Uncategorized – Page 86 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

I will turn this time suck into a powerful new writing motivator

Last night, I caved and bought the new FTL game that all my friends have been talking about.

OMIGOSH.

Six hours later, I was screaming in agony as my awesome starship went down in flames. AGAIN. In sector eight (on the easy setting, though, so not too impressive).

Seriously, this game is AMAZING. I haven’t seen such a perfect combination of strategy, skill, random chance, and dumb luck since Star Control II. There are SO MANY things you can do … and SO MANY ways you can die! I love it!

Granted, with every game like this, there’s a danger that it will become a huge time suck (minecraft, anyone?). However, this one is different.

Famous last words, right?

But seriously, each round takes only an hour or two, there’s only one save slot, and you die so frequently that it’s hard to become too attached to any one game. In other words, this is the sort of game I can pick up and put down again without devoting too much mental space to it. Which (hopefully) makes it a perfect carrot to get me to write more.

Here’s what I’m going to do: for every thousand words in my WIP, I’ll allow myself to play one (and only one!) round of FTL. If I hit my daily goal, I’ll allow myself to play as much as I want.

It’s still too early to tell if this is going to work, but I’m going to give it a try. Seriously, though, once I told myself “you can play FTL as soon as you hit that first 1k,” all I wanted to do was write! And now that I’m more or less finished with this blog post, I think that’s what I’m going to do.

Later!

And now for a little Minecraft…

I call it Teotihuacan.

The temples each have a base of 31×31 blocks and a height of 13 blocks, with the topmost level a 7×7 square. They are spaced kitty corner five blocks diagonally, in a sort of equilateral quadrangle. The biome is actually a swamp; I added the jungle trees later for effect.

The idea came to me a couple of weeks ago, when I was playing with my toddler nephew. I built a Mayan step pyramid out of Duplos with him, then figured why not do the same thing in Minecraft? The first attempt was in survival mode, which took FOREVER, so for this one I decided to go creative.

Overall, I’m rather pleased. This was my first time playing around in creative mode, and I must say it’s a lot more … creative. Go figure.

Don’t worry, I’m still writing. This was just a little diversion to keep me busy between job applications and temp jobs. The staffing agency has kept me pretty busy until now, so I’m looking for something a little more steady. Had an interview at J-Dogs today that went pretty well–hopefully, I’ll hear back from them next week.

In the meantime, I’d better get some sleep. G’night!

Read an Ebook Week 2013 at Smashwords

In case you didn’t know, the first week of March is Read an Ebook Week. Apparently, this is something that the early adopters of ebooks started back in 2004 to help popularize the new reading format and break down some of the initial wariness from the general public.

Well, Smashwords does a Read an Ebook Week promo every year, and I’ve enrolled all of my books at a 50% discount. If you want to check out one of my $.99 short stories like “Memoirs of a Snowflake,” or Part II (Fidelity) and Part III (Sacrifice) of the Star Wanderers series, you can now pick those up for free. If you want to try out one of my novels, like Bringing Stella Home or Desert Stars, they’re all under $3. In fact, with the promo code REW50, all my books are under $3 on Smashwords right now.

Also, if you’re a Smashwords affiliate, I’ve juiced the affiliate bonus for all of my titles to 35%. Since I sell all my full-length novels at $4.95, you can make about $1.75 for each referral–almost the full 85% for a novel selling at $2.99.

Some indie writers aren’t too keen on Smashwords, but I’m definitely a fan of the site. Mark Coker has done a lot of great things, opening doors and breaking down walls to help us get our stories out to the world. He’s also been good to readers, especially international readers, who have to pay an extra $2 surcharge for any ebooks they buy on Amazon.

Once you purchase a book on Smashwords, you have access to multiple DRM-free formats, including mobi (Kindle), epub (Nook, Kobo ereader), PDF, and straight up HTML for online reading, among others. Anytime the author uploads a new version, you have access to that as well (or any of the previous versions since the initial purchase). All the books are screened before going up on the site, so the formatting is generally pretty clean.

So yeah, between March 3-9, feel free to check out my books on Smashwords! And while you’re at it, check out some of the other great authors as well. There’s a lot of good stuff up there–a lot of black swans that would never have made it in traditional publishing, but thanks to the ebook revolution now have a decent chance. Who knows what you’ll find? It might just be your next favorite book!

