Five star reviews — Abigail Abernathy: All-Night Analytical Engine Analyst by T. R. Goodman
The description, via Goodreads:
All Abigail Abernathy wants is a respectable job where she can put her knowledge of analytical engines to use. The Royel Trading Company of Bristol provides her with just such an opportunity, but not everyone is pleased to have her aboard. Between incompetent management, clients helpless beyond her imagination, and a disgruntled former analytical engine analyst who will stop at nothing to take back the job she unknowingly took from him, will her credulity, not to mention her sanity, be up to the task? It’s going to be a long night.
Abigail Abernathy: All-Night Analytical Engine Analyst is a steampunk short story about 5,000 words in length.
And my review:
This was a very interesting little story. The setting was believably Victorian with the social norms of that period accurately portrayed. The characters were all unique and . . . well, likeable is probably the wrong word for one, but I guess he was likeable as a character, if not as a person. The plot was intriguing, and certainly not quite what I was expecting from the beginning. But perhaps the best part were the problems she had to deal with that weren’t related to the main plot, problems that I’m pretty sure anyone who’s ever worked in tech support or similar, or knows anyone who has and has heard them ranting, can identify with . . . except steampunk era style.
There’s not really much else I can say about this story, since it was only 5000 words. One of these days I’ll get around to buying and reading it’s sequel.
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Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism
I had another post I was working on for tonight, but I saw this on twitter and it seemed far more important than my blatherings about the different definitions of space opera.
Now, I admit, my French isn’t up to translating the cartoons, nor do I know enough about French or Muslim culture to know just how offensive these are, but the point is good, nonetheless.
And before any idiot says it, I am not condoning murder. I’m just agreeing that this isn’t a black and white situation. It’s not “cartoonists = good; murderers = bad” thing. BOTH were bad. Yes, murder is far worse. But being murdered for it doesn’t make what the cartoonists did right either.
The plan for this year
So, 2014 is over. I edited and published a novelette with an attached short story. I very heavily revised, changing such intrinsic things as POV, and republished a short story. I finished and started editing a novel. I pieced together three semi-related vignettes into a short story and started editing it. I edited a novel for a friend. I read, according to Goodreads, 67 books. That’s an inaccurate count though as I read a couple of things that weren’t listed on there that I’ve been too lazy to add and I read some fanfics which, obviously, aren’t listed on there, and articles, and blog posts that were probably longer than some of the short stories that were on there, etc. I read a lot, as usual, in other words. I reviewed most of those books. I made a lot of blog posts.
And that’s not getting into the stuff that didn’t involve words.
All in all, 2014 was a pretty busy year.
For 2015, I’m planning to concentrate more on writing and less on the other bits of the writing business. I spent months this year following the advice that said getting reviews and networking and stuff like that was more important than writing, and, well, I covered how well that worked in a previous blog post. If you haven’t read it, the short version is: I made some mistakes and tanked my sales.
My plan for this year, in order (And yes, some of this is more notes to myself than anything relevant for my readers, but if I have this somewhere public I’m less likely to change it on a whim just because I encounter a bit of difficulty. Even if you aren’t holding me accountable, for good or for ill I’ll feel like you are now.):
- Edit my wife’s story she wants to submit to Queers Destroy Science Fiction, if she decides she wants to expand it.
- Submit it for her.
- Finish editing my own story for Queers Destroy Science Fiction.
- Submit it.
- Alternate between writing Blaughk on Earth, Intertwined Lives, and editing No More Lies, not becoming slavishly devoted to any one work, but keeping in mind and tracking my monthly word count goals.
- Publish No More Lies.
- Devote a month to marketing it. Just a month. No more. After that, it’ll sink or swim on its own.
- Alternate between writing Blaughk on Earth, Intertwined Lives, and editing the leytgeleshi short story collection, with the same caveats as above.
- Write remaining leytgeleshi stories.
- Alternate between writhing Blaughk on Earth, Intertwined Lives, and editing the Dagger short story collection, with the same caveats as above.
- Write remaining Dagger stories.
- Edit remaining leytgeleshi stories.
- Publish leytgeleshi story collection.
- Devote a week to marketing it. It’s going to be a free short story collection (or 99 cents, I can’t recall what we agreed on now.) There’s no sense in devoting a lot of time to marketing it.
