Tag: news and updates

Back from Arkansas

So we’re finally back from our family vacation to Arkansas! My youngest sister manages cabins over at the Buffalo River National Park, which means she’s busy over there all summer, so we all decided to go over to her.

It was a looong drive. Took us three days to get down there, mostly because we stayed with my brother-in-law in Omaha for a couple of nights (just long enough for our five year-old to fall in the shower and bust open her head. Took her to the emergency room, where she got a couple of staples. She’s fine.) On the way back, we busted our butts and did it in two days. We must have listened to the Tarzan and Mulan soundtracks thirty or forty times each.

Arkansas is almost like another world. Very beautiful, but mostly jungle, and full of all sorts of venemous things that want to suck your blood. The first day, I made the mistake of walking around in shorts without any bug spray, and I got nearly a dozen deer ticks on me, including one that had crawled up into my unmentionables. My wife and both our kids also had ticks on them. Needless to say, we did very thorough tick checks every day after that.

Other than that, it wasn’t too bad. I heard from one of the locals that there are copperheads and water mocassins in the river, but we didn’t see any of those. Also, the black widows like to roof in the awning and lower themselves down in the evening, but we didn’t see any of those either (thank goodness). And apparently, there’s an annual tarantula migration, which sounds absolutely terrifying. In fact, it sounds like someone in the Ozarks started a game of Jumanji some 150 years ago, and it’s never been finished.

But the people are all friendly and generous, and there’s a tiny little country church almost every other mile in the back country. Also, driving through Branson and southern Missouri was like driving through the heart of Trump country. The Twelve Days War was raging the whole time, and there were MAGA billboards and billboards saying “we stand with Israel.” Kind of surreal.

It was good to spend some time with family, but it’s good to be home now. We just got the staples out of our daughter’s head, and it’s healed just fine. She’s really glad to be able to swim now (too bad she couldn’t swim while we were at the park). For the next week, my brother-in-law from Couer D’Alene is down here with his wife and eight kids for a family vacation. Our kids are having a blast, though our littlest just came down with a stomach bug… hopefully it ends with him, but I’m not holding my breath.

The plan for now is to finish writing all the blog posts for Fantasy from A to Z, hopefully before the end of next week. I’ll also do my best to finish up the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar (book 3 of the trilogy) by the end of this week. So far, it’s going really well. After that, it’s back to the revised AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which I hope to finish before we go on our next road trip to Canada for my wife’s family. And after Fantasy from A to Z is finished, I’ll work on the rough human draft of The Road to New Jerusalem, hopefully finishing it in time for the Ark Press contest.

That’s the plan, anyway. I have a lot of thoughts on the Twelve Days War and the situation in the Middle East, but I’ll save all that for now. If the ceasefire holds and it truly is the end of the war, I think President Trump will go down as the greatest American president of the 21st century.

Gearing up for another family road trip

We’ve spent the last couple of days getting ready for another cross-country road trip as a family, this time to Arkansas. My side of the family is going down there, mostly because my youngest sister works at a national park, so it’s more convenient for us to come to her (and it should be fun as well).

The plan is to drive to Omaha, spend a couple of nights with my brother-in-law and his wife, then drive down to Arkansas and spend the week with family. Once we’re done, we’ll just drive straight back to Utah, hopefully in two days, but more likely in three. After all, we’ve got a five year-old and a two year-old with us.

This is the first big road trip we have this summer. The second one is at the end of July, and we’ll be going up to northern Alberta for a reunion with my wife’s side of the family. Her grandmother passed away earlier this year, and this was the soonest everyone could get together (getting passports for the kids was a little tricky).

I’ve already schedule blog posts through the next week and a half, so those should be coming up each day. I’ve also been writing more Fantasy from A to Z posts, and I hope to write the rest of them while I’m out there, though I’m not stressing out too much about that. If they get done, great, if not, I’ll just finish them when I get back.

The big reason why I’m blogging daily now is because of some major problems I’ve been having with my email list. I used to send out a newsletter approximately every week, but over the last couple of years, my open and click-thru rates have been creeping ever lower, until just last month they suddenly dropped by more than 50%. Turns out there’s a whole lot of backend stuff that changed in the last year, most of which I barely understand.

