, leaving him scarred, bruised, and short a limb. Any time he glanced into a mirror, he was confronted by reminders of his own mortality. As the iron ladder gave way and he tumbled toward his death, he found a strange peace taking hold of him. He closed his eyes. When he’d hit the ground, if the mystics were right, his body would perish, but his soul would linger on. And if his assumptions proved correct, and nothing followed death… 

He opened his eyes. If he had a half second left to experience the world, he might as well make the most of it. 

The revised version is 202 words.

Hex was well clear of the impact zone as ball after ball bit into the bricks above. The cracks in the smokestack grew larger. Burke cursed as brick shards and cannonball shrapnel rained down on him. Then he cursed even louder as the iron ladder began to peel away from the smokestack, bending outward. 

Hex circled back over the semi-intact smokestack. The dragon had pulled a few grenades from the bandolier with his dexterous hind-talons. Three rings were snatched away, and three black orbs trailed sparks as they fell. 

Hex had excellent aim. All three balls went right into the chimney shaft. Burke heard them bouncing and banging against the walls. With a muffled boom, all three went off at once. The cracks in the smokestack spread further as Hex wheeled back once more. This time, he drew up just short of collision with the chimney, kicking out with his powerful hind talons. The chimney shuddered, popped, and split down the middle before collapsing. The ladder Burke clung to was no longer attached to anything. 

As Burke tumbled toward the distant earth, he kept his eyes open. He had seconds left to experience the world. He might as well make the most of them. 

You probably noticed I deleted Burke's history of close calls and his musing about souls. The man is falling towards his death. It's not something I want to drag out. But the more significant edit is this one:

Though he was preoccupied with not falling, he somehow kept one eye on Hex circling back around over the still semi-intact smokestack.

Which becomes:

Hex circled back over the semi-intact smokestack

I left it to the reader to assume Burke doesn't want to fall. Describing Hex's actions without describing Burke witnessing them isn't really a POV violation. The reader can just assume Burke sees this.

 It can be disheartening, highlighting a long string of words and hitting delete. It took a lot of work to get those words onto the page. Now, with a keystroke, they're gone, unwritten. But this is the step that gives your work flow and focus. Don't skip it. 

.

Write! Daydream, type, profit, repeat! First Two Chapters!

Before I dive in on my final draft of Dragonsgate: Devils, I've taken time to write my first ever book of non-fiction, WRITE! Daydream, Type, Profit, Repeat! I'll announce a formal release date soon. The book still needs line editing and final proofing, which I'll get too after I make another pass on Dragonsgate. 

In the meantime, here are the first two chapters to whet your appetite! 

1

A Pretty Sweet Deal 

Here’s the deal. It’s pretty sweet. This is it. Everything, absolutely everything you need to do to be a professional novelist:

Daydream.

Type.

Profit.

Repeat.

Yeah, I know, you saw that on the cover.

You’ll see it again on the next page. Tear that page out, tape it above your computer, and follow it step by step. If you don’t type at a desk, adapt. Maybe you ride a train to work in the morning and write during your commute. Ask the stranger next to you to hold this above your screen as you work. Don’t let him tell you he has more important things to do. Explain that you’re a novelist. Don’t let him give you any guff!

Also, I should probably clarify that I don’t actually recommend tearing the page out. Cutting neatly with scissors will give you more professional looking results. These words are intended to change your life. Don’t cheapen them with a ragged, torn edge.*

I looked into getting the pages perforated, but that cost a fortune. And, you know, profit.
Well, my job’s done here. Thanks for reading! Sorry if this book turned out shorter than you expected!  

 

*This text here will make much more sense in the final print book than it will on the blog. Here's the graphic from the page. 

2

That’s It?

You may feel that my instructions in the previous chapter are a little sparse. Daydream, type, profit, repeat. It feels a bit… underdeveloped.

One of the duties of an author is to pick apart the world and study its component parts. You take something complex and break it down to the essential elements that make something, well, something. A cartoonist learns to replicate a human face by drawing a rough oval and jotting a few lines to indicate eyes and a mouth. ☺

It will be the same with writing fiction. You’ll learn how to break complex things like human lives, world histories, geologic eras, religions, morals, myths, and mysteries down into a string of words that reproduce these things in a reader’s mind as effectively as a circle, two dots, and a curved line can invoke a face.

Making things simple is surprisingly complex.