- Edit remaining Dagger stories.
- Publish Dagger story collection.
- Devote a week to marketing it. See above for why only a week.
- Alternate writing Blaughk on Earth and Intertwined Lives.
Word goals, which I think I will track on the blog to hold myself accountable to my readers as well as myself:
MINIMUM, BARRING ILLNESS:
10,000 words a month written; 10,000 words a month edited (20,000 a month written when not editing)
AIM:
15,000 words a month written; 15,000 words a month edited (30,000 a month written when not editing.)
I know I can do 50,000 a month. I’ve won NaNoWriMo twice, after all. But I also know that about 20 to 25,000 a month is a more natural pace for me. It’s slower than I’d like, but given that only a few years ago I was amazed when I wrote 7,000 in a month, I expect that number to keep going up, hence the shooting for 30,000.
I tracked my numbers for December, as an experiment more than anything, and I wrote 9,462 words, which is not far off my minimum goal at all. However, I only edited 2,247. Christmas and my spouse finding out she’s laid off as of January 17th made me lose some time though, so I’m cool with this.
So, in short, my professional plans for the year are to write two novels, edit one novel, write some short stories, edit some short stories, and try to get a short story professionally published, and do a total of six weeks of marketing. This should be less stressful than this year’s attempt at trying to do marketing, writing, and editing every single day was.
This blog will be getting more focus than it has the past couple of months, but less than it was a couple of months before that. Instead of at least two posts a week, I’ll be making at least one. For the next few months at least, starting this week, one week will have a short story, the next a five star review, and the next a WIP update of some kind. Other blog posts will be made as whim and time coincide. My list of things I want to blog about but haven’t yet still has about a dozen things on it, so I won’t run out of material for a while yet, especially doing it at whim instead of doing one of those every week.
I’ll still be writing reviews of most things I read, and I’m again going to try to read one hundred things listed on goodreads this year, but unlike last year I’m not going to try to force myself to finish every book I start, and I won’t be making detailed notes on everything so I can leave long reviews.
If it’s an indie or small press book I’ve agreed to review, that’s a bit different. If I agree to review it, it means I’ve read enough of the sample to think I’ll give it at least three stars. I’m not interested in screwing other indie authors, but I’m not going to glowingly praise works that don’t deserve it either. It also will get a detailed review because indie books get so few that are. Little Women is well enough known that I can leave a review that just says “I love this book!”; Love or Lust is not. I will not be agreeing to review more than one book a month, except maybe when I’m doing the marketing times for my books. I already have books for January, February, and March, but if you have a book you really want my opinion on, especially if it’s fantasy or space opera, get in touch. I enjoy reviewing, I just find it too time and brain power intensive to do it the way I have been. Sometimes I just want to read and enjoy something without thinking too much about it, you know?
So, what are your plans for 2015?
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Does it matter who I am?
I keep seeing people saying things like “I just can’t watch The Cosby Show any more now that I know Bill Cosby sexually assaulted all those women!”* and “I can’t watch Firefly any more now that I know that Adam Baldwin is so ((insert various terms here, as he is not shy about stating his opinions regardless of how stupid/unpopular they are.))”
This makes no sense to me. Ender’s Game is still on my to read list despite me finding Orson Scott Card’s statements about homosexuals extremely offensive. I can still enjoy Firefly despite knowing that Baldwin apparently wasn’t acting when he played Jayne. I can still read books by one of my new favorite authors despite having had to unsubscribe from her blog because of my feelings about her political posts. My enjoyment of a work has nothing to do with who created it.
Usually, anyway. There are exceptions. I research authors before I read near future military sf after one too many books that had lines like “That’s what liberals never understood during the Iraq War” (almost a direct quote from one, by the way) followed by a tirade about how liberals are a drain on everything that’s right and good about America. If they list certain other authors as major influences/friends or anything like that, I don’t even bother with trying the book. But that’s less a “who they are/what they believe/what they’ve done upsets me” thing and more a “I don’t like getting lectured about how horrible I am in fiction” thing. Really, if I’d ever seen it handled without becoming a serious case of Writer on Board, I might not have this policy.
