2019 Goals

2018 wasn't a bad year for me as an author. I released three new novels (The Lawless Series, available here), a collection of novellas (Dragonsgate: Preludes & Omens), oversaw the release of five audio books (you can see all my titles here) and did eighteen conventions in four states. I also wrote three novellas and two short stories that went out free to readers of my newsletter. (See the header above for the sign up link.) Foolishly, I didn't write down anywhere how many newsletter subscribers I had at the beginning of the year, but I think I've added roughly 150 new subscribers. I've also released four of my titles in hardcover.

All and all, between the novels, the hardcovers, the audiobooks, and Dragonsgate, I've got twelve new products to sell. Again, not a bad year... except for one kind of important aspect of being a writer. I've got no idea how many words I wrote in 2018. Only one of the Lawless books, Victory, was started in 2018. Big Ape did go through rewrites, and the Dragonsgate collection went through multiple drafts. My best estimate based on final word counts is that I wrote, plus the chapters I've written on my latest dragon novel, amount to about 180k of first draft material. Which is an underwhelming number. Under 3500 words a week. I quit my day job for this?

Back when I had a day job, I told people I could produce 10,000 words a week. Which I could, but only for a few months at a time. Then I'd take a break, and switch into editing mode. It's hard to keep 10,000 words of first draft coming out each week because the imagination runs dry. On the other hand, I've got no shortage of ideas. I frequently find myself staring at a blank screen while I'm working on my latest project while ideas for other books prance around before me. I normally shoo these uninvited ideas away and try to focus on the project at hand.

It's time to shake up my habits. My goal in 2019 is to master the art of working on multiple projects during the same week or even the same day. If one set of characters doesn't show up that day, I'll write whoever does show up.

Second, it's embarrassing that I don't have a precise word count of what I've written this year. That changes moving forward. For the rest of the year I'll be posting a weekly update of my word count for the year. My goal is still relatively modest: 10,000 words a week, with two weeks of vacation, to produce 500,000 words of new first draft this year. This is a huge leap past anything I've done before, or event attempted. I did 366,000 words a few years ago, but there I had an elaborate system of crediting myself fractional rates for second draft and third draft, and gave myself bonus points for releasing books or selling short stories. This time, the 500,000 is a goal only for fresh writing, though I will count blog posts and other non-fiction.

Wish me luck!

Best Photos of the Year: Up Close

This year I logged over 1850 miles biking, hiking and kayaking, usually with Cheryl at my side, at least once she recovered from knee surgery at the beginning of the year. These are some of our favorite photos from the year. As befits the category title "Up Close," there are a fair number of selfies. The next post will be "Big Picture," and we won't look quite as obsessed with ourselves in those shots.  

I've been to "the Point" at Garden City a dozen times, but this was the first time I was there when the tide was low enough I saw all the sea urchins. 

Yes, this is a zoom lens, but we were still very close to this gator. He lives in a pond near Myrtle Beach and people obviously feed him scraps despite signs saying not to. In any case, he doesn't mind being photographed. 

Technically, we didn't actually get close for this photo. Probably 200 feet away with a zoom lens. But we were in a kayak. Getting something to focus at maximum zoom while you're bobbing on moving water is a challenge. 

It was a good year for beautiful spiders. 

We didn't have to go out into the wild to find this buck. He was just munching on leaves in someone's front yard. 

James Maxey Discovery Day 12-15-2018

I'm dismayed to report that there are still some people in the world who haven't read all my books. I sometimes wake in the night, covered in sweat, with the nagging feeling that I've failed humanity. We live in a troubled age. I can't help but think that if everyone was reading my books, many of the world's problems would seem less daunting. Yes, there's E coli in our salads, dysfunction at every level of government, and our oceans are filling up with plastic. On the bright side, unlike the characters in my novels, we're very unlikely to be eaten by a dragon today, or be crushed by a giant robot, or hunted by space-gorillas. Mine is an enduring message of hope! I feel compelled to share it with the world.

It's time to take action! Saturday, December 15, 2018, is hereby designated "James Maxey Discovery Day."

What is James Maxey Discover Day? That's the day I make it easy for you to download most of my ebooks for free or for drastically discounted prices. Some of the books will be free or discounted for a few days, but a few are for Saturday only, so get 'em fast! There's a little something here for everyone. Action! Humor! Romance! Mystery! Monkeys! Dragons! Robots! Pirates! Singing cowboys... oh, wait, sorry, no singing cowboys. Look, you can't have everything. But you can still have a lot of things. For free!

