Tag: news and updates

Where have I been?

So it’s been almost two weeks since I last posted anything, including any of the half-dozen or so short stories I’ve listened to that I feel are worth sharing. What’s going on?

We did just have a new baby less than two months ago, though that’s not been as disruptive to everything as I expected. My productivity actually went up after he was born, partially because of all the AI-assisted writing I’ve been doing, and partially because I’ve been working on the final revisions for Children of the Starry Sea, which are easier in some ways than writing the initial draft.

But I do think it’s the revisions that have thrown off my blogging, as well as the total lack of a routine. We’re gradually getting back into one, now that the new baby’s rhythms are becoming more consistent. As my current WIP project winds down—which is no small thing, since this is the longest novel I’ve written since I started publishing—I find myself in that weird between-projects state, where I don’t have any firm direction to guide my progress. Combine that with the total lack of routine that comes from having a new baby, and balls are going to get dropped.

Aside from this blog, though, I haven’t dropped too many balls. I’m still on track to write three novels this year, and should be able to pick up the next one without too much of a delay (since this is going to be an experimental AI-assisted novel, though, I may take a week or two to write a few short stories just to familiarize myself with the AI tools). And Children of the Starry Sea has actually turned out pretty well, in my (albeit limited) estimation.

So today I’m going to send this story out to my editor, moving it into the publishing queue. It’s already up for preorder on Amazon and the other sites that allow for assetless preorders. Then I’ll try to schedule a few blog posts catching up on those short stories I feel are worth recommending.

…and now the toddler just woke up, so I have to go. Another day in paradise, right?

We have a new baby!

So the reason I haven’t posted anything here in a little over a week is because we had a new baby! This one is our second, and he’s our first baby boy.

Unlike the last time, when Mrs. Vasicek went into labor around 7:30 PM and the baby was born in the early hours of the morning, she was scheduled for an induction first thing at 6:00 AM and the baby was born in the early afternoon. MUCH better way of doing things! He actually came out with the first push—the only reason he wasn’t born earlier was because the doctor was stuck in traffic, so we had to wait to start the active part of labor!

This was also our first time having a baby not in the middle of the pandemic, so we got to see the faces of all of our nurses and the doctor too, which was nice (last time, the doctor was practically in a hazmat suit with a face shield). They all got a kick out of the April Fool’s joke we played in 2020, convincing our extended family that we were going to name our daughter “Corona.” Everything went well, and Mrs. Vasicek and Little Buddy were released from the hospital the next day, which was nice.

So our lives have gotten quite a bit crazier, caring for this newborn and adjusting to all of the changes that come with that. My in-laws have been a huge help in making us food and watching our nearly 3 year-old daughter during this time, which has been really great. Still, any semblance of a routine has been shot to pieces, and it’s probably going to take at least a few weeks to recover from that.

Normally, my writing would take a huge hit from this… but I’ve actually been writing more than ever, using ChatGPT and other AI tools to experiment with writing AI-assisted stories. In fact, while I was in the hospital with Mrs. Vasicek, I actually wrote a 6k word fantasy short story during the slower moments. It was kind of funny, because just before Mrs. Vasicek got an epidural, I laughed at something funny that ChatGPT came up with, and she got really mad because there was someone in the room having joy while she was in so much pain. Then she got an epidural, and all was right with the world again.

As of right now, I’ve written five stories in conjunction with ChatGPT. The AI tools are still pretty clumsy at writing fiction, and they’re not masterpieces by any means, but they aren’t terrible either—and it actually takes quite a bit of work to make them not terrible, so it’s not like the AI is doing all of the work. One of these days, maybe I’ll do a blog post sharing some of my methods for writing AI-assisted stories.

I’m also working on the second and third rounds of revisions for Children of the Starry Sea, and it’s coming along nicely. It’s really good that I was able to finish the rough draft and first revision draft before Little Buddy was born, because I would definitely be swamped right now if that wasn’t the case. But these revisions are much easier to do, even in a sleep-deprived state: the second revision draft is all about smoothing out the flow of the narrative and making sure there aren’t any awkward transitions or loose ends, and the final revision draft is about polishing the writing on a sentence level and cutting about 10% of the words. Neither requires a ton of brain space.

So that’s what we’ve been up to out here. It’s going to take a while for things to return to normal, but we’re doing well, the baby is happy, the mom is tired but doing okay, and I’m just happy to be a dad two times over!

I suppose I should post something here

So it’s been more than a week since my last post. Don’t worry, I’m still around: it’s just that this blog is always the first ball to drop when I need to get things going. The post-holiday season was actually harder on us in a lot of ways than the holiday season itself, with insomnia, stomach bugs, and the like, but we’re getting back on our feet and doing pretty well.