Also, there are authors I’ve tried just because they seemed like such awesome people. Patrick Rothfuss is the only one that comes to mind right now . . . I was very impressed by what he does with Worldbuilders and by his sense of humor . . . but I’m pretty sure there’ve been others. Oh, right! I’m sure I’m far from the only person who first tried a John Scalzi novel after reading his blog. But, despite loving the blogs of both of them, I gave Name of the Wind five stars and Old Man’s War only three. My enjoyment of either book had nothing to do with my feelings about the man who wrote it.
You see, when I read I’m not thinking about anything other than the words on the page and the story they’re telling me. I don’t care if the author is a blue wombat from Alpha Centauri. I care about the book they’ve written. Likewise when I’m watching a TV show or movie I don’t care who the actors are; I care about the characters they’re portraying. When I watch The Cosby Show I’m not thinking about Bill Cosby, I’m thinking about Heathcliff Huxtable. When I watch Firefly I’m not thinking about Adam Baldwin and how much I’d like to smack him, I’m thinking about Jayne Cobb and how much I’d like to shove him out an airlock. When I read Name of the Wind I wasn’t thinking about the awesome guy who wrote it, I was thinking about Kvothe.
I know there’s a school of thought out there that says I’m wrong and that authors and actors always put so much of themselves into characters that in some way they are the same. To some extent I suppose it’s true. No one is creative enough to be someone completely unlike themselves. But, for the most part, this quote by S. M. Stirling sums things up well: “There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.” The inverse is also true. Yes, maybe it’d help you understand my books better, or at least why they contain things they do, if you knew my political beliefs or religion or sexuality, or even whether I prefer ham or turkey. But you should still be able to enjoy them without knowing any of that, and even if what you do know of that you find offensive. Because Jake, Lyndsey, Renata, Bobby, Viktor . . . none of them are me. I’m not writing autobiography. I’m writing fiction. That means I get to make shit up.
* We will not be getting into the bigger issue of him not having actually been found guilty yet, because the whole thing about how innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply to people accused of certain crimes is not something I feel like getting into today.
Intertwined Lives Excerpt and Update
(Not necessarily the final cover)
This was supposed to be my WIP list post, but since all I’ve worked on since the last one is Intertwined Lives that seemed kind of daft to bother with. Intertwined Lives is now 34,442 words. I’m two weeks into a plot that will cover two years. I’m pretty sure I’m looking at a George R. R. Martin length thing here. Oh well.
(Random oddness: A suggested related article is a recipe for red velvet cake with cream cheese icing. What the fuck is this thing smoking lately?!)
Synopsis:
Kayden, Richie, Quinn, and Rusark couldn’t be more different. One’s a future stay-at-home Dad, one’s a minor rock star, one’s a rebel-for-hire, and one’s the newest officer in the Sweytzian Special Forces. One’s quiet and shy, one’s outgoing and hyper, one’s suave and charming, and one’s forthright and pragmatic. This book follows their four, very different, stories as they simply live their lives, lives that intertwine because of family, friendship, and love.
This is a story for everyone who’s ever wondered what the heroes do when they’re not saving the day. This is a story for everyone who’s ever wondered what the ordinary people in a society with epic heroes are like.
And the excerpt, from the chapter introducing Richie and his daughters:
Somewhere out there in the tri-galaxies, one of my older sisters was headed home after fighting to free a world from a tyrant. Somewhere out there, one of my other older sisters was headed home after a bit of smuggling. I, on the other hand, was in the nursery of my own house, trying to convince my daughters to take a nap.
“Izzy, c’mon, sweety. I know you’re tired,” I said, putting her in bed for the fourth time in a nulair. “Boris is sleepy,” I said, handing her her pale purple stuffed luriset. “Why don’t you cuddle him?”
“Rosie’s up!” she argued.
“Only because you kept poking her,” I said, fighting the perfectly understandable urge to throttle my eldest daughter. She wasn’t feeling the slightest bit of remorse for waking her sister up. “Now, back in bed, both of you. You need to be well rested for tonight. We’re going to my parents’ house for dinner. You don’t want to be too sleepy to enjoy that, do you?”
“Don’t wanna sleep with her!” Rosie said, clutching the pink stuffed dragon she carried with her everywhere to her chest. “She’s meanie!”
“Fine then. You can go nap on my bed. Izzy . . . Rosie, what’s wrong, sweety?” I asked, having felt fear from my baby girl and caught a glimpse of her thoughts. There was something about monsters in them, but I couldn’t make sense out of them beyond that. There are times being only a quarter-Magvinnian is really annoying.