You might think I dashed out daydream, type, profit, repeat in a matter of seconds one lazy afternoon. The reality it, it’s taken me very close to twenty years to understand my writing process well enough to capture it in four words. Allow me to use many hundred words to explain how I mastered such brevity.

One of my duties when I was Piedmont Laureate for Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill was to teach writing workshops. Planning for these workshops, I did my best to focus on the components I thought a novice writer needed to learn. How to create characters was an obvious topic. I taught another workshop on how to create realistic settings. Plotting. Research. Time management. Anything people asked me about when I taught one workshop inspired me to create another workshop.

Overall, I did close to thirty events, and ended the year fairly confident I didn’t know a damn thing about writing. Everything I’d lectured on was probably useful advice, but I’d always felt compelled to focus on one aspect of writing fiction rather than trying to explain the whole process. In doing so, I was more or less trying to explain how a car works by showing people unassembled car parts. If you’ve never driven a car, and I showed you a detached steering wheel, then showed you a gas pedal, then spent an hour going over the windshield wipers, when you actually sat in a car you might feel more lost than if you’d never gotten any instruction at all. Ultimately, if you want to learn to operate a car, you need to get behind the wheel of an actual car.

I pondered this problem for a several years. How do I capture the sprawling, time-consuming process of writing novels, something I’ve spent half a century trying to perfect, and break it down into something that evokes the whole process at a glance, the way a circle and a few squiggles turns into a face?

I stumbled into my answer by accident. I was doing a writer’s panel at a convention, one of countless “How to Make a Living Writing” discussions I’ve done. There were five people on the panel, and I was the last to speak. One by one, the authors going before me talked about how difficult it was to be a writer. They complained about publishers going out of business, agents ignoring their emails, and how a career that’s hot one day can go cold the next. A big gripe was how saturated the genre markets had become, as self-publishing had transformed the industry from one where a few hundred new titles a year would find their way into bookstores into a new world where thousands of books get published every hour. How can a writer hope to survive against such terrible odds?

I don’t think this grousing is unique to writers. I think if we’d been a panel of five cab drivers, we’d have spent an hour griping about how terrible traffic is with all those amateur drivers mucking up the roads. It’s a legitimate gripe, but look, if you don’t enjoy being a cab driver, don’t drive a cab. If you don’t enjoy writing books, don’t write books.

Writing novels is a completely optional activity. Mankind invented writing roughly 10,000 years ago. The novel as we know it didn’t come into existence until 400 years ago, more or less. For the majority of human history, people have gotten along fine without novels. It’s not too late to turn back. If the hassle and frustrations of writing books cause you to feel hassled and frustrated, give up! Producing a novel is no more important to the world than driving a cab.

Unless, maybe, you have a beautiful and unique vision for a book that you alone can write. A book that might change the world, or, at the very least, a book that at least a few people will regard as a pretty good story. Which, probably, you do, or you wouldn’t be reading books on how to write novels.

Sorry. I’ve gotten sidetracked. I was telling the story about the writing panel. I kept listening to my fellow writers, hearing them express every frustration I felt about my chosen career. Writers work long hours and the most common reward for your work is obscurity, though occasionally you also get poverty. The publishing industry is brutal. The standard contracts offered by most publisher creep right up to the borderline of legal theft. The gripers ahead of me on that panel didn’t need to explain to me how much life sucked for writers!

Then the moderator asked me how I felt about writing as a career. I looked at the audience. All the energy had drained from the room. The authors on the stage had collectively published over fifty novels. Now we were telling a room full of people working on their first novels that only an idiot would want to be an author.

What if we were telling people this because it was true? What if writing novels is an absolutely crap job? What if those people uploading a thousand books every hour to Amazon were hopeless fools? Forget those thousand people on Amazon. What the hell was I doing? Why did I ever want to be a writer? Why was I still doing it, despite knowing the difficulties?

And suddenly, I knew. Like a cartoonist who discovers a face in a few squiggles, I grasped the entirety of my career. I could see the whole process end to end, and it was simple and elegant and beautiful. No wonder I love doing it.

I said to the room, “I don’t know why everyone’s saying this is hard. I daydream and I type and people send me money to keep doing it. It’s a pretty sweet deal.”