But ChatGPT has been a huge help in figuring out what’s wrong, and how I need to register DMARC and SPF and all the other stuff that I still don’t understand. My wife has also been a huge help in sorting through it all. I think it’s all set up properly, but I haven’t sent out a newsletter yet, and probably won’t until I get back from Arkansas. I also need to update my newsletter template. ChatGPT should be really good for that.

So the email newsletter is turning into a monthly thing, and the blog is turning into a daily thing, at least for the forseeable future. All of that might get thrown out the window when the new baby comes along, at least temporarily.

In the meantime, I’m working on Fantasy from A to Z and the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar, both of which are coming along quite well. I’m going to experiment with having one human WIP and one AI WIP active at the same time, because ChatGPT suggested that this would be the best way to maximize by writing time and productivity.

I fed ChatGPT my accountability spreadsheet and the daily project journals I’ve been keeping for the past year, and it came back with some fascinating insights into my writing process. It’s amazing how you can feed it a bunch of raw, barely-formatted data, and get a genuinely insightful analysis.

Is this taking away jobs from a data analysis / writing coach? Not really, at least in my case, because I doubt I would have hired one. But the results sure are useful. I’m also experimenting with feeding my entire book into ChatGPT and asking it to write a book description or generate a cover. It’s amazing how it can “read” a whole novel in a fraction of a second, and spit back answers that show (or at least simulate) a genuine understanding of the material.

But one thing ChatGPT can’t do is convert a short story into a screenplay—at least, not without significant human input. I tried uploading “What Hard Times Hath Wrought” and told it to turn it into a screenplay, and the results were hilariously bad. Maybe Sudowrite has a plugin, though…

Summer plans

So summer is practically here, and that means things are about to get crazy. Next week, we’re leaving on a multi-day road trip to Arkansas, where we plan to have a family vacation with the extended family. With a five year-old and a two-year old, that’s going to be quite a ride. Fortunately, we’ll be staying with family from my wife’s side along the way, at least on the way down. Coming back, we’ll just do our best to make a straight shot back to Utah.

After that, things should calm down for the rest of June and most of July. I’m hoping to get a lot of writing work done, especially on The Soulbond and the Sling. With luck, I’ll finish the AI draft of this 200k word epic fantasy before Writer’s Cantina.

I’ll only be at Writer’s Cantina for the first day; we’re leaving on another multi-day family road trip that weekend, this time to Canada, for another extended family vacation with my wife’s side of the family. That’ll only last a couple of days, though, and we should be back pretty soon. But then, things will get really crazy, as we move back to our house in Orem and my wife starts her new job as a professor at BYU.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, we’ve got to fix the sprinklers at the house up in Orem. They all need to be totally rewired, and the valves in the back should also be replaced. So the yard isn’t going to get much, if any water this season. It’s going to be… interesting… growing a new yard from scratch next year. We’ll probably take advantage of the opportunity to do some xiroscaping and gardening, perhaps even getting a backyard beehive like my wife has wanted to do for some time. But it’s going to take a lot of work.

I’ve decided to scale back my email newsletter, making it a monthly thing instead of a weekly thing. In turn, I plan to blog much more often, roughly daily. I hear that blogging is a great way to optimize for AI, making your work more likely to show up in ChatGPT and other LLMs. So I’m going to blog a lot more about my books from now on. I’m also thinking very seriously about doing some video, I guess with what you’d call “authortube.” I’ll start out with some book readings on YouTube and see where things go from here.

That’s the plan, anyway. It’s going to be a super busy summer, but I’m looking forward to it! I hope you are too.

Five things I did at work last week

So apparently DOGE’s “what are five things you did at work last week” is now an ongoing weekly task, which I am heartily in favor of, at least until the Trump Administration’s reforms to the executive branch are complete. The best counter-argument for this policy that I’ve heard so far comes from Cal Newport, who points out that this sort of request is typical of an insecure and overbearing manager, but I don’t find that argument very convincing. Given the sheer amount of corruption and outright fraud that Elon Musk’s DOGE has already uncovered, I think there are very good reasons for the Trump Administration to be overbearing. Besides, it really shouldn’t be that hard to come up with five bullet points, as I will demonstrate now.

