The Self-Sufficient Writer: Introduction

Before I graduated from college five years ago, I decided that I was going to pursue writing as a full-time career. That was my dream: to make a living telling stories that I love.

It’s been a crazy ride so far, and I don’t doubt that it’s only going to get crazier. For the better part of a year now, I’ve managed to live that dream, but a changing book market combined with a shift to writing longer books has made for rocky times ahead. That’s just the way things go when you’re self-employed: you never know how much you’re going to make each year, or when your income streams are going to dry up unexpectedly.

As a career writer, there are a lot of other economic challenges I expect to face. Health insurance, for example: the current system here in the US is completely slanted against self-employed people, especially those who don’t want to be totally dependent on the government. Without a steady paycheck, I also expect that I won’t be able to get a traditional mortgage. And self-employment taxes… don’t even get me started.

Point is, it’s tough to make a living as a career writer—and that’s without taking into account how anyone actually makes any money at it. It’s an oft repeated truth in the entertainment industry that no one knows anything, and that’s true of books more than any other segment. No one knows why some books flop and others take off, which can be really frustrating when your ability to make a living depends on that.

Fortunately, there are two sides to the “make a living” equation. It’s not just about building your income streams, it’s also about reducing your expenses. So long as the money flowing in is greater than or equal to the money flowing out, you’re in the black.

Over the past five years, I’ve come to realize that the best security I can ever hope to have comes from learning to live a self-sufficient lifestyle. That means learning how to make, store, and ideally grow my own food, how to fix, reuse, or re-purpose things that are old or broken, and how to DIY as much as reasonably possible. Basically, I’ve learned how to be something of an urban homesteader, insulating myself from economic shocks through developing the skills of self-sufficiency.

It’s been an ongoing process, and I still have a lot to learn. At the same time, though, I’ve managed to cut my expenses fairly significantly, living on just four-figures with little or no debt and still managing to put aside a little each month into savings. I’ve also learned how to eat really well on food that I’ve grown myself, which beats anything you can buy in the store. So while I’m not yet an expert, I do think I’ve learned a few things that are worth sharing.

Over the next couple of months, I plan to write a few blog posts where I share my experiences and explain what I’ve learned. If you’re an aspiring writer like I was five years ago and you want to learn how to make it, or if you’re just someone who’s interested in becoming more self-sufficient in general, I hope you’ll find this blog series interesting and informative. And if you’re already an enthusiast for self-reliant lifestyles, feel free to stick around and share your own experiences! I’m definitely interested in hearing what you guys have to say.

The Self-Sufficient Writer (Index)

$.99 sale for TALES OF THE FAR OUTWORLDS

Hi guys! Just a quick announcement that Star Wanderers: Tales of the Far Outworlds (Omnibus V-VIII) is on a special $.99 for the week!

While this omnibus contains the last four parts of the series, they stand on their own a little bit better and can be read independently of the first four. My favorite book is probably Deliverance (Part VIII), which was a lot of fun to write. Also, Dreamweaver (Part V) is basically a retelling of Outworlder (Part I), but from Noemi’s point of view.

I’m also running a Goodreads giveaway for the print edition, which came out just a couple of months ago. The giveaway ends when the sale ends, at the end of the week. To enter the giveaway, click here.

In the meantime, you can pick up the ebook edition of Tales of the Far Outworlds basically everywhere for $.99 until Sunday. So check it out!

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Blogging vs. journal writing

So as you may have noticed, I generally blog a lot less nowadays than I did just a couple of years ago. That doesn’t mean I don’t blog at all, or that I don’t value keeping a blog, but it’s just not something I do as frequently as I used to. I’ve been wondering why that is—about what changed to make me blog less frequently. And I think I’ve found the answer.