The main thing I’ve been focusing on is writing, and I’m happy to say that I’ve been making very good progress these last few days. I’m trying out a completely new process, which I’ve blogged about a little, but I’ll have to write a full blog post on it once I’ve got all the kinks worked out. It basically involves hacking my ADHD to write more, in much the same way I hacked my ADHD to read more.

So yeah, things have been kind of crazy around here, and definitely more off-balanced than I would like. But it’s also turning out to be more productive, too—at least when our toddler isn’t throwing up and I’m able to sleep through the night. Happy new year!

Quick update

So I was going to post the next blog post in the Grand Conspiracy series today, but this week between Christmas and New Year’s has been unusually hectic for us. Long story short, both of my families (extended in-laws and my own extended family) are in town, so I’ve been juggling family obligations between the two of them. If I were still single, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but now that we have small children, it’s not quite so easy.

On top of that, I’m trying to stay up on publishing tasks, including the production of all of my books as auto-narrated audiobooks, and a new short story single that’s supposed to come out the first Saturday of January. Also, I’m trying very hard to get some writing in whenever I can, and since that obviously takes precedence over the blog (and really should take precedence over publishing tasks, too), this blog is the thing that often gets the shaft.

But I know exactly what I want to write for this blog post series, and I definitely plan to put it all out there eventually, even if it takes a while. In other words, I’m not going anywhere, so it will get done eventually. Just have to deal with other things right now.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this amusing video that I recently watched. Enjoy!

“Hell From Beneath” by J.M. Wight

I’ve been working on this short story for a while now, and the rough draft is finally finished… but I feel like it needs some work. This will likely be the final story in the first Zedekiah Wight anthology, but the story ends on quite a downer—in fact, the whole story itself is kind of a downer—and I’m not sure what to do about that.

I think the opening is pretty good, though:

In ancient times, bombs fell from the sky. People sought refuge from them underground—they did not fear that the ground beneath their feet would betray them.

Of course, until this last war—this war to end all interstellar wars—neither did we. The very thought of the ground opening up and swallowing us, or belching brimstone and hellfire, was unthinkable. We were a multi-planet species, after all. Wasn’t this sort of Biblical cataclysm something that we had evolved beyond?

Unfortunately, no. The age of galactic colonization was glorious but brief, because in the end, the bombs did not fall from above, but came up from beneath.

I should know.

I was on the team that developed them.

Interestingly, this story borrows much more from Romans than it does from Isaiah. That may change, though, as I go through and edit it. But I’m going to get some feedback first—hopefully that will help me to identify what the story needs. So it will probably be another month before it comes out.

In the meantime, General Conference is coming up, and I need to get October’s short story single out before then. Going to be rather busy!

Quick Update Post

It’s been a while since I posted to this blog. I had planned to keep a regular twice-a-week posting schedule, then went a little more than that for about a month before falling out of the routine.

We just got back home from a family road trip, where we drove out to Omaha and back again, making the Mormon pioneer trek in both directions. It was our first time going on a road trip with the baby, and we had a really fantastic time! Saw Chimney Rock, Independence Rock, Martin’s Cove, Sixth Crossing, Fort Bridger…and then we decided to go straight home, instead of finishing the trek with a tour of Salt Lake City. But that’s only a quick day trip for us, so we’ll probably do that soon.

It was a really awesome road trip, and definitely a good thing to get away and actually vacate for a while. But now that we’re back, I need to pick up some of the balls I’ve dropped and get back into the saddle. Writing is a high priority: I haven’t written hardly anything in the past week. Another big priority is publishing. I was supposed to put out a new short story single last weekend, but decided to put it off until we got back home. So that’s something I’m going to do right away.

I also want to get back into blogging. While on vacation, I DNFed a dozen books, most of them recent Hugo, Nebula, Dragon, and Goodreads Choice nominees. I have a lot of thoughts. Also, the 2022 Dragon Award nominees are out, and I’ve got to be honest, it looks kind of schizophrenic—which is exactly what you would expect to see with rival political tribes battling for control of fandom. But that’s been the case for the Dragons ever since the award’s inception. Again, I have thoughts.

Point is, I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on, but I hope to get back into a good blogging routine before the end of the month. That’s the plan, and it’s not a lack of content that’s the problem: more just a question of routine. Expect to see more here soon.

Post-Christmas Update

Christmas was great! My parents came over from Iowa on the train, and stayed with us for a few days. My wife’s brother also came down from the Salt Lake area. He has a bazillion board games, so we had a ton of fun playing with him.

