Joe Vasicek

T minus 24 hours and counting…

That’s right! After much wrangling, I formatted it this morning and published it to Amazon this afternoon. In less than 24h hours, it should be up for sale!

In many ways, Bringing Stella Home is a lot different from Genesis Earth. For one, the scope is much larger, with the rise and fall of galactic empires and a war leaving billions dead in its wake.

At the same time, however, the stakes are very personal. It’s not about turning the tide of human history or saving millions of lives; it’s about one boy who doesn’t want his world to fall apart, and will do anything to save the people he loves.

I put a content warning in the description because there’s a lot of darkness in this book. It’s not for everyone; I know that some of my friends would find it shocking and offensive. However, it isn’t my intention to glorify evil or celebrate immorality; rather, by portraying it honestly, I hope to make the struggle against it that much more meaningful. There is, after all, an opposition in all things.

Writing this book was a watershed moment for me. Not only is it the first book in a series which I hope to continue across many books, but it marked a shift in my writing. Before the rise of indie publishing, I thought this would be the one that finally broke through the iron gates of the publishing industry and made my debut. Perhaps that was why I was so reluctant to send it out; I didn’t want to experience the crushing blow of rejections from agents who didn’t think they could sell it, or editors who think that science fiction is dead.

But now, I don’t have to break through those iron gates; now, I can send this story out into the world and let the readers decide whether it’s any good. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.

For all those of you who have helped bring this project up to this point, I want to sincerely thank you by giving you a free copy of this ebook. I’ll be sending it out tomorrow, most likely; if for some reason I miss you, please email me and I’ll correct the mistake. They say that writing is a solitary art, but this day and age, that’s no longer true. So once again, thank you.

It’s been an exciting journey thus far, and something tells me that it’s only getting started. I can hardly wait to see what the future will bring!

Holy crap! I just broke into the top 10!

Holy Amazon rankings Batman!

So about 24h hours ago, Amazon noticed that I was giving “From the Ice Incarnate” away on a number of other sites, and decided to drop the price down to free. What happened next was INSANE.

Almost immediately, the downloads started pouring in. Within a matter of hours, it cracked the #1,000 spot in the Kindle Store rankings, breaking into the top 100 for horror. By noon today, it was at the #14 spot for Horror and #256 overall.

Holy crap! That’s a jump of three orders of magnitude from where it was in the rankings before–more ebooks downloaded in just a matter of hours than I’ve sold across all platforms since April! The really cool part is that it’s driving some interest in my other stuff. Not a whole lot at this point, which is fine, but more than I was expecting, especially in my other short stories.

One thing I’m a little worried about, though, is that it seems to be selling with a different crowd than my target audience. “From the Ice Incarnate” definitely has some prominent horror elements, but it’s essentially a science fiction story.

I changed the category in KDP and republished the ebook, but I’m worried that the act of republishing will set the price back to $.99. I like having it free; I’m hoping it will generate more interest in my novels, which is where I hope to make my bread and butter. To jump off the free train right now, just as things are starting to take off…

…well, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Still, holy cow! It’s a wild and crazy ride!

In other news, I recently did an interview over at my cousin Angela’s blog. Angela is a mom, a writer, and an all-around awesome person, and she publishes a bunch of poetry on her blog, both her own and by others. The interview covers why I feel drawn to science fiction, themes in Genesis Earth, and how studying political science influenced my writing. Good stuff; check it out!

Getting ready for publication

So the edits for Bringing Stella Home came in just a couple days ago, and I’m hoping to finish running through them either today or tomorrow. After that comes formatting, then uploading to the various ebook vendor platforms.

I have to admit, even though this is my second full-length ebook, I’m a little terrified. Formatting is always tricky, and I want to try out some new stuff (such as interior images and a logical TOC) that might not carry over well into other formats. That, on top of all the usual fears associated with sending your work out into the world, is pretty nerve-wracking.

It doesn’t help that I’m currently working full time–or that a bazillion other things are conspiring to totally eat away this weekend. However, I’m determined to get this book out, and to get it out right.

I don’t currently have any plans for promotion, but I’m not too worried about that. I’ll probably put something together when I finish Sholpan. On that front, I’ve finished the first draft of the novella, but decided to run it through a pretty substantial edit to make it more satisfying for people who read the novel first.

But…yeah. I’ve got the cover art, got the blurb, got the edits, got the interior map…the only thing left is to write up the author’s note and acknowledgments, format the book, and put it up.

Crazy!

You should check this guy out

As some of you may know, in 2008 I traveled to Jordan with the BYU study abroad program. One of my friends from the program was Joey Anthon Jackson, pictured here.