Last year, one of my new year’s resolutions was to keep a detailed weekly personal journal. All of my other 2014 resolutions eventually fell by the wayside, but that was the one that I actually accomplished. In fact, towards the end of the year, I switched from keeping a weekly journal to keeping an almost daily journal. By December, I had written 169,000 words—more than four hundred pages—about the personal events in my life for the year 2014 alone.

I’ve been a journal writer ever since elementary school, but when I started this blog back in 2007, I kind of took a break from that. My reasoning at the time was that my blog was my journal, and while I recognized that there were some parts of my life that I wanted to keep private, I figured that those just weren’t worth writing about.

After living and studying in Jordan for a summer, I realized that there was value in keeping a private journal in addition to my blog, and I started up another one. But I kept it fairly infrequently, sometimes with months going by between journal entries. In 2012 when I went to Georgia, I had a lot more things happening in my life to write about (and a lot less access to the internet), so I kept it much more regularly. But then I came back to the States, and life fell back into a monotonous routine.

The thing that changed in 2014 was the realization that I wasn’t just keeping a journal for myself, but that I was keeping it for my children, grandchildren, and others who would come after. When I was a teenager, journal writing was an act of self-discovery, and for that reason it was much more private. As an adult, though, I already have a pretty firm sense of who I am, so the self-discovery is much less important. Keeping a personal historical record, though, both for myself and for my family, is much more important to me.

Even though I’m not just keeping a journal for myself anymore, there is still a lot of sensitive information in there that really shouldn’t be available for public consumption at the present time. That’s especially true now that my blog is less of a personal project than it was when I started it. Now that I’m a professional writer, I’m a lot more careful about what I post here. I still try to be honest and genuine, but I’m probably not going to blog about, say, my romantic relationships or personal spiritual experiences.

It’s weird, though, because the roles are now reversed. Back in 2007, I felt free to blog about anything but didn’t know what to write about in my journal. Now, I know exactly what sorts of things to write about in my journal (I’ve already up to 42,000 words for this year) but have no idea what to write for my blog. And that’s the main reason why I haven’t been posting quite as much.

So for those of you who do keep up with this blog, what sorts of things do you want to hear about? I’m happy to post weekly updates on my writing, though I’m worried it might get tedious after a while (contrary to popular belief, writing is one of the most boring professions on the planet). Do you want to hear more of my thoughts on current and political events? More reflections on life as an indie author? More insights about the worlds and characters in my books? More tvtropes?

This blog is not going anywhere, so don’t worry about that. But it’s going to change as I figure out exactly what I want to use it for.

My LTUE 2015 Schedule!

It’s that time of year again—time for Life, the Universe, and Everything, Utah Valley’s best and longest running sci-fi convention! I will definitely be there, so if you’re able to make it this year, be sure to hunt me down and say hi! And if you can’t make it, I’ll be tweeting about it using the #LTUE hashtag, so you can follow along that way as well.

I’m on four panels this year, one of which I’m apparently moderating. Here’s my schedule:

THURSDAY

10:00 AM: Raising the Language Barrier

6:00 PM: Publishing in the Future

SATURDAY

12:00 PM: What I Wish I Knew When I Started—Common Mistakes Made by New Writers

1:00 PM: Self-Publishing Pros and Cons

I’ll also be helping out with registration, so you might see me there as well. At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be at the mass signing: there was some confusion about the sign-ups for that, and I get the sense that things are still very disorganized. But if you want to buy a book from me, I’ll have a few on hand either in the green room or in my car.

See you there!

Thoughts on American Sniper

Yesterday, I saw American Sniper. In a word, it was fantastic. Super intense—so much that the friend I went to see it with had to walk out in the middle—but well, well worth it.

The movie is about Chris Kyle, a US sniper in Iraq who had an incredible number of kills. He’s credited with being the most lethal sniper in US history. And yet, at the end of the movie, he states quite openly that he can answer a clear conscience for every shot he took—including the one in the trailer, which was his first combat kill.