And that’s that. You daydream. You type. You get paid. Then you do it all over again. It’s that easy. Why anyone thinks this is difficult is a mystery. It’s not rocket surgery. You aren’t digging ditches. You seldom get tackled by linebackers. You’re getting paid actual money to sit around daydreaming! Also, there’s some typing involved. And some business stuff. Contracts, royalties, taxes, that kind of junk. Don’t sweat it. It’s easy to figure out. Keep your eyes on the big picture. You want to be a professional author? Daydream, type, profit, repeat!

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s hard!

I mean, sure, occasionally it’s a little hard, parts of it. Not too hard. Except for the times when it’s really hard. Speaking from long experience, there are only four difficulties in writing that I would describe as “soul-crushing.”

1. Daydreaming

2. Typing

3. Making a profit

4. Repeating it. 

Dragonsgate Update

Winter gives way to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and still Dragonsgate grinds on. Yesterday I completed chapter 20 of the second draft, which brings the novel as of now to 102,533 words. There's the very real possibility that when this draft as done, I'll be looking at the longest novel I've ever written, probably 150,000 words. But maybe longer! As the second draft has evolved, I have an ever growing list of scenes I need to go back and work in, I also have at least six more existing chapters to rewrite, plus a bare minimum of two chapters past those where I wrap up final plot threads. I really won't be surprised if the final second draft comes in closer to 160K words. But, I'm also certain there are redundancies and bloat I'll be trimming on future drafts. Assuming I do have 160k words when I'm done, then assuming I edit out 10% to tighten stuff up (or, more realistically, 15% cut, but 5% new enhancements and clarifications), I'll probably have a final book of about 144k words. My previous longest book was only about 130k.

Ultimately, the book will be as long as it needs to be. I've added a lot of fresh characters who need room to breathe and grow alongside existing characters. It will all be worth it.

What's intimidating is that this is just book one! The second book my be longer, and the third book longer still! But maybe not. I'll have a much smaller cast after this book.

Restock

Unpacking my latest restock order. The one downside to selling a lot of books is that it's always followed by a order where you buy a lot of books!

Still, this year I've finally gotten good at it. I used to rely too much on my memory of what books I had in stock, and my hunches as to what books were likely to sell at upcoming cons. Too often, this would result in my packing up for a con the following day and discovering, oops, I only have two copies of Nobody Gets the Girl, or just a single Bad Wizard. My two biggest sellers, the Dragon Apocalypse and Bitterwood collections, were relatively easy to keep track of. Nine times out of ten, I'll sell most of what I take, so it was easy to keep track of my stock levels and anticipate when I needed to reorder. Where it got tricky was my superhero novels. It's not unusual for me to do an event and not sell a single superhero novel. So, I generally didn't bother keeping a lot of them in stock. But, almost at random, I do have events where I sell superhero books to just about everyone who looks at them. Probably the most I've sold at an event is 30. So, 0-30 is a big range to keep track of.

Complicating matters further, I often sell books in bundles. So, a single superhero novel is $10, but a full trilogy is $25. So, I'd have multiple line items for selling the same items.

But, all along, the tools to manage sales were built into Square. Each item in Square can has an inventory field. Today, unpacking five cases of books, I stopped and input every book I received into the inventory. Square also lets you set up alerts when stock levels fall below a certain level. So, I now if I fall below having ten in stock of any superhero title, I get an alert and know to reorder. And, the final trick was to get rid of all my bundle entries in square. Now, I ring up each book of a trilogy as it's own item, but then add a fourth item, a $5 discount. Square lets you create discounts as negative value items that you just add to the transaction. Now, I not only keep an accurate count of what I'm selling, I can also look at the end of each month and see how much I'm relying on discounts to move books. It helps find the balance between cutting a deal to move books, and holding firm on price to maximize profit.

In retrospect, I wish I'd been doing this years ago. I'm sure I've lost sales by not having enough inventory. And, while you don't get a volume discount from Amazon by ordering a lot of titles at once, you do save on shipping costs, so being able to quickly know every possible title I can add to an order helps cut that cost, at least.

Mid Year Update: 209745

As June comes to a close, my word count for the year is 209745. This is mostly new fiction, between a first draft of Dragonsgate, 14 chapters of Nobody Nowhere, and lots of false starts and test chapters on other projects. At the beginning of the year, I still thought I'd be writing a Smash Lass novel called Smash, and I may one day, but for now it's gone and forgotten. I also wrote several false starts for a younger reader novel called Squire. It's also set aside and mostly forgotten. In non fiction, I've written several chapters or fragments for my writing book, The Stuff. It's very much an alive project, but a ton of what I've written is probably unusable. I've been approaching the book as a series of essays, but am starting to see that, despite being non-fiction, it really needs a plot. There should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it needs some twists along the way. I wrote a new first chapter for the book last week and feel like I might finally have a handle on how to make the book a page turner. I also think that my previous takes on writing advice have been somewhat serious and dry. My new vision incorporates much more humor.