Before I had kids, I never really got the point of Christmas. There were things about the season that I enjoyed well enough, but a lot of other things that I despised, and over time I developed a love-hate relationship with Christmas. I think I’ve blogged about it before. In any case, I used to think that it was due to the tension between commercialism vs. religion—Santa vs. the baby Jesus, or holiday vs. holy day, if you will—but now that I have children of my own, my perspective has changed. Christmas really is the perfect holiday for kids, and when you’re celebrating it for them and not just for yourself, the tension between the religious aspects and the commercial fades, and it all comes together in a really awesome way. Perhaps that’s why all of the best secular Christmas songs were written in the 40s and the 50s, in the earliest years of the post-war baby boom.

Anyways, those were some of my thoughts this year. It’s a lot more work to pull off Christmas with young children, but it’s also a lot more fun. It was also really fun to have other family visiting us, even if it was a bit stressful at times. But not too stressful, thankfully.

So we saw my parents off at the train this morning. The west-bound California Zephyr is running on time these days, which almost never happens with Amtrak (I have some of the worst train-travel horror stories you will ever hear—catch me at a convention and I’ll tell you how my girlfriend at the time broke up with me in the middle of a 60-hour train ride). Apparently, the supply chain crisis means that there are less freight trains, which makes for fewer delays. But the east-bound train leaves from California, the most dysfunctional state in the union, so it was running almost eight hours late. For us, though, that was actually kind of nice, because it meant that we got to sleep in.

In any case, the extended family is all gone now, and we’re slowly getting back to normal, though it probably won’t be until after the new year before we’re back to 100% again. If you sent me an email over the break, that’s why I haven’t sent a reply (although I am pretty horrible about replying to emails generally). I’ve got a BookBub Featured Deal running tomorrow that has me biting my nails, and a couple of other things to catch up on the publishing side of things.

Other than that, I hope to get back in the saddle with my writing pretty quickly. Should be able to pick up the WIP where I left off with it, and I’d like to pull out a couple of short stories from the outline too. Definitely need to get some more short stories into the production pipeline. I’ve got every month covered through May with new projects, though April’s story is appearing in Bards and Sages Quarterly and I’d like to line up a self-publishing project during that month too. But that shouldn’t be too hard.

I’ll leave off with this awesome rendition of I Saw Three Ships from the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. My dad was college buddies with the organist, Rick Elliott. Happy New Year!

2019-12-05 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the December 5th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

We had a very eventful Thanksgiving this year. My whole side of the family was in town for a baptism and a funeral, and we had Thanksgiving dinner with Mrs. Vasicek’s family, as well as pie night, which is a tradition my in-laws have. So lots and lots of family, which was stressful in some ways but also a lot of fun.

Mrs. Vasicek and I took advantage of this to make a family announcement, which I can now share with you: we’re having a baby! The due date for little junior is in May, and we don’t yet know if it’s a boy or a girl, but we will definitely find out next month.

I don’t think it’s really hit either of us yet. Of course, it’s something we talked about while we were dating, and since both of us are in our thirties we decided it would be best not to wait. Our lives are sure to change in a major way once little junior comes along, but for now, it’s still business as usual.

It has made me think a little bit about a blog post I wrote some nine and a half years ago, right after I graduated from college. The post was a response to a New York Times article about “emerging adulthood,” or the idea that we should count the time between adolescence and full adulthood as a separate stage of life.

The article points out that there are five traditional milestones that mark the transition to adulthood:

  • Completing school
  • Leaving home
  • Achieving financial independence
  • Getting married
  • Having a child

In our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, people commonly achieved all of these milestones sometime in their early twenties. However (the NYT article argues), because that isn’t as easy in today’s modern world, and because the human brain isn’t fully developed until about age 25, we shouldn’t put too much pressure on young people to achieve these milestones until their late twenties or early thirties.

As a 25 year-old at the time I read the article, I was much more interested in how I measured up with the milestones than the argument for putting off adulthood itself. Now, at age 35, I’m finally about to hit the last one.

I never consciously tried to put off the responsibilities of adulthood. If I’d found Mrs. Vasicek in my mid-twenties, I wouldn’t have made her wait another ten years. And yet, it seems that many of my peers are putting off adulthood as long as they can—in some cases, indefinitely. There’s a reason why “adulting” is a word now, and why pajama-boy is a meme.

And yet… if I’d met Mrs. Vasicek ten years ago, I don’t think it would have worked out. And if somehow it did, I probably would have put my writing career on the back burner, or abandoned it entirely. Many of my friends who got married a year or two out of college did exactly that. Those who are still pursuing their creative careers are generally either single, married without children, or stay-at-home moms (which seems even more difficult than juggling writing with a day job, but hey).