Pause for a minute to think about that. What must it be like to have your first ever kill be a child? There you are with your finger on the trigger, wondering if you have it in you to take another human life, and instead of an obvious combatant, you’re presented with a grenade-carrying child. On top of that, add on the fact that you’re a family man. Could you do it?

And that was just the first combat encounter of the film. Things got progressively more intense with each combat tour, with some truly evil people and some truly hard decisions.

At the same time, though, the film didn’t try to dehumanize the enemy. Again and again, Chris goes head-to-head with an enemy sniper named Mustafa who is just as good as he is. Just as we see Chris with his wife and child, we see that Mustafa has a family as well. But there are evil people in the movie—truly evil people, such as the Butcher, whose preferred instrument of death is a power drill—and we see them too. Because guess what? Those people were real, and the atrocities they committed were real as well.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to kill one person, let alone more than two hundred. And yet at the end of the film, I sincerely believe Chris Kyle when he says that he can answer a clear conscience for every shot that he took. That is what made the movie so fascinating. The man was a true hero—I don’t see how you can possibly come to any other conclusion than that.

Still, I couldn’t help but think about the wider context of the war in which Chris Kyle was fighting. Men like the Butcher exist in every society, including our own. If a foreign government had set up a brutal dictator over our country, plunged us into a ten year proxy war in which millions of our people were killed, imposed a punishing sanctions regime on us for another ten years, and finished it off by invading us, would the United States be any different? Because that’s exactly what happened in Iraq. Every enemy that we have in the Middle East is an enemy of our own creation, and the harder we try to fight them, the more enemies we create.

I don’t say this to diminish Chris Kyle at all. I admire the man tremendously, and I can only hope that I would rise to the level of his stature if given the same responsibility to protect American lives. And to be fair, American Sniper didn’t try to defend the Iraq War at all. In fact, it wasn’t even about the Iraq War—it was about a soldier who struggled to do the right thing in combat and not be consumed by the war itself. In that aspect, I think that this film was outstanding. It’s probably the most empathetic war movie that I’ve ever seen, and I would gladly watch it again.

I have tremendous respect for the men and women of the US military, and this movie reminded me why. At the same time, I have very little respect for the politicians who sacrifice the lives of these brave men and women for their political ambitions. My personal views on the subject are best reflected in this 2012 campaign ad for Ron Paul which sums up the history quite succinctly. I don’t agree with Ron Paul on every issue, but on this one, I think he’s spot on:

But yeah, American Sniper was an amazing movie—well worth seeing. It’s rated R mostly for language, so even if you don’t usually see R rated movies, don’t let the rating alone scare you away.

Pay what you want

For a long time, I’ve said that if I didn’t have to make a living at this writing thing, I would love to give all my books away for free. Well, for the month of January at least, I’ve decided to do just that.

Smashwords has a special pricing option that allows readers to set the price for your ebooks that they’re willing to pay. There is no minimum price, so you can set the price to $0 and download it for free. You can also come back and pay for the book after you’ve read it. Smashwords breaks down where the money goes, so you can see how much of it goes to the author. Smashwords pays authors better than any other site I’ve worked with, and also gives you the widest variety of ebook formats to choose from.

I started this experiment two weeks ago and didn’t say much about it, just because I wanted to see what would happen first. The response so far has been quite surprising. A lot of people have downloaded the books for free, but the people who are opting to pay have more than made up the difference. If things continue like this, I may just keep all my Smashwords books at Reader Sets the Price indefinitely.

So if you’ve got an account at Smashwords and you’d like to pick up some of my books, feel free to check them out! You can pay whatever you want for them, or download them for free and tip me later.

More than money, though, what I really need for my Smashwords books are reviews. It’s an unfortunate fact that people who download ebooks for free are more likely to leave negative reviews (and then download the rest of the books in the series they supposedly hate, leaving negative reviews on each one). If you have a Smashwords account and you’ve enjoyed any of my books, I would really appreciate it if you’d take a couple minutes to go over there and leave an honest review. I would actually appreciate reviews more than payment, so if you want to pick up one of my books that you haven’t read yet, leave a review on one that you have and we’ll call it even.