Last week, I:

  • finished releasing all of my books in audio on Audible, using KDP’s AI narration tools,
  • made a rough outline for a seven book series, of which my current WIP (The Soulbond and the Sling) will be the first,
  • re-released “Lord of the Slaves” as a free short story,
  • wrote up character sheets for all of the viewpoint characters in The Soulbond and the Sling, and
  • outlined twelve separate throughlines in the story bible for The Soulbond and the Sling.

Oh, the trauma. How can I possibly be expected to do this every week? And people say that writing isn’t a “real” job… in any case, I plan to make this a regular thing for as long as DOGE and Elon Musk continue to keep it going. Feel free to add your own five bullets in the comments!

Late February Update

Wow, it’s been a while since I gave an update on what I’ve been up to. Life has been crazy, but not too crazy. I really ought to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly.

Last week was LTUE here in Utah Valley, and while I didn’t attend the convention, I did stop by the launch party for Ark Press. It looks like it’s going to be an interesting publishing venture, with Tony Daniels, Dave Butler, and David AF heading it out. Their goal is basically to be the MAGA of science fiction and fantasy publishing, though they probably wouldn’t put it quite that way. However, they do want to publish more pro-American, pro-conservative, pro-human fiction, and to fill a gap in the current publishing market that has neglected male readers in recent years.

They’re also running a contest, with the winner receiving a $10,000 publishing contract, to be published on July 4th, 2026. The theme for the contest is America 2076, and it can be any genre (though it sounds like they want it to be a pro-American story). Of all the WIPs I currently have floating around, The Road to New Jerusalem might actually be a good fit for that. I haven’t worked on it for a few months, but I’ll probably dust it off pretty soon here and get it ready to submit.

Speaking of my J.M. Wight pen name, I ran the first three chapters of The Fall of the Poet King through my writing group, and I think the best course of action is to rewrite it as a fantasy novel loosely based on the David and Bathsheba story. If I’m going to write it as a straight historical fiction, I need to do a lot more research to firmly ground it in the era, and the trouble with adapting a Bible story (especially a more difficult story like David and Bathsheba) is that everyone brings their own baggage or personal interpretation to it, and is liable to get miffed if your retelling doesn’t exactly match what they’ve got in their own head. Besides, fantasy sells a lot better than religious fiction, so I think this is a much more prudent course to take.

In fact, I’ve recently made an inventory of most of my WIPs, and decided to trunk all of them that don’t explicitly fall in the fantasy genre. I will still finish the Outworld Trilogy and the Falconstar Trilogy, but after that, I’m going to focus a lot more on writing fantasy than on writing science fiction. Also, I’m not going to work on those until after I’ve filled up my writing queue with more fantasy-oriented works. This is a pivot that I’ve been meaning to make for some time now, and I’ve been slowly making that pivot, but now I think I need to speed it up and make it more definitive.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, mostly. I’m currently finishing up the rough AI draft of The Unknown Sea, and plan to pick up the human draft of Bloodfire Legacy, which should be coming out in the Spring. And hopefully I’ll be working on that David and Bathsheba story again soon.

Swamped but Still Here

I’m pretty swamped with stuff right now, especially all the publishing tasks that I need to catch up on (with the way we’ve set up our new routine, it really only makes sense to spend one day out of the week working on publishing tasks, rather than an hour or half-hour each day. So if I miss a day, or don’t finish all of the week’s work on that day, things tend to spiral pretty quickly). But things are going pretty well overall: I’m making slow but steady progress on writing, and the wife and kids are doing pretty well. Everyone’s warm, fed, (mostly) happy, and still alive.

