Dancing to Dirges

A conversation about Love

2012-01-10T08:07:00.001-08:00

I've been hesitating to write this post, because it implies some sort of closure, and I think it's a while before I'll have closure on this. Also because I'm trying to make this blog less about my personal tragedy. But I've also come to realize that this journal is more for me than it is for you. It's more of a public record of me, of who I am, a reflection of my mental and emotional state at this moment. I've been going back and reading about myself.

Anyway. In case you don't know, or haven't figured it out, this is a post about my dog.

We got Phae a little over a year after we got married. It was probably too early for us to get a dog, but we wanted one, and the timing worked out really well. When we went to look at her, she and her brother were romping around, causing trouble, eating grass. She threw up in the car on the way home. I slept on the floor next to her crate that first night, so she wouldn't whine so much.

Phaedrus was always full of love. She was patient, she was gentle... frankly, she was the sweetest dog you would ever meet. We loved her every day of her life, and she tolerated that love, because it was her due.

I have a thousand stories, but I'm going to keep them to myself. Suffice it to say that she played hard, felt bad when she caused trouble, and loved to steal pizza out of the trash or off of an unattended plate. These last few years have been hard. Watching her decline hasn't been easy. But it was easier than this part.

She has been suffering from fluid on the lungs since Thanksgiving. Last Thursday night she was having some trouble with it, but no worse than she's had a dozen times since it started. I got her up and got her leash on for a little walk, since sometimes that helps. A year ago we were able to get her to walk down to the end of the block before her legs gave out. Recently it's just been around the house. That night I was able to get her to the front yard, but I had to carry her back inside. We propped her up so she could breath easier, got her a little water, and then went to bed. At 2:30, Jen checked on her. She was sleeping peacefully. Maybe even dreaming.

She never woke up. I found her the next morning, right where I had laid her down. Still. I can't tell you how empty she looked.

It's been a hard weekend for us. It's hard, right now, thinking about it. It's going to be difficult for quite a while. Every time I walk into the main room, I'm going to look at where she usually was, to see how she's doing. I'm going to hear things in the house, sounds, and think it's the dog settling down to sleep, or getting up for a drink, or just huffing in her dreams. The house is going to feel empty for quite a while.

We named her Phaedrus, after the character in the Socratic dialogues who starts the conversation on Love. She was, and is, true to that name.

She was a good dog, and I loved her. I miss her. I always will.

As stone sharpens stone

2012-01-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

I was watching the last few games of the regular NFL season, and I was thinking about how strange it must be for those guys in irrelevant games. They have this moment, these three hours, and then their jobs are technically over for a few months. Maybe forever. And, as these things tend to work in my brain, that started a whole cascade of thoughts about professionalism, self-will and the writing life. I'll try to parse it all out here, if I can.

First of all, being a player in the NFL isn't really just a job, just like being a writer isn't really just a job. It's a lifestyle, and it's a lifestyle that you only attain through years and years of serious determination and full-time effort, layered on fat stacks of talent. Think about the process players go through to get to the NFL. They were probably the standout talent of their high school team, their coaches marked them as the best they had ever seen, because you have to be that good to get recruited by a real college. Then they need to be among the best at the collegiate level just to get noticed by NFL scouts, playing for a major team and putting up major numbers. And that might get them a high draft pick, and the kind of attention, coaching and patience that the high pressure world of professional football gives to valued players.

And then they have to perform. Because no amount of perceived value will replace actual value on the field. How many players go through all of that, land the good pick, the dream contract, and then wilt on the field? I'll tell you; most of them. Most play a few years, the coaches figure out they can't adjust to the accelerated pace of the professional game, and they wash out. They knock around in the smaller leagues, they do a turn in Canada, maybe they get another chance, maybe not. Maybe they end up installing drywall and dreaming.

And that's a lot like writing. Too many aspirant writers think that first book contract is the win. And it kind of is, for a day or a month or a year, but then you have to step up, suit up, and step onto that field. You have to perform.

Players in the NFL don't end their season on the last down. They may take a break, may get that surgery they've been putting off until this season is over, but then they start preparing for next season. They are where they are, succeeding at the level they're at, because they are finely honed monsters of determination.

Be that.

Advice for Writers. No. Seriously.

2011-11-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

I first met my agent at World Fantasy in Madison, in 2005. Actually, that's not strictly true. When I initially decided that I wanted to be a writer, I also decided that I should go to some conventions, and the first con I went to was Worldcon in Toronto. That was 2003. And I went to a panel, the sort of panel that aspiring writers go to. I don't even remember what it was about. But Joshua was on that panel, and the things he said impressed me. I was making myself go around and talk to people, seeking advice for my budding (really, at that point still buried in the dirt and wondering which way the sun was) career. You know. The kind of this aspiring writers do. I approached a number of writers that weekend, but Joshua is the only agent I talked to. I think I asked him to extrapolate on something he said in the panel. Honestly, I don't remember. I remember being scared, and nervous, and hoping that he would at least talk to me. And he did. But I'm sure he doesn't remember that.

No, the first time I really, really talked to Joshua was in Madison. We met over a can of Sundrop at, I believe, the Tor Party. If you saw Joshua on Saturday night in San Diego at WFC, you might have heard this story, or at least part of it. And to be honest it wasn't a hugely complicated conversation, but it ended with him asking for a sample of what I was working on at the time. Like everyone else, I was working on a YA fantasy novel. And then over Christmas while I was visiting my in-laws, Joshua requested the full manuscript.

In February, he sent me a letter. Three pages, single spaced, typed. I actually carry that letter with me everywhere I go. It's on my desk right now. I keep it in my bag. If you asked to see it at WFC in San Diego, I could have showed it to you.

It's essentially a rejection, but not really. It points out, in grim detail, everything that's wrong with the book. There are some specific suggestions on what to fix, and some general suggestions on ways that I need to think differently about writing something like a novel. And then there's a great deal of encouragement.

Today I'm working on how to improve the new work. I think it's good, but I think it can be a great deal better. And after conversations with Joshua, I realized that I'm kind of slipping into some of the mistakes I made with that first book, and forgetting a lot of what I learned with the previous three. I sometimes look at the sales numbers for those books and wonder if the things I learned while writing them were good things, or bad things, but I'm coming to grips with it. So this morning I got to work and took out that letter, and left it on my desk. Because now, almost six years after the fact, it's still an insightful letter. There is still instruction, and still advice. And still encouragement.

This is why I'm careful with what I say to other writers, especially young ones. Because it can mean so much, for so many years. You can shape a career or ruin one. And I'm always grateful that so many of the people who have had contact with me over the years have all done so much to shape, in such constructive ways.

Ritual of Morning

2011-11-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

There's a tangle of spray paint on the asphalt. Different colors; pink for this car, yellow for the truck. Red and blue and green. Lots of colors. The dashed lines describe velocities, trajectories, the paths they took through metal and broken glass as things went wrong. Badly wrong. Someone left their house yesterday and didn't come back. They did their morning things, their rituals. They got in the car and they took the same road they always take. They went to work. They never got there, and now there's this arcane diagram on the road trying to describe why.

I drive over it, over the lines that tell a story of a life ending in mundane and violent ways, and I continue on to work. Another day. One more day. Every day.

I worked at Borders well after it was cool, but before it was depressing

2011-09-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

So, the Borders liquidation. Store number one (Ann Arbor, MI) closed earlier this week. There are still some stores open, like my local, but they're pretty much wrecked. Borders is now a past tense phenomenon.

But the sale itself? That's been interesting. I've mentioned in the past that Amazon now provides limited BookScan numbers to authors, so ever since the first round of closings, I've been watching a steady increase in the sales of my books, or at least certain titles. Heart of Veridon isn't on any shelf, anywhere, so it was largely unaffected. But both Dead of Veridon and The Horns of Ruin saw a modest bump with the first round.

And then we had the liquidation.

DoV saw a modest increase. But The Horns of Ruin? Murdered it. It's jumped up week after week, each week increasing by more than it had the month before. We passed release week figures weeks ago. We're well into the top weekly sales for that book. Solidly.

The bad part? The publisher will never see any of that money, which means I won't garner royalties against advance. So we basically just gave away hundreds and hundreds of books.

So here's the game: what impact will that have on the overall popularity of the book? If there are now hundreds of people out there who have the book, and they read it, will they tell their friends? Will there be a steady burn of people ordering the book on the recommendation of their barista, or their co-worker, or the mad drunk down at the pub (the author) or whoever? This is what I want to see.

Anyway. The Borders sale is pretty much over. I expect the next BookScan report to slow a precipitous dive back to normal sales figures. Next we see if people actually reading the book has any effect. I'm hopeful. But I'm always hopeful. You know me, Mr. Blazing Inferno of Optimism.

What's the collective noun for dragons? A Frustration?

2011-07-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

I finished A Dance with Dragons over the weekend. I have things to say. But before I say them, I want to be clear about something; I read the hell out of this book. I tucked my nook under my monitor so I could read a page or two while my jobs ran. I read it at lunch. I read while I wandered around outside with my dog. I read while I should have been writing. By the end I was just pushing through to get to the end, but still, most books that produce this level of frustration for me I would have just thrown to the side. GRRM does a lot of things right. But I need to express what I think he does wrong. It's my nature. I'm a writer. Also, *SPOILERS*, duh.

Gods, where to start. I need to reiterate that the magic is getting out of hand. A Game of Thrones was a real breath of fresh air in the fantasy genre because it only minimally touched on the supernatural. Because it's largely a medieval book you kind of have to include some of this, because people at the time really believed in dragons and giants and shapeshifting wolf people, and it's really only a small step to include evidence of such things in the past and maybe a hint of something horrible beyond the Wall. But what I loved was that this was basically a story about knights and ladies and the common, human emotions that can lead to epic tales. It doesn't take a secret history of alien interference or magical blood or a sword forged in the heart of hell to make an epic story. It takes people. People can be epic. They should be epic.

And now we're five books in and people are no longer epic. Oracles buried under the earth, and wild dragons, and prophetic dreams that guide the characters, and whatever the hell else was included in the pages I skipped... those things are epic. Too epic. GRRM did a good thing at the beginning of this series, and he's either betrayed it or never intended to stay true to it, or something.

I should also point out that I don't skip paragraphs usually, much less pages. The last chapter (actually the second to last chapter, but how about we just call it the last chapter that wasn't misnamed as an epilogue) was bad. I was trying to think of a word that wasn't quite so harsh but that accurately demonstrated my disdain, but to hell with it. It was a bad chapter. I skipped so much of that chapter. Terrible way to end a book.

Also, because there are so many ponderous storylines running in parallel, the last fifth of the book is dedicated to ending the book. Each time a chapter ended I had to think "Is that the last time I see this character in this book? If so, was that a satisfying way to tie up their storyline for now?" And sometimes I would think "No, there certainly needs to be more said before we're set adrift for the next book" only to never see them again, or I would think that I was done with someone, only to have them pop up and be irrelevant for another chapter, often ruining a perfectly good ending with additional and unnecessary exposition.

And when you have plotline after plotline drawing to a close for such an extended period of time, things get tiring. We all know how a novel should be shaped, but when you're trying to coordinate a dozen or so lines and have them land in a coordinated manner, it's just tough. And it's tough to read.

The last thing I'll say about this book specifically is that GRRM in the past has done a good job of surprise killing characters. I was really near the end of this book and thought "Wow, no one important has died, I don't think. Am I really going to get through a Martin book without someone dropping off the twig?" I'm pretty sure GRRM looked at his draft and had the exact same thought at the exact same moment, because he immediately killed three major characters in succession. Well, majorish. Including the last Stark that I give half a damn about, assuming that he actually died there and won't wake up in a bed, grievously wounded but still relevant to the plot. As Starks are wont to do.

Actual final thought. Dany is a terrible queen. And she and young Griff occupy the same narrative space in the plot. Eliminate one of them, and then make that one relevant. He's doing the things with Griff that he should have done with Dany, but Dany went off in some wild other direction that is a waste of pages as far as the central plot goes, so it kind of feels like GRRM pulled Griff out of his hat to do the things that he originally intended Dany to do, before she became occupied with slutting it up all across the Narrow Sea.

So, where does the series go from here? GRRM doesn't seem like the kind of writer who is suddenly going to exercise some narrative discipline, cut down the whirling nebula of characters that is spinning out of control across Westros, and finish the series in the next couple books. I also don't see him producing the next book all that quickly. Is he going to continue producing half the narratives at a time, five years apart? Do I have to wait five to eight years for the next book, only to find out what happens to half of the characters I care about, all while threshing through a dozen narrative plotlines that I don't find relevant? And then another five to eight years to tie up the rest of the plotlines? I seriously hope not. While I see no immediate evidence of this, I hope his editor is able to discourage that sort of behavior. But any one book that follows all of these characters is only going to cover a minimal amount of narrative space. We have a long way to go with Westros, and at this pace we're never going to get there.

Do you think HBO knew what they were getting into? In fairness, I haven't seen the show yet, but my understanding is that they had to clip a lot out to keep it focused enough for a television series. They finished A Game of Thrones in one season. Maybe in the next two seasons they get through to A Feast for Crows. And the way that a television series has to be structured, they're going to edit the hell out of the plot up to that point, and will take a mean blade to books four and five. I predict they'll do AFFC and ADWD in one season. It's one season of material, with three seasons worth of cast. Will GRRM have even written another book by then? I'm guessing no. And then what does HBO do? I'm going to go with "Get Frustrated."

Ecrivains sans Frontieres

2011-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me say how happy I am that the French word for writer includes the word "vain." Clever boys, those frenchies.

I got my official Borders Rewards notification of the liquidation sale. Tonight I'm going to drive down to the store where I used to work and buy a bunch of books. I've been resisting writing about the liquidation, but I thought I'd give some thoughts on what it means to me, as a writer.

