I’m pretty sure that the first post I write every March for the last… 8 years?… has been some variation of “In Like a Lion.”
I don’t even know what that phrase is from. “In like a lion, out like a lamb”? Or something like that?
Anyway. New month, new novel time!… theoretically! I’m still 30K words to go in the second draft, but it’s coming along really well. I love the feeling of flow. I sit down at my computer, and four or five hours later I realize that time has passed. It’s a really amazing feeling, and that’s what the edits have felt like.
Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to start the movie filming. I had hoped to, but the painting commission I’m working on has chewed up basically all the time I haven’t been writing. I’m happy with it, I think the client will be very happy, but yeah, super time consuming. But when I wrap up the edits (maybe by the end of the weekend, if I really manage to put nose-to-grindstone), then I’ll send it off to my editor and I’ll have all that time available to me.
And I’m excited! I love my art, I love making my art, and I’m hopeful that someday soon I can focus all my energy towards that instead of dividing it between the work I love and my muggle job!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Constant Worry/Worries
I worry about a lot of things.
I worry basically constantly, actually. There are many things I worry about, and all of them wax and wane in importance from day to day, from hour to hour, and from year to year.
But mostly I worry that I’m doing something wrong.
There are a lot of things I might be doing wrong. But first and foremost, I worry that I’m approaching my writing career wrong. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I love it, and honestly I think I’m pretty dang good at it. I doubt I will ever win a Hugo or anything like that, but there are over a thousand copies of my books circulating in the world, and I think the people who read them probably enjoyed them.
And yet I still haven’t gotten any traction. I still have only one sold short story. I spend more editing my books than the combined sales of all my books, and then when you add advertising costs on top of that… it’s not only not sustainable, it’s downright expensive.
But what else can I do? I try to stay on top of my advertising, I spend on good covers and editing…
So all I can do is keep on keeping on. Hoping that all the stuff I’m doing wrong, and all the stuff I worry about, won’t get in my way as I take steps towards being fully employed as a writer.
I’ll get there. But gosh it’s a slow process.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Some "Time Off"
For the next seven days, I don’t have a muggle job to worry about… and gosh do I plan to get a lot of art stuff done!
I have the novel to finish editing (so close!). I have the movie I want to shoot (I have the script, characters, and some of the settings already built!). I have short stories I want to submit to publishers (gotta write them first, but that’s minor!). And I have some commission painting I need to get finished (I’ve started, it has a very strong start).
So much art! Gosh I wish I could make a living this way…
sigh
Ah well! I’m getting there. Slowly, steadily, these are all steps on the path.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Free Books
So I’m giving away another of my novels for free… technically, I just gave one away for free for the last five days, and I’m giving a different one away for free now!
20 lucky people received free copies of “Starconvoy EH-76” last week, and I’m hopeful that more than that will receive free copies of “The Wind’s Howling Rage.”
The goal, of course, is to encourage people to buy my books because they’ve read and enjoyed a free one. And at this point, I have 7 novels in circulation, and I can afford to give one or two away every once in a while. It’s been a few years since I did one of these free giveaways, so I was about due.
Plus, the advertising hasn’t been working out so well. The amount I would have to be able to afford to have a significant hit-rate is… well, it’s probably much higher than I’m doing, that’s for sure. Maybe in a few years if I have some extra money I can devote more energy into ads. For now, the effort continues to go into writing more books.
Speaking of which, I’m 3/4 of the way done the 2nd draft edits for the new novel! Exciting! Hopefully I’ll have it done next week, at which point I can jump into shooting the movie!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Painting Work
In addition to writing, I have to do various other jobs to pay for… well, life. Food, housing, transportation, stuff like that.
One of the things I do is commission painting. I’m not the best out there, but I am pretty dang good, and very fast relative to most of my colleagues in the field. It’s not the best paying gig, but it’s something I can do with my art to pay some of the bills while I continue to work towards being a full-time writer.
I recently completed an order for 6 giants from Warhammer Age of Sigmar. Great models, but gosh they took a long time (almost a full month!). Still, it was nice to get them to their owner, and he seems very happy with the results, which is nice. I’ve already started the next job (a bunch of Chaos Space Marines, specifically World Eaters), and I’m looking forward to that one. I love painting sci-fi almost as much as I love writing it!
It’s just neat to find new ways to turn my artistic passions into income.
I just need to figure out a way to turn it into reliable income, and I’d be set. Oh well, one step at a time!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
What Do I Bring?
Still spending a lot of mental cycles on this question of what my “brand” is or should be. I know that my goal with being a writer is to bring a little hope and happiness to the people that read my work. The world is a hard, depressing place, and a little escapism can be a very powerful thing.