Why I am not afraid of the Noise part III

These days, it seems as if everyone is terrified by the fact that anyone can publish a book. Indies, self-published writers, authors with traditional book contracts–it doesn’t matter. Everyone is mortified by the sheer volume of crap books coming out nowadays, as if Sturgeon’s Law is a new thing. The assumption is that all this noise is making it harder to get noticed–that readers have to slog through all the crap to find the good stuff.

I’ve blogged about this twice before, here and here. My views haven’t changed–I still think that the flood of crap ebooks is nothing for writers or readers to fear. However, I’ve found a new way to think about it.

It’s been almost two years since I tested the waters of self/indie publishing. Since then, I’ve learned that an ebook is like a message in a bottle, floating in the midst of a stormy sea. Readers make up the ocean, and the vicissitudes of the market are the storms that rage across it.

A good book will tend to float, whereas a bad book will tend to sink. Gimmicks like Select freebies and other promotional activities may pull the bottle back up to the surface, but they won’t make it float. And maybe, if a bottle sinks to the bottom of the ocean, someone will come trawling for sunken treasure and haul it up, but more likely than not it will just stay there.

Most readers don’t go to the bottom of the ocean to find their books. They go to the beaches, where the bottles eventually wash up. These represent communities like book clubs or Goodreads, or just groups of friends who like to talk about books. When a bottle does wash up on a beach, that represents a book coming into its natural audience. It might take years, but if the book is good enough to float, eventually it will wash up somewhere.

As long as the bottle floats, it doesn’t matter how deep the ocean is beneath it. Similarly, as long as a book is selling a handful of copies a month, it doesn’t matter that there are ten million bazillion crap ebooks on Amazon, or Smashwords, or Kobo, or wherever. Those books are all at the bottom of the ocean, where the waters are calm and cold.

When I was a kid, I was terrified of deep water. Then I had a swimming instructor who told me that it didn’t matter how deep the water was–so long as I could swim, the ocean could be a mile deep and it wouldn’t matter. Since then, I’ve swum in some pretty deep waters, and I can say with complete confidence that my swimming instructor was right.

Discoverability and visibility are challenges for authors everywhere, but the problem is not the flood of crap that everyone always worries about. It doesn’t matter how deep the ocean is, or how many ebooks are being published. Instead, the problem is making sure that your writing is good enough to float. If it is, then with enough courage and perseverance, you’re going to make it.

Right now, I feel like most of my books are floating on the face of that stormy ocean. A couple of them have sunk, mostly the short stories. I’m not much of a short story writer, though, so that makes sense–I still have a lot to learn in that area. But the novels and novellas are all selling, with no promotion other than the first title in the series set to perma-free. That tells me that they aren’t crap. So long as I can keep telling good stories, I’m confident that my books will find their audience. When and where they’ll wash up, I have no idea, but one thing is certain: all the crap at the bottom of the ebook ocean isn’t going to keep me from making it.

Image taken from this site here, which I recommend checking out. Interesting stories!

The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend by David Gemmell

druss_chronicles Before Dros Delnoch, before Skeln Pass, before the Legend there was a seventeen year old woodsman and his young bride Rowena. They lived a happy, simple life until slavers attacked their village and carried her away.

But Druss would stop at nothing to save her. With the demon-cursed blade Snaga, he crossed oceans and continents, fighting corsairs, brigands, armies, empires, even chaos beasts to find her. And with each battle, the legend grew.

But the greatest challenge Druss would face was not a warrior or a monster, but an old family curse from beyond the land of the living.

Oh man, it’s been far, far too long since I’ve read a David Gemmell book. Far too long. And this one was perfect. It had everything you could possibly ask for in a book by David Gemmell: honor, glory, blood, war, mystics and evil sorcerers, monsters from beyond the grave, great empires and epic sieges, and even a good deal of romance. And Druss himself is such an awesome character, an unassuming, simple hero who may be brash and may have a temper, but is never completely corrupted by evil.

That said, this is a brutal, brutal book. The pithiest way I can describe it is Taken meets Lord of the Rings. People get killed. Women get raped. In fact, I think most of the women in the book get raped. Certainly, more than 50% of the characters die, most of them in a grisly, violent way. And not everyone is redeemed. In fact, some of the noblest characters fall.