My word count is also including some non-revenue oriented writing, like these blog posts, some written interviews I've done, and some of the writing-related work I've done on organizing projects for the Friends of the Library. (For instance, writing the rules for the costume contest at the Comic Fair.)

But, still, I'm not happy to be over 40k words under goal for the year. On the other hand, I'm not panicked either. My year got off to a slow start, with really low selling cons in January and February, and the first BookBub ad I ever ran that had no long trail off at all. On previous ads, I had elevated sales for up to six months. The last one I ran had a one month boost, then a rapid reversion to what I'd been selling before. So, in March, as I was really starting to dip into my savings, I took a temp job. I really thought the project would end in early May, but it ran through the third week of June. Ironically, once I took that job, the writing income panic went away as bigger cons started kicking in. But, it's nice going into the rest of they year with my savings account boosted up a bit. I've got some good sized cons lined up for July and August. September doesn't have any huge events on the calendar, but October and November should be good, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this year I won't have two events in a row cancelled by hurricanes. It's the December through February window that's challenging, both for finding events of any size, and for not having those events canceled by snowstorms (which also happened to me this year).

Of course, the best cure for the winter con slump is going to be to have books releasing during that time frame to boost my online revenue, and I'm on target to do that. Getting in 300k words in the second half of the year requires an average of 12k words a week. Not very daunting. Now, it's time to wrap up this blog post, and get back to cranking out chapters!

Year to date: 188092 words

I skipped a weekly update last Sunday since I was still at ConCarolinas. Next Sunday I'll be at HeroesCon. This week, Cheryl and I took a trip for her birthday to Damascus, Virginia to bike the Virginia Creeper trail. As I predicted in my last blog post, all of this has just killed my writing momentum for the time being.

In addition to all the travel, I also did something yesterday that was writing related, took hours, but didn't count toward my word count goals. I finally created an online inventory system for my books. I've almost certainly lost sales this year by not having enough stock when I head out to a con. I've now upped my inventory level for all my titles and, more importantly, have linked all my inventory into Square so I'll know when it's time to order more while I'm selling them instead of waiting until the day I'm packing for a con to discover what I still have. Unpacking every book I had in stock, sorting them, rearranging shelves so I can more easily store what I have, and keying the inventory into Square ate up my whole afternoon yesterday, but now that it's done it should pay off moving forward.

This week, I was listening to a radio story about a musician who wasn't releasing her new album digitally but was instead only going to release it as a CD. She talked about how CDs might not sell as well in stores, but they still sold well at concerts. It made me realize that my career has kind of become that of a gig musician. Last month I had more revenue from selling books at cons than I made in online sales. This pattern will likely hold true at least through August. Online sales in theory have less cost, but the landscape of digital sales has changed a lot in the last few years and now Amazon has sort of changed the rules to a system where you have to pay to play. If you aren't running ads, your books disappear.

There's a lot of cost involved in selling books at conventions, but the raw dollar profit on a physical book is much larger than the royalty on most ebooks. My ebooks sell best when I discount them. So, from time to time I've done 99 cent promos on my dragon collections, and these are always profitable compared to what I spend on the ads. But, at 99 cent, selling 45 books earns me a royalty equal to the profit I make selling one trade paperback dragon collection at a con. And, at cons, the competition is  less intense. I'm not going to conventions where George R. R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson are sitting next to me selling their books. At a lot of the cons I do, there are only a handful of other authors, and most aren't targeting the same audience. So, for now, doing cons most weekends seems to be the most reliable way of turning my time into money... with the one long term cost, for now, seeming to be a loss of hours spent actually producing new fiction.

The only way forward is forward. I used to balance a day job with writing a couple of books a year, so I see no reason I shouldn't be able to balance all these conventions with producing at leas the same number of books. And, I feel like I'm spending a lot of time beating myself up for making it to June without having released a new book this year, and kind of ignoring the fact that I have actually produced the first draft of one novel and am creeping toward the final chapters of another. Little by little, the writing is getting done. I'm still on track to release two books this year. And, unless the bottom completely falls out, I should have a more profitable year this year than last. It's hard work, but anyone who thinks that making a living as a writer is easy is delusional. It's still so much more rewarding than anything else I've done in my life to earn an income.

