We have some pretty weird traditions in my family. One of them is that we watch The Ten Commandments every Thanksgiving. Another is that my mother tells everyone “rabbit rabbit!” on the first of every month. Yet another: whenever anyone opens a bucket of fresh butter, everyone nearby screams bloody murder and scrambles to be the first one to break it.
The biggest tradition of them all, however, is that whenever it’s someone’s birthday, everyone else rushes to be the first to wish them a happy birthday–or at least to get one of the first slots. For mine, my youngest sister called me at midnight to get the coveted number one spot.
So anyways, today is my sister Kate‘s birthday. I called her at 11:35 pm MST (GMT-6), which is half an hour past midnight where she lives. Of course, she didn’t answer her phone (she never does!) so I called her husband and asked him to wake her up so I could talk with her. “It’ll only take a second,” I said.
I have a confession to make…I bought minecraft a week ago, and I’ve been playing it almost non-stop ever since. It is such a fun, addicting game!
The goal is…well, there is no goal, and that’s kind of the point. You start out in this vast open wilderness full of resources, and you gather them together and build stuff while trying to survive the monsters that spawn in the night. It’s like a world made of legos–there’s no limit to what you can do!
I got it so that I could play with my brother in law, but since then I’ve learned that a whole bunch of my other friends play too. I’ve got a pretty awesome world that I want to share with them, since multiplayer is probably a lot more fun than single player anyway. I call it New Cappadocia, and it’s basically a vast underground city that runs from the top of a mountain down to the bedrock.
Anyhow, I just finished up the main hall. Here are some pics:
The view from the entrance.The hearth.One of the wings--not sure whether to build anything here or just leave it as is.The feasting table. Get me a tankard of ale, serving wench!
So yeah…needless to say, my productivity has taken a major hit. Fortunately, the novelty of the game has started to wear off; I managed about 2k words in Star Wanderers on Saturday, and I’ve all but got the kickstarter campaign for Desert Stars ready to launch. Last week was upside down, but this week I think I’ll be able to strike some balance. Famous last words, right?
Anyhow, if I did throw this up on a server, who would be interested in playing? I don’t want to make it too public for fear that griefers would tear it apart, but I think it would be cool to open it up to friends. My only rule would be that the physical structures have to look semi-plausible–no giant floating platforms with waterfalls that you swim up to get to the top (unless you can make it look believable).
So a bunch of blogs I follow have been doing this blogfest called “Pay it Forward,” organzied by Alex J. Cavanaugh. The idea is to bring attention to some well deserving yet lesser known blogs, and that’s something I’m all for supporting.
The rules are simple: list, describe and link to three blogs that you follow, and check out some of the ones that others are recommending. So without any further ado, here are mine:
Believe it or not, this guy is an American.
سفيرات أنثون — Don’t let the Arabic intimidate you. This is the travel blog of an old college friend of mine, Anthon Jackson. Since graduating in 2009, Anthon has been to just about every continent except Antarctica, taking some amazing pictures in the process. He’s the kind of guy who believes that life should be lived in the present, to the absolute fullest, and his blog reflects that.
Recently, he just got back from an Oxford sponsored expedition to the Danakil people of remote western Ethiopia. Other places he’s visited include Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, the Hindu Kush, western China, Italy, Norway, Korea, Morocco, the Sahel, etc. He posts rather sporadically, but whenever he does, it’s a real treat. So check him out!
God, Witches, Space & Stars — Laura is an old friend from Brandon’s writing class. She’s a great writer and insightful blogger, who takes a very thoughtful approach to everything she blogs about. She’s also an avid Kindle user with a lot of interesting thoughts on ebooks. So check her out!
Ben Godby — Ben Godby writes “mysteriously thrilling pseudo scientific weird western adventure fantasy tales.” He’s got a hilariously sarcastic writing style, and he’s not afraid to tackle controversial subjects on his blog. Whether or not you agree with him, he’s always entertaining to read. So check him out!
So my birthday is coming up a little later this week, and my family has been asking what’s on my wish list. In order to help them out, as well as anyone who might feel inclined to give me stuff, I thought I’d post it here on my blog. Some of the stuff might be reaching a bit, but what the heck, might as well throw it out there.
Item One: Signed First Edition Hardcover Copy of Legend by David Gemmell
This is the ultimate gift of all time for me. It is my life’s goal to obtain a signed copy of Legend, which is made all the more difficult by the fact that David Gemmell passed away in 2006. He is, by far, my favorite fantasy author, and this book is my favorite of everything he’s written.
I don’t expect to fulfill this life ambition on this particular birthday, but in the unlikely chance that it lies within your power to help me obtain a copy, know that I will be your slave for life in exchange for this priceless gift. Literally. With chains and everything (or caramel topping and whipped cream, if that’s your preference).
Item Two: Göttmann Dress Cap
Specifically, the Dallas-2 design pictured here. I have no idea how or where you’d get it, but that’s what I want–specifically from Göttmann Caps and Hats, in Germany. I’ve got a similar cap right now and it’s pretty spiffy, but it’s from Ross so the quality is pretty cheap. I need an authentic writerly cap like this to give me x2 pretentiousness and +5 charisma.