That just about does it. When January is over, I’ll write another blog post where I’ll detail my results.

Thanks for reading!

Things I want to learn in 2015

I was going to follow up my retrospective 2014 post with another one, but instead I want to look ahead at the things I hope to learn in 2015. Of course, I’m sure that many of the things I’ll learn are things that I couldn’t have foreseen, but it helps to have some direction to start out with. Here goes!

How to consistently sell books outside of Amazon

If I learn nothing else this year, I want it to be this. In 2014, about 90% of my sales were through Amazon, and when they came out with their Kindle Unlimited subscription service, my income took a big hit (Amazon requires all books in KU to be exclusive, so none of my books qualified). If I can grow my non-Amazon sources of income to more than 50% of my total revenue, that would be fantastic.

So far this year, I’m off to a good start. I have a book featured in Apple’s ongoing First in a Series Free promotion, and that’s given my books on iBooks a huge boost. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I sell more books on iBooks this month than I will on Amazon. But the key here is to sell consistently on the other platforms. Right now, I have no idea how to do that—but I definitely want to learn!

How to turn readers into lifelong fans

I’ve been publishing for the last four years now, and I’ve picked up a few fans along the way, but I get the sense that most of the people who read my books are just casual readers who find my books interesting but tend to move on after they’ve read them. Perhaps this is normal, but I would like to take things a step further and build a strong fanbase around my books.

Up until now, I’ve mostly focused on writing books, not in connecting with the people who actually read them. But I want to do a lot more of that next year—not only in order to sell more books, but also to connect with the fan community in general and make a more lasting contribution to the genre.

How to write (harder) better faster (stronger)

If I could write 10,000 words a day—good words, publishable words—that would absolutely fantastic. So far, the most I’ve managed in a single day is about 5,000. Right now, I’m lucky if I hit 2,000. It’s aggravating, because I feel like I’m so ridiculously slow, and the stuff that I do write usually needs some cleaning up before it’s publishable … basically, I just want to be a robot unicorn who farts rainbows and writes a bestselling novel every 72 hours.

Barring that, I’d just like to learn how to overcome some of the things that get in the way of writing.

How to write memorable characters that readers fall in love with

Of all the areas of craft that I’d like to work on, this is the one that probably needs improvement the most. I’ve had lots of readers tell me that a particular story resonated with them, but I’ve never had a reader tell me that they were crazy about a particular character. I think I’m reasonably good at writing characters that are complex and three-dimensional, but that’s a separate thing from writing a character that readers fall in love with.

I think I’ll stop here for now. There are other things that I’m sure will be good to learn, but these are the ones I especially want to learn in 2015.

First in a Series iBooks promotion

For those of you who read on an Apple device, I’m happy to announce that Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I) is one of several titles listed in a special first in series promotion over on iBooks!

If you’re looking for new books to read, this is a great way to find them. The promotion runs through January 14th, so you have until then to check it out. Even if you can’t read all these books right away, you can keep them on your device or in the cloud until you’re ready to get to them.

So check it out! And thanks for reading!

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Outworlder

He wanders the stars in search of a home. Instead, he got a girl without one.

When Jeremiah set out for the stars, he never expected to receive an accidental bride. Since neither of them speak the same language, he has no way to tell her that there's been a terrible mistake. But the more time they spend together, the less of a mistake it seems.

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About the Book

He wanders the stars in search of a home. Instead, he got a girl without one.

When Jeremiah arrived at Megiddo Station, all he wanted was to make some trades and resupply his starship. He never thought he’d come away with a wife.

Before he knows it, he’s back on his ship, alone with his accidental bride. Since neither of them speak the same language, he has no way to tell her that there’s been a terrible mistake. And because of the deadly famine ravaging her home, there’s no going back. She’s entirely at his mercy, and that terrifies him more than anything.