Week 21: 3300 word

As expected, the Hillsborough Comics Fair ate up most of my time this past week. No new fiction, most of what I'm counting as writing is a blog post and a lot of social media posts promoting the event. I normally count blogs posts, but don't count, say, a Facebook post, but these were fairly chunky posts hyping several features of the event like the cosplay contest. Oh, and I'm counting typing up the rules for the cosplay contest and creating an entry form and judges form.

Tomorrow I'm doing a 50ish mile bike ride from Anderson Point Park in Raleigh all the way back to near the Southpoint Mall in Durham, so that's going to chew up tomorrow. I'll probably be brain dead Tuesday after the ride, and Thursday I'll be packing up to head for ConCarolinas, so I won't get a lot of writing done this week either. Still, I'm optimistic that I'll be well over 200,000 words by the end of June, probably in the range of 230,000 words, which leaves me positioned to get back on track over the summer, when my cons aren't quite as stacked up as they've been in recent weeks (and won't be requiring quite as much travel).

It was totally worth it to take the time to plan the Comics Fair. Our best estimate is that over 200 people came to the event, and it might have been closer to 300 people. There were a lot of kids, which was exciting. A lot of the cons I go to are really focused on nerdy adults, which is great for me since that's my target reader. But, since this was a free event at the library, the proportion of younger kids was a real thrill. It felt good to contribute to the future nerds of America.

Luckily, my friend Calvin Powers came by and snapped some pics! Here's some of what you might have missed if you didn't make it yesterday!

Week 20: 4850 words

Last week I took a micro vacation on the way to Tidewater Comicon, spending two days biking in the Virginia beach area before the two day con. With Wednesday spent packing, this effectively gave me a work week of Monday and Tuesday night, and a count of 4850 words.

This week, I'm mainly doing last minute organizing on the Hillsborough Comicon, so probably another low word count week. Then, the following Monday, if plans hold, I'll be doing a 75 mile bike ride, then prepping for ConCarolinas, a three day con where I'm moderating panels, again giving me another short week. But, despite a hectic May (and early June), things should calm down considerably after HeroesCon, as I won't have any more multi-day cons on the books until the end of July for SuperCon/GalaxyCon.

Cons are a huge time and energy investment, and there's no question my busy travel schedule over the last few months have sapped my writing energy. Is it worth it? Yep! The more cons I do, the better I'm getting at selling my books. This year, I've earned four times what I'd earned between January 1 and May 20 last year. Part of it is just that I have more books to sell, since I didn't have all of my Lawless books out last year at this point, nor had I released Dragonsgate. I also didn't have hardcovers. I'm charging more for my books than I did last year, relying less on discounts to move products. I'm also travelling a bit further and doing more multiday events. I've revamped covers that weren't selling, and improved my table signs and banners to do more selling without me spending as much time doing pitches. Part of this means that I'm once again a part time writer... only now, instead of my energy being divided between a day job and writing, my energy is divided between writing and a career as a travelling salesman for my own books.

I'm not complaining at all about this, by the way. In my years working a "real" job, I spent countless hours selling products of dubious value, with my soul withering as the people who signed my checks kept inventing new ways to gouge customers with unnecessary add-ons. It turns out that selling a product I believe to be superior to other items of a comparable price is actually quite uplifting. I normally finish a con exhausted, but giddy at how many books I've sold. Hoorah for the intersection of creativity and capitalism!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work!

Week 19: 7155 words

Another week where writing related activities devoured actual writing. I've been working behind the scenes on the Hillsborough Comics Fair most of the week. I also had to put together a newsletter, since I hadn't done one since March. To put out the newsletter, I had to do a few more edits of the DRAGONSGATE Sneak Peek, and make a temporary cover to go with it. I also listened to more audio chapters of Covenant, and booked hotel rooms for upcoming cons. I do give myself some "word count" for some of these activities, like the revisions and newsletter, but except for about half a chapter of Nobody Nowhere, I haven't produced much new fiction.

The upcoming weeks don't look much more promising for production. The Comics Fair is going to be taking a little bit of time every day through May 25. I also have the Tidewater Comicon in Virginia Beach next weekend, and we'll be doing some touristy stuff on the way up, so that will be four days on the road.

