Desert Stars – Page 10 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

The blog tour rolls on

I’m writing this post from Leading Edge (the internet is down at my apartment), so I don’t have much time, but I did want to take care of a few items of housekeeping.

First, my next guest post in the Genesis Earth blog tour is up, this one at Charles Millhouse’s blog. Charles is a fellow sf writer whom I met on the Kindleboards, and the post basically explains my writing routine since last year. Of course, since I’ve technically been unemployed since graduation, my routine is a little wacky, but I think you’ll find the post interesting. Check it out!

Desert Stars is coming along. I took yesterday off to finish drafting the revision notes, but I’ve still got the last three chapters to go. It’s going to be awesome, though–I’ve got so many ideas for how to improve the story. Many thanks to all my first readers for your feedback! It’s been immensely helpful.

Also, I decided to take down “From the Ice Incarnate” from Amazon. I still think it’s a good story, but I don’t want someone to buy Genesis Earth, love it, then buy the story and feel ripped off. Also, I think I might have more luck with my short stories if I send them out to print markets instead. I’ve submitted “Decision LZ1527” to Escape Pod; if it sells, hopefully that will drive readers to my ebooks.

And on that note, if you’ve read Genesis Earth and enjoyed it, I would like to ask you to please post a review on Amazon. I don’t want to be one of those guys who secretly boosts his stats by coercing people to write fake reviews, but if you did enjoy the novel, I would appreciate it a ton if you would take the time and share your experience. At this point in my career, that’s probably the thing that would help me out the most.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on here. Hopefully, the internet will be back before the weekend. See you around!

First Radio interview and other such stuff

Dude, check it out–my first radio interview just went live on the Dungeon Crawler’s Radio website!

I met these guys at CONduit last month, where they had a booth and were recording all sorts of authors and artist. They were way cool when I talked with them, and when they found out I was a writer invited me on!

Hehe, considering how many big name authors they have on their show, I think I totally bombed–but it was still awesome. The guys who run the show were really great, too; it was a ton of fun hanging out with them. So thanks, guys, for having me on!

In other news, I just uploaded Genesis Earth to Smashwords, and I think it’s already live. So for all those of you who want to get it from somewhere other than Amazon, it’s now available! I’m still working through all the formatting kinks, so if you buy it and find some errors, let me know and I’ll send you a fixed copy.

Also, the cool thing about Smashwords is that you can generate coupon codes and even give the book away for free. What I’m hoping to do is print up a few business cards with the code for a free book, then distribute them at conventions like Worldcon. Hehe, imagine walking up to an editor and being like “hey, want my book? Here you go!” Or even just dropping off a stack at the freebies table; I think it could be an awesome way to get exposure.

Man, there’s so much exciting stuff going on! This is a great time to be a writer.

On the writing front, I’m making excellent progress on my current WIP (work in progress), Desert Stars. I’ve read through all the feedback from my first readers, and have a ton of fantastic ideas for how to make this story really shine. I revised through about 2.1k words this morning before work, and I’m hoping to do at least two and a half chapters before this weekend.

Also, a couple days ago at work, I was trawling through tvtropes (one of the advantages of doing data entry is that you can afford to feed the addiction, hehe), and I had a SUPER awesome idea for the next book in the Gaia Nova series.

Since Bringing Stella Home is basically the Mongol conquests set in space, the big story to conclude that arc would be the battle of Ayn Jalut, where the Mongols suffered their first decisive defeat. I did a little bit of setup for that in Into the Nebulous Deep, with the remnants of the Gaian Empire gathering at New Rigel.

Well, here’s what I’m thinking: I’ll bring back Danica’s team of mercenaries from Bringing Stella Home, make Roman a viewpoint character, and have Rina from Desert Stars join up with them as a quiet little girl in black who seems painfully shy, but is actually a deadly effective assassin whose weapon of choice is a bowcaster.

Oh yeah, I think this has some crazy awesome potential.

In any case, I should probably get to bed so I can get up early and write tomorrow. I hope to finish Desert Stars 3.0 by July 10th, and even though it’s going to take a lot of work, I think I can make it happen.

