news and updates – Page 6 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

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

I’m married now!

So last week ~~Future~~ Mrs. Vasicek and I got married! It’s been really amazing so far. Amazing, and surreal. This is the first I’ve been on a computer since the 11th. We honeymooned in a cabin up in the Tetons, about a dozen miles from the edge of civilization, and it feels odd to be back, not the least because I’ve moved into her house now, which is now our house… an actual house. Like, with a yard and stuff. It’s pretty rad.

The reception was amazing, too. I should probably post pictures, seeing as we had a dunk tank in the end. Yes, Mrs. Vasicek got dunked in her actual wedding dress. She didn’t want the guests to get bored during the reception, so we had a dunk tank, and a bounce house, and an ice cream bar, and a live band that was really amazing. I’ve never seen so many people dancing at a wedding reception. The floor was packed.

So we’re married now, which means going through all of our stuff, figuring what to keep and where it should go. That process will probably continue for the next couple of months. I’m also learning a bunch of interesting new things about her, like the fact that she has a pen collection of probably more than 100 pens! Good thing she married a writer.

In any case, it’s going to take a couple of weeks to ease back into writing again. My plan as of now is to spend the rest of June outlining my next WIP, The Stars of Redemption, which will complete the Genesis Earth trilogy. Lots and lots of publishing stuff to do, too, including new print editions of all of my books. Expect to see those in the very near future.

To get back into the swing of things, I will do my best to regularly update this blog. I also plan to send out a newsletter before the end of the week, with a sweet deal for my subscribers.

So much stuff happening. It’s surreal. I’m married to a woman who is perfect for me in every sort of weird, quirky way imaginable. If you’d told me a year ago that this was where I’d be, I wouldn’t have dared believe it. It’s amazing. It’s beautiful. Everything is beautiful. When people cut me off on the road, I don’t even care. My wife gets off work in an hour and ten minutes, and I can hardly wait to see her again. Being a newlywed is the most amazing drug ever.

Post Memorial Day Update

I just got back from Iowa, visiting family. My nephew got baptized over the weekend, so we had a big family get-together, and Future Mrs. Vasicek came with me, so it was her first time spending any significant amount of time with my family.

Overall, it went very well, though the train was delayed for more than six hours in Denver on the way back, so we didn’t arrive home in Provo until nearly 4am. But Future Mrs. Vasicek didn’t break up with me on the train like my last girlfriend, so everything’s pretty good.

When you travel across the country by train, you kind of go into this fuzzy place where you’re not fully awake but never fully asleep either. For that reason, I didn’t get much writing done, since I didn’t trust myself to do good work while I was in that weird state of consciousness.

However, I did get a bunch of publishing stuff done, such as writing and sending out another email newsletter and typesetting Gunslinger to the Stars for print (Future Mrs. Vasicek helped with that as well). I also finished updating my 2019 business plan, and while I expect to keep making changes over the next few months, it’s now in a state that I can share with other people (like my Mom) and say “no, I don’t just sit around all day in my pajamas eating peanut butter straight from the jar.”

It may take a while before this blog gets regularly updated again. Tomorrow, Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are working on the house, so I can’t promise an update. I also really need to get back on track with my writing, which has fallen off a bit in the last few days. Also lots of wedding stuff going on… so much wedding stuff.

So that’s where things stand right now. Lots of stuff going on, all of it very good, but it’s definitely keeping me busy.

A quick update

If life had a crazy-meter, the needle on mine would be somewhere in the yellow green right now and trending toward the red.

Next week, Future Mrs. Vasicek and I will be traveling to Iowa for my nephew’s baptism. It’s going to be a big family affair. Future Mrs. Vasicek has met everyone already, minus some of the nieces and nephews, but this will be the first time that we’re all in the same place together. Should be fun, but also very busy.

Next month, we’re getting married, and that’s a whole other source of craziness right there. Good craziness, but craziness all the same. Things are coming together one thing at a time, but there’s still a bunch of stuff to figure out, and a bunch of unknown unknowns as well. It will probably take at least a couple of months after we’re married before everything fully shakes out.

As far as writing goes, I’m making slow but steady progress on Edenfall, and should still finish it before the wedding. I’ll share more details on that in the email newsletter that I plan to send out this week, but the short version is that I seem to be over the hump and making good progress. That’s where I’m putting most of my energy, so if the blog falls off for a while, don’t worry—I’m still here.

