Memoirs of a Snowflake available on Amazon

I just released my first short story on the Kindle. “Memoirs of a Snowflake,” a whimsical short story about the life and times of a December snowflake, is available for $.99 on Amazon.

The publishing process was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.  Because this is a short story, I didn’t have to worry about formatting for a table of contents or other stuff.  All I did was upload the .doc file, and Amazon automatically did the formatting.

Bryan and I did try to upload it as an html file, which failed miserably for reasons we don’t understand.  Also, Amazon automatically generated the free sample for it, which is something I’d like to figure out how to control in the future.

So as far as practice goes, this story perhaps wasn’t the best one to learn on.  However, it’s good to see how the publishing process works–and really, it’s not that hard.  The hardest part was reading all the terms and conditions, which took maybe an hour.  Everything else was just uploading files, filling in fields, and checking off boxes.

The cover art was fun.  To make it, I took this image from Wikimedia Commons (where practically everything is in the public domain), photoshopped it with The Gimp (“gimped” it?), and added the lettering.  Voila!  I don’t know if it’s my best work, but for a short story, I think it’s decent.

$.99 is the lowest that Amazon will allow me to price it.  For every sale, I make about $.35, and Amazon starts transferring money to my account after I earn $10. You can download it to your Kindle device, or you can read it on your computer with Amazon’s Kindle for PC program (where you can also read a two paragraph free sample, heh).

So far, I’ve made two sales and gotten one review–a pretty good one, too!  I posted the story on Facebook and Chuck has blogged about it, but that hasn’t translated into sales yet.  But after reading this, you all are going to go out and buy it, aren’t you?  AREN’T YOU??  Hehe, just kidding.

Next week, I’ll probably release “Decision LZ1527,” after I figure out the cover art.  It’s a little more complicated, because I wanted to buy the art that was in the magazine in which it was originally published.  But I’ve got that squared away, now just tweaking it.  And I’ll probably add an author’s note at the end, too.

This is exciting stuff!  I’m interested to see how the stories take off.  For those of my writer friends who are thinking of doing something like this for their own stuff, I’ll be sure to let you know how they do!

Spinning out

Just a quick post before I go to bed…and I really should, because it’s freaking late.

I feel like I’ve been getting more and more busy, yet less and less productive.  It’s @%$! frustrating.  In the last two weeks, I’ve had numerous job applications and interviews (though not as many interviews as I’d like), tons of complicated paperwork for the EPIK job in Korea I’m hoping to take come September, the only TEFL course I’m taking (in which I feel I am constantly behind), and all sorts of other random crap.

Oh, and then there’s writing.  I’ve been averaging only about 1.5k words per day, which is kind of pathetic when you realize that I don’t have regular work.

I wish I could say that I’ve been spending a lot of this extra time socializing, but sadly that isn’t the case.  I haven’t gone out on a date in months, and with each passing week I drift further and further from the people in my ward.  I’ve been pretty active with Quark, though, so that sort of makes up for things, but not enough.

One of the good things, though, is that I’ve been getting up relatively early all week–and by “relatively,” I mean before 9:00 am.  Next week’s goal: go to bed by 1:00, and get up before 8:00.  The timestamp on this post can probably tell you how much of a head start I’ve got.

Oh, and I have been exercising regularly.  That’s a good thing, I suppose.  Haven’t seen many results of that, except perhaps a slightly more active lifestyle, but it’s fun and I’ll keep it up.  Running is where I catch up on old podcasts, and I subscribe to quite a few.

I don’t know if this late night rant is useful in any way, except maybe to empathize with what it’s like when you’re busy all the time but never feel like you’re getting enough done.  I guess most people feel like that at one point or another, but it’s good to look back and see what you accomplished, like I did here.  For all the spinning out, I suppose it wasn’t a total wash.  And really, it almost never is.

But yeah, the main thing that makes me angsty is that I never feel that I’m writing enough.  I hear from everyone that with the way the publishing world is changing, fast writers have a huge advantage over slow ones.  And I know I have the ability to write fast, it’s just that I never really do it consistently.

Fast, in my mind, is 4k words or more per day.  I can hit it when I’m on, but that’s fairly rare.  Most of the time, I average between 2k and 2.5k, and my personal deadlines reflect that.

At least with ITND, however, I’ve been writing consistently every day…except today, when I took time off to revamp a short story (“From the Ice Incarnate”).  But my wordcount graph  hasn’t had any huge spikes or valleys, which is good I suppose.  The novel is coming along, if slowly, and that’s a good sign.

Anyhow, enough of this rant.  Time for bed.

Quarter Finalist? AAAHHHH!!!

Holy crap, Genesis Earth made the quarter finals for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest!

That means that it’s one of 250 other entries that will go on to the next round of voting.  The grand prize is a publishing contract with Penguin for a $15k advance.