And after that…well, things just keep getting more and more awesome. I love writing!

Ebook update

As many of you know, I epublished my first novel two weeks ago, and three short stories a few months before that. How has it been going?

First, let me point out that I have another guest post out as part of the Genesis Earth blog tour, this one on my friend Gamila’s blog. Gamila reviews YA and LDS fiction, and is a big proponent of clean reads. For my post, I wrote about the place of LDS writers in science fiction and fantasy and the unique things we have to offer these genres. Fun stuff; you should check it out.

So now that that’s out of the way, how do the numbers look for my epublishing venture? Not bad, actually. In two weeks, I’ve sold twenty copies of Genesis Earth and gotten two five star reviews on Amazon, only one of which was from someone I know. Not bad–I’m looking to get at least $50 from Amazon come September, which should be very nice.

The short stories have not sold nearly as well, however. Part of it probably has to do with the fact that I’m not a super stellar short story writer, but another part probably has to do with the lack of promotion. The review of “From the Ice Incarnate” by Red Adept Reviews did lead to a few extra sales for all my stories, but only about half a dozen or so. Nothing spectacular.

Part of it also has to do with the sampling system, I think. With ebooks, you can download a free sample (usually the first 10% of the text) and decide whether you want to buy it or not. For Genesis Earth, that amounts to the first three chapters and then some; for the short stories, maybe a couple of paragraphs and that’s it.

So what’s the takeaway? I think that novels work out much better as ebooks than short stories. For one, you can justify charging more for them (I haven’t seen anyone selling short stories for more than $.99), and thus get the higher royalty rate. For another, they work much better with the sampling system; readers are much more likely to get hooked on the first 10% of a novel than the first 10% of a short story. And lastly, I’d say that you need to figure out some kind of way to promote yourself and get your work out there. Still working on that.

All in all, not too bad. But here’s the really cool part (and I mean really cool): at my current cost of living, I estimate that I need to sell only 15 ebooks per day to break even financially. At a consistent average of 25 books per day, I could justify quitting my “day job” (150% of all monthly expenses).

How is that exciting? Well, get this: starting out the gate with very little platform or exposure, I’m averaging a little over 1 ebook sale per day. If I could boost that up to 3 sales per day for 5 books, I’d be breaking even. At 5 sales per day for 5 $2.99 books (~800 total ebook sales per month), I’ll be making a living.

See why I’m excited?

My goal now is to get up to 5 full length novels / novellas out before the end of the year. Believe it or not, that’s very achievable.

First, I’ll be epublishing Bringing Stella Home sometime this summer, hopefully in time for worldcon. Shortly thereafter, I hope to publish Sholplan as a $.99 novella.

My current WIP is the third draft of Desert Stars, and I bet I can have that ready before Christmas. While I’ll put the whole thing out as its own novel, I like Emma’s idea of splitting it into two books as well. I’ll probably title them Dome and Desert and Sand and Stars, and make the first one available for free just to get more exposure.

And at some point in between all that, I’ll finish compiling all my travel journals from the 2008 BYU Jordan study abroad and put that out as its own work. That one should be fun, and a good way to experiment with in-text photos and illustrations.

That’s my plan. The more I put my work out there, the better my chances at making it big. And even if I don’t, if I have enough titles out and they all sell more or less consistently, I can still leverage that to make a full-time living. And that’s my dream.

So yeah, I’m extremely excited.

New title and writing update

Just a quick update before I go to bed.

After much deliberation, I decided to go with Desert Stars as a title. Thanks, Megan, for suggesting it. It’s a little short, and doesn’t exactly wow me, but I’ll try it out and see if I grow into it. The most important thing anyway is what the readers think.

The last couple of days have been going slow, mostly because of stupid writerly avoidance things. It’s a lot easier for me to revise than it is to write new material, and the last couple of chapters have required a lot of new material. But I think I’m through most of it, and will hopefully make some good progress tomorrow.

Genesis Earth has been selling a lot better than I thought it would…which doesn’t say much, but at least it says something. For promotion, all I’ve done is the blog tour, a couple links on facebook, and general participation on the Kindle Boards. In any case, I’m betting that writing is more important than promotion, so that’s where I’m focusing my energy.