For Thanksgiving, we’re going up to Bear Lake with my wife’s family, since my brother-in-law has a timeshare there, and it’s closer to Couer D’Alene so it’ll be easier for the family up there to come down. But Bear Lake gets pretty cold this time of year, so we’ll have to pack warm. Also, with the recent developments in Russia and Ukraine, it occurs to me that Bear Lake might be one of the best places in the lower 48 to ride out an initial nuclear strike (though definitely not the best place to ride out a nuclear winter). Hopefully we don’t have to test that theory.

In any case, it should be fun to spend some time with the family, and to watch our kids spend some quality time playing with their cousins. Since my mother-in-law doesn’t want to do any cooking at the timeshare, she’s farmed out most of the work to everyone else, and had us bake a turkey so that she could collect the drippings for turkey gravey. Looks like white bean chili with leftover turkey is on the menu for the next couple of weeks!

My job is to make the cranberry sauce. I’ll be using my Mom’s recipe, which is super simple, and also super tasty: combine one pound of raw cranberries, one whole unpeeled orange, one whole apple, one cup of sugar, and one cup of pecans and blend until smooth. Chill before serving.

Up and Back from Denver

My uncle just got remarried, after losing his wife of some 40+ years to dimentia. The wedding was Saturday, so I flew up there in the early morning with my two sisters who live here in Utah. And then, because my four year-old daughter had her first primary program in church this Sunday, I flew back that night around midnight.

With all of that said, though, I still managed to get 2k words of writing in while on the plane or in the airport (mostly on the plane). This was all human writing, taking the stuff that I’d previously generated with AI and using it as a detailed outline (or sometimes as a loose suggestion) while I rewrote it in my own words. Which goes to show how AI-assisted writing can be super useful, especially for those in-between moments where it’s impossible to get a more sustained focus. If not for what I had previously generated, I wouldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hundred words in, if that much. And of course, I didn’t get any writing in during the wedding or any of the family stuff before and after.

Needless to say, after waking up at 5am to fly out, and not going to sleep until 2am the following morning, I was pretty hashed all Sunday. But the primary program went really well. My daughter remembered her part, and all but swallowed the microphone as she shouted it so we could all hear: “I love Jesus! Jesus is the Prince of Peace and the King of Kings!” It was hilarious, and very cute.

Sudowrite just rolled out a new outlining feature in their Story Bible, which replaces the old outline field. I tried it out this morning, and two things strike me about it:

First, it’s really nice that there’s no longer a word limit on the novel outline. I did have a little trouble getting my chapters to link with the outline, so there are probably still some things on the backend that need to be smoothed out, but I did get it to work in the end.

Second, it is SUPER convenient to be able to have the AI generate the individual chapter descriptions. After playing around with it, I found that the best way to generate them was simply to copy and paste all of the plot points from the spreadsheet that I use to map out the whole book, not even bothering to format it for the weird table breaks and tabs. The AI takes all of that input as-is and spits out a super accurate chapter description every time! Very nice, and hopefully it translates to better chapter beats too.

So for today and tomorrow, I’m going to work on the outline for Lizzie-99XT. After that, I’ll go back to writing out the rough human draft for The Road to New Jerusalem, and probably just focus on human writing for the rest of the month.

It’s November already?

It’s November already? Wow, that went fast. October was so mild, it felt almost like summer. Then, about a week ago, a cold front blew in and it’s been feeling very much like autumn ever since.

I figure I should share more pictures in these updates, so here is one of the food storage wheat I’ve been sprouting. I just started doing this, and the results from the previous attempt were quite delicious. The kids loved them! Since they’re super healthy, I figured we might as well make it a regular thing. They go great on salad, with a little bit of hummus on the side.

I’m getting ready to start a new novel WIP. This one is for my friend Ben, so I ran three book blurbs by him and had him pick his favorite. That’s what I do these days whenever I need to start a new project: I keep a document with pre-written book blurbs for the books I want to write, and I have a friend pick from them. That’s also how I choose who to dedicate the book to. Anyway, Ben chose the blurb for the novelization of my old short story, “Lizzie-99XT”:

To save the people she loves, she must become the machine.

The first wave of the alien invasion was just a few scouts—and they nearly conquered us. Now, a proper expeditionary force is on the way, forcing humanity to scramble their defenses fast. But the best defense is a good offense, and the XT starfighter program is the culmination of every space and weapons program since the war began.