It's not good. I mean, that's obvious, there are no writers for whom it will be good. But just as an example, Dead of Veridon got shelf space in nearly every Borders in Chicagoland. There's only one B&N around here that's carrying it. If there was no Borders (as there will not be starting sometime in August) that book would basically not have been available in a retail environment in Chicago. So that would have sucked. I'm not really sure what it means for my books going forward. Was that limited distribution directly tied to the series/publisher, or specifically my name? Who knows.

But in a larger sense, Borders was kind of a magical place. Bookstores have always been marvelous to me. When I was a kid we had to drive most of 45 minutes to the dingy local mall just to go to a B. Dalton. It wasn't until almost high school that we got a Waldenbooks in the same mall. I was ecstatic. On vacation my main interest was visiting bookstores that could serve my voracious needs. And then places like Borders and Barnes & Noble started cropping up, and it became less of a challenge, but I still always thrilled to walk into those places and see ALL THOSE BOOKS. In college I worked at a Crown, and then when we bought our second house we had to stretch our budget to fill it with furniture and to cover those one time expenses that come with a move, and I got a second job at the aforementioned Borders. I think in different circumstances I could have owned a bookstore and been completely happy in my life.

Well, now the local B&N has closed, and all the Borders are going away. My home town (not where I was born, but where I've lived most of my life) no longer has a single bookstore in it. Since this is Chicagoland, there are plenty of stores in driving distance, but still. It's weird.

My hope is that independents rise up in the wake of Borders' collapse. Their main problem in my opinion was that they couldn't support their square footage. Too much space had been dedicated to music and dvds, and when those retail industries fell apart (Remember Tower Records? Remember going to the mall to *buy* music?) they had nothing to fill that gap. When I was working there they instituted Paperchase, which was perennially empty of customers. It was like they walled off a section of the store and said "We don't want customers in this area" so they stuffed it with paper products. Very strange. And then they took out Paperchase, but that part of the store languished. And sometime after I left they put it back in, to no visible affect.

I can't say this any more clearly. The only way to describe the managerial style of leadership while I was there, and after, is "thrashing about." Things didn't work, they tried something else, it didn't work, they went back to what hadn't been working. But there were many problems, and I've not been following it closely enough to tell you what they could have done to save things. I have opinions, but they're made without full knowledge of the financials. Maybe in their place I would have thought that Paperchase was a great idea. Who knows.

Point is, there are fewer bookstores than there were a week ago. And while I'm sure I'll see a bump in sales as all those copies of Dead of Veridon get liquidated, after that bump is gone there's going to be a long, flat strap, fading away into the horizon. And Barnes & Noble will be deciding what the country reads, by and large.

A Tangle of Plotlines

2011-07-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons, George RR Martin's epicly overdue fifth Westros novel. I think I started reading these when the third one came out, and the first two are some of my favorite books ever. The third was fine, but it was beginning to strain under the weight of its own mass. That mass became critical in book four. I still read the hell out of that book, mind you, but I found its form kind of horrific. For those of you who don't follow (who are you people!) the fourth book was way overdue and way over wordcount, and he didn't feel like it was even half done. GRRM has this problem with creating more and more characters, and while he's pretty good at killing them off, the narrative threads were still expanding at a much greater rate than they were being snipped off. So, oddly, the fourth book ended up being a certain part of the narrative from about half the characters in the series, and book five is the same period of time from the other half. I can't call that a good plan, I'm sorry. You shouldn't mean to write a book like that, and if you end up writing a book like that, you've made a grave mistake somewhere.

Still. I read the books, because they're well written and the characters are interesting. I have a couple nits to pick, though, so I'd like to go ahead and lay those out for you. Don't consider this a bad review of the book. It's a good book. But there are things that bubble up as I'm reading that I have to vent.

Before I go any further, I should point out that my agent, Joshua Bilmes, has his own list of complaints here. I agree with some of the things he says, but not all. I have found myself skipping through GRRM's pointless lists and even (gasp) a lot of his description, especially of pointless people. I don't care about the histories or even names of the six who travel with Jon north of the wall to say their vows in the godswood. They're not prime motivators. They are there to give Jon and excuse to go north, for plot purpose. Don't make them more than they are. Anyway. I guess that's complaint number one, and as long as I've begun my list, I may as well continue.

So I guess the next thing is that the characters and places are like caricatures of medieval things. Kind of like the Medieval Times equivalent of characters. These knights who are eternally donning helmets cunningly fashioned into fish heads or pig snouts or whatever, that's what knights wore to tournaments, and that's kind of it. The Boltons, with their flaying and their pink everything, it's like you dipped Vlad the Impaler into pepto bismol. And the throne room in White Harbor? The interior of the throne room was painted to look like it was underwater, with waves and sea creatures painted on the walls and floor, and the ceiling was draped with fishing nets. And all I could think as I read those several pages of description was that this place looks like Long John Silvers, and then I couldn't take it seriously. So that keeps getting in my way.

Also, ever since this series started people have been describing it as a low magic fantasy. Those people are reading a different book. What's sad is that what interests me most about the books (and I think I stand with the majority of the fans in this) are the unmagical people and places and events of the book. For a little while it was about petty kings and proud knights fighting for their place in history. And in book three a little more magic crept in, and then in book four it was a major player. And now? Book five is choked with it. I don't know if this was GRRM's intent from the beginning. There are certainly indications that it was, but I wish to gods he would have left it out. I think there's some requirement in a fantasy novel for at least the implication of magical power in the world, and that's pretty much where he started in Game of Thrones. But now everyone's a "skin walker" and there are magicians and ghosts and... it's too much. If he stayed with the level of magic in the first novel, maybe bumped it up a little bit, things would have been okay. But the people in the book who aren't magical have pretty much no chance in this magic-sotted environment. Too. Much.

I haven't finished the book yet. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts as I go along. I keep getting frustrated because when I think of the events of the last book I honestly have no idea if those things have happened yet in this timeline, or if they have yet to happen, or what. It's a terrible way to tie two books together.

Getting better, always better

2011-07-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman said something that I'm going to paraphrase quite liberally here. Or maybe it wasn't Gaiman. You know, let's say it was a writer you've heard of and respect, and that way I can be lazy and not look it up. This person said something along the lines of "I haven't learned to write books. Each book I finish, that's the end of my education on how to write that book. And for the next book I have to learn how to write that book, kind of from scratch."

That sounds like Gaiman, doesn't it? I don't know. Anyway. While I think this nebulous yet famous author was generally right, I also think they were exaggerating. There are things I've learned from each book that I write that informs the next book. Honestly, sometimes those things are detrimental to the next work. You can learn bad habits, or crutches that cover up some of your weaknesses without ever addressing those weaknesses. But you also learn something about process, and discipline. Mostly you learn that you can write a book. It's not some impossible task reserved for the elite. Look, here's the proof. A book!

But mostly I become aware of the areas where I'm limping by. I see the ways I can write better, and with each book I try to address those things. I get better with each book. I can say without a doubt that Dead of Veridon is the best book I've written to date. But honestly I think it's only marginally better than The Horns of Ruin, which in turn was marginally better than Heart of Veridon. And I'd like to make one of those commitment moves. I want the next book to be significantly better.

I started that process by sitting down and writing out everything I felt like I could improve, and how it could be better. I made a plan. And that general sketch became a structure, and that structure became an outline. And this thing I've been working on in notebooks and laptops and big sketch pads has slowly solidified into something solid. And now I have ten thousand words that do nothing but describe the book. An outline. A backstory. Characters. The map for this book is written. And I'm now passing it around to people I trust to see if it makes sense, to see if there are any "What the hell?" moments for someone coming to this story for the first time.

Anyway. I've been working on it feverishly (literally. I've been sick.) for a while now, and I wrote the last word well after midnight last night. I think it's good that a week ago, when I was legitimately quite ill, I woke up and said "To hell with it. I'm not working on the book today. I'm going to take cold medicine and watch some racing, and take a lot of naps." And that lasted about an hour before I was at the table, working on the book.

In shadows dwell, and shadows make for heaven, and for hell

2011-06-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

I have one of those colds where you turn your head and something slips inside your skull, some deep, tectonic plate of mucus, and then your whole head squeaks for about twenty seconds while the phlegmy geology of your sinus caverns readjusts itself.

It's unpleasant.

On the plus side, I was on an actual vacation last week. Like, I left my house and bought souvenirs and everything. I still remember when I was in France and we visited a winery, and the tour guide handed me a wine label and said "Souvenir!" and the verb (souvenir = to remember) and the noun (a bit of kitsch that only has value as it relates to my memories of this time) connected for me. Language is weird.

I was thinking about the current project last night. We're out of nyquil so I was drinking a glass of wine before bed, and I was thinking about what I was trying to get at with the religion. In the book the dominant religion worships the sun and the moon as dual deities. I'm using a lot of the mesoamerican idea of duality for this religion. See, the Aztecs treated their gods as both good and bad things. I guess it's more accurate to say that what you and I would think of as a good deity would frequently have evil aspects. For example, Quetzalcoatl. He seems to be the one most Westerners know. The feathered serpent, his name means. I'm just speculating, but I think the name comes from rainbows. See, QC at his most basic level is the god of the wind. There are a lot of connotations to that; The wind brings rain, and it blows seeds from one place to another, so he was a god of fertility. But the wind is also the storm, especially as manifest in the hurricane. So one aspect of QC, the hurricane, was the god of destruction. He brings life, but he also tears your home down and floods your fields. Duality.

So in the book you have this church that worships two gods, each of which has positive and negative aspects. The sun is life, growth, beginning, exuberance, fertility and joyful abandon. It's also fire, drought, sickness (as expressed by fever), fury, madness and war. The moon is death, sacrifice, winnowing, darkness, hidden things (both good and bad), secrets and mystery, as well as the logic and intelligence to puzzle out those secrets and that mystery. The moon is ending. And since all things end, meditating on the nature and value of your own ending. It is peace. But it is also the harshness of winter, the sadness of autumn, and the terror of darkness.

Anyway. I guess in my small way I'm trying to get people to think about evil. Good and evil, but mostly evil. When people ask where I get my ideas I usually shuffle something off about accumulating images in my head and trying to puzzle out what those images mean, and how they might relate. But often my books start as a meditation on something, and it's usually something related to religion. So, in this case, I can tell you that this book started off as a meditation on the nature of evil.

The important thing is that, if and when you read this book, I don't think that will smack you in the face. In fact, if you hadn't read this post, I'm not sure it would have occurred to you at all. Because if you read a book that is obviously about the nature of evil, it's because you are actively seeking out and looking for books about that subject. And while that's noble of you, I think it might be a little much to ask of the general population. And I don't worry so much about people who are actively thinking those kinds of thoughts. The people who need to think about these things are usually people who have to be tricked into reading about them. And tricked is the wrong word. I seek to entertain. And in my entertainments, if I can subtly introduce the idea that a black and white worldview is perhaps a bit juvenile, and that you the reader might be better off thinking more broadly than that, then that's great. And if you can read the book and start thinking in those directions without realizing that the book is pushing you in those ways, that's even greater.

Akersville needs a motto. How about "Grim Reality Since 1972"

2011-06-02T08:52:00.001-07:00

Borders conspires to make me look bad. This morning the number of Borders in Chicagoland to have Dead of Veridon has doubled. My agent believes that the whole chain is having trouble with their supply line, so expect the numbers to pop up sporadically.

Also, I'd like to point out that The Horns of Ruin is still doing decent numbers. Not huge numbers, but consistent, comfortable numbers. This in spite of the fact that it can't be found in most bookstores. It's developed some kind of inertia of readers who are seeking it out despite the fact that it's not in their local big box. I think I have a lot of independent booksellers out there to thank for that inertia. That and the liquidation at Borders. At least one reviewer said he picked the book up on a whim at a Borders that was closing. If that flood of purchases leads to wider readership and positive word of mouth, that's a good thing.

So. It's not all grim and gray here in Akersville. I think too many writer's blogs are either an unending flood of delusional self-promotion, or just depressing. I realize I come off as depressing sometimes, but I try to look at the simple realities of the industry, and I try to be honest with my readership. Sometimes those realities are depressing. Sometimes they're serendipitous. Sometimes they're just numbers.

Today I'm just excited about what I'm writing. You will be, too. Trust me on this one.

The Grim Toll

2011-05-31T07:55:00.001-07:00

Today is the official release date for Dead of Veridon. It's my book day, hooray. Okay? Enough celebration? Let's look at some tacks, made up of brass.

Dead of Veridon is the second book in this series. Heart of Veridon, as we all know, didn't do brilliantly out of the gate. There are a variety of reasons for it, but the simple fact is that the book shipped to every B&N and Borders in the US, and most of those got returned. That creates a precedent. Regardless of the reasons for the book not doing well, it creates a pattern that gets lodged into the algorithms of the industry, and there are repercussions.

In this case, it means that the second book just doesn't get the same distribution. In Chicagoland, precisely one B&N is carrying the book. Only five Borders have it, which is maybe a third of the remaining storefronts. My parents have precisely one location they can buy the book in all of Western NC. So it's not a pretty picture.

This is unsurprising. Part of the problem I had when writing the book was simply the fact that I didn't see a path whereby this novel got to much of an audience. It's disappointing to put so much effort into a work and then see it falter, but that's just the nature of this industry. Which gets us back to the algorithms.

I consider it likely that this will be the last "Tim Akers" book. That's particularly difficult, but I've achieved a track record of imperfect sales and disappointing returns. I can't undo that. The thing I'm working on now may well come out under a pen name. It's a disappointing result, but it's where I am. So. Buy the book, but I'm going to start practicing a new signature.

Failing to Fear

2011-05-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

This is a cheater post, because all I'm going to do is point you to another blog. That of John Allison, the brilliant artist behind ScaryGoRound, Bad Machinery and Giant Days. He is my national favorite. And it's a cheater post two ways, because all John is going to do is point you to a video by a hoary old gentleman who has some things to say about failure.