I’m happy to see I’m not the only old time Quarkie to make the cut; Drek also made it, with his novel Fires of Besowin. We’re having something of a friendly competition with this contest, but I think it’s pretty dang awesome that the two of us made it this far.  Best of luck on the next round; I have a feeling we’re both going to need it…

The 50 finalists will be announced April 26nd.  Until then, wish me luck!

A Fascinating Moral Dilemma

For FHE* tonight, we had an interesting discussion about ethical dilemmas and moral absolutes.  It started with the following question:

If you were a prisoner of war, would you consent to have sex with the prison warden if it would set you free?

The overwhelming answer, predictably enough (at least from a bunch of Mormons), was “heck no!” So then, the teacher upped the ante by asking: what if it would free one hundred other prisoners who were scheduled to die the next day?

I was a little surprised (but not really) when I was the only one who admitted that I probably would.  After all, there’s precedent for something similar in the Book of Mormon, and a very real question of whether or not the blood of the dead prisoners would be on your hands if you didn’t.  Also, I would still consider it rape, since I draw a distinction between the act of sex and the act of saving lives–IOW, the sex itself isn’t strictly consensual; it’s the cost of saving the other prisoners.

Laying aside completely the question of whether or not you can take the warden at his word, it’s a very interesting dilemma, and one that gets at the heart of what people really believe.  The fact that so many of my Mormon peers wouldn’t sleep with the guy tells you a lot about Mormon culture.  My follow up question would be: if it meant freeing yourself and the other prisoners, would you kill the warden?  Because I’m pretty sure most of them would say “heck, yes!” even though murder is typically considered to be a more heinous sin than fornication.

But anyway, the point here is that all of this makes excellent story material.  For your characters, what are the moral lines that they absolutely will not cross?  The ones where they’re a little more fuzzy?  What, for example, would a character be like whose method for choosing between two undesirable courses of action was to flip a coin–no matter the stakes?  And what about the characters like Ender Wiggins who flip the dilemma on its head by stabbing the giant in the eye?

This is the kind of stuff I love to read, and the stuff I love to write as well.  I’m hoping to pull off a really good one in Into the Nebulous Deep, but not for a couple of chapters.  Gotta set things up, get the story moving, and give the romance a little momentum.  But once the characters are all fleshed out and the stakes are insanely high, that’s when the fun begins.  Bwahahahaha!!

Man, I would make an awesome prison warden. ;P

Image courtesy postsecret.

*FHE (Family Home Evening) is, for young single Mormons, roughly the equivalent of a college-aged church youth group meeting.

A few additional thoughts

So, after the last post on my ebook venture, I have a few thoughts:

I haven’t yet decided to go all out indie, so don’t think that I am.  All I’m doing right now is putting out a couple of my short stories, mostly so I can learn hands-on how the epublishing process works (and make all my mistakes with something that isn’t a full-length novel).

I write mostly space opera and science fiction adventure, and those are apparently selling pretty well.  I don’t know about horror or epic fantasy, so to all you horror / epic fantasy friends of mine, realize that my experience might not be your experience.

After looking into DBAs, LLCs, business licenses, and taxes, I’ve decided not to register as a business or set up a separate account for this venture–at least, not until I sell more than $500, which from what I understand is when the IRS requires Amazon to start reporting earnings (I could be wrong; I’m not a lawyer).  Again, I’m not doing this for the money right now, more for the experience and to learn how to do it.

Why, then, am I putting together a formal business plan?  Well, it’s more of a self-discipline thing; as a writer, I am in the eyes of the world a self-employed owner of a small business, so I want to discipline myself so that I can be successful as such.

And honestly, I think this is very exciting.  I’ve found, over the past year, that I’m the kind of guy who would rather work for himself or as an independent contractor than work for a corporation and take a salary–firstly, because I believe that the corporate paradigm is fundamentally evil, and second, because I enjoy the independence, the control over my livelihood, and the adventure of being an entrepreneur.

Anyhow, my CS friend Bryan is going to help me figure out how to publish on Kindle this Tuesday, so my short story “Memoirs of a Snowflake” will probably go live that afternoon.  As for “Decision LZ1527,” I’m probably going to spend some money on the cover art, which means figuring out contracts, payments, pricing, etc.  My my goal is to put it out sometime in April, though, and between now and then, I might put up something else.  So keep an eye out!

Business Plan for an ebook venture

Alright, after watching the market and giving it some considerable thought, I’ve decided to venture into indie publishing, if only to test the waters.  I’ll release a couple of short stories first, mostly to learn how to format and release an ebook, and from there I’ll move on to other work.