When we got back from Jordan in August, Joey graduated and promptly went back overseas. Ever since, he’s been traveling the world, spending no more than a week or two in any one place. He’s been from Korea to Iran, down to Ethiopia, up to Italy and Norway–seriously, I think the only place he hasn’t been is Antarctica. He blogs about it, too.

Most recently, he’s joined up with a team from Oxford University to film a documentary about the nomadic Danakil people in western Ethiopia. It looks like a really fascinating project, and Joey is definitely the right person to do it.

From his site:

In August and September of this year, I’ll join two young travelers (one the Chairman of the Oxford Exploration Club and another from Addis Ababa University) on a 6-week camel journey through the remote Afar region of eastern Ethiopia. Already sponsored in part by Oxford University, the Danakil Expedition aims to follow the footsteps of famous British explorer Wilfred Thesiger on his 1933-34 Awash Expedition.

We hope to develop a similarly involved relationship with the Afar People, becoming their guests in one of the world’s most inhospitable environments. Most importantly, we intend to document their threatened nomadic lifestyle with writing, photos and especially film. A travel writer and photographer, I will shoot the film entirely by DSLR. My colleagues and I are determined to reach the Afar lands by August, although I am still seeking support to cover the costs of suitable gear.

He’s buying supplies and leaving on August 8th, but he needs a little help with funding. Towards that end, he’s put together a site on gofundme.com, where he’s giving out a bunch of really cool stuff for donations. The deadline has technically passed, but anything you donate from now until the 8th will get to him in time.

I only promote stuff on this blog that I truly believe in. I know Joey personally, and I know he’s got what it takes to make something amazing here. Those of you who’ve read my books (especially the forthcoming Gaia Nova series) know that I have a thing for the Middle East and nomadic peoples, and this documentary looks to be not only timely and important, but downright fascinating as well.

Man, I wish I could be out there traveling the world like Joey does! As he would probably say, “it’s easy–just buy a planet ticket.” One of these days, I just might…

Wow, this is fun

I spent almost the whole day Saturday with family, but when I finally got around to working on Sholpan, I breezed through almost 10k words in only a couple hours. Granted, it was mostly light revision and the material was fairly well polished to begin with, but still…it was just fun.

The best part of writing this novella has been rediscovering Stella’s story from Bringing Stella Home. At first, I was a little worried that it might be a bit too shocking (and for some of my friends, it probably is), but there’s a lot of depth to the story, and the content, while definitely mature, is never gratuitous.

The story is basically about an innocent, sexually inexperienced young woman who struggles to keep her virtue and self-respect intact within the harem of the brutal space barbarians who have enslaved her. While she starts from a position of almost total powerlessness, she finds ways to leverage herself without completely compromising her values.

I haven’t figure out the blurb yet, but that’s a pretty accurate description of the story. It’s basically all of the scenes in Bringing Stella Home from Stella’s viewpoint, up through the first and second acts of the book. In the third act, everything comes to a head, and…well, I won’t ruin it for you. 😉

I’ll probably finish Sholpan sometime later today. My copy editor for Bringing Stella Home should be sending back the manuscript with his edits tonight, and I’ll spend the rest of the week going through and getting it ready for publication. By Monday, it should be up!

In the meantime, check this out: I was playing with the cover art yesterday afternoon, and came up with a cover for Sholpan. What do you think?

The thumbnail:

…and the full sized image:

Man, this is so much fun!

How’s my new blog template?

It’s up! What do you think?

I especially like the sidebar layout, with the featured item on top and the double sidebars below. I think I’m going to put all my promotional stuff (books, social networks) on the right sidebar, with all the blog stuff (tags, archives, recent comments, blogroll, etc) on the left.

I’m not so sure about the Current Projects bar, though. Does it look good on the left, or should I put it on the right, above my books? I don’t want the sidebar to look too busy, but at the same time I don’t want to push my books too far down from the top.

I made a few tweaks to the color scheme, though there will probably be a few more kinks to work out in that area. The black text on white is a radical departure from the previous template, which is going to take a while for me to get used to. However, now that my blogging goals have shifted from personal to more professional, I think it’s a move in the right direction.

Things I’d like to change but don’t know how:

The blog header font. I’d like to go back to Courier New small caps, like the old one. Every time I try to tweak the CSS stylesheet, though, nothing I do seems to work.
Font size for pages and categories (pages are above the blog header, categories are below). Jerle pointed out that they could be larger, and I agree with him.
Background color for the child category pages. They blend in too much with the current shade of gray.
The favicon. I don’t want the generic WordPress logo, I want to make something unique to this site (like the eye).