I couldn't agree more.

Someday we will refer to something as TimCon

2011-04-28T07:14:00.001-07:00

So. It looks like I won't be going to WFC this year. Not really by choice, mind you. WFC is one of the few cons to cap their membership, which I applaud, and they've reached their cap. I was a little surprised to hear this. Last year I made the decision to go on August 19th (checked the blog, don't have robot memory) and had no trouble getting in. So, I asked myself, why have they reached their cap so quickly this year?

Neil Gaiman. He's the GoH. So I'm thinking, and forgive me if this offends you, but I think this year's WFC is going to be a fan con. A NeilCon, to be precise. So maybe missing isn't such a bad thing. I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun. Neil's people tend to be fun. And yes, I could put myself on the waiting list and hope something opens up, but that's just not my way. I'll see most of you at Worldcon, and then there will always be next year. Toronto, right? The Canadian WFCs tend to be smaller affairs anyway.

In the meantime I'm fully engaged in the next project. It's exciting to write something new, something completely unlike my previous work. I think I established some bad habits in Veridon. Nothing terrible, but I was still learning to write, and they were fundamental things in the narrative that couldn't really be corrected during the process. So I'm coming to this new project with a clean slate and the opportunity to apply those lessons. Anyway. I'm feeling good. Two days ago I woke up with what could only be described as optimism in my heart. I was looking forward to the day. I don't do that, especially when I didn't have anything specific to look forward to. Just the day, like any other day. I guess I'm trying to say that I'm enjoying things more than I used to. Or something. Whatever.

It is also my way to be awesome

2011-04-04T08:06:00.000-07:00

I'm not even going to apologize for not posting since January. You read this blog, you know full well that I'm going to disappear for months at a time. It is my way.

I have been busy. I present this, not as an excuse for my absence, but merely as a note to mark the time. Our office moved, I finished Dead of Veridon, I did a lot of pondering about my writing career. These things have taken a lot of my attention. And I've begun a new writing project, about which I am alternately thrilled and terrified. I really don't know what to think about it yet; I just know how to do it. Anyway.

I'm reading a very curious book right now, about sword fighting. Medieval sword fighting, specifically, or at least the recreation of same. I will tell you one thing about this subject: It is *contentious*. The first half of the book is essentially a vitriolic screed against various other factions in the HEMA (Historic European Martial Arts) community, and their clearly uninformed opinions on such matters as the validity of parrying, the effect of a sword cut on the human leg, and the proper value of "cut training". Cut training is the practice of using high quality medieval reproduction swords to slice open various objects. The purpose is to learn the proper way to strike a limb, or jab a torso, or hack a skull. It's interesting. He even goes into some detail about how to set up mail clad targets, and the proper way to strike with a sword to sunder the mail.

There are two thoughts that come to mind. It seems to me that most of the people in this community like to play at swords, and to them gently tapping your biceps with a length of foam wrapped plastic pipe is sufficient. To the author of this book, the goal is to learn the martial art of Medieval Europe. I can understand his frustration with the former group. Completely. And they are two entirely different mindsets, so different, in fact, that proponents of one group are probably incapable of understanding the reasoning behind the other group's belief structure.

For example, some sparring groups disallow leg strikes. Others require that you go to your knees when struck in the leg. There are established teams whose fighting style actually improves once they've acquired the "ground position". Please, for one second, consider the idiocy of this. Even a glancing blow to, say, your calf with the kind of weapons we're talking about is going to nick bone. Imagine the meat damage of that. Now, imagine that you're an actual knight whose livelihood and, for that matter, life is dependent on being able to "hew" various things in "twain". I imagine actual knights performed a bit of cut training, don't you think? And, when called upon, would be more than capable of putting steel through meat, bone and mail. Now. Get on your knees and keep fighting.

You see the kind of vitriol this book contains. I like it, because I'm trying to get at the legitimate feel of medieval combat. A lot of the demonstrations I've seen have revolved around points and tapping. And you can't write about that.

A task of light

2011-01-21T06:29:00.000-08:00

It's amazingly cold today. The sky is that clear blue that makes you feel like the atmosphere has been scraped clean off the earth, and there's nothing above you but the stars and the moon and that deep, deep cold.

On the way to work this morning I heard an interview with a virtuoso violinist who is performing locally this weekend. Well. Most of an interview. The interviewer kept talking over him, and babbling on about how fascinating the things he was saying were, and then she'd play a "snippet" of his music which just served to remind you how much you'd rather be listening to him play, rather than her talk. And talk. Can you tell I've been working on my patience? Because I have.

Here's the important part: she finally got around to asking him 'what advice do you have for young musicians and their parents, just starting out?' And his answer kind of shocked me, and got me to thinking about writing.

He said "Enjoy it." I mean, that's a paraphrase. His long answer was something like "Do it because you're passionate about it, because it speaks to you and lets you speak to other people. Do it because it makes you a fuller person." And then he talked some about how there was a tiny bit of discipline involved to get over the initial unpleasant stuff, those first few years of learning to play and practicing while your family cringes politely around you, but once you're beyond that point it's just a matter of doing what you would naturally do.

At first I thought he was expressing typical British (because he's a Brit) understatement when he said "a tiny bit of discipline" but later I realized he was dead serious. That if you're having to apply huge sums of discipline to the task, if you're forcing yourself to do this every night, then what the hell are you doing? At least that's what he said to me.

That's contrary to a lot of what I've learned about writing in the last few years. Mostly because I'm not just writing, I have the day job and a busy social calendar (ha!) and I have to squeeze my writing time out increasingly smaller parts of my day. So until I'm able to more fully form my life around my writing, there will always be some element of discipline to the process. But that discipline needs to be supplemented by joy. Joy in the process, joy in the product, joy in the belief that what we're doing is making us better people. I did not enjoy writing the book I am writing right now, and I'm afraid that will show up in the final product. I'm sure it will. Whatever light there was in that work, I lost it in the scheduling.

So. I guess I'm rededicating myself to the joy of writing. Because otherwise, what the hell am I doing?

Sealing up 2010

2011-01-10T06:39:00.001-08:00

You may or may not have noticed this, but I haven't been posting much lately. This is mostly because of deadlines. 2010 was a complicated year, and we're well lodged into 2011, but I wanted to give a little meditation on the year that's passed and try to come up with some idea of what I'm going to carry over into the new year. Right.

Mostly, 2010 was about complications. Jen and I quite suddenly decided that we were going to build a house. We've been tossing around the next stage of our lives for years now, whether we were going to stay in the area or move somewhere else. Once we decided to stay locally, it was clear that we didn't want to stay in our current house. So, in the middle of one of the worst housing markets in recent memory, we sold our house and built a new one. Kind of like how, in 2009, I quit my long standing job and jumped to another company where I had no guarantee of long term success, right in the middle of the worst job crash in my lifetime. That's how I roll.

Part of the complication with the house stuff (other than building a house, writing the three largest checks of my life in quick succession, etc) was that we had to move twice. Blessedly, our house sold very quickly. Two and a half weeks quickly. And the new house wasn't going to be available for a long time, so we had to get a rental. Not just a rental, but a rental that would take an elderly dog and didn't mind that we were only going to be there for, like, four months. Those sorts of situations just fall out of the trees around here. Yeah.

But we found the right place. It was small, and we had to keep all of our furniture in it with the majority of our possessions stuffed into a storage unit. It was crowded, but we found a sort of simple peace in living there.

In the middle of all this, that company I jumped to began to disintegrate. Things are straightened out now, according to finance, but I have trouble believing it. I blogged about some of it then, but the easy summary is that my department lost about a third of its staff, and there were serious questions about whether the company would survive at all. I'm not convinced that we're out of it, because I still see a lot of the underpinnings in my daily job, and things haven't improved. We've just changed the way we accrue debt, and if the fundamentals are flawed then all you're doing is moving the disaster to another day. Anyway. Today I have job. Tomorrow, probably as well.

I think the last complicated thing that happened was I had a friendship collapse in fairly dramatic fashion near the end of the summer. It knocked me for a loop, especially on top of the strange living conditions and the job madness. I lost most of August and September to this kind of depressive static in my head, where I just couldn't produce anything of value, either creatively or socially. WFC was pretty much the final kick that got me out of it.

The real product of all of this is the writing schedule for Dead of Veridon went to hell. I was already having trouble writing the book, just thematically. I wrote Heart of Veridon almost three years ago, and I'm at the stage of my career where my ability and my style are still solidifying. I made a lot of decisions in the Veridon series about style and point of view that I wouldn't make today. I chose the noir style to clamp down on my usual florid wordiness, and the first person because I was having trouble getting into Jacob's head. Also, I wrote the early Veridon stuff while I was at a pretty consistently dark place. Considering the litany of trouble I've just unfolded for you, you'd think that would feed this kind of writing, but it didn't turn out that way. I'm just not as moribund as I used to be. I wouldn't call me a cheerful guy, but I'm different enough that getting into Veridon takes a mental shift that I'm not as good at, and frankly don't want to make on a regular basis. I'm happy that that isn't my natural state of mind anymore, and don't want to tour the old stomping grounds if I can avoid it. So I did a lot of avoiding. And then that depressive static kicked in, and I was hopeless.

The real upshot of all this is that while I wrote a lot of words on Dead of Veridon this year, I kept starting over because I wasn't writing something that I liked, or something that I thought was any good. I finally had to go head-down and just write, regardless of my schedule. So, uh, I've kind of written almost the entire book in the last two months. It's not done yet, but I got an extension and think I can finish it by the new date. Which is this weekend. And of course that's just a first draft, and there are some revisions in the early chapters that I already know need to be done, but it'll be "finished".

And see, in all this chaos I haven't even mentioned that I finished The Horns of Ruin in March, did edits while moving to the rental house, and it came out to much fanfare in November. Well. Fanfare in my head. And general fanfare. People seem to like it.

So the year ended. We're in our new house, I'm working like a maniac to finish Dead of Veridon, and I'm thinking about this new year. Here's what I'm thinking.

I want to have an uncomplicated year. Whatever that means. And I know we don't control the things that come into our lives, so I guess I'm just not going to intentionally do anything complicated. Not going to put off deadlines and make excuses because I have a lot of time, not going to worry about whatever happens in my job. Not going to build a new house, or ruin any friendships, take on any tasks that I don't think I can accomplish. This might be a year of reflection. Reflection, and writing.

So, happy new year to you. Live well.

We call it the Meat Truck

2010-12-01T09:47:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of nice things about my new house. One of those things is that, while we're right next to a light industrial park, the building directly across from us is a sausage manufacture. We are often greeted by the smell of smoking meat and spices when we step outside. It's pleasant.

But it has a cost. Every Wednesday morning at around 7:30, an unmarked tan garbage truck drives up to the back of the building and loads the slop. That is, all the stuff that is technically meat, but can't be made into sausage. Think about that. And it loads it by hauling the slop bin over its cab and dumping it into the back of the truck. This is what we watch, every Wednesday.

And we watch. Man, I wouldn't miss it. It's horrifying and disgusting and just...awful. But it's also fascinating. We can't hear it or smell it, but I have a sufficiently vile imagination that I can populate my own internal soundtrack of smacking and schlupping and slithering. And when it's done, there are still strips of the stuff that didn't quite land in the bin, hanging like meaty confetti off the cross bar of the truck.

You're welcome. Enjoy your lunch.

Now Serving

2010-11-15T11:40:00.001-08:00

Amazon has The Horns of Ruin in stock. This is very exciting to me, for obvious reasons.

This is a con. Where is the bar.

2010-11-14T13:20:00.001-08:00

My WindyCon experience this year was kind of perfunctory. My only scheduled events were on Saturday, but I didn't know that until I already had Friday off. This is good, because I have a lot of writing to do, so I stayed home Friday and wrote. Unfortunately, that went terribly and I'll probably have to throw out the lot, but that's not the point. Sometimes you have bad writing days.

On to the Con!

I was able to convince Jen to attend with me this year, which was fun. She doesn't usually come out to these things, but we haven't seen much of each other recently because of my writing schedule, so it was nice. Plus she got to see me be an author.

My first event was a reading at 11am. In the past my readings have been poorly attended, simply because no one knows who I am and I always get an early slot. These things go hand in hand. But my usual retinue of people came out (four or five folks who come out to a lot of my stuff because they know me. If just they show up I have trouble getting the reading off, because we just sit and talk. It's weird to just read to your friends) and we had two others show up. After the reading one of these two had me sign a shirt from last year's convention (It was a steampunk theme. Jason Blaylock had signed. Scary.) and the other gentleman had a copy of Heart of Veridon to sign.

I think that's the first time someone has gone out of their way to get a signature on HoV. I mean, people brought copies to my signing last year, but again those were people I know. People I refuse to think of as fans.

Readings are tricky. It's the one time authors actually perform their work, and I don't think most authors put enough thought into it. I'm not the best at it yet (next year I will read while standing) but I do what I can. Rather than just present a chapter and then take questions, I pulled three selections from the first three chapters and read them, with some explication and packaging in between. I hadn't practiced the in between bits, though, so I kept remembering things I meant to say before, or explaining the bit I just read after I read it. Imperfect. But I think the form is good and I'm going to stick to it, probably with some more practice ahead of time. I was worried about the clock and then ended up with all sorts of time. There was Q&A, and then it was off to lunch.

Sat in the bar for a couple hours, ate lunch, drank with some friends. Emptiest con bar ever.

Second event was a panel called "Writing Despite the Day Job." I am qualified to be on this panel. I don't know what to say about it, other than it went well, I feel that the audience was engaged and entertained. Some difference of opinion on how to go about getting better. I think that you need to write your way out of writing groups, but that's something I've come to later in my career. Also, none of us are Thomas Wolfe or Stephen King. That doesn't make sense unless you were there. So be there next time.