But man, this is a good book. Where other fantasy books start off with the lore of the world, painting an exquisitely detailed picture of the world and the magic and the history, Gemmell just throws you right in and grabs you with the story. Things happen, and they happen quickly. From the beginning, he snags his hooks in you.

But more than anything, the story means something. Not in the sense that there’s some kind of underlying moral, or the characters are all black and white. They aren’t. People do good things for the wrong reasons, and bad things for the right reasons. Some of the most despicable characters rise up to do heroic things, while some of the noblest and most honorable characters end up fighting for evil through no fault of their own. But through it all, there’s so much truth, so much insight, that you can’t help but come away feeling like you’ve been through life and death, and seen the best that both have to offer.

I’m gushing, I know. This book is INCREDIBLE. Definitely on par with Gemmell’s best. I wish he could have written a hundred novels just like it. I would have read them all.

This is the second to last book in the Drenai series that I’ve read. The only one that I haven’t gotten to yet is The Legend of Deathwalker, and I plan to get to that one right away. After that, I’ll probably move on to the John Shannow novels, and then the Rigante series. In three years, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve read every book that David Gemmell has ever written. He’s just that kind of an author to me. And if he were still alive, you can bet I’d be ravenously devouring every new book that comes out…

Sadly, the number of David Gemmell books in the world is finite. But still, there’s quite a few left before I read them all. And one day, somewhere in the far-off future, I hope to write books as incredible as his. To one day surpass him would be an impossible dream…but as the Ventrians say, may all your dreams come true save one, for what is life without a dream?

Awesome, awesome book. If you’re a fantasy reader and brutal stuff like rape doesn’t trigger you, you definitely need to give the Drenai Series a try. Start with Legend, but get to this one shortly thereafter. It’s an amazing, incredible read.

Thoughts on Twitter

Oh man, I used to hate Twitter so much. It’s amusing (and a little bit embarrassing) to look back on some old threads on the Kindle Boards and see how snippy I would get with everyone who raved about it. I guess it’s just my contrarian nature.

Well, in the last month or so, my opinion of Twitter has done a 180. Most of that has to do with getting a smart phone and having quick and easy access to it. Back when I first signed up, I had lots of ideas for short, pithy tweets, but mostly when I was away from a computer. Because of that, Twitter became just another chore, like checking email or keeping up with Facebook updates. But now that I have easy, instant access, I can drop in whenever I want, without opening a browser and starting up another relentless cycle of timesucks.

About a year ago, I got involved in a huge discussion on the Kindle Boards with Nathan Lowell. It all started when he credited his success as a writer to Twitter. That hit me like a bombshell, since he’s following a very similar career path, and has had a tremendous amount of success at it. He shared a ton of helpful tips on that thread, all of which I carefully filed away for later. I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to try them out, since I was in Georgia and had limited internet access, but since getting back I’ve been slowly trying them out.

What I’ve found in the last few weeks is that Twitter is a great way to get into interesting online conversations that don’t require a high degree of time or commitment. The 140 character requirement makes it hard to say anything of any substance, but that’s actually a strength, because it makes it easier to follow what others have to say. Instead of channeling all your time and energy into a handful of comment / forum threads, you can start a dozen new conversations, or follow a dozen new people, or drop out for a while and do something else. Less substance means less commitment and more flexibility.

It makes me think of something Cory Doctorow mentioned on a panel at Worldcon 2011. He called Facebook the high fructose corn syrup of the internet–which is actually a very relevant comparison. Facebook is very information dense the same way that HFCS is very calorie dense. Both of them are fairly addictive (“compelling without being satisfying” is the way that Cory Doctorow put it). And just as HFCS is not very nutritive, Facebook is not a very good way to stay genuinely close to the most important people in your life, especially when you’re following hundreds of people whom you barely even know.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a great way to connect with people who aren’t much more than strangers or casual acquaintances. The value is not in what you’re able to share, but how many people you’re able to connect with. If I tried to make myself accessible to everyone via Facebook, I would quickly become overwhelmed. With Twitter, I am accessible simply by being there, and I can reach out to just about anyone and expect a response.