Item Three: Kant Stop The Music T-Shirt
This one’s a little pricey for a T-shirt, but I absolutely love the design. What better way to combine your love of music with your love of 19th century philosophy?
Item Four: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends by Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress is one of my favorite people to listen to at a con, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about this book. If you want to get me a book on writing, this would probably be the best one (or, alternately, either of Orson Scott Card’s books: Character and Viewpoint or How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy).
Item Five: Anything by Hiyao Miyazaki
You simply can’t go wrong with this awesome Japanese director. I already own Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Castle in the Sky. Even though it was done by Miyazaki’s son, I wouldn’t mind a copy of Tales of Earthsea either.
Item Six: Interstella 5555
My favorite anime ever! Now out on Blu-Ray!
Item Seven: Mirage: the Remixes by Armin Van Buuren
Recently, I’ve really gotten into trance & progressive music, and Armin Van Buuren is one of my favorite artists. I skip lunch each week just so I can listen to his radio show, A State of Trance. His latest album, Mirage, is really good, and so I’d like to pick up a copy sometime of the remixes. Alternately, you could get me the Imagine remixes album, or anything by Cerf, Mitiska, & Jaren.
So that’s pretty much my wish list. Of course, if for some reason you’re not in a position to get me any of this awesome swag, I’ll take a gift card or a sweater or a homemade whatever <grumble>. But if you do get me a gift card, please make it an Amazon gift card, so I can buy more books and music. And if it is within your power to get me a signed hardcover first edition copy of Legend…let’s just say, I’m only partially joking about the slave thing.
Today I was supposed to finish the second draft of Sholpan, but I moved apartments this weekend, so everything got thrown completely out of whack. I’m all moved into my new place now (with some awesome Quarkie roommates), but Sholpan is going to have to wait until Monday.
Fortunately, I’ve only got a couple of new scenes to write, then touch up the rest to make sure it fits the novella storyline. I got in touch with my copy editor, and he should be able to have them for me by mid-September. If all goes well, I’ll send it out to a couple of my first readers to give it a pass, make the fixes, and then send it out to Josh and have it up about a month from now.
I’ve gotten some amazing responses for “Memoirs of a Snowflake” in the past week, and it’s gotten almost 2,000 downloads on Amazon so far. Not bad! However, while rereading it, I noticed an error: in the author’s note, I said that I wrote the story in December of 2008, when really it was 2007. I must have been thinking “winter of 2008” when I wrote it the first time. In any case, I’ve made the corrections, so it should be up on Amazon in 24 hours, and all the other sites before the end of the month (since I distribute to them through Smashwords).
Also, another piece of encouraging news: the boss at the temp job I’ve been working the past few months wants to hire me! If that works out, I should have steady work at least through into 2012. I’m hoping they’ll let me work part time, since that would help me juggle the writing career a lot better, but this is their busy season so I might have to work 40+ hour weeks for a while. Still, it’s better than starving.
Which reminds me: my first royalty check from Amazon comes in next month, and to celebrate, I’m going to crack open that bottle of Martinelli’s from Charlie and throw a small party. More on that later.
Finally, I found this the other day while trawling youtube for good trance tunes. It’s a remix of “Are We Human?” by the Killers, done by Armin Van Buuren. Everything Armin touches seems to turn to gold, and this is no exception. Check it out!
I especially like the sidebar layout, with the featured item on top and the double sidebars below. I think I’m going to put all my promotional stuff (books, social networks) on the right sidebar, with all the blog stuff (tags, archives, recent comments, blogroll, etc) on the left.
I’m not so sure about the Current Projects bar, though. Does it look good on the left, or should I put it on the right, above my books? I don’t want the sidebar to look too busy, but at the same time I don’t want to push my books too far down from the top.
I made a few tweaks to the color scheme, though there will probably be a few more kinks to work out in that area. The black text on white is a radical departure from the previous template, which is going to take a while for me to get used to. However, now that my blogging goals have shifted from personal to more professional, I think it’s a move in the right direction.
Things I’d like to change but don’t know how:
The blog header font. I’d like to go back to Courier New small caps, like the old one. Every time I try to tweak the CSS stylesheet, though, nothing I do seems to work.
Font size for pages and categories (pages are above the blog header, categories are below). Jerle pointed out that they could be larger, and I agree with him.
Background color for the child category pages. They blend in too much with the current shade of gray.
The favicon. I don’t want the generic WordPress logo, I want to make something unique to this site (like the eye).
That’s about all I can think of right now, but I’m definitely open to any of your suggestions. My goal is to turn this blog into a home site for my writing career, where readers can connect with me and easily find my stuff.
First off, let me get some business out of the way. I did another post for the Genesis Earth blog tour, this time on my friend Cavan’s blog. The subject: how and why I decided to become an indie published writer.
Also, if you live in Europe, it may interest you to know that Genesis Earth is now available on XinXii, a European ebook retailer website. The price is 2.99 USD and I believe that is VAT inclusive, which should make it much less expensive than Amazon and other American sites.