Other stuff. Uh, there's a worldcon bid for London in 2014. I find that exciting, but in a very distant sort of way. And I had corn beef hash, scrambled eggs and hash browns for breakfast, then came home and took a long nap. Still recovering.

Windycon is set

2010-11-09T08:44:00.001-08:00

Windycon is this weekend, and I finally have my schedule. It's light:

1) I'll be reading from The Horns of Ruin on Saturday at 11am, in the Walnut Room

2) Writing Despite the Day Job - Saturday at 4pm, in Lilac D

So it's a light weekend. Which is good, because re: item #2 up there, I have a book to write. And a day job.

I will be Old + 1

2010-11-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

A quick post to let you know that The Horns of Ruin will be part of a front of store promotion in Barnes & Noble facilities across the country from November 30th through December 13th. It is also important to note that one of those days is my birthday.

Buy me a present. Specifically, buy a copy of the book on one of those days. Pretend that whatever day you pick is my birthday. If you already have a copy (OMG THANK YOU!) then buy a second copy and give it to a friend. Or you could just archive the second copy, and when I come to your pathetic town on my eventual world tour (dates pending and largely imaginary) you can have me sign this pristine first edition of The Horns of Ruin, and tell me Happy Birthday. You may even sing Happy Birthday, if you feel it is necessary.

Bringing me cake might be taking it too far. But I will allow it.

Kind of a Roundup

2010-11-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

Do you like my random capitalizing in the titles of these things? I do what feels good, man.

Apparently I'm all over the internet. I didn't realize it until I tried to compile all the guest posts I've done. I have two more coming, maybe three if I can think of something clever to say in the next week or so. But I thought I'd take this opportunity to direct you to the wise things I've said online in the last couple weeks. Also, there have been reviews of the book, and I might as well point you to those as well. Work those tabs.

Guest Posts:

Literary Escapism

TorDotCom

Madhatter Interview

The interview is actually with Eva Forge, the main character from The Horns of Ruin, but I had to write it, so I'm comfortable calling that a guest post.

Like I said, there are two or three others coming up in the next few months, but I'll point you to those as they become relevant.

Excerpt:

The Horns of Ruin

Reviews:

Rob Will Review

Alternative Worlds

Madhatter

Goodreads (which includes both positive and negative reviews)

New Jedi Order

There are probably more, but that's what I've been able to find. Most are good, some are so-so, at least one is openly dismissive. And that's okay. I can't please everyone.

Anyway. That's what I've been up to. If I missed your review or post about the book, let me know in the comments and I'll add it. Even if it's negative. These things don't offend me, which was something it took a while to develop, but I've learned.

**edited to add**

Check out the Banner ad!

Columbus is where the cool girls sing all night

2010-11-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

So. WFC 2010. Good time.

I'm not going to give your typical con report, listing names and panels and whatnot. Mostly because I'm terrified of leaving people off, but also because I wasn't keeping a running checklist in my head and I'm kind of tired. Not firing on all cylinders. But I'm worried that if I don't get this report out there I'm going to start forgetting things. It took me forever last night to remember what I did on Saturday night for dinner, not because it wasn't an interesting meal, but because I had just gotten out of my car and was just pacing around the house trying to remember how to be a normal person. (Dinner was with Amy and Yonni and Richard, at the brewpub. I did remember eventually.)

I nearly didn't go this year. Horrible idea, not going. I've finally figured out that WFC isn't a business con for me anymore. There was stage where, professionally, WFC was the only convention that mattered. No longer true. But socially? Vital. Without WFC I'd be a hermit all year long, rather than all year minus four days. And those four days matter. Tremendously.

So, generally speaking, it was a great con. There are ways in which it was my best WFC yet, in the sense that I think I'm finally getting into the mode of being a writer. This is the first con in which people recognized me. Not just people whose job it is to know who I am, but completely random attendees stopping me in the hallway to ask questions about Heart of Veridon. This doesn't happen to me. Only, now it does.

On top of that, I feel like I'm getting to a point of recognition among the professionals in the industry. Two different people stopped me in parties to ask if they could take my picture, including Liza from Locus magazine. LOCUS. It's surreal. While walking through the Dealer Room, a lady from the next Worldcon handed me an invitation. It had my name on it? I realize it's just a sticker and a database, but it's a database that I'm in. It's all very strange.

People who know me know that I maintain a pretty low level of respect for my own work. It has something to do with standards, or just pushing myself to get better, but someone asked me to read something from the book that I liked, and I did, and my god. I liked doing that. I liked thinking, even briefly, that I was good at what I do. I'm not looking for compliments or affirmations or anything. I'm just saying. It was important to me.

So that's your con report. There were meetings in bars and at parties. I went to two panels and walked out of both of them because I would rather be talking to my friends. I have a bruise from shaking too many hands. I drank enough to not freak out socially, and little enough to not freak out socially, and never had a hangover. Every night I was up until 3:30.

And now I'm home, and I'm feeling pretty good. So thank you, everyone. And see you next year. In a bar.

I said she said

2010-10-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

I'm in that fever-dash at work prior to being out Thursday and Friday for World Fantasy Con, so forgive the recent silence. But there are many things going on, so here are a couple:

Over at Tor.com, I've got a guest post about cyberpunk and steampunk. Or something. I'm sure I'm brilliant.

And Madhatter reviews The Horns of Ruin. I usually don't point to reviews because you get into dangerous self-editing, where you point to positive reviews and ignore negatives. This happens to be a fairly positive review, but it brings up something that's been bumping around in my head that I wanted to talk about.

For both Heart of Veridon and The Horns of Ruin, I get tagged for having flat secondary characters. This troubles me, simply because it's a bad thing, and I try to address bad things.

First off, I don't dispute it. I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I wrote both of these books in the first person, which was a new style for me when I wrote HoV, and so all the tools I had learned to get inside a character's motivation could no longer be applied to anyone other than Jacob. There were so many other things I was grappling with stylistically in that book, that I never really got around to developing new tools.

And I think the same thing dogged me in Horns. I won't get into the decision making process about PoV and which characters to follow, but I was hoping to be able to correct a lot of that "flatness" in this one. So that's something I'm still working on, I guess, but that's the nature of writing.

Anyway. Much work to do. I'm going to be doing that now.

This is hardly a post at all. Dreadful effort.

2010-10-18T17:25:00.001-07:00

Seriously, two weeks? Sorry about that. I'm shocked I have any readers at this rate. Comfort yourself in the knowledge that I'm cranking out wordcount. There's also a lot of stuff built up around the release of The Horns of Ruin that take up bandwidth. Interviews, a couple articles for various sites... just business. But you'd be surprised at how much attention that kind of thing takes. Wrapping a lot of it up today, but still. Busy-ness.

It's only two weeks until WFC! It's also only two weeks until Eva Forge hits shelves. I'm comfortably nervous. THoR is a considerably different book that the Veridon stuff, but there are also similarities. Not many folks read Heart of Veridon, though, so it's not like that will have a significant impact on reader reaction. Sadly.

What's weird is that I have this sprint to the end of the year, and then I'm clear for some undetermined period of time. Signed up for a discussion/forum/internetty thing for Borders in February. Going to be writing opposite Mark Hodder, Felix Gilman and Jay Lake. How's that for intimidating? It is quite sufficient for intimidating, thank you very much.

Okay, anyway. Want to finish this interview tonight. Get on it, Akers.

You know you're looking at me

2010-09-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

There are people whose blogs I follow where I think "Man, you haven't posted in a week! What the hell's wrong with you!" And then I remember that you're lucky to get a post a month out of me. Again. Twitter. It takes all of me.

I've spent a lot of this year learning to be humble and thankful. I've had a lot of friends go through some pretty horrible stuff. I've had my own issues, but when you set them side by side it's a little silly to get bent up by these things. I'm a lucky guy, in a lucky situation. So I'm not writing full time. How many writers out there even manage publication. So Chicago isn't my ideal habitude. I'm here. So friendships don't always work out. I've got some pretty wonderful people in my life. So the writing isn't as good on the page as it is in my head. It's better than it was when I started.

Anyway. There's always a lot of bad static on these pages. I just wanted to be clear that I'm learning to live beyond the static. I'm learning to be up. It's a curious feeling.

The Desolate Nature of the Business

2010-09-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

Initial indications are that distribution for The Horns of Ruin will be quite good, and there are already some reviews showing up. I'm hopeful. And of course, all this talk of book releases brings up talk of signings in the Akers' household. I'm resistant to it. Wife and I were talking about this, and I was struggling to express how badly signings sit in my head. They're one of those things that I recognize as important to the business, but I really, really hate doing them.

Put it this way: we all know how socially crippled I am. I just don't deal with people, or groups of people, terribly well. I do okay in formalized settings. Panels seem to go okay, because then I'm performing and I have a set topic and if it goes badly I can just pick a fight. Purely intellectual.

But signings? Realistically it's just sitting at a table with a pen and a stack of books. But really? It's sitting at a table for three hours with a pen and no one who walks by will make eye contact with you like you're some kind of eye-borne disease, and there's this stack of books, but not just books but *your* book that you bled into and sweated over and crafted like your life depended on it because let's be serious, your life does depend on it. And eventually they let you go and you can crawl back into your hole and hope no one ever, ever, ever asks you to make eye contact with a stranger ever again. Never.

So that's why I don't like signings. But I recognize that they're important.

An Early Christmas

2010-09-12T19:50:00.000-07:00

Pretty chaotic couple weeks, there. And the next couple aren't looking too good. But we've closed on the house, moved in some furniture, and started our punchlist. In about a week we'll actually be living there. That's going to be weird.

I'll update as best I can, but seriously, my time is spoken for. Things will calm down in October, but by then I'm going to be on the contract trail, and that book is going to be coming in hot. We should probably just wish each other a Happy New Year right now, cuz that's the next time I'm going to be at my leisure.

Hello September

2010-09-01T09:18:00.001-07:00

To celebrate the end of August, I'm going to buy myself a shirt. http://tinyurl.com/24hxcwj or http://tinyurl.com/244h8a9 ?

Chemically Tuned to a Minor Key

2010-08-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

So, that's a week between posts. Nothing shocking about that, is there?

Things are getting better. One of the things that keeps me going is that I recognize that most of my down times are either the direct result of, or exacerbated by, my natural chemical imbalance. I'm tuned to a minor key. No fun, but it's a good thing to know. So no matter how down it gets, I know that time will, uh. Get it up. And I realize how bad that sentence sounds, but by God there's no going back.

Point is, yesterday was a good day, and if not for work today would be going pretty well, too.

There's going to be a little chaos here while I get moved into the new house and establish my office. I got a new standing desk, which is an experiment I've been looking forward to. I pace when I write, and all this standing and sitting and then getting stuck so I have to disentangle and walk some more and then go a couple rounds with the heavy bag and then sit again... it sucks. So I'm looking forward to standing while I write.

Little things, man. It's the little things that make it good.

Anyway. I hope your lives are going well.

Driving means I can carry more books home

2010-08-20T11:19:00.000-07:00

After a great deal of consideration and not a little drama, I've decided to attend World Fantasy in Columbus this year. Membership and hotel room were purchased last night. It's going to be about a 6.5 hour drive, I'm guessing.

I did this mostly because I'm in terrible need of socialization. I miss my people. I sort of despair of ever having people I can just hang out with locally, both because my prospects are poor and because I'm kind of terrible at that. Also, The Horns of Ruin will be just about to drop, and I'm kind of excited about that. This will be a fine kick off for the release.

So anyway. See you in Ohio.

Bottom line numbers.

2010-08-18T06:46:00.001-07:00

I said I wasn't going to complain about work on here anymore, but come on. Come on! Don't tell me you actually believed that. Goof.

I want to unpack (corporate talk!) something that happened last week. I was having a terrible week for a variety of reasons ranging from the personal to the corporate to the authorial, so it was better that I didn't just lash out a post at the time. I'm still a little furious about this, so I think you'll get the idea.

We have this internal system for timekeeping. It's essentially a database, where you log your time and assign it to a job and a task associated with that job. I have to keep a pad of paper to track my time by task and then input yesterday's time at the beginning of every day. I assume something like this is common in the corporate world.

Theoretically, this is used to keep track of how long tasks are taking and to find inefficiencies in the system. For example, there are certain client teams who make their jobs incredibly complex. Most jobs take me about two hours, but these teams consistently clock their jobs at six to eight hours. Or if there are mistakes on the front end of a job that cause it to be redone over and over again, that should be reflected in this system. We're told that it gets used to improve our performance and hammer out bad systems.

Right.

What actually happens is that the boss gets a bottom line report of how many hours we've worked each week, and how many we (as individuals and departments) average per week, and then uses that number to berate us for working too few hours. They don't care if our work gets done, or if we're meeting all of our corporate obligations. They only care about the hours. It's silly, but absolutely typical for the corporate environment.

In fact, they just re-issued the employee handbook, and the only difference any of us have been able to find is a little sentence that states that full-time employees are expected to work 40-65 hours/week. And that's illegal in the state of Illinois (God bless ye, merry Wobblies) so I won't be signing this document.

Anyway. Everything is ridiculous. I'll continue doing my job well, and putting in whatever hours that requires. And if that's too few hours, then they can stuff it. Stuff. It.

Seven months. That was a long time.

2010-08-11T06:10:00.000-07:00

This has been a terrible week, for none of the normal reasons. Leave it to me to find new ways to be internally miserable. I'm amazing. But these things, along with many other things, have really been interfering with my ability to write. I can't tell you how many times I've sat down at the table and just...come up blank. For example, this was originally going to be an exercise post. Just a bit of description, maybe a scene. I got nothing. I've saved and edited and written and resaved this post about a dozen times now. It's not working.