Some things I’ve found that have helped improve my Twitter experience:

Follow anyone who seems interesting, and unfollow them as soon as they stop being interesting. If you’re not getting much from Twitter, it’s probably because you’re following the wrong people and not following the right people. A follow isn’t a huge commitment, so no hard feelings if you break it off.
Reply to tweets that strike a chord with you. Don’t just consume–start a conversation. Add something, and you’ll get even more in return.
If you’re going to include a hashtag, try to offer something of value. Don’t just do it to get attention, or to draw people to some link or something. Do it because you want to contribute something meaningful.
Don’t approach it like a chore. If you want to bow out for a while, that’s fine–you don’t have to follow every tweet, or reply to everyone who tweets at you (at least, not right away). There isn’t any “right” or “wrong” way to use it–there’s just the way you use it.

So yeah, I plan to be much more active on Twitter in the future. I probably won’t go crazy fanatic with it like some people do, but I’ll be on there, so if you want a quick and easy way to keep in touch, that’s a great way to do it.

And as for Facebook, that’s pretty much only for my close friends now. When I got back from Georgia, I deleted more than half of my Facebook friends. With Facebook, Dunbar’s number (aka the 150 friend rule) is probably a good upper limit. With Twitter, I now agree with Nathan Lowell that it’s more of a lower limit than anything.

A not-so-obligatory New Year’s resolution

First of all, happy New Years! I hope you’re all looking forward to 2013 as much as I am. Last year was full of awesome life-changing experiences, but I have a feeling that this one is going to be even better.

So after chatting about resolutions with some old friends, I’ve decided that a good new year’s resolution should be more than just another mundane daily goal. Those are great, but you shouldn’t just set them at the beginning of the year and forget about them around February or March, you should adjust and rework them constantly no matter what time of the year it is.

Instead, a good resolution is some extraordinary task or challenge with a deadline of December 31st. Basically, it’s something from your bucket list that you hope to accomplish that year. Because it’s extraordinary, it’s not something that you forget in a month or two. And the deadline gives you a sense of urgency, so you don’t put it off for “someday.”

With that in mind, here’s my 2013 resolution:

Hike four of the seven peaks of Utah County.

I was originally going to go for all seven, but I’m not (yet) an experienced climber, and some of the peaks look a little difficult. Others, though, seem pretty doable. I’ve hiked Y Mountain several times, and got a chance to do a little hiking in Georgia. Four shouldn’t be too much, even with my relatively limited skill level right now.

Here are the seven peaks:

Of course, I’ll wait until June to make the first hike (probably Provo Peak). In the meantime, I’ll do what I can to get ready: eat healthy, climb a few smaller mountains, and otherwise get in shape for the big ones.

As far as writing goes, I’m going to go back on the early morning writing schedule and shoot for three hours of writing new words per day. My monthly goal is to start / finish / publish at least one thing, and my yearly goal is still to finish at least two novel-length works (2012 was Star Wanderers I-IV and Stars of Blood and Glory).

But it’s hard to call any of those goals resolutions, since most of them are probably going to change over the coming weeks and months. It’s hard to know exactly what life’s going to throw at me once I get back in Utah, so I’m going to stay flexible and just try to do the best I can.

I do want to publish Stars of Blood and Glory next month, and I think I can finish The Sword Keeper before then–if not, then definitely Star Wanderers: Benefactor. After that, I’d like to do a print version of Star Wanderers I-IV with some decent cover art. And Star Wanderers: Dreamweaver will probably be out sometime in the spring.

Beyond that, who knows? It all depends on where the muse takes me. One thing’s for sure, though–I’ll definitely keep writing.

Someday…

Someday I will settle down, probably in southern Utah or somewhere else in the American West. I will live with my wife and kids in a small house in the country, one that I’ve built with my own hands. It won’t be larger than 1,000 square feet, but we’ll have at least five acres of land–a small house with a big yard.

We will keep a sizeable garden and grow at least half of the food we eat. We’ll start with tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, and zucchini, then move on to other crops as our tastes change and our gardening skills improve. We will keep live chickens, and maybe a cow if it’s not too difficult. We will eat what we love, love what we eat, and live by the maxim: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In the winter, we’ll stay warm with a wood burning stove. Everything in our house will all be centered around one main room, which will help to keep our family close. We’ll sleep in the loft, with the kids on the other side. Daddy’s writing space will be off in the corner, but not cut off from the rest of the family.

Our house will be well-insulated, so it will be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We’ll get our water from a well on our property. Like good old-fashioned Mormons, we’ll grind our own wheat and bake fresh bread every week. We won’t own a lot of material things, but we won’t waste anything either. The people in our lives will always be more important than the things.