Finally, an update on my upcoming novel Bringing Stella Home. I’ve commissioned the cover art from Līva Šmaukstele, an artist from Latvia. We just got the sketches finalized this week, and I am very excited to see the final copy! My copy editor, Josh Leavitt, is finishing up with the edits in a couple of weeks, so if all goes well with the art Bringing Stella Home should be up before the end of the month.
And now, the teaser: I spent a couple of hours this afternoon putting together the starmap for Bringing Stella Home. This will appear in the front, just before chapter one. Check it out:
Pretty cool, eh? I might touch it up a little before publication, perhaps lighten the background a tad. I did it in B&W so that it would work better for the Kindle. Many thanks to Logan Kearsley for help with the stellar classes; it really pays to have geeky friends who know so much.
And yes, the Good Hope Nebula will be in the cover art. Yes, it’s going to be awesome. Expect another teaser to come out soon.
The Genesis Earth blog tour rolls on; just recently, I did an interview with Cindy Borgne of Dreamer’s Perch. She’s been showcasing a number of other indie writers on her site, and the interviews are quite interesting, so check it out!
Also, Moses Siregar is up to an interesting new project called Indie Author Rockstar. I’m not sure exactly how it will work, but it’s basically a community book blog / monthly book contest. Genesis Earth will be participating in that, so be sure to check it out once it goes live (and also check out the site’s twitter feed)!
Finally, I got embroiled in a somewhat heated discussion with Howard Tayler on the comment thread of the latest Writing Excuses podcast. The question we circled around was: “is traditional publishing still safe?” I’m not totally sure what ‘safe’ means in this context, since writing has never been truly ‘safe,’ but it was an interesting if somewhat exasperating discussion.
Fortunately, it ended well, meaning that I didn’t get banned (though I think Howard was contemplating it). I don’t think either of us ‘won,’ but several onlookers came away feeling enlightened–and most of them agreed that the discussion was generally polite. So if I’m a troll, at least I’m a civilized one. If that’s even possible.
So that’s what’s going on here. Genesis Earth is still selling at a slow but steady pace, and the revision of Desert Stars is going very, very well. This is going to be such an AWESOME book–I can’t wait until I’ve got it up for you guys to check it out!
In parting, let me leave you with this amazing trance song I discovered while working data entry. That’s one of the advantages of doing boring computer work all day–it frees you in some ways to do other things. Enjoy!
Yeah…today wasn’t that great. I revised through about 2k words in Desert Stars, but none of it was new material, and I only worked on it for maybe 3 cumulative hours. I’m working full time now, but even so, I can do better than this.
My self-imposed deadline for Desert Stars is July 9th. That needs I need to do three chapters per week, and last week, I only did two. Some of the later chapters are going to require tossing out everything and starting from scratch, but for the next four or five, I probably just need to shuffle scenes around without changing too much. Hopefully, I can get through three this week, perhaps even four.
Genesis Earth continues to do well, though. I checked it at work, and saw that 69% of the people who view the Amazon page end up buying the book. That’s huge. Some glitches over the weekend have made sales updates sporadic, but it’s still selling a good 1.5 copies per day. So to all of you who have bought a copy: thanks so much!
There’s still a lot I need to do for Genesis Earth on the epublishing front, however. Here’s my to do list for this week:
Send GE to +5 review sites.
Publish GE to the nook.
Get GE listed on Goodreads.
Do 3 guest posts / interviews for the blog tour.
Create an index for the blog tour.
Should be pretty straightforward…if I can balance writing time with non-writing publishing/promotion time (along with full time job time). It’s going to be tricky, but I think I can do it.
Here’s my plan: I’ll get up at 6:30 each morning and write for at least half an hour, exercise, get ready for work, etc. When I get home at 5:30, I’ll eat a quick dinner and then devote myself to writing until about 7:30 (I have events going on every weekday evening that start at 7:30). In the late night, I’ll maybe write a little, but that won’t be my primary writing time (since I never get much done when it is).
So anyways, that’s my tentative plan for this week. Hopefully, that productivity boost will kick in soon, and I’ll be writing 3.5k words a day again.
In unrelated news, Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing posted an awesome interview of Kristine Katherine Rusch up on their podcast yesterday. To all my writing friends: you really should check it out and listen to it. Kris is an amazing veteran professional in the sf&f field, and has loads of good advice. I read her blog religiously and recommend that all other aspiring writers do the same.
Which reminds me: Robin Sullivan was interviewed last week on another podcast, and this one is also very much worth checking out. Robin runs a small press called Ridan, which is embracing unorthodox business practices and doing surprisingly well in today’s publishing climate. I’ve said that I’m on hiatus from seeking a publishing house for the next three years…but if I could get into Ridan, I would in a heartbeat.
Finally, let me end this post with a cool trance song I discovered the other day. Way mellow, with sweet vocals that fit surprisingly well with my current WIP.
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!
Item One: Signed First Edition Hardcover Copy of Legend by David Gemmell