As for the publishing side of things, I’m figuring out how to get all my books out in print, which was something I thought I’d figured out back in January until I learned just how crappy KDP Paperback really is. That said, it’s the best option for the present time, so I’m trying to figure out how to work within those limitations and design covers that their POD printers won’t mangle too badly. Still, it’s going to be a while.

An area where I’ve really dropped the ball is short stories. It’s been months since I wrote the last one, and I need to put a bunch out on submission again too. Also, marketing is an area that I need to do better in. I’m experimenting a bit with AMS ads, but it is so freakishly complicated that I hardly know where to begin.

But reading is an area that I really need to do better. I try to spend an hour or two each night reading, but the last couple of weeks that hasn’t happened at all. My TBR list is about three shelves long right now, and that’s just the print books. That’s definitely an oversight that needs to be rectified.

At the same time, I’m well on my way toward collecting all of the works of David Gemmell, mostly through Paperback Swap. If everyone has a superpower, mine is the ability to acquire books, so Paperback Swap is a really fantastic way to leverage that. The Neverending Story is my favorite book, but David Gemmell is my favorite author, so I definitely want to have all of his books in my personal library.

That’s pretty much it. Still need to figure out cover work for Edenfall. Still need to assemble my first readers and get stuff figured out for that. All of these are good problems, though. Hopefully, I’ll be trading up for better problems in the very near future.

Back to Blogging

So my life is in well enough order now that I think I can get back to my goal of daily blogging. If I fall behind on writing again, I may duck out for a while, but for now it looks like we’re good.

The last couple of weeks have been a little crazy. Engagement photos, wedding invitations, and then there was FanX this weekend. Future Mrs. Vasicek is finishing up with school, with all exams last week and a group paper due today. But once that’s done, she’ll be working full-time over the summer, so it’s not like her work load is going to lighten all that much. Plus, we have the wedding in June.

In any case, the next couple of months are going to be a bit rocky, but there’s enough of a lull right now that I think I can get into the swing of daily blogging again. Hopefully I can keep it up for quite a while.

Getting better, coming back

So last Monday, I woke up with post-nasal drip and a sore throat, which quickly turned into a 101 degree fever. Needless to say, I was out for the rest of the week. I’ve mostly recovered by now, though I’m still coughing up gunk from my chest, and should be back up to 100% in the next couple of days.

Coming back is giving me a chance to re-examine the way I’ve been doing some things, and to make some adjustments that will hopefully yield some positive dividends. This includes reworking my writing goals, writing process, and publishing schedule, updating my business plan, and figuring out what I need to focus on with regards to marketing and publishing.

The biggest thing is that I’ve decided to trunk Queen of the Falconstar, just because it’s not the kind of story I want to write or be known for. I’m still working on Edenfall, but enough time has passed that I’m going to call it a new draft. The current one is a bit of a mess, so I’ll take the next week to clean it up before hopefully going into it full-speed.

More stuff to come, but I’ve got to run so I’ll share it later. With luck, I’ll be back up to blogging weekly again soon.

Quick update

So I missed a couple of blog posts last week, and I don’t currently have any more lined up in the queue. I know I said I’d try to blog daily from now on, and I intend to work up to that, but I’ve got to get other things in order first. Here’s what I’ve got going on:

Wedding stuff
Tax stuff
Writing Edenfall
Revisions for Edenfall
Copy edits for Gunslinger to Earth
Metadata, formatting, and publishing Gunslinger to Earth
Writing a short story for March
Catching up on emails (there’s a lot of them)

It’s not that the workload is overwhelming, it’s just that there’s a lot of moving parts. Also, the daily routine has fallen apart and I need to build it back up again. This tends to happen periodically, so I’m not too worried, but it is frustrating and it does mean that balls are going to get dropped.

First things first: finish the copy edits for Gunslinger to Earth and get that up for preorder, preferably by the end of the week. Taxes also need to be done ASAP. The wedding stuff is mostly being handled by other people, but I need to be available, so that’s an ongoing thing. But if I can tackle those big ones, then the rest should fall into place hopefully.

Also, sleep. Can’t function without it. Caffeine is not a long-term substitute.

I’m not gonna lie, there’s a part of me that wants to shut out everything else and just do family history all day. Then there’s making family history, AKA spending time with Future Mrs. Vasicek. But she’s got school and work, so there’s a hard limit to that.

Then there’s reading. So much reading to do. Books are piling up everywhere.

Anyways, that’s enough for now. I’ll post as often as I can, but it’s going to be touch and go for a while, at least until everything else is in some semblance of order.