I'm hoping that once the house is settled and I've got an established place to work, things will sort out. But that's a month away, and there are deadlines. I have to start being realistic about my abilities. For a long time I've been trying to really push myself on this book, and it's just not going to happen. Need to settle into something I can actually do. Be realistic.

Okay. Another grim post. This is why people flee from me.

Is it for "Reading Nook" or "New Book"?

2010-08-08T17:23:00.001-07:00

So for Christmas last year my wife (surprise) got me a Nook from B&N. I wasn't planning on doing the e-book thing until the market had shaken out some, but I was pleasantly surprised. That was eight months ago, and I've used the device extensively in that time, so I thought I'd do a little sum-up/review/rumination thing. That's right. This post will have actual content. Amazing.

First, I'd like to talk a little about ebooks in general. I'm a big fan of the format. I'm in the process of moving, and I gave away something like fifteen boxes of books and still had to move another fifteen. It's ridiculous. I'm at the stage of trying to reduce the baggage in my life, and this is some pretty bulky baggage. Having a single item that could be my entire library? Awesome.

Also, I like being able to just buy a book wherever I am. I have no patience for bad books, so a great number of those books that I gave away were things that I only read half of before I lost patience and threw it (quite violently, on occassion) to start another. Being able to browse, buy and download a new book while sitting in my living room is all kinds of wonderful. Oh, and I can download samples, so maybe I buy fewer books that I'm just going to end up hating. My record on that isn't so good so far. But the theory is good.

The only bad thing I'm going to say about ebooks in general is that they're a single use device. I don't remember where I saw it, but someone pointed out that we used to have standalone word processors. Kind of a transition between typewriters and computers. I think ebooks, ultimately, are a transitory form of the ebook between paper and... something else. Maybe the iPad, or something similar. But I don't think this market is settled yet.

As to the Nook specifically, I experienced a lot of the stuff that you've heard about. Slow page turn. Awkward and counter-logical user interface. I had some network issues. It was definitely rushed to market, but that's all behind us. There have been several software updates, and I think the page thing is mostly hashed out. Download speeds have definitely improved. They've implemented a page turning feature with the touchscreen that lets you flick from page to page. It's not perfect. If you do it too slowly, nothing happens. Too fast, nothing happens. If you don't drag your finger over enough of the screen, it opens up the menu instead of turning the page. It's touchy. I spend too much time thinking about how exactly I should strike the screen, and then end up using the button instead. Hopefully they'll work it out.

I'm not entirely convinced about the ability to browse covers. Postage stamp sized covers don't cut it. And even when I filter my search pretty tightly, I end up having to flip through hundreds of books, squinting at these tiny covers that don't really speak to the book that well. It's a nice idea, but I'm just not feeling it.

The other thing that annoys me is how hard it is to flip through a book. If there's a cast of characters or a map or something at the beginning of a book, it's really tough to stop and flip to that and then come back to where I was reading. Right now, that's a failing of the format, and the Nook's still awkward user interface.

Final thought about the format. I read books, and I read manga. I can read all the books I want on the Nook. Manga, I have to buy the real thing. This has me thinking about the iPad, and I'm sure my brothers in the comic books world think the same thing. That's something the Nook (and its e-ink brethren) will never be able to do. So there's that.

But understand. I've got a lot of complaints on here. I haven't bought a single physical book in the last six months. The technology is still figuring itself out, but we as an industry need to accept that this is how we're going forward. There's a lot of infrastructure in place to support the paper book market. It's all going away. Adjust your expectations, and advance.

*Edited to add* Joshua has noted that the whole "word processors were popular for a while, too" thing came from this article in the NYT. Read and enjoy.

Wordcount! Brought to you by caffeine and desperation

2010-08-04T03:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, let's be honest. Progress is progress. I've spent a lot of time at the front end of this book dithering about how the plot is going to be formed, how it's going to differ from what I originally proposed (God) almost two years ago. The simple answer is that I submitted the second book in a series, and what I'm writing is the second book in a trilogy. Significantly different things. Plus I didn't want to handicap this book by requiring absolute knowledge of the first one. That's more stylistic than structural, but still. It required some thinking.

And then I remembered how I felt when I finished Heart of Veridon. Tired, sure. Ready for a break from the constant writing grind. But I was so comfortable in the voice and with the trickiness of plotting that particular kind of story that I remember thinking "I could just sit down and write another one of those right now. No problem."

And then two years passed.

But I've got that feeling again. I've put down 3300 words in the last two days. I've learned to stop questioning every decision I make in the plot, and just write. I can fix things later. God knows I did a pretty significant rework on HoV. Even The Horns of Ruin (first book of the upcoming Eva Forge thing) required some architectural work at the end. But right now? I'm writing. And it feels good.

Oh, and sometimes I complain about work on here. I'll do that again soon, but let me give you a brief idea. When I was a vendor for this company, I couldn't fathom some of the decisions they made. When it became clear that I had to jump from my last job (or a bridge. metaphorically, of course) and that this place was my best option, I convinced myself that all of that was probably just distortion from an outsider's view. And when I first started, well, there were a lot of things that pleased me. Most of them were things that stood in stark contrast to my last job, as in "people care about their work" and "each other".

Anyway. I was right the first time. This place is fucked.

Usually solved by drink

2010-07-28T14:48:00.001-07:00

A better day today, due mostly to my headphones. Social interaction is overrated. And the php is progressing nicely. So much I don't know! And what will probably happen is that I'll get kind of good at this and then they'll hire someone who actually knows what they're doing and then I'll never use those skills again. That's consistent with my life cycle so far.

I almost bought the first issue of Scott Pilgrim last night. I feel like I should at least be aware of this thing, but picking it up after the series is done and it becomes familiar to the mainstream makes me feel a little... artificial? I don't know. Would reading it after it became popular lessen my enjoyment of it? I can't be all kinds of nerd all the time, you know.

I probably overthink this stuff. That's why I can't dance, too. Overthinking.

What currency is there other than time?

2010-07-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

I said something to a coworker yesterday, and it baffled her. In fact, I think it might have lowered her opinion of me. And this thing I said is central to how I operate, so I thought I'd roll it out here and see if I'm just messed up. Probably.

It has to do with laziness. That's a bad word for it, but it's the word I used at the time so I'll stick to it. My basic premise is that every organization needs a certain amount of laziness in it, to improve efficiency. We have this problem at my company where people do the most amount of work possible because they believe that produces the best end result. This leads to sixty hour weeks, fatigue, poor morale and a functional breakdown of the corporate engine. The quality of work suffers, and in the mean time you've wasted an enormous amount of time getting there.

The problem is that we don't value our own time. It doesn't matter that the company doesn't value our time, because it doesn't, but we as workers don't value our time. So if we get a high quality product by working 40 hours, but could be getting a high+1 quality product at 60 hours, people will put in those 20 hours for that +1.

And I won't.

I imagine this will become difficult at some point. It's built into the system. Here's an example: There was an unreasonable amount of design that had to be done for a project over the course of about two weeks. Many jobs going through the system. And, for reasons that are not entirely relevant, they were all going through a single designer. They tried to get some freelancers in here, but for various reasons weren't able to get people up to speed in time, so we only had one designer on the task. And she worked unreasonable hours. Slept two or three hours a night most nights, and over the weekend before the project was due did not sleep at all. That's correct. She stayed up for 48 hours straight to get the task done. This is what we do to people.

So back to laziness. Any rational person faced with that would say "Sorry, it's not going to happen." and things would fall as they would. We're not talking about putting out a fire or triaging patients, here. We're talking about direct mail. No one was going to die. You know what would have happened if we'd been late on that project? We'd pay rush charges on material delivery to the vendor. But that would cost money and, as previously described, our time is free.

I value my time. I don't look for reasons to work extra on a project. I produce good results in the minimum amount of time, with the minimum effort. If I doubled my hours would my results improve? Probably. But I'd be miserable.

I am not a lettershop

2010-07-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

My post count here has dwindled since I added Twitter. It's just easier to snap off a bit of ire there, rather than posting here. Follow me. And if you can't figure out my handle on twitter, then you never really loved me at all, did you?

Work update, I suppose. They aren't going to make us work for free as they had previously announced. New CFO, new income report, I suppose. We're going to be doing a bunch of the printing and inserting for acquisition ourselves this year (and ongoing) so that's going to trim the budget enough. Actually, we have to hire people to run those machines, and apparently that's covered too. So we fired five and a half people and are now hiring...more than that. The exact number is up in the air, but the actual quantity is increasing. I just get the feel we're making up the numbers as we go along.

What troubles me most about it is the direction of the hires. We laid off our entire Strategic Services department, who were tasked with providing data for strategic decisions. Math stuff. Drilling down into our projects to see what is working and why, and how we should proceed from there. Important stuff. So they're gone, and we're replacing them with, essentially, shop help. We're changing the focus of our company from thinking to...well. To production. To vending a product. And it's not a change for the better, because frankly we barely know what we're doing in that realm.

Anyway. Something to add to the list.

The sound of people who are too busy to despair

2010-07-06T07:18:00.001-07:00

I really hope you people don't sit around waiting for me to update this thing. I do all my talking on twitter these days, so even if I'm feeling productive you might never see it. But some things can't be properly meditated on in 140 characters, so here we go.

I should start with the cutbacks at work. The firings are officially over, and we've basically been floundering. Like I said, we as a company were working over capacity. People were working ten and eleven hour days on a regular basis. Work quality was suffering because we had too much on our plates. Morale was in the pits. And in this environment, we were still losing money. You see? There's something fundamentally wrong with the way that we're doing business. Our processes, our services, our business model...something is broken. And when you present these problems to management, you get a speech about how great our team is, and how we're going to buckle down and work through this difficult time together. Sorry, kids. There are things that gumption can't fix. And no one here shows any sign of fixing the things that are actually broken. It's a bad culture. That's all I have on that.

Oh, and there are pay cuts across the board. They tried to present it as "furlough" but we'll still be working. You don't know what furlough means. Only you do know what it means, and you just decided to not be honest with us. You tried to spin it. We understand. We know how this game works. Buddy.

Other than that shit, my life is pretty good. We got moved into the rental with little hassle. The dog has acclimated well to the new environment, which is a real relief. We're all on one level now so she can get to us no matter where we are. Still adjusting to her walking into the bedroom at three in the morning. Freaks me out.

Still Dancing

2010-06-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

So, all the tumult yesterday kept me from saying that I've finished my first read through on the copy edits for The Horns of Ruin. Now all I need to do is read the full thing through with a pen in hand, putting final touches on and looking for things that might impact the narrative down the road. Bad timing, since I'm moving on Monday, but things always happen at once.

Of course, the reason that there were layoffs yesterday is because things have been slow at work, so I have time to sit here and read the thing at my desk. Just don't know how wise that is on the day after massive, company-wide firings. We risk the blade for our art.

All is well, and all is well, and all shall be well

2010-06-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

Well. Today's the one year anniversary of this job. Interesting, because droves of people are being laid off. First round is done, but no one knows if there will be more. Let us meditate on this.

We've seen it coming for a while, those of us with access to multiple departments. I'm unfortunate enough to be on the Acquisition team. Acquisition is a single mailing (well, three mailings, but all one job) that accounts for about half our billing for the year. Last year the company decided to take an aggressive pricing strategy to acquisition for 2010. Sort of a make or break thing. We broke. The actual numbers are only beginning to coalesce, but to give you a rough idea we needed to sell something like 7 million pieces to not lose money over last year, and 8 million to make our targets. We're just under 5 million right now, and that's if all of our regular clients buy the recommended quantities and don't decide to tighten their belts. So it's ugly.

There are other things. This company bleeds money. It's just inefficiently built. Everyone is working at top capacity, and we're still not making money. So they're cutting people. I have an idea how much we're losing thanks to acquisition this year, and I know that today's cuts won't cover even an eighth of it. So things are far from settled. There's no way for them to cut their way to profitability, but they can try to close the gap. We'll see.

So, here I am, a year later. I still think it was the good move, coming here. I would have lost my mind a long time ago at the last job. And there have been other developments that are positive. I don't really think my job is in immediate danger, but I do think that as a company there are some deeply flawed systems in place that will not be easily repaired. May be irreparable. And on it goes.

So today's firings. The fired the whole research department, one guy in production, and the CFO. And yes, the CFO has been screaming bloody murder about how much money we're losing. So that was the kind of move that makes you think we're adrift. In case you were wondering.

That's all I've got right now. Updates will follow as time allows.

*UPDATE* Two others were let go, but management has said that the layoffs are over for the foreseeable future. So that's something. Then again, we just shouldered a whole bunch of work from Research, using tools that none of us know. So that's something else.

Updatery

2010-06-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

While browsing through my blog, I noticed that way back some months ago I mentioned that we are building a house and had put our place up on the market, but I had never updated that. So here's an update.

We are still building a house. It is being built right now. We have walls and a roof and they've poured the concrete basement and garage pad and put in all the plumbing and most of the electrical. This part goes quickly, I am told, and then it will appear as if all progress stops. But for now, it's flying by.

Also, our house sold. Hooray! The first realtor we talked to wanted us to replace all the carpet, replace our appliances, and then list it for considerably less than we felt was reasonable. So we contracted with someone else, cleaned the carpet, did a little repair work, and listed for only slightly less than we thought was reasonable. Honestly, if we'd sold two years ago, we would have listed for $50k more. Downturns turn down.

Anyway. We got an offer in two weeks. So that worked out.

There's a four month gap between our sale of the current house and the completion of the new house, so we're having to rent a place. It's going to be an interesting period. A throwback to our college days, really. I'm curious to see how it impacts my writing schedule. Etcetera.

Musing on the Dead

2010-05-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

Here's what I've been struggling with: People didn't read Heart of Veridon. Not many people, at least. I appreciate all of you who bought it and read it, but I assure you that you're in the minority of genre-reading individuals. And now I have a contract for book two in the series, which I am finally starting. Took longer than I thought to recover from Horns, but I worked harder on it than I expected. Point is, I now have this project, and I need to decide how to approach it.