Here's the full list of free and discounted books for the promo:

FREE BOOKS for December 15, 2018

Nobody Gets the Girl: A Superhero Novel

Who can save us? Nobody!

Cut Up Girl: Lawless Book One

Exploding clones to the rescue!

There is No Wheel

Dark, funny, twisted short fiction!

Bad Wizard

War Zeppelins versus winged monkeys!

Dragonsgate: Preludes & Omens

Bitterwood confronts his greatest enemy!

Available at 99 cents on December 15:

(Some don't change prices until 8:00am PST)

Bitterwood: the Complete Collection

Post-apocalyptic science fiction dragon war! 

Dragon Apocalypse: the Complete Collection

Dungeon-crawling, monster-stabbing, treasure-grabbing high adventure!

Big Ape: Lawless Book Two

Man-ape battles robots and dinosaurs!

Victory: Lawless Book Three

Aliens have stolen the moon!

Covenant: A Superteam Novel*

Superheroes hounded by dark secrets!
*And, apparently for this title, I set the discount for the UK only and didn't discover the error until early Saturday morning when it's too late to fix it! My apologies to the rest of the world! But the book is only 2.99, so it's still a pretty good deal! 

The Jagged Gate

Twelve tangled tales of suspense! 

Since the dragon collections each contain four novels, if you download everything on this page you'll wind up with 17 novels for less than you'd pay for a footlong sub. Grab 'em while they're hot! And, if you decide to buy the sub instead, tell them to hold the lettuce.

A Year of Conventions, Hardcovers

2018 was my busiest year ever for conventions. I did more events in 2018 as Piedmont Laureate, but those were mostly workshops, readings, and panels. While the workshops required a lot of advance work, for the most part the actual events only lasted an hour or two, and all events were confined to within an hour of my house. This year, I travelled as far away as Kentucky and many of the events were multi-day affairs like the Louisville Supercon, three days of sales, plus two days of travel. With 18 events under my belt for the year, I'm in a strange space between completely burned out and extremely invigorated. 

The burn out is obvious. I essentially run a travelling book store. Every event requires a lot of set up and breakdown, plus there's the accounting hassles of trying to keep up with sales taxes in different jurisdictions, keeping up with mileage and receipts, and the headache of keeping up with stock. As great as it would be to just order several hundred copies of each title I sell in one big order at the beginning of the year, the reality is that I only have so much space available for storage. Our spare bedroom is already stuffed with cases of books. I also can never be quite certain what's going to sell at a convention. At most events, my big dragon books are my best sellers, so I normally keep a stock level of at least two cases of each title. But, I've also done events where my dragon books get ignored while I sell out of superhero titles. If I had some crystal ball to know how much of each title to bring to an event, it would make my life a lot easier. It's depressing to cart home full cases of titles, and a little stressful wondering if I might have sold more if I hadn't run out of a title. 

While there's a lot of work and planning going into the events, I'm also invigorated by them. Today, online, I've sold about twenty books. This isn't bad, but it's happening in the background and doesn't carry a lot of emotional weight. But, at a convention if I sell twenty books in a day,it's a rush! My last sales day of the year, December 2 at Louisville Supercon, I sold 32 books, and probably interacted with close to a hundred people in order to make these sales. This much socializing really helps keep an introvert like me from withdrawing completely into my own head. 

Some of my favorite encounters at a con are with people who don't even buy my books. I keep little toy dragons at my table, plastic, about two inches long, and I give them free to little kids drawn to my booth by the colorful images. I gave one to a little girl maybe six years old at my last con and saw her walk back down the aisle an hour later holding the dragon in front of her swooping it up and down like it was flying. That made my day. I've also had very geeky conversations about obscure superheroes, gotten to talk with readers about books we had in common, and heard some terrible, terrible jokes. I was giving my pitch to a guy about Bad Wizard, my steampunk Oz novel that involves that essential steampunk mode of transport, the rigid airship. The guy asked, very deadpan, if I knew why Zeppelins were no longer economical to fly. I said I didn't know, and he said, still deadpan, "They're prone to inflation." 

This year has come with something of a learning curve. I've spent a lot of time tweaking marketing material like banners and business cards, and refreshed covers on a couple of books. I've also started adding hardcovers to my line up, and have definitely sold enough to make it worth the effort I put into getting them set up.

Right now, I've got the four titles above available in hardcover. The two dragon books were obvious choices to put out in this premium format. There is No Wheel is the least obvious choice here, since it's a slow seller online, but it actually sells quite well at conventions. Bad Wizard also does well at conventions, and it captures a lot of readers who are only marginally interested in science fiction and fantasy. Many of these readers like the hardcover format. 