Eliza never thought she would become a soldier, much less the human half of an AI/human hybrid starfighter. But when the recruiters seek her out for her rare genetic attributes that make her ideal for the program, she goes all in, dedicating her life—and her humanity—to saving the people she loves from the looming alien menace.

And thus, from the merger of human and AI, Lizzie-99XT is born. A superweapon capable of fighting at near-light speeds, the moon his her playground, the planets her backyard. But her power comes at a steep price. Whenever Eliza decouples from the machine, she feels as if she’s lost another piece of her humanity. And with each new battle, the world that she’s fighting for slips further into the past.

The XT starfighter squadron is the only thing standing between Earth and annihilation. But as the war drags on and humanity takes the fight to the enemy’s own stars, Eliza begins to wonder if death is truly the ultimate sacrifice.

So the plan is to write that one next. I’ve already imported the short story into Sudowrite, and have played around with it enough that I’ve even generated a few chapters. But most of that is stuff that I’ll probably end up throwing out, since I really need to write a thorough outline first. I have a pretty good idea of what the book will look like, but I need to meet with Ben again first to hash a few things out.

I would have already started the outline this week, but my four year-old came down with a really bad UTI. We though it was the flu at first, so we didn’t catch it until after her fever was spiking to 104 and she was really delirious (kind of surprised the clinic didn’t give her a urine test the first time we went in). But she’s on antibiotics now, and they appear to be working. Thank God we live in a time of cheap, safe, and effective antibiotics.

The other big thing I’ve been up to is figuring out what I want to do for my pricing strategy. It’s been about a year or two since I first started publishing my books as AI-narrated audiobooks, and until now, I’ve been pricing them similar to human-narrated audiobooks, but running frequent sales (for example, all of my audiobooks are currently on sale for $2.99). But the audiobook market is changing rapidly, and it appears that most other authors are pricing their AI-narrated audiobooks similar to their ebooks.

Perhaps I should do another blog post where I share the results of my survey. This is the third year that I’ve run it: the first time was in 2020, and the second time was in 2022. There have been some interesting changes compared to previous years. Basically, within the $2.99 to $4.99 range, people are more open to higher prices if they know and trust the author, but much fewer readers are willing to go higher, even for authors they know and trust. And for unknown authors, they are much less willing to go for anything higher than $2.99.

In short, it seems like readers are feeling the pinch of inflation, and are finding it much more difficult to justify spending more than $5 for an ebook. So what I plan to do is price all of my ebooks and audiobooks at $4.99, and run the occasional month-long sale where I drop the price of all my ebooks to $2.99, or all my audiobooks, alternating between the two. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get the best of both worlds that way.

Also, it being November and all, there’s an election going on. For the last week or so, I’ve been doing my best to tune it out. We don’t live in a battleground state, and my wife and I already filled out our ballots and dropped them off. On election night, I’ll probably tune into the livestreams, and I’ve been following the news through alternative and conservative media, but I’m really trying not to think about it more than that. I will say, though, that this AI-generated political ad was super, super hilarious:

Hey… if it were a novel, I’d at least check it out from the library. I’d probably DNF it, but I’d at least be willing to give it a try. In the hands of a good writer, it could even be a decent sci-fi novel… emphasis on the “science fiction.” LOL!

Just finished my last short story

So I just finished writing what may be the last short story I ever write, at least for the forseeable future. Years from now, I may scribble out a quick short for a charity anthology or something, but unless someone actually commissions me to write one, I’m done for now. Instead, I’m going to focus all of my attention on writing novels, since that’s where all the money (and readers) are.

This last one was fun: a post-apocalyptic tale in a wintry wilderness, where the scout of a tribe of survivors comes across the “Ark Facility” built by a bunch of wealthy elites to freeze themselves in stasis while their workers maintain the facility, and wake them once civilization has been restored. But of course, the plan goes to hell, and the only person left is the daughter of the last caretaker, all the other workers having abandoned the aging facility rather than trying to maintain it. So the scout convinces the girl to come with him, and to leave the facility in the care of the elites after waking them up. That’s when the drama begins.