Do I make this second book utterly dependent on the first? That automatically limits the people who are going to want to read it. And if someone who doesn't fall into that subset picks up the book, it would be incomprehensible to them. Who is this Emily. What Cog?

The answer is obviously no, we need to make it more independent. Appeal to those who read HoV, follow through on the promise of the narrative, but without cutting out the new readers. It's a challenging thing. I've started to form in my head the changes that will come to Veridon as a result of HoV that will in themselves do a lot of explication of the first book. There's a lot I want to bring to this book, thematically, things that got left out of HoV due to the cut-chase nature of the plot. It will be a fuller book. I hope.

Anyway. It's going to be challenging. It's going to be good. I hope you like it.

And yes, it's still all about Jacob Burn.

Horns of Amazon

2010-05-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

The Horns of Ruin is now available for pre-order at Amazon. Let there be celebration! Also, check that damn fine cover. Check it.

The pampered life of the full-time/full-time writer

2010-04-29T08:10:00.001-07:00

I sometimes forget how badly I want to be a full time writer. I don't mean that I'm any less passionate about the craft, or that my goals change, or anything like that. I mean that every once in a while I brush up against some bit of writing culture or the writing life and I just *burn* with this need to be doing that and living that with my whole being. It's the worst kind of lust.

At the end of Horns of Ruin I was devoting most of my non-day job time to writing. Any time I spent doing other things, I felt guilty. I looked forward to just being able to do leisurely things without feeling like I was stealing time I should be spending elsewhere. And once the project was done (for now) I delved fully into my leisure activities. That's not to say that I forgot about the joy of writing, or that my desire to go that route was waning. Just that I was enjoying not "working" 14 hours a day, between two jobs.

Now that I've started on the next project, though, I'm getting that burn again. Couldn't come at a worse time, with the house coming together and we're just beginning the ramp up into the horror that is Acquisition season. This is part of why I'm not doing any conventions this year. I recognize that there's going to be an enormous about of work for me to do, and I can't spend time recovering from or attending such things. Next year, tho. Next year.

Personally, I'm the VP of snark. I have a system for it.

2010-04-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

Due to various technical snafus (MICROSOFT!) I'm having to quite suddenly switch from my usual data environment to a different, less familiar environment. Considerably less familiar. And I'm having to make this transition more or less on the fly. Like, last week I could use my old program and today that program is completely nonfunctional, and there are jobs piling up that have to be done. Today.

So I went out back and told production that the current queue is going to take longer to resolve than is usual, and please bear that in mind when looking for jobs. Also, because we're having to use a new process (that I am making up as I go along) they should be extra diligent in their setups. This led to production going to my boss and asking if jobs will always take extra time and require extra diligence from here on out. That is, they asked if we were intentionally choosing to implement an inferior and more time consuming process.

What's hilarious about this all is that it's a good question, considering the company. It is entirely reasonable to expect elements in this company to sit down and say "Here, we have this fully functional, efficient, reliable system. What can we do to screw this up. Are there more steps we can implement? How about we hire a VP of this particular thing? Oh, I know, let's just have a couple dozen meetings on each stage." So, yes. Reasonable to wonder if we had intentionally traded a good system for a bad system. We have a history of that.

So when I say that I'm "happy" in my current job, I can honestly say that I'm a good deal happier than I was. But I also mean that sometimes I am endlessly amused, because that's the best defense against frustration.

Well. Back to the money-burning machines. We have some money we could be burning, and we're not, and there's going to be a meeting about it later.

Meanwhile...

2010-04-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

That was something of a pause, huh? I swore to post everyday and then didn't write anything for almost two months. Sounds about right. And I don't even have anything substantial to say now. So instead of content, I'll give you the reasons I haven't really been blogging of late.

1) A lot of my posts have been about why I wasn't happy with this or that aspect of my life. I've been kind of happy for the last few months.

2) I'm between projects. Horns of Ruin is turned in, Dead of Veridon isn't due until the end of the year, and I don't have any other contracts on the horizon. I've given myself a start date for DoV, but I'm also allowing myself some creative freedom in the meantime. I've been noodling around the edges of an epic fantasy that I don't really intend to start writing this year. Something nice to have in your pocket.

3) We're building a house. And the ramp up to that means cleaning our current house, storing all the stuff that we don't actually need to have around, performing minor repairs, and then living in a state of perpetual maintenance while we're on the market. It's a weird life to live.

So. That's why I've been quiet. That's why almost no one is going to read this post, and those of you who are reading are wondering *why* you're reading it. There you have it. Life is full of questions.

This is a professional blog post.

2010-03-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

Today is March 3rd. Exactly one year since I learned that Solaris was putting itself up for sale.

This is probably the last time I'll talk about this, because it's history and not something I want to dwell on. But it had a significant impact on my life and my career, and not all of it has been bad. I wanted to mark these things one last time, put them in the dirt, and then move on.

The bad things that happened mostly revolved around Heart of Veridon. Because of the legal complexities involved with the sale, no review copies of the book went out. Uncertainty on whether the house would sell led to poor pickup at the bookseller level. So Heart of Veridon foundered and eventually sank. This is life.

On the good side, related to HoV, the new Solaris has gotten those review copies out, and some slight buzz is being generated. Maybe that translates into future sales, or better initial sales on the second book, or whatever. It's a positive development.

The best thing that came of this whole process is that I sold The Horns of Ruin to Lou Anders and Pyr. It's a world I've been kicking around in my head for a long time, and I'm really happy with the final product. Well. Not final yet. I'm doing revisions right now, but the process has been pleasing unto me.

So, a lot has changed in a year. I expected to be grinding out Veridon sequels for a while, and instead I've established a second world while maintaining (after a slight delay) the Veridon series. I've changed jobs. I'm building a house. I'm back in church and really very happy with that, too. None of these things I could have predicted a year ago.

Life goes on.

You'd never know I was a lazy bastard.

2010-03-02T20:43:00.001-08:00

It was my intention to post everyday for a little while, just to get the content rate up a little. Technically I'm keeping to that, but this is really just a slapdash excuse for a post. It's been busy.

Today I worked like a madman all day, got home late, ate a quick dinner and then hid at the local starbucks for revisioning. It's going well. But now I'm home, and I'm tired. Tomorrow will be very similar. And tomorrow's tomorrow. This is what I do for a little while.

But I'm really looking forward to some free time! There's a lovely Wednesday in 2011 that hasn't been spoken for yet.

Returning from the Bunker

2010-03-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

It was getting dusty in here. Sorry about that.

Basically, I've spent the last two months bunkered in my office, writing The Horns of Ruin. There were a lot of false starts with this book, as there were with Heart of Veridon. Difference was, by the time I got my head wrapped around the issues involved I was done to a handful of months, rather than most of a year. That's my fault, caused partly by my new job, but mostly a lack of focus.

All that aside, I finished the first draft of the book on Saturday. I've just learned that the publisher wants it in quite solid form (which it is not currently) in a week, so I'm grinding the reread for the rest of the week. Oh, and I was so looking forward to some downtime. Maybe next week?

Oh, and we've decided to build a house. There is a lot, which is mostly mud. There are blueprints. Some process of money and wisdom will move us from this state to something we can live in, hopefully sometime in the Fall. Last night I went through my office and culled five boxes of books for Goodwill. That was the light touch. The serious purge will happen later, when we move things into storage for the interim.

Don't have hobbies. That's all I can say. They take up space and money, and just weigh you down. Either that, or never move. Or move every year. It's the only way.

These things that happen

2010-01-13T17:50:00.000-08:00

Today had its good and its bad, and honestly the good way outweighed the bad. It's hardly like you're reading my blog at all, isn't it? It's like I'm some kind of damn happy person who tells you about the good things in their life. That's just crazy.

To keep in theme, I'll tell you about the bad stuff first. Many work problems. We had a server utterly fail at work, and we're scrambling for replacement parts and what not. It's a mess. But it wasn't so bad, mostly because I was part of a team that was working to fix it, and we had our laughs and our good ideas, and it was nothing like being chained to a sinking ship while being eaten alive by filthy-minded ants (aka, nothing like the last job) so that was nice.

Also, about a week ago my agent told me that Borders was pulling Heart of Veridon from the shelves as part of their post-holiday inventory reduction. I immediately checked my local area Borders online, and they all still showed as being in stock, so the sting wasn't felt right off. Today I checked again, at the end of the day, and sure enough all but one of the Chicagoland stores show as out of stock. And some of those were autographed copies, too. Is the suck.

But the good! Ah, the good.

I have seen the final cover for The Horns of Ruin. It is brilliant. It's different than the cover for Heart of Veridon, which was also brilliant but in a very different way. I am quite pleased to have managed two excellent covers. No, I can not show it to you, but when Pyr makes the cover public I will certainly be spreading the joy here as well.

Oh, and the roof to my office is leaking. That sucks, too. But whatever.

Meditate

2010-01-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

This is a little late, but that's in keeping with all things 2009. Here are my thoughts and observations on the year.

There are two events that loom in my mind. I changed jobs, and my first book came out. Big things, and bigger things are coming, but let's start at the beginning of the year.

In January I had been talking to the good folks at DSA for about two months, and had just been told that it wasn't going to be an immediate move. That was discouraging, but there were indications that it was a move they wanted to make, so there was hope for the future. The future ended up being around mid-summer. It was a good decision, but not a permanent one. I'm here until I can work the finances to write full time. That's happening at a reasonable but not breathtaking pace.

The things I like about this job: The people I work with, the final product that we produce, and certain aspects of the corporate culture. Things I dislike: Certain of our clients, the insanely long hours during the busy time, the fact that I'm still working in direct mail. I don't like the things I do, specifically presorting data and keeping current with postal regulations. It's boring. Changing jobs also interrupted my writing schedule. There was a period of time when I was working 60-70 hours, and I just didn't have a drop of creative energy left. It was bad. It will be bad again this year, but at least this time I know it's coming.

Above all, it's not writing full-time. But very little is.

The second thing that impacted my year was the book. That goes back a couple years, but things really started happening in March. Solaris announced they were going up for sale. We did some stuff, tried to move the book, tried to get them to release the rights... a lot of business. It didn't work out the way we were hoping, but hey, the book still came out. Pretty much everything we were worried would happen as a result of the Solaris sale happened, mostly related to sales numbers but especially in distribution and support. This happens. I'm getting on with my life.

Other than the book coming out (which is all sorts of YAY! don't get me wrong) I also sold the second book in the Veridon series and a first book in another series. I'm very excited about both these projects. I'm also getting to the point where I have a lot that I want to do, and I don't have the time to do it. I work all day, I go home, eat dinner, watch a little tv to unwind. Then I write. Some days I'm weak of spirit and only get a little bit of writing done before I log in to WoW or go sit with my wife, or whatever. Some days I have to clean the kitchen, and can't get my act together. There's a lot that I want to be doing and I'm not doing it, just because of time. There will come a point when this changes, but it wasn't last year and it probably won't be this year.

Nothing much else. Here, on the sixth day of the year, I feel like the whole year is accounted for. I know what my writing schedule is going to look like, I'm contractually locked up through December (though I have a little project in mind, and another that might present itself) which is a first.

Oh, I'm probably not going to any conventions this year. Worldcon is in Australia, World Fantasy hasn't impressed me the last couple years, I can't make Dragon*con or Comicon due to work. I'll probably still go to Windycon, just by default. Oh, and I might take a vacation this year. Won't that be quaint.

Winter is good for working

2009-12-30T08:31:00.001-08:00

Wow, the last time I posted here I was 36. I'm 37 now. Everything is totally different, in every possible way. Honest.

I've been working hard on The Horns of Ruin pretty much this entire time. I have up days and down days, but progress is being made. Comparing the progress made to the progress that *must* be made...that's a little discouraging. It is mathematically feasible, but I don't like feeling as if I'm squeezing text out onto the page quite so much. Lesson: Take the full time you've been allotted for a work, rather than getting caught up in your job and having to rush it.

In some ways, taking this new job was a mistake. It really did kill about four or five months of my literary productivity. But it was unquestionably the right thing to do. My mental state was so poor at the other place. At the very least, I've bought myself a year or so of sanity. Hopefully that will be enough.

One nice thing that's happened on the current book. For Heart of Veridon, there was this moment about two weeks before the book was due that I had this moment of clarity. It took my agent going through the book and showing me the problems, but I had a clear vision of how the book should be formed. Pity that I had already written it. What followed was about three weeks of the most hectic and all consuming revision I've ever performed, and what came out of it was a better book.

I've already had that moment. I may have it again, later, when it's more inconvenient. We'll see. But for now I've seen the book. Had to throw out some text, rearrange some chapters. Essentially made myself a lot more work, when I already had a lot of work. But it'll be a better book.

I've started writing at lunch, which is something I didn't attempt with HoV. Usually I read at lunch, something genre specific but not too similar to what I'm doing. It gives my creative mind some room to stretch, plus I enjoy it. Put that aside for now.

Work work work.

The Dead of Veridon

2009-12-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

Official happiness. I got the contract from my agent today for The Dead of Veridon, the next Jacob Burn novel. Tentative publication date is in the first quarter of 2011. Solaris comes through, my boys! Hooray!

Maybe fuck each other?

2009-12-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here at work reading about the Intelligent Mail Barcode, preparing to format my mail.dat file for use in the Testing Environment for Mailers. This is...kind of a complicated process. Better, it's a complicated process that is provided to you by the government, so it is perhaps intentionally impenetrable. I finally found a checklist to make sure you've got everything squared away. It's 70 pages long. Better, step one on the checklist is:

1) Review the Guides & Specifications (refer to Appendix A)

Appendix A is 100 pages long.