The temp job I’m working is pretty good. I listen to stories, writing podcasts, and lectures all day while doing data entry. One of the most interesting ones is this presentation from Gencon, all about story structure and the hero’s journey. Good stuff; it’s helped me figure out a lot of things with my current WIP (Desert Stars).

I’ve also been listening to a lot of trance music, especially Armin Van Buuren. I know my Dad will think it’s crap, but hey I like it! I think I’ll leave you with this track, where Armin teams up with the guy behind Owl City. I’d tell you how many times I’ve listened to it, but that would be embarrassing. So anyways…good night!

In search of a new title

I’m not that great at figuring out titles. It seems that with every project, I agonize for days to find the perfect title, only to settle for something that sounds reasonably good.

Worlds Away from Home is no exception. Even though it was better than the previous title (Hero in Exile), I never really felt wowed by it.

So now that I’m midway through the third draft, I figure it’s time to fix this problem. For those of you who’ve read it, I’m hoping you can help me out with suggestions; and for those of you who can’t, maybe you can tell me which ones sound cool and which ones sound lame.

Here are some of my ideas so far:

Dome and Desert, Sand and Stars
Through Sand and Stars
Beyond a Thousand Suns
Beyond the Caves of Babylon

I don’t really know, though. I’d like to throw in a reference to the Temple of a Thousand Suns, but there’s already a famous book with the “thousand suns” phrase. I really like the phrases “dome and desert” and “sand and stars,” but when I throw them together it doesn’t really seem to get across Jalil and Mira’s storylines. Then again, I don’t know if any title could.

Anyhow, if you have any ideas, please toss them my way.

“…and I am doing my best to leave traditional publishing behind.” –Tracy Hickman

Those were Tracy Hickman’s exact words today at CONduit.

He said it as part of his introductory remarks at his first panel, “To Cliche Or Not To Cliche,” and reiterated it on all of the panels he was on for the rest of the day.

For those of you who don’t know, Tracy Hickman has built a career spanning over thirty years, and has 56 novels still in print. He is an incredibly successful and prolific author. What’s more, he is quite possibly the most humble and sincere person at the convention: extremely approachable, and very accommodating towards his fans. He is an amazing man, and I hope to have a career like his someday.

He’s not the only big name author talking about epublishing either. I heard this secondhand so it’s not admissible in court, but L.E. Modesitt apparently had a lot to say about Kristine Katherin Rusch‘s recent blog posts concerning the disturbing changes in traditional publishing. Rusch is one of the voices at the epicenter of the indie publishing movement, along with her husband Dean Wesley Smith.

The initial shock wave of the ebook revolution has hit Utah, and people all over CONduit are talking about it. In fact, I think I spent more time today in the hall talking about ebooks than I did attending panels.

You have no idea how invigorated this makes me feel. I’ve been going around signing up bloggers for my Genesis Earth blog tour, and the sense of ownership I feel for my career is thrilling. On my way back to Provo, I made a connection between two ideas for my current work-in-progress, and I literally screamed for two minutes straight. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more excited to be a writer.

In his last panel of the day, Tracy Hickman closed with the following bold statement: if you master the art of story structure, have the dedication to work hard, and are willing to do what it takes to learn your craft, you will not only write a successful book, you will build a successful career in this world of new media.

That, my friends, is exactly where I want to be.

Rocking the rewrite

I am well into the third draft of Worlds Away from Home, and oh man–it is so much fun! That might seem a bit counter-intuitive (revising = fun?), so let me explain my process.

In a first draft, I have a ton of ideas, but it’s hard for me to keep track of them all (and they also tend to change even as I write them). I’ll cobble together a story out of them, but it’s a rough, misshapen story, with subplots that go nowhere, characters who seem schizophrenic, scenes set in the wrong point of view, and setting details that are inconsistent. The main throughline is still there, but it’s buried under a ton of crap, sometimes so much that even I can’t see it.

In a second draft, I cut out the worst of the crap and try to dig out the core story elements. I’ll cut entire chapters and subplots, throw out characters, rework the world, and fix as many of the glaring errors as I can.