Rosie started to speak at the same time I noticed Izzy running off. “Isabella Gwenneth Reddige-Fine, get your butt back in here!”
Izzy looked at me and apparently decided she didn’t like what she saw, as she climbed wordlessly back into bed. “You’re cranky,” she informed me.
“Because you’re being a brat today. Now, Rosie, what’s scaring you, baby girl?”
“Monsters under bed!” she yelled, clutching her dragon tighter.
I sighed heavily, wishing once again that I was telepathic enough to know who was to blame for this. “Why do you think that?”
“James said so!”
I silently swore to kill my younger brother then said, “James is wrong. Come with me, and we can look under the bed, okay? Or you can climb up there next to your sister and sleep in here.”
She chose her sister over the monsters. “Monsters eat little girls. Izzy just pokes,” she informed me, as she scooted as far away from her sister as she could.
I ran my hands through my hair and shook my head as I walked back down to the living room.
Five star reviews — Tsar Wars (Agents of ISIS #1) by Stephen Goldin
This is a book I read because the sample made me want to know more about the setting, the characters, and just what the heck was going on.
Also, the series title seems a bit unfortunate now. This is space opera with no connection to any real world groups, so nobody judge me or the author just because of it, okay?
The description, via Goodreads:
Welcome to the first great space opera decalogy of the twenty-first century! Agents of ISIS is the 21st century re-envisioning of the Family d’Alembert series by its original author, an epic saga describing the fight to preserve humanity from the forces of chaos and destruction.
With humanity scattered across the galaxy on hundreds of worlds, the Empire is the only force for order across the stars. Without it, interstellar conflicts would bring chaos and billions of deaths.
But the tsar has been in a coma for five years now, and his grand-niece, the only apparent heir, is only 14 years old. In this hour of crisis, the task of preserving the Empire falls to two untrained–but far from unskilled–agents of the Imperial Special Investigation Service. Can they make a difference against the vast forces arrayed against them?
And my review,which the author appears to have liked since a quote from it appears in the front matter of the new edition:
What stands out the most to me in this book is the characters. They’re all very distinctive and very entertaining/horrifying/whatever words suits that character the best. They felt real, which is something I personally love in a book. The dialogue also felt natural and appropriate to each characters’ personality.
The plot was fairly predictable in some ways, but not enough to be annoying. That they were going to get from A to B was certain; it was clearly that kind of book; but how they got there was frequently a nice surprise.
I have a minor complaint: A dictionary of the Yiddish terms would’ve been nice, as Google is letting me down on some. Other than that, this is best space opera I’ve read in ages.
An interesting thing about posting this reviews on my blog so very long after I write them is that it gives me time to reflect on the book some. This one my recollections of prove something Larry Hama once said about how people don’t remember plots, they remember characters. Tomorrow it will have been six months since I finished the book. I remember the characters vividly, but only the most exciting and interesting bits of the plot. This is still the best space opera I’ve read in ages, and the sequel is very high up in my 1300+ item “to read” list.
Short story: Talen
There are various components in the laboratory… (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This one is rather unusual in that I know not just what inspired it, but the precise moment that it started forming in my head. I was reading Elizabeth McCoy’s Queen of Roses and encountered the phrase “robot autopsy”. Pretty much immediately I saw the scene with Ren ripping out hunks of Talen’s innards, followed quickly by a couple of the other scenes.
This, like all stories on my blog, differs slightly from the version found elsewhere on this website. I will, eventually, be updating all of those to have the final versions.
I think this one stands alone fairly well, but if I’m mistaken and you need anything explained, just ask in the comments and I’ll do my best.
Here’s the story:
Renata swore violently as the blast shook her ship. “Talen, you okay?”
“Talen!” she said again, more forcefully.
“Talen! Goddammit, answer me! This is no time for a joke!” Fear was beginning to creep into her voice. She dodged the next blast with the ease expected of someone who’d managed to live through being a fighter pilot for a bit over three decades.
“Talen!” There was still no answer.
Having a moment to do so, she finally looked at the readout that would show if anything were wrong with her ‘bot.
The relevant section of the display was completely blank.