When we aren’t at home, we’ll be on the road. Our children will see the whole country, from the rolling hills of New England to the oil fields of West Texas, from the orchards of California to the skyscrapers of New York. My wife and I will have seen the world together, and we’ll visit our international friends as often as we can.

Above all else, we will be independent. No one will own us, and we’ll stay out of debt as much as possible. Our failures will be our own, as well as our successes. And when our friends and family need us, we’ll be there.

All of this will happen someday. That’s my dream. Someday soon, I’ll find a girl who shares this dream, and together we’ll make it a reality.

New theme

Hey guys, I decided to update my theme to make it a little less cluttered and easier to read. What do you think?

A lot of the stuff in the sidebar seemed rather useless, so I got rid of everything but the bare essentials (book links, email newsletter, progress bars) and the visitor map. The header images are from my book covers–they should cycle randomly.

At first, I thought I’d keep the tag splash, but it didn’t seem to fit with the word sizes. Not sure if I should bring it back or not. And as for the categories and archives, I’m not sure whether I should keep those somewhere or just get rid of them.

I like this design a lot so far, but I think it’s kind of annoying that the tags and categories are listed at the top of the blog post, instead of at the bottom. I’ll see what I can do to change that. I don’t want to tweak the actual theme files if I can avoid it, since they seem to update every now and then and when they do, all the modifications are lost.

I’ll probably make a few minor changes over the next couple of days, until I get it where I want it. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let me know. Thanks!

A Letter From My 2013 Self

So shortly after writing up my last blog post, I got an email from myself marked December 27, 2013. How freaky is that?I don’t know if it’s a glitch or a feature, but apparently in 2013, you can use gmail to send messages back in time.

In any case, the letter is pretty interesting, so I thought I’d post it. Here it is:

Dear Joe,

Well, it’s been an interesting decade so far, hasn’t it? Not a bad time to be alive–and that’s going to be even clearer by the end of 2013.

Right now, you’re still in the Republic of Georgia, anxious to get on that flight and head back home. Don’t be. You’re going to miss that place, even though it’s hard to feel that way right now. Your time there has changed you a lot more than you realize, though it’s going to take most of the year for you to figure that out.

You’ve picked up some bad habits, mostly from the other expats. Swearing is one of them. Clean up your language–it’s not going to do you any favors, especially back in Utah. Personal hygiene is another. Just because you could go for days without showering back in Rokhi doesn’t mean that you can get away with it in the States.

Money issues are on your mind right now. That’s good. You’ve learned how to be extremely frugal in the past two years, and that skill will serve you well. Don’t be afraid to get a crap job–that’s actually one of the best things you can do right now. The economy hasn’t improved much since you left, but if you look in the right places and speak with the right people, you’ll be able to make ends meet without too much trouble.

Remember, your writing career should be your main focus. Don’t go chasing after the dollar. You’ve experienced a taste of success in the last few months, and you’re going to taste it again. It comes in spurts, though, so be prepared for that. You’ll figure it out–in fact, you’re already most of the way there. Just remember to keep your butt in that chair, and you’ll be all right.

By the way, you really should spend more time on your business plan. Don’t just use it as motivation to write something else–that stuff is actually important. In Georgia, you can get away with winging it, but not in the States. That’s going to take some getting used to as well.

Your biggest anxiety right now is your supposed lack of self-discipline. That’s actually not as much of a problem as you think. After spending a year in Georgia, you might feel incapable of working another honest day in your life, but that feeling will soon pass. In fact, 2013 is going to be a very productive year for you. All that self-discovery is going to pay off in a big way soon. So don’t worry about it so much, and remember, you haven’t written your best book yet.

Perhaps the most important thing about your year in Georgia is that it really lit a fire under your butt. You know what I’m talking about. If you can travel alone to a foreign country, you can work up the courage to ask her out. No, I’m not going to tell you who. You’ll know her when you see her. But you may have to trim the beard. Just sayin’.

You won’t spend the entire year back in the States, but when you do go overseas again, you won’t be alone. No, I won’t tell you who you’ll go with, or where. Some surprises are better left unspoiled.

There’s more I could tell you, but that’s enough for now. You’ll figure things out on your own, same as you always have. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Follow the path of least regret.

Joe