I suppose I benefited from this idea of “emerging adulthood,” since through my mid-thirties I basically was one. But I didn’t choose it because it was the easy path. It would have been a lot easier to give up on writing—but ironically, I don’t think Mrs. Vasicek would have been attracted to me if I’d done that, and there’s a very good chance I’d still be a single basement-dweller.

So what does this mean about this idea of “emerging adulthood”? Is it something that we should recognize? Yes, but not as an excuse to put off the responsibilities and milestones of adulthood. It isn’t worth putting off your life—or your future family—just because you’re afraid to take that next step, whatever it may be.

2019-08-15 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the August 15th edition of my author newsletter. To sign up for my newsletter, click here.

It was not an easy decision to enroll all of my Star Wanderers books into Kindle Unlimited. For years, this was my flagship series, not only on Amazon but on all platforms. Enrolling it in KU means that the ebooks are only available on Amazon now, and the first book is no longer free to non-KU subscribers.

In the indie author community, KU has always been a controversial program. It all boils down to one word: exclusivity. In order to enroll your books in KU, you cannot publish them anywhere else but Amazon. The upshot is that Amazon’s algorithms give your books a huge signal boost—about 2.5x, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations. Getting writers to do anything is a bit like herding cats, but with the right incentive structure you can do it. Amazon wants to be the dominant retailer for ebooks, and KU is their tool for doing it.

I don’t blame readers for subscribing to KU. It seems like a great program: $9.99 per month gives you an awesome selection of books to choose from. And certainly, Amazon can do what it wants on its own platform. If that means reducing the visiblity of books that aren’t exclusive to your platform, so be it. But as a matter of principle, I believe that exclusivity is bad for readers and writers, which is why I’ve stayed out of the program.

Until now. What changed? A few things. Earlier this year, I finally wrote out a complete business plan that describes everything I do (72 pages, 22.2k words). That made me rethink a lot of things, especially my marketing strategy. If Amazon gives books in KU such a huge signal boost, could I use that to bring more readers to my books that aren’t in KU? If none of my books are enrolled in KU, isn’t that just another way of making my books exclusive?

When Kindle Unlimited launched in 2014, I had finally reached a point where I could live off of my book royalties. A lot of that was because of Star Wanderers: with a permafree first-in-series, it got a lot of visiblity. But then, the Amazon algorithms changed to favor KU over permafree. I chose to stay out of KU, and lost more than 60% of my writing income over the next 18 months as a result.

I learned several things from that experience. First, I learned that I couldn’t rely on Amazon to do my marketing for me. I had to come up with a plan. Second, I learned that it was a bad idea to be dependent on just one platform. It was time to diversify.

Paradoxically, this meant doubling down on my decision to keep my books out of KU. But it paid off. In 2014, more than 90% of my writing income came from Amazon. Now, it’s more like 40%-60%, depending on the month. If I had panicked and put all my books in KU, I wouldn’t have those other income streams right now, and many of those readers never would have found me.

Over the years, I also became less dependent on Star Wanderers as well. I began to move toward writing trilogies of longer books instead of longer series of shorter books. And as I wrote and published more books, interest in my Star Wanderers books seemed to wane.

So now I’m in a place where enrolling Star Wanderers into KU actually makes sense. I have a plan and a marketing strategy, I’m not dependent on Amazon anymore, and the books themselves seem well-suited to the experiment. We’ll see how it turns out.

If you’re not an Amazon customer, don’t worry: I’m not going to enroll all of my books in KU, and still plan to release all of my new books wide. For now, it’s just Star Wanderers. And if you are a KU subscriber, I hope you enjoy! These books have a very special place in my heart, and I’m happy to share them with you.

“Lizzie-99XT” published in Serial Magazine!

It’s another week, and I have another short story out, this time in Serial Magazine! Here’s what the editor has to say about it:

We kick off ISSUE TWELVE with “Lizzie-99XT” by Joe Vasicek. This futuristic sci-fi tale follows a half-human, half-AI space pilot as she travels the galaxy to fight in an interplanetary war. She’s doing all she can to protect the lives down on Earth, but what type of life can this pilot truly have if most of it is spent lightyears away from those she loves?

“Lizzie-99XT” is a hard military SF piece about a starfighter pilot whose consciousness merges with the starfighter’s AI in order to fly it. She’s tasked with saving the world from a horde of alien invaders, but when battles are fought at near-light speeds, everything can change in an instant, and the home that she returns to may not be one that she recognizes.

Basically, it’s a cross between Neon Genesis Evangelion and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, except more uplifting. Probably. Also, it’s a short story, not a novel (or an anime series… yet). If that sounds intriguing, pick up a copy and read it today!

Buy Serial Magazine Issue 12