Jeremiah isn’t ready to take responsibility for anyone. He’s a star wanderer, roaming the Outworld frontier in search of his fortune. Someday he’ll settle down, but for now, he just wants to drop the girl off at the next port and move on.

As he soon finds out though, she has other plans.

Details

Author: Joe Vasicek
Series: Outworld Trilogy, Book 99
Genres: Science Fiction, Science Fiction, Space Opera
Tag: 2012 Release
Publication Year: July 2012
Length: novelette
eBook Price: free!

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Get the ebook FREE from my online store!

Get the audiobook FREE from my online store!

Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek fell in love with science fiction and fantasy when he read The Neverending Story as a child. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Genesis Earth, Gunslinger to the Stars, The Sword Keeper, and the Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic at Brigham Young University and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus Mountains. He lives in Utah with his wife and two apple trees.

Other Books in the "Outworld Trilogy"

Star Wanderers

Children of the Starry Sea

Preview

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A HILL ON WHICH TO DIE now available on Amazon!

Hey everyone! Just wanted to give you a heads up that my latest release, A Hill on Which to Die, is now up on Amazon for a promotional launch price of $.99. Here it is!

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Thoughts on the new Star Wars trailer

I have a lot of thoughts on the new Star Wars trailer. But first, a little background.

Growing up in the 90s, I was a huge Star Wars fan. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Star Wars was my life. I played X-Wing every day, I watched at least one of the original trilogy movies every week, I read every Star Wars book in the library that I could get my hands on, and I daydreamed and made up Star Wars stories all the time. I was living in the golden age of science fiction (about age 9-12), and that meant Star Wars.

Then Episode I came out. Like all the other fans, I was super, super excited about it. Like all of the other fans, it was a huge disappointment. Several things ruined that movie for me, but the biggest were Jar-Jar Binks and midichloriens. The most magical aspect of the Star Wars universe, the Force, was singlehandedly ruined by the whole midichlorien thing, and as for Jar-Jar … I don’t even want to go there.

There were a lot of other little things too: like the pod racing sequence, where the sand people were thrown in for a gag, and that part where Obi Wan and Qui Gon Jinn drove a submarine through the center of the planet. My suspension of disbelief was stretched to the breaking point, and this awesome thing that I loved now felt like a little kid story. But the biggest things that broke the movie for me were Jar-Jar and the midochloriens.

But that was Episode I, and Episode II was bound to be better. After all, how could you screw up the Clone Wars? Unfortunately, I was about to find out.

To be fair, Episode II wasn’t nearly the disaster that Episode I was. Not that that’s saying much, but still, it wasn’t horrible–it was just bad. The romance was cringe-worthy, the pace was glacial, and the action sequences had too much flash and not enough substance.

Jar-Jar was gone (thank the stars!), but C-3PO and R2D2 were little better, and the fact that they were in the story at all caused a major sprain to my suspension of disbelief. The lightsaber duel with Yoda and that other guy felt like it was thrown in for a gag, and Anakin … yeah. By the time the big stadium battle happened at the end, all I could do was yawn. The battle of Hoth had a lot less flash to it, and yet was infinitely more engrossing.

By this point, I’d started to phase Star Wars out of my life. I still occasionally watched the original trilogy movies, and played stuff like X-Wing: Alliance from time to time, but I wasn’t nearly as invested in the franchise as before. I’d moved on to stuff like Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, and spent more time playing stuff like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Star Wars did not hold the same magic as it had before.

Then came Episode III, the final nail in the coffin for me. I can sum it all up in one word: “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”

Episode III was marginally better than Episode II, but that was only because of Order 66, where all the Jedi died and the Republic transformed into the Empire. Order 66 was pretty cool. But the rest of the movie? I mean, right from the first battle, I knew that it was going to suck. When a ship in orbit tilts to one side, it does NOT cause everything to fall in that direction! Lucas might as well have shown people falling off of the south pole. From that point on, my suspension of disbelief was shattered beyond any hope of recovery.