Tears stung her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them fall. “You’re dead,” she snarled at the ship that had shot hers. Flying recklessly, even for her, she caught up to the Kirid and brought all her ship’s guns to bear on it. She fired them all at once, smiling savagely as the enemy ship exploded.
*****
Almost thirty-two years earlier
Her ship neared the atmosphere of the nearest planet much too fast, its engines having been damaged very badly.
“Spirits of Battle and Flight, if you guys could spare a miracle right now, I’d really appreciate it!” Renata prayed as she tried to maintain what control she could of her ship. “Talen, do what you can little buddy, but I think this might be the end for us.”
As the ship fell towards the planet, Renata lost consciousness and was battered around, the safety systems that held her in the pilot’s seat having failed.
She woke up a few days later in a strange hospital’s critical care wing. She was missing a leg, which was easily, if painfully, fixed, and had some nasty internal injuries due to a support strut piercing her torso in the crash, but nothing some kilhu and surgery couldn’t fix. She owed her life to Talen, she quickly learned. After she’d passed out, he’d piloted the remains of the ship to as close to a landing as was possible, then improvised a comm and, showing that he had more first aid programming than anyone had ever expected from any shipbot, kept her alive until help arrived.
*****
Two days later
“He saved my life, and I can’t save his! It’s just not fucking right!” she yelled as she pulled yet another fried component from the ‘bot that had been her companion in battle for so very long. She turned to pick up the replacement piece and found Darrien standing behind her, a concerned look on his face.
“What?!” she snapped.
“When was the last time you slept?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she answered, taking a swig of coffee.
“Renata, go get some sleep. Talen will still be in the same shape in the morning. I promise no one else will touch him.”
“I’m fine!” she yelled, turning back to the shipbot.
Darrien came over and put his hand on her shoulder. “Am I going to have to call Viktor and have him lecture you?” Her husband, Viktor, had very strong views on her periodic attempts to substitute caffeine for sleep and never hesitated to voice them at great length when given reason to do so.
“Let me work. Please,” she said, glaring at her boss.
“Fine. Be that way.” He pulled his comm out and started to key in Vik’s code.
“Darrien, if he were me, would you tell the medics to get some sleep?”
He sighed. “Renata, it’s been two days. You can’t get any response from him no matter what you do. He’s gone. I’m sorry. You can possibly repair the ‘bot itself, but Talen is gone.”
“He can’t be. He fucking can’t be dead!” she yelled, the tears she’d been fighting for the past two days finally escaping her eyes.
Darrien comforted her as well as he could and then gently walked her to bed, promising when she started to go back to the workshop that he would call Viktor if she didn’t get some sleep.
*****
Thirty-three years earlier
Jake greeted his daughter with a hug and a smile. “Go look in the garage. There’s a present for you in there.”
Renata took off for it at a run. Jake followed along at a bit more sedate pace.
“It’s a shipbot! Or, most of one,” she said, seeing that the poor little thing was a bit beat up.
“Took him off a pirate ship we confiscated last korva. Loreen’s done what she could for him, but we didn’t have many parts around for a model that old. Thought maybe you could fix him up and use him.” Jake was smiling at his daughter, who he doubted was hearing a damned thing he said, so intent was she on examining her new ‘bot.
“Daddy, do you have a one ilurĵa spanner? Oh, thanks, by the way.”
*****
Five days later, on The Asylum
Darrien came into the sim room, and his eyes widened at the (simulated) bodies surrounding Renata. “Working out some frustration?”
She glared at him in response, but did lower her sword and command the simulation to pause before asking, “What do you want?”
“Just checking on you. Alia said you didn’t even complain earlier when she arranged your tools properly. It worried me.”
“I’m fine. Or, I will be, once the parts I’ve ordered get here. Then I’ll be able to boot Talen again, and everything will be fine.” Or I’m going to go kill neo-imperialist assholes until it quits hurting, she finished silently.
“Renata, I don’t claim to be an expert on ‘bots of any kind, but from what I do know, the amount of damage he took when that blast caught him … he’s gone. Even if his hardware works, even if, by some miracle, his personality module still works, his memory has definitely been erased.”
“If you gave up hope that easily when it came to us flesh-and-blood Daggers, I would’ve died on Yegio all those years ago. No one could’ve survived that crash after all, right?”