The point is, I'm bored out of my fucking mind, and now I remember why I did shit in school. I hate being bored. I hate doing boring things. I don't really want to know about the new standards for TEM. They can fuck themselves. They probably *should* fuck themselves. Loosen up a little.

Jee. Zus. Christ.

Interview'd

2009-11-25T04:45:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to say that I was interviewed by Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing while at WFC in San Jose this year. I rambled, but Jonathon did a hell of a job of editing that out. You can listen to it here.

Spoilers!

2009-11-20T15:32:00.001-08:00

The book's been out for a little while now, and even though the publisher did not initially send out review copies (this has been rectified) there are some reviews filtering out into the world. Of course I read them. On top of that there are readers who go out and buy the thing and read it and then talk about it on their blog. I read those too. I read everything even vaguely related to my book, to be honest. I'm thorough.

There are two general reactions that I'm seeing a fair amount that have me thinking, and I want to react to them in a very public manner. Since I don't have a public way to do such things, I'm going to react to them here on my blog, where my words will rot away into nothingness. As the title implies, there are spoilers herein.

The reaction that I'm seeing a lot that troubles me the most is that Emily, for all her kick-ass-ity ended up as a fairly typical female sidekick who needed to be saved by the hero at the end. It troubles me because it's accurate, and that was not my intention. I want to create complex and strong female characters, so can't help but be disappointed when I blow it. It's called learning, I guess. The reason that things ended up the way they did is because I wanted to screw up Jacob as much as I could. My focus was different. I will say that this was originally pitched as a trilogy, and there are other female characters in the wings that will develop. Should I get to write the rest of the books, that is. No promises.

Secondly, a lot of people wish Jacob had accepted the Avenger's Heart and burned Veridon the fuck down. I understand this. I wanted it to be a hard decision for Jacob. But let's be clear here, Veridon is a city of hundreds of thousands. Do you think they all deserved to die? I mean, we're talking about the atom bomb here, honestly. Jacob wasn't sure what he would have become, what kind of control he would have had. The book was originally called "Darker Angels", a name that came from the short story that described Camilla's origin story. When Camilla is being, ahem, harvested by the Church of the Algorithm she reveals herself as an angel and then goes on to threaten "There are darker angels." Jacob was given the opportunity to become that darker angel, and he declined it because he wasn't sure what it would do to him, to his city, and to the people around him. It was a choice, a difficult choice, and one that he made. Again, the implications of that choice are a major theme in the later books. Again, if I ever get to write them.

Anyway. Reaction has generally been very good. I get a lot of "I read it in two days because I couldn't put it down." While I don't consider myself a very thrilling writer, well, clearly I'm wrong about that. As long as people don't lose sight of the other things going on.

I am good, in all ways.

2009-11-12T06:26:00.000-08:00

I am in full and desperate writing mode, plus I have a convention this weekend with panels and readings and, HA!, and autograph session. So if you're in the vicinity of Lombard IL, I encourage you to come out and heckle me. I'll be carrying the Haggler.

I also bought a netbook last night. I needed a dedicated writing engine, because with my current configuration it was too easy for me to get stuck and just log in to WoW to do my dailies and next thing you know it's 2am and I've got 300 words, none of which I like. So this is good. I'm happy. Asus Eee PC 1005HA, for those of you who must know.

And after the battery had charged overnight and I rushed downstairs like a little boy on Christmas (as an aside, I love being an adult. I love being able to declare my own Christmas and just go buy what I want) to set up the box and get my bookmarks lined up, there was a very happy email notifying me of the following review:

Rich Horton reviews Heart of Veridon.

For serious, I'm thrilled. I was nervous when I saw it was Rich, because he's big among sf/f reviewers and his reviews of my early work, while not bad, were not exclamatory in their admiration. It's interesting to me that he notes The Algorithm and A Soul Stitched to Iron when he discusses my stories, because those are the best and closest to HoV.

I like being promising. So all in all, I'm having a good morning. Have at ye!

WFC Roundup 2009

2009-11-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

Usually I feel driven to rush home after WFC and write a post about everything I did and everyone I saw. Not so much this year. Not that it wasn't a great con, because it was, but I think because I'm more balanced this year than I have been in the past. For the last few years I was miserable in my daily life and absolutely ecstatic in my con life. Now, my daily life is pretty good. Not perfect, certainly, but the range between Tuesday morning commute and Saturday night con party is much less than it used to be, emotionally.

Also, I've learned not to drink as much. I just really hate trading most of the next day for a decent night. And I don't really trust myself to not be an idiot while drunk. So even though I was staying up until 2 most nights, I was in fine mental and physical shape each day, and getting back to work has been a breeze. I don't know if this means I'm settling into being a boring person, or if I'm just not that into lying in bed with a killer headache and wondering what I said to whom the night before. *shrug* Call it business.

But it was WFC, and there was business. Couple things I'm following up on that might lead nowhere, but I'm excited.

For those of you wondering what con you should go to if you're a young hopeful, let me give you some stats. At WFC I met my agent and the editor who bought my second book. I can trace both of those contracts back to, respectively, a conversation at Tor's party in Madison and a breakfast in Calgary. Business gets done. Maybe once you're established the other cons become more important for the doing of business, but I haven't gotten to that point.

Of course, the most important thing that happened in San Jose was that I got to meet Colin Peters, whom I've known for years online and never thought I'd see because of the whole "he lives in Japan" thing. But he's on temporary US assignment in San Jose, so we got to shake hands and drink beer and, you know, be human to one another. Non-electronic. It was marvelous.

Anyway. Next year is Columbus (OHIO!) so I'll be able to drive down and actually buy all the books I want rather than just the three books I can stuff into my bag. And maybe this time around I'll try to get on some panels. Sure. That could happen.

Mind Meld Madness

2009-10-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

I was honored to be asked to participate in SF Signal's feature, Mind Meld. The topic for this round was about literary science fiction and fantasy, and whether it had mainstream respect. Go read all the responses here (big names! bright lights!) but what my response is below:

I think we need to talk about what we mean by mainstream respect and approval, because I think the entire discussion hinges on that. I get the feeling that what you're asking is "does literary sf/f have literary respect?" The answer to that, of course, is no. We don't win those awards, we don't appear in those magazines, we don't get filed on those shelves. And that's okay, because we have our own awards and shelves and magazines. There are a lot of voices calling for sf/f to get the recognition it deserves, but I think that's wasted breath. We're trying harder and harder to get recognized and admitted to a club that just keeps getting smaller and duller and less important. What we need to understand is that sf/f is the seat of innovation, modern creativity and true cultural relevance. Of course the literary establishment is borrowing from our toolbox. It's the best toolbox there is, and they're welcome to borrow it. It's kind of amusing to watch them treat time travel, or the apocalypse, or whatever else as a shiny new plot device. They probably won't hurt themselves.

But that's the literary community. You asked if sf/f have mainstream respect.

Let's be absolutely clear here; I'm not sure *books* have mainstream approval. Increasingly though, science fiction and fantasy are the default languages of true mainstream media - videogames, movies, television and their continuously evolving, singularity inducing internet spawn. You can blame short attention span if you'd like, but only if you haven't played World of Warcraft. WoW has eleven million subscribers, and it is the opposite of a short attention span game. The best television shows expect a lot of their viewers, emotionally and intellectually. We can pretend that we're losing market share because we're crafting a higher product in a lower world, but that's just inane. If anything, we're losing market share because we're writing books for each other, and not for our audience. Or our potential audience, I should say.

The heart of the matter is that we seem to think we have to choose between beauty and excitement. We write ponderously important books that no one really wants to read, or we write vapidly exciting books that expect nothing of their readers and less of their writers. We can do both. We can write exciting books that are beautiful, and beautiful books that are exciting. We can make our readers think while they're on the edge of their seats, and literary respect be damned.

Appearance!

2009-10-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

I will be attending WindyCon this year, in lovely Lombard IL. My appearances follow:

Friday
5:00 p.m.
Junior Ballroom A: So What is Steampunk?
What makes Steampunk steampunk? Is it the Victorian setting, the gadgets? The characters? Our panelists will tell you.
T. Akers, J. Ballard-Smoot, R. Garfinkle

Saturday

10:00 a.m.
Walunt: Reading by T. Akers

2:00 p.m.
Hallway: Autographings by T. Akers J. Hines, P.C. Hodgell

3:00 p.m.
Lilac A: The New Weird
No need to ask if it's really weird, but is it really new? Is this the same stuff that was always hiding around the corners, but with genetic recombination added? Our panelists discuss the idea and tell you their opinions.
T. Akers, F. Gehm, K. Hughes, A. Woolard

Y'all come out now, ya hear?

Tor Love

2009-10-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to point to Lou Anders talking glowlingly about Heart of Veridon on Tor.com. I am, frankly, speechless.

Can winter be postponed, like the Arena Football League?

2009-10-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

Well, the main data server is down, but I still have internet access so... guess I'll blog a little. Beats staring at the wall or complaining about the server, which is what everyone else is doing.

I was sick all weekend. I was supposed to run a D&D game on Saturday, but stayed home and napped instead. The group still got together and started a new campaign. I told them I need to step away from gaming until I finish The Horns of Ruin, since that's due at the end of February. Don't like leaving a group, since gaming is so important to me, but I have to set up priorities. The campaign they're running in my absence is Pathfinder, btw, for those of you with such interests. I'm curious to see how they find it.

HoV's amazon number have been getting steadily better. There was the obvious baseline spike when it first dropped, but since then it's been tumbling. Over the weekend and today it's improved. Hopefully that's a sign of good word of mouth, since nothing has happened with its visibility. I'm doing some interviews in the next couple of months, too, so we'll see what kind of impact that has.

Also, I'm excited for Autumn, but dreading Winter. See what you can do about that, please.

Get your Heart for Less

2009-10-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to say that Tor.com is offering 30% off on a bunch of steampunk titles, including Heart of Veridon. Great way to get your stack on!

Making your own day

2009-09-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

It seemed like August 29, 2009 was a long way away. And practically speaking, it was. Since the first hint of interest I got from Solaris to today, it's been two years, three months. Something like that. And then it was a year spent writing the book, and most of another year going through edits and making plans for book two. And while I've been distracted by the Solaris business and have shifted my attention to Eva Forge, Veridon will always be my first book, and will always have a special place in my heart. I love that world, I love the characters, I love the themes and the visuals and just...everything. I want to write more of it. But mostly, I want people to read it and love it, too.

And today's the day that can start happening on a grand scale. It is my book day, the first day of my professional life, the last day of my excuses. There are days we remember because of what happened to us. There are days we hold close because of happenstance, of luck, of birth and death and memory. There are days that are important to us.

And then there are days we remember because we made them important, because we worked hard, we threw ourselves into each night, each page, each word because it's something we wanted. Because it was important to us. There are days we forge out of nothing but ourselves.

Today is that day. Today is my day.

Mondays are monday

2009-09-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Busy weekend. My inlaws are coming to town, and that is always preceded by a furious round of cleaning and trimming and what have you. It's hectic. Add in the usual work madness and, well. Busy.

But on Friday I stopped by my local barnes & noble and they had the book in stock, so I signed their two copies and then went and had a beer. Very satisfying. There was a little while there that I wasn't sure HoV would make it onto US shelves at all, but now all the B&N's in the chicagoland area are showing copies on shelves, so that's good. Again, very few reviewers ever received copies, so this book is dropping out of the sky. Life.

So, inlaws, acquisition mailing for DSA, and then book, book, book. And book during those first two things, because Book! Sorry I'm rambling. Just one of those days.

2009-09-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

Two weeks. What do I have to show for my two weeks, since I last updated this thing? I'm probably 20% through the first draft. I really need to buckle down on that. I'd like to get the first draft done by the end of the year, so I have a couple months to polish before I kick it over to Lou. But my in-laws are visiting next week, and work is still busy. Oh, I'm buying a new furnace *and* an air conditioner. The furnace is blown, and the A/C is the same age, and we'd rather get it done and save on labor. Plus that tax credit is just...crazy. And there you have the rockstar life of the sf/f writer. It's nonstop. It does not stop.

I think about junk mail

2009-09-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

So I've been absent from here. This is a super-busy time at work, and I ended up at the office for a good portion of the holiday weekend. Hours have been long enough that my off-time is mostly spent staring at walls or, you know. What was I talking about?

I'm still managing to get out on Tuesday nights to write. I've had to abandon the handwritten manuscript thing, so that time has gone to typing in the stuff I've already written. Finished with Chapter Three last night. One more night like that and it's back to original material. Though honestly I've been sprinkling new text in as I go. Wrote a happy dialogue last night, or at least a dialogue that made me happy. It may be a little over the top, since it's mostly old men swearing at each other, but I can always tone it down later. There are some names in there I still don't like but again, they're just placeholders. All stuff that can be done or redone later, once the structure is down. Anyway. Book progress.

What else, what else. Flight and hotel booked for World Fantasy. Membership taken care of. Oh, and I'm going to be interviewed while I'm in San Jose. That should be entertaining.

And that line break represents a two hour meeting stuffed to the gills with math and schedules. So I'm going to go and let my head unknot. You take care, now.

A whole new Rebellion

2009-09-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

As Woodrow notes in the comments of the last post, Rebellion Press has purchased Solaris. You can read about the details here. It looks like Solaris will continue as a parallel imprint to Rebellion's other line, Abaddon Books, and will be under the editorship of Jonathon Oliver.

I don't really know what impact this will have with current or future Veridon works. Ideally, this announcement would have been made a couple months ago, so booksellers would have the comfort of knowing Solaris was going to be around when the question of picking up my book was being asked. I think it's too late to alter the US numbers, but it will definitely help in the long run. Overall I'm encouraged by this. When I first heard about this deal, back when it was all still tenuous and wrapped in lawyers and not something I could talk about, there were a handful of concerns I had. Most of those have been addressed, and I suspect the other questions will be at least answered in the near term. My biggest concern was that Solaris would just be dissolved into Abaddon, but that doesn't seem to be the case. My second biggest concern was that I don't remember having seen an Abaddon book in a US store. Their distribution on this side of the pond didn't seem that thorough to me. As you can see in the press release, they've secured Simon and Schuster to distribute, which is who Solaris was using. So that should be seamless. Hurrah!