I spent this afternoon drafting a business plan for the venture, using the resources available at the SBA website (thanks, Jerle).  Here’s what I have thus far:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Mission Statement: To tell cool stories and have fun doing it
Projected Start Date: 31 March 2011
Founder and sole owner: Joseph M. Vasicek
Employees: 1 (services to be contracted on a freelance basis)
Location: Provo, UT (subject to change)
Product: Short stories, novels, and novellas

1) Summary of Growth

As the business has not yet been launched, there is no growth to report.

2) Future Plans

Stage One: Initial Release

In this stage, I will prepare and release two short stories, “Decision LZ1527” (previously published in issue 58 of The Leading Edge) and “Memoirs of a Snowflake” (previously unpublished) as ebooks on Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords.

The goals for this initial venture are to:
1) learn how to properly format and release an ebook,
2) gain familiarity with the ebook publishing system, and
3) gauge a general estimate of ebook costs and profits.

Stage Two: Initial Novel/Novella Release

At least 3 months after releasing “Decision LZ1527” and “Memoirs of a Snowflake,” I plan on releasing Sholpan, a novella based on the novel Bringing Stella Home. By doing so, I hope to:
1) learn how to properly outsource editing and cover art,
2) gauge the earnings potential for my novels, and
3) generate an audience for other books in the Gaia Nova series.

After releasing Sholpan, I will most likely wait for a few months to see what happens, submitting my other novels to traditional publishers in the meanwhile. If sales of my ebooks exceed expectations, I will consider moving to the next stage and fully implementing this business plan.

Stage Three: Full Ebook Release

If success in the previous stages justifies it, I will release my completed novels as ebooks, starting either sometime in July/August 2011 or after September 2012 (depending on how well my other works do, according to a metric which has yet to be determined). Currently, these consist of Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home, though Worlds Away from Home should be nearing the final phases of revision.

My business goals from here out are the following:
1) produce and release two novels each year (minimum of one),
2) consistently expand my audience through social networking,
3) obtain an agent to handle foreign/subsidiary rights,
4) obtain a print deal in order to build career prestige, and
5) earn enough to support myself entirely off of my writing.

If the works released in stage two do not sell well enough to justify moving on to stage three, I will continue to make them available as ebooks but will postpone releasing my novels until either my other works begin to sell well, or independent publishing becomes the generally accepted path for new writers.

Mainly, I just want to experiment with ebooks and figure out how they work. Since the initial costs are so low, my initial goal is not to make a lot of money, but to learn how to format and release an ebook. I was a little uneasy doing that with my novels, but I figure it wouldn’t hurt to practice on my short stories (all two of them).

So yeah, that’s the date: March 31st, 2011. I’ll release “Decision LZ1527” for $.99, and “Memoirs of a Snowflake” for $.50 or so (since it’s flash fiction). I’m not sure how well it will sell, but I hope that all of you reading this right now go and buy it!!!1!! (that includes you, Mom) Hehe, just kidding. ;P

But seriously, I’ll keep you guys updated closely on how the venture goes. A lot of ebook authors are very transparent with their numbers, and I plan to be no different. And if you have any feedback on the business plan, please let me know. I’m kind of new to this sort of thing, and while it’s surprisingly fun, I’m sure I’ll make a TON of mistakes. Your help would be appreciated!

A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

Travis Fisher is an outsider in most places, but nowhere more than the small midwestern town of Haute Montagne.  But when his mother dies, leaving him parentless and jobless in the midst of the Great Depression, his stern aunt and uncle are the only ones who will take him in.

When Travis falls in love with Nancy Wilcox, the rebellious daughter of the Baptist Ladies Association president, things become worse.  With murderous transients roaming the countryside, Haute Montagne closes ranks, casting them out.

In this moment of distress, a mysterious yet hauntingly beautiful woman reaches out to them with a cry for help.  Stranded in the small midwestern town, she is a being from another world, and she is dying.  Only the two young lovers can help her, but to do so, they must find her dark, masculine half–and in so doing, confront the demons that threaten to tear them apart.

This is one of Robert Charles Wilson’s earlier novels, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  It’s very short, yet well crafted and beautifully written.  Wilson’s prose is extremely evocative, and his descriptions of Haute Montagne brought back childhood memories from when I lived in the Midwest.  The story was also done well, and had a very satisfying ending.

While this is a good book, though, I wouldn’t say that it’s Wilson’s best.  His characters were interesting, but not nearly as compelling as those in Spin. The baptists were a little too villainous, though Travis’s aunt and uncle were individually more complex.

In spite of all this, however, the story was structured so well that the poignance of it largely overcame these flaws.  As a writer, that’s what I found most interesting about this book–how the masterful way the story was constructed made the whole greater than the sum of the parts.  Call it the monomyth, the hero’s journey, or whatever else, but something about this story made it reverberate in a powerful way.