Long term, I plan to do a superhero collection called The Complete Nobody, and another collecting my Lawless series. But, first, I need to write a fourth book for each series. I'll also probably do a Dragonsgate collection once I finish that series, and already have in mind a deluxe short story collection that would combine all the stories in There is No Wheel, the Jagged Gate, and new stories I've written since those were published. Some of these are likely to see life in 2019, some probably won't become reality until 2020. 

For now, though, if you want a great gift for the holidays, it's not too late to get your hands on these books! Just click on these links: There is No Wheel, Bad Wizard, Dragon Apocalypse: the Complete Collection, Bitterwood: The Complete Collection.

Or, come buy them from me personally next year! I've already got close to a dozen events lined up, most in North Carolina, but with Virginia and South Carolina getting visits as well, and I'll probably do at least one Tennessee event again as well. Want to know where I'll be and when I'll be there? Sign up for my newsletter! 

Dragonsgate Update: 9 chapters, 45014 words

Just finished chapter nine of Dragonsgate, bringing me to 45014 words on the first draft.

At this point, the two major plots are well under way, though the biggest, most difficult problem the characters are going to face still hasn't been introduced or even hinted at. Structurally this is a problem I'll need to address in the second draft by writing some scenes that are going on outside the awareness of my core POV characters of Bitterwood and Burke. So far, only one chapter has been told from a dragon's POV, which is a very different from the previous Bitterwood books. Of course, in the previous Bitterwood books, I had humans and dragons with close bonds. Jandra's relationship with Vendevorex and Hex was an important part of her character. Shandrazel negotiating with Pet in Dragonforge also gave me a lot of character scenes where dragons and humans had reasons to be together. This time, I'm missing a human/dragon friendship or partnership to work around--so far. The dragons have a lot more to do in the second half of the book.

I feel pretty good about the pace I'm writing the book. Finishing the first draft by the end of the month is still vaguely possible, though I suspect mid-November is a more realistic goal.

Right now, the thing I'm least satisfied with are the emotional plot lines. In the previous books, Jandra really provided the emotional heart of the books, and a lot of the other characters were mostly static as she changed and grew. The great thing about Jandra was that she could make mistakes and have doubts. The problem with using Bitterwood as the actual protagonist of a Bitterwood novel is that he's competent and certain. He's haunted by his past, yes, but I've established him as someone who doesn't agonize over his options before he takes action, and as someone who doesn't waste a lot of time second guessing what he could or should have done. I've got a slowly building subplot for him that will lead him to an emotional revelation, but it's tricky. If I bring it to the forefront, readers will likely guess my plans for him. If I leave it slowly building in the background, his later epiphany might look forced. Oh well. That's why there's first drafts.

Slow Burn

The current Mike "MEZ" Phillips cover.

The original cover

Most of my titles have been available for the last few years via a company called CreateSpace. They were already owned by Amazon by the time I started doing business with them. Amazon is now phasing them out and will be handling all printing through Kindle Direct Publishing. Today, I transferred all my titles from the old website to the KDP dashboard, a relatively pain free process. Afterwards, I went back to CreateSpace and printed off five years of sales and purchase data in case it suddenly disappears one CreateSpace is completely gone. 

I'm always looking at my sales data, of course. Maybe a little too obsessively. I mean, in traditional publishing, you go six months without seeing sales data. Now, I look at sales maybe six times a day. Which is crazy. But that's another essay. 

This essay is about something surprising I discovered when I pulled all my CreateSpace sales data. In ebooks, my dragon stuff is far and away outsells my superhero titles. But it turns out that as far as what people order online in print editions, my supervillain novel Burn Baby Burn has had the best cumulative total of any of my print on demand books, beating out Bitterwood: the Complete Collection by forty total sales over it's lifetime, not a giant win, but, still, I was  surprised. Burn Baby Burn has never been a best seller. It usually only logs single digit sales in the paperback version every month, but the every month part is important. Over the long haul, it's earned more than I got as an advance for either of the first two novels I sold to traditional publishers. 

This is important to me because Burn Baby Burn was the first title I didn't even try to shop to a publisher or agent. It was too quirky to pitch, and had too much personal meaning for me not to write it. A traditional publisher would likely have taken the book out of print years ago. But the fact that it keeps selling is rewarding. Some books just need time to find their readers. I'm glad I came into publishing at a time when a quirky title like this had a chance at life. I'm also glad it opened a career path to me I didn't even dream of fifteen years ago when I first saw one of my books in a bookstore. 