The stories that tend to stick in my brain are almost all about rebellion. Fighting against big, overpowering forces and the steps needed to overthrow (or at least resist) those forces. Star Wars, Firefly, Babylon 5… these are all about the “little guy” to some extent (although in all cases a very well trained and dangerous “little guy”) standing up to overwhelming force. The Alliance, the Empire, the Shadows.
But the other stories I love are ones about hope. About looking at what could be and seeing how much easier and better things are as a result. I’m mostly thinking about Star Trek here, but there are others that shine a spotlight on a glorious “what if” sort of thing. We can include several of the Marvel movies in there (although those are usually underdog stories as well), but also Terry Pratchett and John Scalzi’s works. Stories about “Okay, but how can we make this better” are fantastic.
I’m nowhere near that stage yet. But day by day, I’m working on getting closer.
Speaking of which, I should get back to editing this here novel I’m writing! I’ve pushed back the editing timeline to March 18th to give me some extra time to go over it one or two more times, which I think will really help. The only problem is that by pushing it back… I can’t start my other projects yet! Gah!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Lot of Ads
Well, hands up if you’ve spent the last week (in addition to editing the new novel) writing up a thousand new ads?
Okay, okay, not a thousand. Only ten, technically, although each had a unique set of issues to solve. I dived into trying to give more visibility to my books without increasing the cost of doing so, so far with mixed success. Previously I ran ads on three of my books, but it was a total of one ad campaign per book: now I’m up to five campaigns per book, and I’m doing two books.
Ooh, and in two different countries. So technically, I created 20 different ad campaigns in the last week. Phew! No wonder I’m so tired!
I remain cautiously optimistic that this may result in a slight improvement in my overall writing fortunes (I mean that in the “luck” sense, not in the “financial” sense, although that would be really nice as well!). The process seems to make sense, and it’s had some success so far already, but I’ll revisit again in a few days, start making tweaks and changes.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Thinking about Brand
The writing gig is weird. All I really want to do is create art (I mean, mostly I want to write, but I also want to shoot movies and play music, but mostly write), but in order to do so I have to make enough money that I can write. As it stands, I make about $100/month from my writing, all told, and my advertising expenses are about $400/month. Don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that math doesn’t work so well.
But part of becoming a full-time writer is thinking about “Brand.” What do I want people to think about when they see one of my books? When they see my name pop up on one of those extremely expensive ads, or when they see my name somewhere. Mostly I want them to think “Ooh, fun little story on its way!” because I think that’s what I write. I write escapism because I want to forget how awful everything is, and I hope that by doing so I can help other people forget how awful everything is.
I work a muggle job right now to pay the bills, and I am frequently asked if I have a YouTube channel. I technically do (I have a few short videos on the craft and one LEGO stopmotion movie), but that’s technically not “me.” It’s just part of what I’ve done, if that makes sense?
So I don’t know about a brand. I really need to think more about it… maybe I’ll start just copying whatever Scalzi is doing (not plagiarizing, obviously, but if he posts about the State of Sci-Fi one day, maybe I’ll do it on the next? Take topic ideas from him… I dunno, I’ll have to think about that). It’s just not something I thought I’d have to think about when I started writing.
Life is full of surprises.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Cost of Business
My editor sent me a quote for the cost of my newest book. It’s… substantial.
Editing has always been the most expensive part of my books. Advertising comes close… I spend close to $3K CAD on ads a year. In some years that’s more than my editing costs, and in others it is less. This year it will be less.
But previously the cost was for multiple books. This is just one book… a longer one thus far than my average (about 8K words more than usual), but woof. That price tag is steep. It’s going to take me months to pay it off.
I can’t keep spending on my books like this. They have to start making money. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money, not yet, but I have to change something so I’m not hemorrhaging cash every month.
Ah, the cost of doing business. I just want to write… nothing is ever so simple, eh?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Storytelling in Games
I mentioned on Sunday that storytelling in board games has come a long way. That’s not entirely fair.
See, back when I was young, games, whether board or video, were all about emergent narrative. You discovered a story that was crafted around the activities you undertook and the events that happened as a result. Games like the old Ultima series had fixed storylines, sure, but most of the things that happened in the game were about you and what you did as the player. Same for games like the original Twilight Imperium or Cosmic Encounter. The “narrative” was the game, and the way you told the game afterwards determined the kind of story it was.
We can contrast that with the rise of Japanese-style storytelling in the 90s. In these, you were playing a specific character who did specific things. You didn’t craft the story, you discovered it. The story had already been formed, and you were going down the path to find out what happened next. This created a bit of a rift for some people who would gravitate towards one ‘style’ of story over the other, but honestly they were both good. Japanese-style games could have much tighter narratives because the game always knew the order of the events that would happen to you, whereas American-style games were all about giving you a big sandbox with just a hint of story attached to it.