By the way, I'm not complaining about organizing the Comics Fair. I've taken part in several cons organized by libraries, so helping my own hometown library get one set up suits my particular skill set, and anything I can do to get more people to visit a library makes me feel like a responsible citizen helping to maintain civilization in good working order. I don't really have the skills I would need to find a cure for cancer, but getting comic books into the hands of kids and maybe instilling a life long love of a true American art form? That's right in my wheelhouse. Also, organizing the con helps me realize how much hard work other volunteers to for the cons I attend. I don't know if I can call what I'm doing paying it forward, but hopefully I'm at least paying it sideways.

Back to word counts: I'm already making time on my calendar later in the year for a few "writing retreats" later in the year, where I go to an undisclosed location to get away from distractions and spend days just typing for a full week. My goal this year of 10k words a week was always going to be about averages. I'm going to have a few weeks of 30k plus words. I've had weeks in the past where I've gotten out close to 60k words in a week. I admire writers who can follow the slow and steady route, but a lot of my favorite books were written when I just closed out the rest of the world for a few days and did a full immersion in a project.

In other news, a few weeks back I mentioned doing a guest blog. It was published this week, and here's the link. It's an essay about my own personal experiences of entering some of the dream worlds where my Dragon Apocalypse novels unfold, and the treasures that I found there.

Week 16: 7552 words

Finished a chapter and got a good start on another chapter of Nobody Nowhere. I also did some rewriting work on Dragonsgate! My goal is to send out a new newsletter by next weekend and include a sneak peek. I had some trouble picking the scene to rewrite. There's some good action scenes, but when I pulled them out of context I worried they felt like random violence once stripped of the story context. It might work for a movie sneak peek, but people read books for different experiences. In the end, I went with a scene of a conversation between Burke and Bitterwood that I think sets up the emotional stakes for both characters nicely. It's a quiet character moment that sets up all the mayhem and carnage that will follow. I'll do two more passes on it this week, then get it out in the newsletter. 

This week I also I did a fair amount of non-writing writing work. I set up a table at the Free Comic Book Day at Atomic Empire to sell books and help promote the upcoming Hillsborough Comic Con, As long I was heading out to make copies of the flyers to promote the con I figured it was time for new pricing signage for my books. My old signs didn't reflect the hardcovers, and I've raised the price of my short story bundle from $16 to $18. I've sold out of the sets three times this year, at SC Comicon, Raleigh Comicon, and Wilmington Geek Expo, so I'm probably way overdue in bumping up the price. Still, once I had the old signs open in Photoshop, of course I had to start tweaking fonts, and before I knew it, poof, there was an evening gone. But, it needed to be done, and it's done, and I won't need to mess with it again for a long time. 

Even though I'm keeping busy, I'm aware that I've had three weeks in a row where I failed to hit my target of 10k words. I'm going to need to start getting in some weeks above goal to break out of the hole I'm digging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of the year left. I'm not worried yet, which is probably the problem. It's too easy to procrastinate at this stage of the game. If the end of June rolls around with my word count for the year not near 250,000, then I'll worry.

Week 17: 8944 words

A decent week. Another chapter of Nobody Nowhere, plus a guest blog post (I'll let you know when it appears), plus two text interviews. Also some writing advice bits added to the growing pile of words that will one day be edited into my writing book The Stuff. 

When I first got the idea to do a writing book, I thought, hey, this is going to be easy. Back when I was Piedmont Laureate, I was teaching a lot of writing classes and writing a lot of articles about writing. So, I easily had a book length mass of words that could just be collected, or so I thought. My real challenge is trying to find my own unique twist on the genre of writing books.

One thing that drives me to write the fiction that I write is that I'm often writing in reaction to elements I don't like about the genres I'm writing in. When I started writing Bitterwood, I was in sort of an anti-magic mindset. I had grown up liking fantasy literature, but when I started writing Bitterwood I was at the peak of my atheist activism, and really wondered if the casual inclusion of magic in popular culture didn't prep people to accept the supernatural. Skeptics in most pop culture are always proven wrong. Ghosts are real, or angels do exist, or there really is a vampire next door. So, Bitterwood was my attempt to write the fantasy fiction I still pined for, but to do so without any supernatural or magical elements. Fantasy without the fantasy. How's that for a pitch to a publisher? But... it worked.