Some writers call this a “triage edit,” and that’s as apt a term for it as any. I’m not doing surgery yet; I’m applying the field dressings that will get the wounded from the battlefield to the operating table.

But the third draft, by far, is my favorite. That’s when I take a hard look at the story and figure out how everything connects. It’s like dumping out a new Lego set and opening up the instructions. This is where I iron out the major character arcs, where I start to intertwine the subplots properly, where I get a sense of the book’s themes and figure out how to make it insightful and thought provoking.

Writing the third draft is absolutely glorious, and I love it.

Right now, I feel so immersed in the world of my novel, it makes me want to lock myself in a room and do nothing but write. I have to force myself to go to bed, otherwise I’d be up until 4am writing. Even with some of the major changes I need to make with this book, I wouldn’t be surprised if I average 4k or 5k words per day for the next two weeks (about all the time I have before I have to go back to work).

I finished the third draft of Genesis Earth in less than three weeks. I finished the third draft of Bringing Stella Home in considerably more time than that, but that was partially because of other real-world stuff out of my control (like a nightmarish internship), but between that and the fourth draft, it was much the same thing.

So anyhow, I’m having an awesome time revising Worlds Away from Home, and the finished draft is going to be AWESOME. And next to changing someone’s life with one of your books, that’s probably one of the best feelings you can have as a writer.

Man, writing is so much fun. 🙂

Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1 is finished!

That’s right; my fifth novel, Into the Nebulous Deep, is finished! Here are the stats:

ms pages: 447
words: 101,215
file size: 230 KB
chapters: 20
start date: 7 March 2011
end date: 14 May 2011

And the wordle:

This novel is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and takes place within the same universe as Worlds Away from Home (note to self: find new title for that one). I got the idea for the novel from a conversation with one of my first readers for BSH, who mentioned that James didn’t get a whole lot of closure at the end and still had a lot of maturing to do. Immediately, I saw that there was a story there, and got to work figuring out how to tell it.

This was back in October, and like so many other things, the project quickly started going in about twenty different directions. I was still on something of an sf romance binge, so I decided to throw in a love story, and that quickly turned into a love triangle with a weird sf twist. But then, I started getting interested in the girls’ stories, which led to other subplots, which led to more stuff…and…and…

Actually, for a rough draft, I feel I pulled it off pretty well. I dropped the ball on some aspects of the story (didn’t develop the techno-democracy elements of the Colony hardly at all, and dropped James’s sidekick without giving his character a satisfying arc), and forgot to throw in other stuff until well past midway through (the wolf vs. sheepdog debate–Lars has a rather feisty take on that, which should be interesting), but I think the overall structure is mostly intact. For a rough draft, I’m rather pleased.

Of course, it will need a major triage edit before I can send it out to any first readers. It has problems, I know what they are, and I need to give the draft a major overhaul to get it to the point where feedback would be helpful.

But after ten weeks of working on this thing, I’m ready to move on to something else. Next up: my second revision of Worlds Away from Home. I am sooo stoked to get working on this project–it’s going to be AWESOME!

The song that had the biggest impact on my as I wrote ITND was probably this remix of hot head bop on ocremix. I think the lyrics sum up James’s character pretty well, especially in this book:

Now, onto other exciting things!

Where will Joe go?

Just a quick and dirty update before bed, because hey it’s been forever since I’ve posted to this thing.

Holy crap, this last week was CRAZY for my family! Youngest sister got married, middle sister had a baby, and oldest sister…well, I’m not at liberty to discuss that yet. But congratulations to all of you!

It was fun to get out and see everyone, but now that I’m back, man I’m looking forward to the next month. Wrote 2.5k words today in ITND, only two more chapters and an epilogue to go.

And strangely enough, I don’t feel like the project totally sucks. Usually by this point, my fingertips are bleeding it hurts so much to write. But no, even though this is a rough draft and it needs some major story level edits, I don’t feel that it totally sucks (knock on wood).

Now, whether that’s a sign that I’m maturing as a writer, or simply self-delusion …your guess is as good as mine. Probably better, actually.