I suppose that this is what all great stories do: echo some greater, universal story that is in all of us.  It’s the same echo that I felt when I read Spin, or Ender’s Game, or The Neverending Story, albeit a little softer.  It’s something that I hope my own stories evoke, this sense of clarity and wholeness, of returning to some great truth that we lost somewhere between birth and adulthood.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but those are my thoughts.  It’s a short read, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.  If you can find it, it’s a good one to pick up.

Story Notebook #5 (part 1)

Alright, time to revisit my old story notebooks and run through some of the ideas there.  This one starts in fall of 2009, my last semester at BYU,  and ends shortly after my hasty exodus from a miserable internship in Washington DC.

And now, without further ado, here goes:

A super-celibate society that holds that sex is evil and reproduces entirely by artificial insemination.

In other words, what if the Shakers had had our modern reproductive technology?  Weird, but not beyond the realm of plausibility.

I suppose that in such a society, the nuclear family would not exist, and children would instead be raised by the community as a whole–kind of like Plato’s Republic.  Question is, would this be a happy utopia, or a miserable dystopia?  I know how I’d write it…

Shattered glass sparkling in the roadside desert

Okay, that’s less of an idea and more of an experiment with prose.  I suppose I saw broken glass on some dusty asphalt and wanted to capture it with words.

The next passage is from an assignment for the wilderness writing class at BYU.  We went camping in Moab and hiked up to Delicate Arch, perhaps the most iconic natural landform in all of Utah.  Shortly after taking this picture, here is more or less what I wrote:

They say that the arches in this national park are formed by wind erosion.  The funny thing is, so is the slickrock.  The same wind that carved the gravity defying structure of the arches also wore the rock all around them almost perfectly smooth, so smooth that you feel as if you’re about to slip and fall even as you sit on the edge of a relatively flat ledge.

It makes you wonder: what was here before the wind blew it away?  What did the land look like before the wind took out the loose material, leaving behind only the strongest, most resilient bedrock?  How many other arches lie underneath our feet, waiting only for time and the wind to unearth the landscape that hides them?

Awesome class; if you ever get a chance, take it.  Professor Bennion is great.

A boy born without a name.

Not sure where that came from, but it kind of makes me think of this girl in an abusive household, who grew up to age 14 before learning how to speak.  It seriously crippled her intellectual development, so much that she never became fully independent.

Think about it: how would not having a name stunt a person’s growth?

Below them lay the alluvial plains–miles of silt and dirt vomited from the mountains over the passing of countless centuries.

I think I intended this to be a line in the first chapter of Worlds Away from Home…and unless I’m mistaken, something very similar to this passage made it into the book.

The detritus of life from which we extract the fossil record of our memories

Another passage meant to evoke something in the reader.  I think I wrote it when I was cleaning out my apartment shortly before leaving for DC.  It certainly makes me think of a dirty, junk-filled room.

And that’s enough for now.  This basically takes us up to January 2010, when I left for the BYU Washington Seminar program.  All the other ideas in this notebook have a decidedly civic/political bent to them, so stay tuned!

8-bit Irish music FTW!

Holy crap, this is so cool:

Doctor Octoroc is this awesome internet artist who did the 8-bit version of Dr. Horrible and the Twilight: Eclipse interactive game. This latest album release looks pretty good, combining two things I absolutely love: Celtic music and chiptunes.

Dude…seriously, this is awesome–like, 9.2 on the awesomeness Richter scale. I can’t stop listening to it.

Part of me is just a teeny tiny bit bummed, though…I was thinking of doing an 8-bit Celtic music album myself, but it looks like Octoroc beat me to it. Well, I can still give it a shot–and hopefully it will sound as good as this one!

Now, back to writing…

Momentum slowly building

I wrote about 2.2k words today in ITND–not a bad amount, but I feel as if it could have been much more.  I think I spent more time thinking about the novel than I did actually writing it, which is either 1) a sign that I’m procrastinating too much, or 2) a sign that I’m slowly building momentum.

Trouble is, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.  When I haven’t worked on a project for a while, I’m often restless for a couple of days before I settle back into the zone.  The weird thing, though, is that while I’m pacing restlessly around, I’ll be writing out lines of dialog or paragraphs of description in my head.  Weird.

I think I’ve got a good idea where I’m going with this project, though.  The thing that hung me up on the first attempt was that I did a poor job introducing one of the viewpoint characters (Kyla Jeppson), even though I did a good job outlining her.  I’ve given that scene to my online writing group, so hopefully they’ll give me some good feedback tomorrow.  However, I still have to read the other submissions, and it’s getting late, so I’ll probably just cut this short and go to bed.

But first…what the heck, provo craigslist?

I swear, one hundred years from now, our contemporary attitudes towards women will seem as wrong-headed and despicable as the last century’s attitudes seems to us.  Honestly, which is worse: turning women into domestic house slaves, or turning them into mindless sex objects?  And we consider ourselves feminists…

…but that’s a post for another time.  G’night!