That’s about all I can think of right now, but I’m definitely open to any of your suggestions. My goal is to turn this blog into a home site for my writing career, where readers can connect with me and easily find my stuff.

Also, if you have any cool ideas for my Error! 404 page, please let me know. Those are always fun.

Fighting for a Homeland

For the past few weeks, I’ve been brainstorming ideas for my next big novel project. One of the ways I’ve been doing this is to by trawling tvtropes and putting together a mashup of the story tropes I’d like to play with.

By far, the one that’s struck me the most is Fighting for a Homeland. This is basically when a band of displaced warriors is wandering the Earth, trying to find their own promised land. There are a lot of examples of this on the tropes page, but the coolest one is probably this from real life:

The first Czech legion, after World War one. Their country was then merely a province of Austria-Hungary, who started the war and teamed up with the Germans. The Czechs had very little reason to fight for them, and surrendered to the opposing Russians whenever they could. Through a lot of political scheming, the Russians were convinced to raise a Czech legion of 60,000 men to fight against the Austrians.

Then the Revolution broke out, and with the peace treaty between Russia and Austria, and the vicious warfare and politicking in Russia, they would not get their goal, an independent Czechia, so they turned to the western allies. They could not leave the country through the western side, so the allies chose to rendezvous with them in the port of Vladivostok, on the other side of Russia.

They crossed the country in three years, using the railways that they hijacked, joined with the Russian White Army (anti-communists) and the allies, stole the Tsar’s gold, traded it for free passage to Vladivostok with the advancing reds when they lost, and safely sailed home, to the newly founded country of Czechoslovakia.

Isn’t that friggin awesome? What’s even cooler is that I might have ancestors who fought in the legion. My great grandfather emmigrated from Moravia right around that time, perhaps a little before. Man, if I ever write a historical novel…

But yeah, the trope almost perfectly characterizes Danica and her band of mercenaries, who feature prominently in Bringing Stella Home. Their homeworld, Tajjur V, was fighting for independence right before the Hameji conquests began, and the New Gaian Empire put down the rebellion rather forcibly. Later, when the system fell to the Hameji, their homeworld was bombarded and slagged into oblivion, leaving them with nowhere to call their own.

Long story short, the story of the Czech Legions and their epic journey across Siberia has totally inspired me for this next novel. I’m going to make Roman (Danica’s NCO) a major viewpoint character, bring back the old mercenary team, throw in a few new ones (including a character from Desert Stars)…man, it’s going to be AWESOME!

In other news, “Decision LZ1527” and “From the Ice Incarnate” are both available for free from Diesel Ebooks. Genesis Earth is also up there too, so if you feel inclined to post a review, I would certainly appreciate it!

Also, if you REALLY want to help, drop by the Amazon pages for “Decision LZ1527” and “From the Ice Incarnate” and fill out the little form where it says “tell us about a lower price.” I’m trying to get Amazon to offer my short stories for free, but the only way to do that is to make it free somewhere else and get Amazon to price match.

Hopefully, by making them free it will get me more exposure and drive more interest in the novels. Moses Siregar did a guest post on that just this morning.

Also, I think I’ve found a new template that might work well for this blog. What do you think? Obviously, I would tweak the background and header (and possibly the color scheme as well). The main thing is that it has multiple sidebars, which will make more room for my books. But if you have a better suggestion, please let me know.

Sholpan, or The Great Novella Experiment

So now that I’m finished with Desert Stars, the next project I’m working on is a companion novella to Bringing Stella Home titled Sholpan. While Bringing Stella Home is about James and his quest to rescue his brother and sister, Sholpan is entirely from Stella’s point of view and traces her rise in Hameji society, from prisoner and slave to…well, I won’t ruin it for you.

I started writing it on Monday, and so far it’s been a lot of fun. In some ways, it’s kind of a break for me, since I already know the story (most of the material is lifted straight from Bringing Stella Home, with a few extra changes to make the viewpoint tighter and build more character development).

At the same time, though, it’s a challenge because I’ve never written in the novella format before. The definition as given by SFWA, has mostly to do with length:

For the purposes of the Nebula Awards, the categories are defined as follows:

Novel — 40,000 words or more

Novella — 17,500–39,999 words

Novelette — 7,500–17,499 words

Short Story — 7,499 words or fewer

However, I can’t help but feel that there are many other artistic elements to consider. For example, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms gives this definition:

novella [nŏ‐vel‐ă], a fictional tale in prose, intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel, and usually concentrating on a single event or chain of events, with a surprising turning point.