Board games have been veering into the Japanese-style of story for awhile. I kinda blame Kickstarter, since the rise of the KS-game means that more is always considered better. And being able to have a 20-mission campaign is better than a randomized setup, right? According to Gloomhaven and its 100-mission campaign… yes!
But while the designers are pushing towards longer and more elaborate stories… many of them aren’t being written by people who can actually write. The idea is good, but the execution is often lacking. Too much of Gloomhaven is binary Left-or-Right decisions with no real indication of why one is better than the other. Oathsworn has a massive campaign, but many of the story beats are almost free of player intervention (a branching narrative that always ends up at the same place, no matter what choices you make). And so on. There are exceptions: Legacy of Dragonholt is exceptionally written, and Forgotten Waters equally so, but games like that are still the exception, and they seem to be made by people who respect the craft of writing independent of the craft of game design. Very different tasks, after all.
Anyway, I have more to say, but I’ll give the topic a rest for a bit. Still so much editing to do! I’ve reached 25K words on the current draft… only 55K to go!
Writing for Board Games
I’m a big fan of board games. I think the industry is doing a lot of really interesting things, and one of the big changes over the last twenty years (more or less when I started playing games) is the drive towards narrative-style experiences.
A lot of older games had emergent narrative… there wasn’t really a story, but as you played you created a series of events that sort of implied a story. To take a quick example, the classic board game “Twilight Imperium” (which is now on its fourth, very successful iteration) had players trying to conquer a vast intergalactic empire, very much in the theme of Master of Orion or similar video games.
But there were no real “narrative” or “story” events. Instead, you would craft a tale based on which of players did what. So, for example, a story about how the sneaky Hacan betrayed the Jol-Nar might happen in one game, but there’s nothing fixed about either of those races or about that betrayal in the game itself.
Compare that to something like “Forgotten Waters” or “The Adventures of Robin Hood” or even “Legacy of Dragonholt,” which instead are games with fixed stories (with variable elements, sure) and the players discover the story as you go along. And originally, those were written very badly. But these days?
Well… these days they’re still often written very badly. But occasionally, like the games listed above, they are written very well.
More on this next post. I have many thoughts about board game writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Muggle Jobs
One of the podcasts I listen to likes to discuss non-creative jobs as “muggle work.” While I dislike many aspects of the Potter-verse (no judgment on those who love it: we’re all allowed to enjoy the fiction we enjoy), that particular term has struck a chord with me.
“Muggle” is the Potter way of saying “Mundane” or, more importantly, “Non-magical.” I love the idea of creative work being a form of magic, because it does feel that way sometimes. I’m creating worlds, people, and universes while I sit here at my table tapping on my little computer. It is a form of magic.
Which isn’t to say muggle work isn’t important. At no point are the muggles “less than” by anyone in the Potter-verse that aren’t racist, despicable people, even if some of the muggles themselves are awful people (Harry’s adoptive parents, for example). A lot of muggle work is very important. But it’s not magic, and that’s significant.
I still have my muggle job for now. I can feel it tugging at the edges of my consciousness, though. The thought that I should stop pouring so much time and energy into the regular, and really focus more on practicing my own unique form of magic.
Some day.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Editing Away
The edits are coming along nicely, all things considered. I’m about 10K into them, and the switch from third to first person is going quite well! The story is still flowing, and I’m editing up some of the looser bits while also making sure to seed in the elements that will end up being critical to the conclusion.
I do love a good “sudden but inevitable” conclusion.
With some luck I can finish this up in the next few weeks, since I’m supposed to get it to my editor mid-Feb. And then she’ll probably have it for a few weeks, and then I can release it to all of you fine people! Huzzah!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
So Many Things
One of the writing podcasts I listen to talks a lot about “Hustle Culture,” and how toxic it is. This is something I know deep inside me… I’ve always hated the rat-race, and I hate the idea that I have to work my butt off or die.
It pervades throughout modern Canadian culture. It’s everywhere. Everywhere expects you to work harder for less. Longer hours, shorter vacations, more guilt.
I hate it.
But here I am with a novel I’m editing, a movie I want to shoot, a series of short stories I want to submit, and painting commissions to help pay for everything else. Plus a day job that pays most of the bills on top of everything else.
I don’t want to hustle. But I feel like I have to. Because if I stop, I may never be able to stop? Like, I have to “earn” the right to actually relax. I can’t remember the last time I had a day that was just… “off.” Like, a day I didn’t have to do a dozen things for a dozen different projects.
But I need one of these projects to start to take off. I need it to be successful enough that I can start dropping the stuff I dislike to focus on the stuff I like. Or, failing that, I need to have made enough money doing the stuff I dislike that I can actually focus on the stuff I love.