When I moved on to the Dragon Apocalypse, I was kind of reacting to my own attempts to de-magic fantasy, and decided to go over the top with the magical and mythical elements. But, even more, the books are a rebellion against a trend in fantasy that annoyed me, which was that so much fantasy was centered around royalty, and/or built around the notion of a "chosen one." So, while there is a princess hidden in in the Dragon Apocalypse, she embodies none of the usual traits of royalty. 99% of the time, a rebellious princess will find that duty calls, and she must reconcile her desire to be herself with her responsibilities as royalty. Dragon Apocalypse has none of that. Aside from the princess, you get through four books without meeting another member of a royal family. (Not counting the so called Queen of Witches, who is ruling over an empty kingdom of bones.) None of my heroes are "chosen ones," except, of course, for the actual chosen one, Numinous Pilgrim, and he's a dick.

Of course, readers probably never notice what my novels aren't about. But, for me, creativity is something of a rebellion. I'm not trying to write books that imitate books I've liked. I'm trying more to write books in genres that I once loved, but where I eventually came to see that the genre wasn't really giving me what I needed or wanted. I start to spot weaknesses, gaps, and blind spots in books I've already read. Then I think, you know, this could be done better, so I try to do it better.

Right now, with The Stuff, I'm trying to figure out what I'm rebelling against. I've got some low hanging fruit, bits of common advice on how to write well that I think actually cause people to write dreadfully. Like, show, don't tell. This is great advice for screen plays, but not as great for prose. There are lots of situations in writing novels and short stories where directly telling the reader important information is absolutely the most effective approach, while page after page of body language and facial expressions and cryptic conversations leave the reader more annoyed than intrigued.

But, even as I say this, I create my own rule, and that rule is almost certainly wrong. Some times showing instead of telling is the only thing that works, and it's magic.

Do what works. There! That's what all my writing advice comes down to. Which seems like, I dunno, kind of a skinny book.

I do think I've got some useful stuff to say about writing, but I'm still rooting around for the big, driving theme that's going to unify it all. When I finally have that, I suspect I'll be able to put the book together relatively swiftly. I easily have 80K words about writing already written. I just need the theme to tell me what goes in and what stays out.

This coming week should be a good one for writing fiction. This last week I was tied up with a lot of Library stuff. This week I've got a lot more time blocked off for butt in chair, focused on Nobody.

Week 16: 4905 words

Well, this week was a good lesson in why you shouldn't procrastinate. I got one chapter and some blogging done this week, then Friday kept piddling around intending to knock out another chapter, then thunderstorms came through and knocked out my power for most of the afternoon. I didn't get any writing done Saturday since I was in Wilmington for a con. (And some amazing pizza at a place called Slice of Life Pizzeria and Pub. It's easy to get complacent about pizza, since even mediocre pizza tastes pretty good. But Slice of Life was pretty much perfect. Amazing dough. I could have eaten a crust just by itself. But the toppings, sauce and cheese were absolutely in perfect ratios. I'm really happy this place is three hours away from my house since if it were nearby I'd likely be eating way, way too much pizza.) Anyway, excuses aside, I got in 4905 words and can look back and see the gaps in time of the last week I should have filled with writing.

I've been helping to organize the Hillsborough Comics Fair for my local library, plus helping design a flyer for the upcoming book sale, plus also organizing the Local Author Book Fair that's happening in September. I enjoy organizing events for the library, but it does always take up more time than I plan.

Still, the positive development this week was that the chapter I reported having lost last week showed up this week! Because I'm paranoid about losing stuff in the cloud, I'd actually cut and pasted the text to save it in a different file, then forgot I'd done so! So I was very relieved when I spotted the file on my hard drive this week.

I've now completed 10 chapters of Nobody Nowhere. The final book will likely be 25 chapters long, so I'm pretty far into it. The book starts with all the characters scattered in very different locations. I mean, two of the characters are on Mars, one's on a planet in another solar system, two are on a remote island on Earth, and four are in a completely different universe. Oh, and some of the characters have multiple versions, as the same characters living in different timelines run into one another. So, pulling all the characters into a common setting has been something of a challenge. But, now the characters are all positioned where I need them to be to interact with each other, and the rest of the book should have less jumping around between POVs and settings. Most of the rest of the book will just involve two different mashed up teams of characters pursuing a common goal with different motives. I like writing team ups, where the interplay of characters can really drive the story. Also, the next couple of chapters are pretty much big fight scenes, which are often fun to write.

Forward!