Other sites I’ve browsed (including this post from The Galaxy Express, this review from 2009 of several small press novellas, and another interesting post on short stories vs. novellas vs. novels) leave me with the impression that novellas typically

can be read in one long sitting, such as a train ride,
center around one major conflict, idea, or issue,
have more room for rich settings and lavish descriptions,
tend to focus more intimately on character,
are compact enough to take risks with voice and theme, and
can end without a definitive conclusion to the central idea or conflict.

I must confess, I’m not an avid reader of novellas. I’ve read some of the classics, of course: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Time Machine, Animal Farm, etc, but in terms of modern sf novellas, all I’ve really read is I Am Legend (and a few golden/silver age “novels,” if you count them). Point is, I’m not an expert on novellas by any means.

However, the novella seems like a very promising format for epublishing, especially in conjunction with a novel. Readers can pick up the novella for $.99 and get both a sample of the writer’s longer novel-length stuff, as well as a complete story in itself.

That’s what I want to do with Sholpan. I want to write a less-expensive derivative work that’s artistically sound in its own right, while also driving interest in the full length novel. Besides, it’s just fun to experiment with new styles and formats.

If this is successful, I can see myself writing a companion novella to most, if not all of my novels. And who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to sell some of those to more traditional print and electronic markets. It’s worth a shot, and no matter what happens, I’m bound to learn something new.

So yeah, that’s my current writing project. If all goes well, expect to see it out sometime this fall. And if you have any comments or suggestions regarding novellas, please share! I’m very interested to learn anything I can.

Blurb for Bringing Stella Home and thoughts on Borders

One of the essential elements for a successful in epublishing is a killer book description, and I think I’ve got a pretty decent one for Bringing Stella Home. However, I could use some feedback, so if you could read it and tell me what you think, that would be great. Here it is:

It is a dark time for the galactic empire. Rebellions at Tajjur and the New Pleiades sap the empire’s strength from within, while hordes of spacefaring Hamiji warriors from the outer reaches sweep ever closer to the Imperial capitol, slagging entire worlds in their wake.

When the Hameji forces conquer his homeworld, young James McCoy runs away to rescue his older brother and sister, Ben and Stella, from their grasp. Though he faces an enemy undefeated in battle and feared throughout all of inhabited space, James will stop at nothing–not even death–to get his brother and sister back.

Things start to look up when he meets Danica Nova, a Tajji mercenary captain who takes him in and becomes his mentor. James reminds Danica of her own brother, whom she failed to protect when the empire slaughtered her family years ago. Now, she hopes to find some redemption from her demons by saving James from his own.

Unfortunately, neither of them realizes that Stella has become a concubine to the main Hameji overlord–and that Ben has been brainwashed and made into an elite shock trooper in the empath squadron sent to hunt them down.

So what do you think? Too long, too confusing, too cliche, or too boring? The genre (if you can’t tell) is space opera / space adventure, so I’m hoping it will appeal to fans of Orson Scott Card, C. J. Cherryh, Lois McMaster Bujold, Star Wars & Star Trek, etc. It’s also got a slight military science fiction bent to it, though I wouldn’t presume to be qualified to write true military sf.

In unrelated news, I recently did an interview with Charlie of Playground51, which appears to be down for some reason (the link is on my Blog Tour page above). Topics discussed include how I got the idea for Genesis Earth, which parts were inspired by real life, and thoughts on book promotion. Hopefully the site will be up again soon!

Also, I’m thinking it’s time to do a major overhaul of my blog template. As much as I love the current one with the purple stars and nebulae, I need something with two sidebars so that my books don’t push everything else to the bottom. If you have some ideas for a good WordPress template that still keeps the sci-fi feel of this one, please let me know! I’m very much open to suggestions.

Finally, since the Borders liquidation is all over the news, I thought I’d share my $.02. It’s sad, certainly, but I don’t think that the fallout will be nearly as gloomy as Joshua Bilmes claims.

Corporate-run big box stores are certainly on the way out, but there will always be a market for good stories, and in many ways the new ebook technology is causing that market to expand at a wonderful rate. So while the predictions of the print death spiral appear to be coming true (David Gaughran did a great post recently on that), new models will emerge–indeed, are already emerging–which will fill the vacuum.

The thing that gives me great reason to hope is that these new business models give so much power back to writers. Instead of relying on the mercies of large media corporations to build a viable career, we can now make a living by publishing independently or going with any number of small independent presses. Readers have more choices and writers have more options. It’s glorious.

If anything, the Borders bankruptcy has confirmed to me that I’ve made the right choice to go indie, rather than wait for New York to anoint me before launching my career. Will I ever go with a traditional publisher? I’d like to someday, but I no longer feel dependent on the old system to accomplish my dreams. Instead, it’s my readers who will decide my fate, and that’s exactly as it should be.

So thanks for reading!