If you've never read it or even heard of it, you're missing out on a pretty special book. It's a Bonnie and Clyde love story between two supervillains on a crime spree. Neither Pit Geek nor Sundancer are particularly lovable. They kill a lot of people during the book, and Sundancer feels like a bit of an underachiever for not killing even more. Anyone can write a love story about lovable people. The fact that Pit Geek and Sundancer are so damaged and dangerous makes the way that love changes them during the book particularly meaningful. And Sundancer is dying of cancer, facing her mortality. Pit Geek is trying to come to terms with her looming death. It's sometimes hard for me to reread. I put a lot of my own emotional journey into these pages. 

Also talking chimps. It's not all gloomy. In fact, it's pretty funny from end to end. It has possibly my favorite opening line of any of my novels: "Sunday Jiminez was fifteen when she killed her first nun." Also my favorite closing line: "He'd gotten out alive." The stuff in between is pretty swell as well. Seriously. Check it out. Wait, don't check it out. Buy it! 

A Bitterwood Bestiary

With a new Bitterwood book coming soon, I thought this would be a good time to post a bestiary of the various races you encounter in the novels:

DRAGON RACES

SUN-DRAGONS

Sun-dragons are the lords of the realm, possessing forty-foot wingspans and long, toothy jaws that can bite a man in half. Sun-dragons are adorned with crimson scales tipped with highlights of orange and yellow that give them a fiery appearance. Wispy feathers around their snouts give the illusion that they breathe smoke. Though gifted with natural weaponry and a tough, scaly hide, sun-dragons are intelligent tool-users who recognize the value of using spears and armor to enhance their already formidable combat skills. Politically, sun-dragons are traditionally organized under an all-powerful king, who, by rights, owns all property within the kingdom. A close network of other sun-dragons, often related to the king, manage individual abodes within the kingdom. The current “king” is Hex, the only surviving son of the old king Albekizan. Hex is a political radical with anarchist leanings, and as a result of his refusal to perform the duties of a king, the sun-dragon political structures are currently in great disarray.

SKY-DRAGONS

Half the size of sun-dragons, sky-dragons are a race devoted to scholarship. Most male sky-dragons dwell at colleges built around large libraries. Their leaders are known as biologians, a position that is part priest, part librarian, and part scientist. Most male sky-dragons distain combat, but a few are selected to either serve in the king’s elite aerial guard, or if they show a talent for brutality, become part of the ranks of slave-catchers than keep human slaves compliant. Sky-dragons practice strict segregation of the sexes. The females of the species dwell on an island fortress known as the Nest, defended by fierce warriors known as valkyries. The scholars among the females tend to focus on more practical disciplines than their male counterparts, and are particularly well known for their talents as engineers.

EARTH-DRAGONS

Wingless creatures, earth-dragons are humanoids with turtle-beaked faces and broad, muscular bodies. They are much stronger than men, but also much slower. As a race, they have few valuable skills beyond their enthusiasm for hitting things. This makes them excellent soldiers and decent blacksmiths. Except for the rare periods of time when earth-dragons are in heat, it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between the two sexes of earth-dragon. They are the only dragon species to lay eggs instead of producing live birth. Very rarely, some earth-dragons are born with a chameleon mutation that allows them to blend into their surroundings. These mutant dragons are also smarter and faster than their brethren and are usually recruited to become assassins for the dragon king, serving in a greatly feared unit known as the Black Silence.

LESSER SPECIES

HUMANS

Humans live in the margins of dragon society as slaves, pets, and prey. The sun-dragons tolerate their existence primarily because of mankind’s natural talent for farming; the labor of humans keeps the bellies of dragons full. Humans are generally peaceful and harmless in small, isolated groups, but quick to war with other tribes. Recently, a prophet named Ragnar united many of the men in the kingdom into a rebel army. The rebellion successfully seized the town of Dragon Forge, and a man named Burke is using the town’s foundries to create new weapons that may forever alter the balance of power between man and dragon… assuming the humans can resist their natural urges to go to war with themselves.

LONG-WYRMS

Fifty-foot long copper colored serpents with fourteen pairs of legs, long-wyrms are ferocious carnivores, and, fortunately, exceedingly rare.

GREAT-LIZARDS

Often used as beasts of burden, great-lizards are twenty food long reptiles that closely resemble giant iguanas with a more upright stance.

OX-DOGS

The product of centuries of careful breeding, ox-dogs are the largest canine species ever to exist, standing nearly six feet high at the shoulder. Despite their fearsome build, most are docile in temperament, though earth-dragons often train them for hunting and have taught some to have an appetite for human flesh.