One thing I’m really wondering about, though, are my post-summer plans. Originally, I was thinking of taking a year to teach English someplace where I could earn enough money to live off of until I break in with my novels. Now…well, I’m not so sure. I’d love to go back to the Middle East, or maybe someplace like Georgia on the TLG program, but Korea…I dunno.

As some of you know, I’m in a local Provo band. Right now, we’re just writing music, but it’s coming along quite well, and we’re hoping to start putting on shows in August. Except…that’s when I’d be leaving, if I were going to Korea. For a year.

Also, I’d miss out on some prime opportunities to build my writing career, like Worldcon, and that seems rather foolish if what I really want to do is be a writer.

The TLG program looks interesting because 1) it’s closer to the Middle East, geographically and culturally, 2) it’s much shorter, and 3) the program isn’t quite as rigorous. In short, it seems like a great way to test out whether I can juggle a TEFL career with my writing, whether I’m suited to TEFL, and whether dropping everything to travel for a while is really a good idea.

Trouble is, the program doesn’t pay much, so I wouldn’t be any better off financially once I get back to the states. Also, if I sign up now, I’d still be there through much of the fall, cutting me out of band stuff.

But if I do decide to stay in Utah for the medium term, I feel like I should at least get something out of it–like, say, a master’s degree. In something. Not sure what yet, but I’ll start looking into that ASAP.

Man, I can just imagine my parents cringing as they read this…

But I still haven’t nixed Korea as an option. The applications are still going through, and I plan on completing the online TEFL course this month. Perhaps finishing the course will help me find out if this is what I want to do. I don’t know.

But what I really want to do (besides go back to the Middle East) is write. And I’m not going to lose sight of that, no matter what happens.

Goals for May

The last two weeks have pretty much decimated my writing routine. Between family stuff and a 40 hour per week temp job, I’ve pretty much fallen behind on everything.

However, the good news is that with the money from the temp job, I can afford to take a month off to work exclusively on writing projects. Here’s what I plan to accomplish, in order of importance:

Finish Into the Nebulous Deep 1.1.
Finish the online TEFL class.
Publish Journey to Jordan on the Kindle.
Finish >50% of Worlds Away from Home 3.0.
Prepare Genesis Earth for publication.
Release the short stories on Nook, Smashwords.
Switch to Linux.

A hefty bill, especially considering that my youngest sister’s wedding is next weekend. However, I think I can definitely do it. I’ve got about 18k words left in ITND, and with the feedback from my first readers, I’ve got tons of ideas for WAFH. That project is going to be fun.

Journey to Jordan shouldn’t be too hard, either. I found a good WYSIWYG html editor and played around with some test files today until I figured out how to make it work. Now, I just need to play around with an actual Kindle to see how small I need to make the interior illustrations/photos to make sure they look good. After that, it’s just copy and paste from old blogs, with a little spot editing and some time to write a foreword.

Journey to Jordan is going to be a lot of fun. It’s a travel journal, not a science fiction novel, but my experiences in the Middle East definitely shaped my writing style, and it might be fun for readers of my novels/stories to see where the influences came from. If all goes well, I can have it up by the 14th.

But above all else, my priority is going to be writing. I want to get back into a steady routine, plugging out a good +2.5k words each day until ITND is finished. The deadline for that is the 14th, but I want to have it finished sooner if possible. It’s going to be hard with my sister’s wedding, but I’ll do the best I can.

Of course, this is all assuming that I can take the whole month of May off. However, Pioneer Book called me up on Saturday to set up an interview–they’ve got a position open, and I’m pretty optimistic that they’ll want to hire me.

If that happens, great! I’ll just push some of this stuff back into June and juggle part time work with these writing projects. Full time work is much harder to juggle, but if things don’t work with Pioneer Book, the guys at the temp job want me to come back in June. So either way, I won’t be broke (inshallah).

The ultimate goal, of course, is to make the writing pay the bills. That seems more possible to me now than ever before, but it’s still a ways out there. 2015, though–that’s the goal. I want to me making a full time living as a writer by 2015.

But for now, I’d better get some sleep. After all, I want to write +4k words tomorrow. Wish me luck!