Darrien pinched the bridge of his nose. “Renata, please be reasonable. This is more like if you’d had part of your brain destroyed. Even if you can get him back online, it won’t be Talen. I’m sorry. I know how much that little ‘bot meant to you.”
“No. You don’t understand. If you did, you’d know why I can’t give up hope. He saved my life; the least I can do is try to save his. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some sword practice to get back to.”
*****
Twelve years earlier
“Okay little buddy, just gonna hook you up to this new little guy and see if you can transfer some of the more interesting modifications you’ve made to your navigation programs to him,” Renata said, connecting Talen to the new — well, new-to-her — shipbot she’d gotten for her daughter, Lyndsey.
<<I have made no modifications. That is outside my programming.>> the display showed, in far more formal language than Talen ever used.
“Oh, you have too made modifications! I never programmed you to override half the safety warnings you do, and nobody else who I’ve ever let touch you would do so. Everybody else is always going on about ‘That area’s marked DANGER: DO NOT ENTER for a reason’ and such.”
The shipbot displayed <<I just have some glitches and need some repairs. I shouldn’t be allowing you to risk your life that way.>>
“Oh, whatever. You do not just have some glitches. You enjoy playing ‘dodge the asteroid’. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody you’ve been modifying yourself. I don’t want them picking you apart to see how you’ve developed something like actual intelligence. You’re my buddy; I’ll take care of you.”
*****
Three days later
“Sokonal and all the rest of the Spirits, please let this work,” Renata prayed, squeezing a small idol in her pocket.
She took a deep breath and powered on Talen. Please, please let this work! she pleaded with the Spirits.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the lights that indicated his systems were coming back online came on. Renata let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. When the last light came on, she finally dared to ask, “Talen? You still in there?”
The message crawled across the display slowly, but it was the best thing Renata had ever read. <<Of course I am. Backup memory seems more or less intact, but the main memory modules are gone so I’m missing bits and pieces. What the hell did you let happen to me anyway?>>
She embraced the little ‘bot as she said, “I didn’t let anything happen to you. You decided to make external repairs while we were still under heavy fire. I swear you’re getting as reckless as me. Wait … what backup memory?!”
<<Figure that one out yourself. You’re the mechanical genius; it shouldn’t be hard for you.>>
‘True A.I. is an impossibility,’ my ass. This little fucker is making physical modifications to himself now! Renata thought as she closely studied Talen’s innards and found the small, easily overlooked, but heavily shielded, memory module. “Talen, I don’t mind you modding yourself, but next time fucking tell me! You scared the shit out of me! I thought I’d lost you for good!”
<<Sorry. So, how badly did you break the ship without me to help you fly it?>>
Renata playfully smacked at him with a spanner and said, “Let me run a few more diagnostics on you, then you can come see for yourself. It’s not very banged up.”
Why I failed Nanowrimo, and how I’ll be doing things going forward
I failed at Nanowrimo this year, but I’m okay with this.
There are reasons I could have failed that I wouldn’t be okay with, things that would boil down to just laziness, but that wasn’t the case this time. True, there may have been a day or two in there where I played around on Flight Rising when I could’ve been writing, but that’s it, just a day or two.
I failed for the following reasons:
First, because I spent the first week, week and a half, of November sick, sick enough that had I had a “real” job, I probably would’ve called in for at least some of those days. I know there are authors who say writing isn’t a job you can take even a day off from regardless of how bad you feel. Those authors have never read the kind of crap I come up with when sick. I’m not talking bad punctuation, I’m talking adding honest-to-Gygax liches and dungeon crawls to Star Wars sort of crap, to use an example from a game I GMed.
Second, because I choose a bad story to do something like Nanowrimo with. Not, I must say, because it was so complex like someone on the forums warned me about when I mentioned it. No, the problem was that I had far more of it already written in various forms so a great deal of what I was doing was rewriting, which is a more time and brain power consuming process. Just writing I can do very quickly. The parts of Intertwined Lives where I’m making new shit up tend to go very fast, unless they’re the ones from Kayden’s viewpoint, but the bits where I’ve got to read what I already have, figure out what of it to keep and what to trash, fix narration since the previous is in third-limited over the shoulder of a character who’s not one of the narrators of this, and so on, those bits are going very slowly indeed. I can’t just skip them and come back to them later because what exactly happens in them will have major ramifications later.