I wrote the rough draft of this story with AI, back when I was just starting to climb the learning curve for AI-assisted short stories. Because of that, it was rather frustrating in parts, and I ended up throwing out almost everything that I generated. It still turned into a +8k word novelette, though I may be able to cut it down to 7.5k or lower with a couple of revision passes.

But frankly, I don’t much care whether it ends up as a novelette or a short story, because I’m not going to bother submitting it anywhere. I’ve come to the conclusion that none of the short story markets for science fiction or fantasy are worth submitting to, because they are all commercially non-viable and exist primarily as (typically short-lived) passion projects, stepping stones for people trying to carve out a career in the book world, or as vehicles for clout-seeking authors and editors to get their names on the ballots for the Hugos and the Nebulas.

Also, I’m a straight white male conservative, which automatically makes me anathema to every (and I do mean every) pro-paying science fiction short story market. The 1,000+ rejections that I’ve accumulated over the course of my career give me authority to say that—specifically, 1,062 rejections out of 1,255 submissions, according to my lifetime stats on The Submission Grinder (and most of those 193 non-rejections were submissions that never received a response). Thank God for self-publishing.

Since I’m not yet at the point where I can consistently write and publish a novel each month, I will continue to republish some of my old short story singles on the off-months when I don’t have a novel. I was doing the novel-a-month thing for the first few months of 2024, but needed to take a break after the third Sea Mage Cycle book to recuperate, re-evaluate, and rework my writing process. Starting in 2025, I will probably start publishing a novel every other month, and ramp up the process until I’m doing a novel every month. At that point, I’ll retire the free short story singles for good.

It’s been a good run. I’ve written and published about 60 short stories, some of them with semiprozines and anthologies, but most of them indie. I do think it’s a good way to get started when you don’t have much of a following, and I attribute a sizeable chunk of my own following to my consistency in putting out new content for my readers each month. But the money is all in writing novels, since that’s what readers are actually willing to pay for—and given the current state of short fiction, I can’t say I blame them.

Late October Update

It’s been a really mild autumn this year. We got our first hard frost only about a week ago, and it’s currently about 66 degrees outside. Feels positively balmy!

The image above is my current computer setup. The playpen is for the kids to watch a show while I’m working on the other monitor, such as what I’m doing right now. We’re still living with my in-laws, so this room is their library add-on. It’s really nice! I especially like how much light the windows let in, as well as the fact that it’s set away from the rest of the house, so I don’t have to worry as much about waking sleeping kids.

For the last few months, I’ve been alternating between each week between different WIPs, trying to use some of the principles I learned from hacking my ADHD in order to write more. I should really write a blog post about that soon. Basically, I switch out a new project every week, shepherding about half a dozen WIPs toward completion instead of completing them one at a time.

Since I only just started a few months ago, it’s going to be a few more months before the first of the projects is finished, but once I fill out the queue to that point I should be able to publish a new novel every other month for the forseeable future. Once I can do that consistently, without sacrificing the quality of the stuff I write, the plan is to move it up to once every six weeks, then once every month. With the way I’ve been incorporating AI into my writing process, it’ll be a challenge but still very doable.

I’m also working to get all of my audiobooks up on Findaway Voices, which distributes to Spotify, among other places. Since I’m not quite sure how to price them, I’m running a $2.99 sale for the rest of the year. The plan is to run a book pricing survey with my email list and use that data to guide future pricing for my ebooks and AI-narrated audiobooks. I’ve also been invited into the beta for Amazon’s AI-narrated audiobooks, so those should be going up on Audible before too long.

In family news, my wife is applying for a position in the BYU Linguistics Department, and they just set up a bunch of interviews (including the one with a General Authority, which is supposed to be with both of us). She’s also finishing up her PhD, which should be done next year. Between that and watching the kids, I don’t have a lot of uninterrupted writing time—thank goodness for AI!

And now the kids’ shows are over, so I’d better get back to doing other things. Take care!