How do I do that? No idea.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Rewrites Are Difficult
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but rewrites? They’re really hard.
I’m converting the novel I wrote from third to first-person. Usually, first-person perspectives are a little more intimate and tend to help readers engage directly with the characters in the story. I’ve written in first-person before (The Queen of the AIs is written in first-person) and, just like this time, that novel was originally written in third-person and then converted during one of the draft overhauls (I think between the fourth and fifth edits, in that case). Back then, like now, the goal is to make a tighter narrative suture.
But it’s a lot of work. You can’t just replace the character’s name with “I” everywhere and call it a day. It takes time and energy, and a lot of careful edits. I’m basically writing a new novel that just happens to be very, very similar to the previous novel.
Ah well! If this were easy, everyone would do it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Started the Editing Process
It’s about time. Two weeks off of writing and I was starting to climb the walls. And I wouldn’t normally consider editing to be “writing,” since they are two very different things, but in this case I’m changing all of the story from third to first person. That’s a lot of writing, I tell you what.
I’ve done the first chapter so far, but the day is yet young so I may do more today. I’ll definitely do more soon… gotta get this finished by mid-Feb so I can send it to my editor, and I’d like to be on at least the third draft by then.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Paperback and Hardcover now available!
For the first time ever, I decided to make a hardcover version of one of my novels… sure, it’s a luxury item that not everyone will need or want, but the fact that you can get one at all isn’t something I thought I would do.
Turns out it’s not a trivial sort of thing to set up, but hey! It’s done!
So, if you want the brand new hardcover version of Caitlyn Morcos, Interplanetary Marshal Service… click on that link right there! Yee!
And for those of you looking for a less expensive way to read a physical version of the book, there’s also the more affordable paperback edition!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Paperback and Hardcover!
I don’t convert all of my books into dead-tree formats. It’s a significant amount of work, and most of it is time consuming, fiddly, and most importantly, very detail oriented.
I am not a detail oriented kinda guy. I’m just not. I can fumble my way through, sure, and I’m okay self-editor (I mean, after eight novels you kinda have to be), but the level of attention to detail I need to make sure that a physical edition of my novel “looks” right… well, it’s not insignificant.
But today, I did it for Caitlyn Morcos, Interplanetary Marshal Service. Did I pick that particular book for a reason? Maybe…
So hopefully in the next 72 hours or so, you’ll all have a few new ways to read my work!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Thinking About My Blog
You know, I’ve mentioned a few times that I don’t really have a “goal” with this blog. I don’t talk about a specific thing, although I probably should… consistency is important to people, and people who wander over to this website probably want “a thing.”
Hopefully that’s to buy one of my books, but even then, the subset of those people who bother to read the blog are probably looking for something specific. Advice, perhaps, or drama, maybe just a glimpse into the wandering mind of a writer who hasn’t really ‘made’ it yet (although I have published 7 novels and am working on number 8). But what they get is this… scatter-shot approach to whatever happens to pop into my head on that given day.
And, hey, I am happy to have my little corner of the internet where I post my thoughts. Some of them I think are pretty interesting! Some of them I think are pretty scattered. Sometimes they’re intelligent and considered, sometimes they’re just whatever happens to transition from brain-to-keyboard, basically unfiltered and unedited.
I try to keep that last one to a minimum. Nobody needs unedited work. I’m looking at you, 95% of self-published authors.
Anyway, today I was again considering whether I should try to focus more on a “brand.” Like, a specific thing I do here that people can identify with. Perhaps I should focus more on the science-part of science fiction. After all, I do have a degree in physics. I could probably mention some useful and interesting stuff. Or maybe I should spend more time on bigger posts, talking about “the craft” and the nuts and bolts of how things are going? Like this morning I was considering increasing the price of one of my books by a little, see if that impacts sales (after all, it’s a new year and everything keeps getting more expensive).
For now, I’m going to leave it as its meandering nonsense that I’ve been doing for years. But I’m thinking about it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Podcasts!
For years I recorded podcasts. They were always targeted at specific audiences (normally miniature wargamers for particular games), but I recorded hundreds and hundreds of episodes.
The upside is that I am pretty dang good with general audio editing and recording. Helps with all the audio stories and movies I’m going to be shooting in the future (I’ve done… oh… a dozen short audio stories that I’m quite proud of).
But it takes a lot of time and energy. It’s not a trivial sorta thing, and I admire anyone that can maintain their energy when they do long term projects like podcasts. These days I’m listening to a bunch of writing podcasts (“The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt” and “Unpublished” are the two big ones), and those help me think about writing when I don’t have time to write or have to do other stuff.
Big fan of both of those!
Anyway, just thought I’d mention that I love podcasts. Probably not going to do one myself… again… am I? Hmmm. Probably n…
Hmmm.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!