But the worst part was Anakin’s transformation. Here’s a guy who is supposed to turn from this whiny, annoying brat into the most iconic sci-fi villain of all time … and I just wasn’t buying it. With each progressive step, he just didn’t seem any different than before. Instead of the character driving the story, it felt like the plot was shoehorning the character into a role, and all he could do was passively accept it. The slaughter of the young Jedi knights at the temple, the oath of fealty to Chancellor Palpatine–none of it felt authentic at all. And even after he put on the mask, he was still the whiny, annoying brat from before. Darth Vader, the linchpin of the entire franchise, was ruined.

At that point, I completely checked out. That’s right–the kid whose whole life was tied up with Star Wars now wanted nothing to do with it. I still went back to some of the old, pre-Episode I stuff from time to time, just for nostalgia’s sake, but I had no desire to keep up with any of the new stuff that was coming out. Books, games, TV shows–I was done.

Then Disney bought Star Wars, and rumors started to fly. My expectations at first were pretty low, but George Lucas had done so much to screw it up already that I figured Disney couldn’t do any worse. Then I realized that Disney does a lot more than princesses and fairy tales these days, and my indifference turned to curiosity. When J.J. Abrams was slated to direct it, curiosity turned to the faintest glimmer of hope.

Which brings us to this:

I have to be honest, I’m actually kind of excited. After all that the prequels did to ruin Star Wars for me, that’s saying quite a lot.

First of all, the black stormtrooper. I’ve heard a lot of griping about the fact that he’s black (or more accurately, that he isn’t one of the clones from Episode II), but come on guys–do you really expect the first generation stormtroopers to stay on active duty for fifty-plus years? Of course the Empire is going to replace the clone warriors with newer soldiers (hopefully, ones that can actually shoot).

Personally, I think it’s kind of awesome that he’s black. More than that, though, I think it’s awesome that he has a face. Imperial stormtroopers have always been quintessential mooks, and that’s always bugged me. Just once, I’d like to see the good guys face off against a bunch of stormtroopers who can actually shoot straight–it would add a whole new level of tension and danger. To feature one as an actual character is promising indeed

One of the things I loved the most about Star Wars was the grungy, dirty, second-hand feel of most of the technology. In the original trilogy, you really get the sense that you’re in a used future, especially on the planet Tatooine. From what I can see in the trailer, it looks like they’re bringing that back. Deserts + derelict spaceship wreckages + super fast hovercars that look like they’re about to break down = OMG YES.

But the part of the trailer that really won me over was this part right here:Specifically, how realistic the X-Wings look. The way they kick up those clouds of water as they buzz the surface of that lake–you can’t deny, that’s pretty freaking awesome. My biggest running issue with the prequels was how they constantly abused my suspension of disbelief, so the fact that these X-Wings actually look real is perhaps the most promising part of the trailer for me.

Yes, the bad guy’s lightsaber with the dinky little lightsaber spurs looks … well, dinky. No argument there. But the last part, with the Millennium Falcon doing the crazy barrel roll as the music hits you with all of its glory–HOLY CRAP YES!!!!!

There’s not a whole lot of substance in this trailer. It’s only a tease–but wow, what a tease! I’d hate to get my hopes up only to have them dashed as badly as Episode I dashed them, but I’ve got to be honest: I’m actually kind of stoked for this movie now.

Episodes I, II, and III alienated a lot of the older fanbase, but it did appeal to the younger generation that came to the Star Wars universe without any preconceptions or expectations. Before I saw the trailer, I thought that Episode VII would simply continue that trend. Now, I actually think it may turn things around–bring back the old-school fans while showing the younger generation that Star Wars can be so much more.