Third, and probably most importantly, I learned that I’m just not the kind of writer who can make the actual writing career part the most important aspect of her life. Actually, I’ve been learning this one slowly since May.
You see, I released Jake’s Last Mission in April and, to put it mildly, it didn’t sell well. So, I did research and embarked on a quest to get it reviews to help it sell. Well, the easiest way to do that was review exchanges and review groups. So from May through September or October I spent hours each day reading books I didn’t necessarily have any interest in, or at least not enough to have voluntarily kept reading, so I’d get reviews. In the future I’ll stick to one-on-one review exchanges so I can control what I read and so there’ll be, hopefully, less mismatch between what a reviewer’s expecting from my story and what it delivers, because this was helpful, but not as helpful as it could’ve been and the toll on my life was not worth it. Reading shouldn’t be a chore and this was making it one.
I also started trying to update this blog twice a week, do networky stuff everyday, and other things like that. Meanwhile, I kept wondering why I never seemed to get any writing done any more.
I’ve figured it out. Reading books I’m not interested in to review them, updating my blog according to the schedule I worked out instead of just whim, networking more than clicking Like or whatever on amusing things . . . that’s taxing for me. That’s far, far harder than sitting down and churning out a few thousand words. Yes, I know it’s important and if I never do it I’m never going to sell and all that shit. I don’t care any more! First of all, I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit. I’m not selling because I’m writing space opera novellas. It’s that simple. My wife writes teen romance novels that sell well with pretty much no promotion. Science fiction readers are damned picky, and novellas don’t sell well regardless of genre, according to surveys I’ve seen. So, oh well.
It’s not even a time thing, like it is for so many authors, which is why I thought I could do it since I don’t have a “real” job. For me, it’s an energy thing. It’s mentally exhausting to spend that much time each day as Shannon the Professional Author instead of Shannon the Person. They’re different. Shannon the Professional Author is, has to be, far more concerned with the ramifications of everything she does. She can’t make a comment on a famous author’s blog that’s got horrendous typoes in it, nor can she be as vitriolic as Shannon the Person gets. Mustn’t alienate potential readers! Checking my phrasing and spelling may only take a few more seconds, but it sometimes takes a not insignificant amount of mental energy to force myself to choose words that aren’t so loaded, to pay enough attention to my hastily typed comment to make sure I didn’t get “to” and “too” mixed up, etc. Combine that with the reading stuff I’m not really interested in to review it and trying to write blog posts when I don’t really feel like it just because it’s been so long, and by the time I can just sit down and write, I can’t. It’s not that I don’t feel like it, though that’s probably the phrase I’d use at the time. It’s that I can’t. I’ve used up too much mental energy and need to do something where I can just turn my brain off completely.
There’s also that by spending all my time and energy on that stuff, I wasn’t getting new material to work with.
Ray Bradbury said: “The time we have alone; the time we have in walking; the time we have in riding a bicycle; are the most important times for a writer. Escaping from a typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give your subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs on the subconscious level.” I wasn’t getting that. By the time I’d recovered from the energy expenditure of networking and blog writing and reading books to review, it was too late to do anything. I tried, but mostly what I succeeded in doing was feeling guilty for the time I’d spent playing video games or reading books for fun instead of writing. Because everybody says you have to write every day, after all. I know that’s not true for me. I know I write best when I write only three or four days a week. But when I’m not even getting those three or four days, I feel horribly guilty regardless of the reason.
No more. My early New Year’s resolution is to stop letting what I should be doing according to experts if I want to treat my writing career like a real career rule my life.
I’m not going to adopt a write just when I feel like it thing. I know myself. I am lazy. I’ll never push past the hard parts if I don’t have a goal to shoot for. I also hate failing, so I’ll give myself a 20,000 word a month goal to shoot at, because I know I can do that easily, but I’ll no longer let myself feel bad over reaching it by writing 4,000 words a day for five days instead of 1,000 words a day for twenty days. So long as I’m not procrastinating and trying to get it all done in the last five days of the month, it’s fine.
I’ll still do detailed reviews of some books I read, including, of course, the two I’ve agreed to review that I still haven’t, but if I feel like leaving just a one sentence “This was pretty good, but overrated” sort of review, I’ll do that instead. I also will not be making myself read everyday whether I feel like it or not. Reading should not be a chore, as I said above.
I’ll try to update this blog at least once a week with the regularly scheduled stuff, but actual posts will be done when I have something to say, so some weeks there might be five, some there might be none. I’ve put off writing some stuff I wanted to for it because I’d already made a post that week. That’s fucking stupid. If I’ve got something I want to say, why not just go ahead and say it then?
And, above all else, I’ll try to remember that even the days where I don’t do anything related to my writing career are still days I spend working on it, because even a day spent, as the day before yesterday was, reading the truth behind comic book urban legends contributes in some way to what I later write. In this case, it made me think about what’s really important in adaptations of works, why I like X-Men: Days of Future Past but would like to string up everyone responsible for the a made-for-TV version of Little House on the Prairie I saw once where Ma told Pa she would divorce him if he insisted they move to Oregon. I’m not sure I can manage to explain this well, but it boils down to “There’s a core at the heart of every character and story that you shouldn’t violate.” And that is useful for my writing because some Universal Nexus stories originate in the long-running rpg version of the setting. There are always differences in the final story and the game, but the core is always there. Stolen Time had, I think, two lines of dialogue and the overall plot in common with what happened in-game. The core of the characters and the story itself was the same though, so it worked. And I know by admitting that I borrow from rpg sessions I’ve just lost some potential readers. To them I say “Go fuck yourself. Take your pretentious attitude elsewhere.”
How Do You Choose What To Read?
Cover of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, issue #150 © Marvel Comics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As part of learning how best to market my books, I’ve read many things that purport to tell how people choose books. The fact that none of these reports, blogs, etc. say the same thing makes all of them a bit suspect, to my mind. The one I remember clearest right now said that a person had to hear of a book a certain number of times before they’d but it; another that the important thing was to sell yourself not the book; some insisted covers were more important than content . . . you get the idea.
So I got to thinking about the last things I’ve read that weren’t assigned for a review group and why I read them:
- Three different M.C.A. Hogarth short stories: One was a reread, the other two were because I enjoyed that one so much. So, why did I read the first one in the first place? It was free, by a self-published author — we need to support each other, and the premise sounded interesting.
- The Name of the Wind: I saw Patrick Rothfuss on Tabletop and was amused so I found his blog and was amused and very impressed by his way with words, so I read the blurb and sample and then some reviews to make sure the book didn’t start out good but end up horrible and then bought the book.
- The newest InCryptid short story: I’ve been an InCryptid fan since I read the first book after the author described the main character as the daughter of Batman and Dazzler. I discovered the livejournal post where she said this when a friend commented on someone’s reblogging of it on Facebook. I don’t think Facebook shows me friends’ comments on other people’s posts any more, so this avenue of discovery is closed. What keeps me coming back? The characters are competent, amusing, and flawed — just like real people.
- The most recent issues of G.I. Joe A Real American Hero: I’ve covered before how very long ago I fell in love with Larry Hama‘s story-telling. So I guess the question here is what keeps me coming back every month. And that’s a question with an easy answer: characterization. Scarlett, Snake Eyes, Duke, Stalker, Storm Shadow . . . they feel more real than some people.
- Self-published novel I won’t name because I don’t recommend it: The blurb made it sound really good and it was free and self-published.
Reading over that list, it looks like for me the key to getting me to read your book in the first place is to make it sound interesting — and there’s no way I could make a list of what criteria do that as sometimes I’m not sure myself what makes one book’s blurb appeal to me while another’s doesn’t — and the key to making me come back is to give me competent, interesting characters; characters that might score high on Mary Sue tests, but who are flawed enough that you still can empathize with them.
Hmm, a list of how I choose to read a book would look like this:
- Blurb sounds like it’ll be an interesting book.
- Sample has interesting characters, good world-building is a plus, but I can overlook it a bit for characters.
- Sample doesn’t have many terrible grammar errors.
- There aren’t a lot of reviews saying things like “The first 50 pages are great, but then it’s like the editor quit.” I have, unfortunately, read far too many books, both self and trad published, that have read like this.
- Cover, number of reviews, who the author is, all that other stuff some people will tell you is so all-fired important
So, what about you? How do you choose what you’ll read? What keeps you buying an author’s work?