Until I (really, my agent) talk to the new editor, I have no idea what the new group's plans are with future Veridon titles. Of course my first priority now is to Eva Forge and the Pyr series. If we start unrolling Veridon titles as well... I could be a busy guy. But we'll see.

Long and short: I'm happy. Lots could have gone wrong with this, and it certainly has impacted the release of HoV. But that is behind us, and there's nothing to be done about it now. Onward, my children, into The Future!

The days advance

2009-09-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

This is an unusually busy week at work, but I'm trying to touch base here as often as possible. It seems that people I *don't* know may actually be reading this thing, finally, so maybe I should be a little more...I don't know. Prolific? Something.

Secret spy technology has revealed that it looks like both Borders and Barnes & Noble will be getting copies of the book. Not very many copies, but I'll take a shallow yet wide distribution. Makes sell through easier, I tell ya what. So on the 29th, all ye faithful march can march into your local bookseller and hopefully buy a little slice of Veridon.

I've gotten some questions about whether Veridon has much of a future. The book was sold and written as the first in a series, but I wanted it to be able to stand on its own. With Solaris being up for sale, future acquisitions were obviously put on hold. That all happened a couple months after I had submitted an outline for book two, tentatively titled The Dead of Veridon. That book is not written, and may never be written. I'm hoping that at some point in the future I'll be able to revive the series, either with the new Solaris (if it gets purchased) or some other publisher. Unfortunately, I can't work on something just for the pleasure of working on it because my writing time is so limited. There are things I want to do with the narrative, though, and I really hope I get the chance.

In the meantime, as most of you know, I've sold the first book in what may be a new series to Lou Anders at Pyr. Everyone knows how much I admire Lou and what he's doing with the imprint, so I really couldn't be happier. The new book takes a lot of the elements I loved from Veridon and added in a lot of other stuff I also love. It's still early days (I'm on chapter five) so you'll get to hear me bitching about narrative entanglements and word counts for months to come. Lucky you.

So rare it's purple

2009-08-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

First, the good news. If you have a copy of the UK version of Heart of Veridon, you have a rare. The bad news is that it's rare because hardly any of the buyers for the various UK chains picked the book up. So...not many copies on the ground over there. The numbers are dismal.

It's not so bad inside my head, really. Every since I found out Solaris was putting itself up for sale, I was pretty sure the book was fucked. That those predictions are coming out true is disheartening, but I've been mentally bracing for this for a while. It hurts to have something you threw so much of your life into go down like this, but that's how life goes. You move on.

This doesn't bode well for the US release, btw. We're probably going to be in the same situation of bookstore buyers just not picking up the book, and therefore the book not appearing on shelves. Not many shelves. So if you see a copy, yay, but I'm not expecting it.

For the longest time I expected Veridon to be my make or break narrative. Not necessary this book, but maybe the second or third book of the promised series. That's not going to be the case. Now my success is utterly invested in Eva Forge. I love my Veridon, but I have to put it away.

So, yeah. Farm those rare drops. Get your copy now, cuz there aren't going to be many more. And when the Forge series does super-well and I'm famous, that book's going to be worth something.

You have to judge your value somehow

2009-08-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

I know I'm not supposed to be the wildly obsessive numbers guy, that the only way to approach this writing thing is with a reasonable mindset and a healthy dose of nonchalance, but I'm bad at that. Much as I don't want to, I check the Amazon sales rank of the UK release four or five times a day. Or an hour. Depends. And I especially know I shouldn't do this based on my observations of that number. It was 110,000 this morning, was 16,500 about an hour ago, and is now down in the high 20's. It's a valueless information set. But still...

refresh. refresh. refresh.

2009-08-24T13:21:00.001-07:00

Things worth mentioning:

I like my new job, I do. But I've noticed that most of my coworkers are some or another breed of evangelical christian. And that's fine. Many of my friends are that type of person, and all of my family. But many more of my friends, and all of me, are not. It comes out in small ways. Swearing, for example. I have to watch that now. Just sitting around my cubicle, when things go wrong data-wise, I have to come up with something other than "Godfucking shit kicker" to express my displeasure. And that sucks. Because that exactly expresses my displeasure.

Bonjour Hello

2009-08-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

Back from Montreal, with some time to think. It was a good Worldcon, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't my biggest. Consider this a weak, disjointed attempt at a con report. I wasn't taking notes. I wasn't even taking pictures. These are just things that occur to me, as they occur to me.

Impressions of Montreal. I like it. The first thing I figured out was just how much French I'd forgotten. Jen and I would stand staring at a sign, trying to remember the verb. Finding? Looking? No...maybe Washing? Washing. I think it's Falling, actually. Sad, sad. We did okay, though. A couple of times we ate at restaurants that had no english menu, and that was always interesting. It always seemed to be at breakfast, too, so we had to struggle with consciousness and verb tense. We did okay. Nobody ordered anything they weren't willing to eat.

They really do have infrastructure problems. Driving in, every underpass had an iron net to catch falling bits of concrete. All the bridges were crumbling, and the road surfaces were poor. On the plus side, we were never delayed by construction! Once we were downtown it was typically Canadian Clean. Our hotel was a couple blocks west of the Palais du Congres, which was the convention center. The palais itself was just west (well, slightly west northwest) of Old Montreal, so for food we usually just walked down to the palais, then continued on into ye olde city. Much good food. Beer selection was narrow wherever we went, at least on tap, but they were consistently good beers. I drank a lot of Chamblay Noire. As a rule the food was slightly rich and heavy, but very good. *shrug* The old city itself is kind of like a slice of Europe that got dropped on the new continent. Charming is the word. Gentil.

The convention itself was haphazardly organized. I was only on one panel, and its time got changed by an hour. No big deal, but you had to keep on top of the daily schedule, which would be modified throughout the day. Most of my friends were double booked at least once. One guy I know was double booked twice, so they rearranged his schedule and then he was triple booked once. Good show. I realize it's hard to manage all those assets, but there are these things called "databases" and they can really help. It's a science fiction convention. I expect some science.

Other than that, it was a good con. Interesting panels, good panelists, rooms were appropriately sized. The facility itself was great. Many dining options, easy to get around, all that boring technical stuff that can make or break a convention. The Dealer's Room was bleak. You know, that thing where no one wants to try to bring books into Canada? In full effect.

What else, what else....parties. There were parties. I went to some of them, I walked through and then left others. As always, I ended up spending most of my time at the Brotherhood without Banners party, as I did in Denver. Good people.

The pro bar was at the Intercontinental. It was kind of small, kind of hard to get to, kind of limited in beer selection...but they had absinthe fountains. I was saved, mostly, because I don't like licorice. But it was a fascinating little ritual, and there was much toasting to Hemingway and what have you. I stuck to beer and tapas.

I'm not going to drop names or anything, not on this post at least. I made some new friends, saw some people I was hoping I'd get to see (but not enough of them, alas) and completely missed seeing some people I'd like to spend some time with. That is the way of this strange, wandering tribe.

And now I am home, and refreshed, and writing. Well, not this second. But heading writing-wise. Because I've got deadlines, bitches.

Step One: Stop Believing.

2009-07-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

We have this hallway at work, lined with corkboard message boards on one side where Leadership pins up notes and cards they've received from various ministries thanking us or telling about some story or event or...you know. Whatever. The wind from my passage knocked one of these cards to the ground, so I went back to re-pin it. It was from a ministry called "France for Christ".

Today is Bastille Day.

Ladies and Gentleman, I take this as a clear sign that the time has come to overthrow the Church. I'll set up a meeting in Exchange, maybe line up some action items. We'll get an agenda together. We have to advance it.

That grumpy old man

2009-07-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

So, I feel like I should say something about the death of Charles Brown. He's someone I've been around, and someone whose writing and editing has had a large impact on my second (and most loved) career. I didn't know him personally. When I found out about it, though, I was pretty wiped. I didn't expect that.

Here's how I got back into writing. I turned 30. I had been talking about being a writer for years, but I hadn't actually been writing. Key component to the process. So I turned 30, and I decided maybe it was time to stop fucking around and get with the writing. And like most newly determined sf/f writers, the first thing I did was go out and buy all the sf/f magazines I could find. Get a feel for the competition. And that's when I found Locus.

I didn't buy it, because I didn't really understand what it was. It wasn't until a couple months later that I realized that publishing wasn't simply a cold mechanism of quality and content, but a network of people and friendships and...well. It was a social circle. So I started reading Locus, and then I subscribed. I sift through it, every month, gleaning knowledge and scrying the signs. What's getting advertised, who's getting reviewed, who just sold a book, to whom, via whom. In every con report I scan the faces for people I recognize, then learn names. Like flashcards, I guess. Being able to walk into a party, look a stranger in a face and know their name...it's important. Not having to do that eye-flick down to their badge is nice, and it's kind of a sign of respect. I don't know. Anyway.

I'm sure Locus will go on, much as it has. Still. We'll all miss Charles Brown. He was Locus, and Locus is the most important publication in the industry. He built a good team, and that team will carry it forward. It just seems like we've lost someone important.

Draft Zero, new job, blah blah

2009-07-08T07:18:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the delay, folks. Work is a verah srs environment, and I'm in a cubicle, and they block a lot of sites. Not twitter, surprisingly, and not blogger or livejournal. But I've been busy enough that I haven't really explored the tolerances of the filter. Anyway. I'll try to update this thing more frequently.

Some thoughts about the new job. First of all, I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad I made the move. I went from an environment where I pretty much knew everything and had no interest in expanding my responsibilities, to an environment where I know a lot about a tiny aspect of the job, and there's a lot of room for improvement and involvement. And I'm finally using SQL, though sparingly. My responsibilities in that area will evolve, and I'll learn as I go because I'll *have* to learn just to stay afloat. It's a nice change.

Also, people here care about their jobs. That's new.

And writing is progressing. I've been asked to provide character descriptions and sample chapters for the cover artist. I won't tell you who it is, because I'm not sure how final it is and I'd like the final product to be something of a surprise, but I'm happy. I'm about halfway through chapter four. I think I finally found the voice for the book last night. Not to say that the bits written are bad, but they're a little unfocused. This is why I handwrite draft zero. The creative process works better for me with pen and ink, and we're still very much in the creative part of this project. But last night I wrote a dialogue between Eva and the Elder Alexander, and it just...it was right. It's still funny to me that I so often find the groove for a work in dialogue, when what drew me to writing was descriptive prose. We develop, my friends. We grow. I'll probably finish out chapter four, write the prologue (or probably the opening to chapter one) that I've been kicking around since I envisioned the character but didnt' want to write until I really had a handle on her, the Cult of the Warrior, and the world. And I have that handle now. Anyway. It's going well.

More good news, and a taste

2009-06-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

As these things tend to come in stacks of twenty, I am also pleased to announce that my short story, "Toke", has just appeared on Transmissions From Beyond, Interzone's audio podcast action. The art is done by Colin Peters, who is brilliant. All is well.

New job, new book...

2009-06-21T19:59:00.000-07:00

Well, Lou has the news. I just want to say what a thrill it is to work with Lou, and to be published with Pyr. I've known Brother Anders for a number of years now, and his philosophies of publication have done much to inform my own writing zen. This is going to be a brilliant thing, my pretties. Beautiful words. You're gonna love it.

Soon as I write it. Heh.

I think I can get pho, though.

2009-06-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

Well, now it's Sunday again. I'm still kinda sick. Definitely better every day, but I have the cough still and kind of some congestion. I don't know. I feel pretty okay, but meh. Meh!

First week of the new job was good. It's nice to be someplace where people want to work, they want to do a good job, and they're good at what they do. It's a change. I really didn't want to be sick my first week, but whatever. It happens.

My parents are visiting all next week. Again, I'd rather than happen when I wasn't sick, but hopefully I'll continue feeling a little better each day and have this thing licked. That's the hope.

There is writing news, but I'm not going to talk about it yet. Expect updates soon. For now, I'm going to go eat some soup. Maybe a nice matzo. If only there was a decent place to get good matzo around here. Stupid suburbs.

First Monday, which was actually Saturday

2009-06-16T18:26:00.000-07:00

I'll keep this short, cuz I'm kind of on my ass. The trick is that I was starting to get sick on Friday, had a kind of head cold on Saturday, and am now rocking the head cold with irritated cough since Sunday. I went in to the new job on Saturday to check out the workstation and confirm all the installations were correct. Monday was a pretty good day. I got introduced to a lot of folks, did some jobs, etc, etc. Then I had to call in sick today. Talked too much yesterday, so I spent my day taking naps and drinking hot tea. I'm still pretty stuffed up, but I'll be okay. There's a lot to do at work tomorrow, too. Fun.

More reports later. The internet makes me tired.

Last Fucking Monday

2009-06-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

So, it's the last week at the old job. I got through Monday. I think that's pretty good. I spent most of the day correcting things other people had done wrong. I kid you not, these people don't know anything about postal regulations. They're going to learn. Mostly by failing.

I also received the Solaris catalog for this year, featuring the art from HoV on the cover. It's very slick, and very pretty, and I think it'll go a long way towards pushing the book onto the shelves. This has been so long in coming (two years since I started talking to Solaris in earnest, about a year since I delivered the first draft) that it's surreal to think that the book is going to be on English and Australian shelves in two months. And by then I hope to be most of the way through the first draft of this other thing I'm working on. I imagine there will be some disruption, what with the job transition and the impending convention season, but I'm really trying to knuckle down and get things accomplished at a reasonable rate.

Invokation. You're going to read this word a lot in the new book. Get used to it.

2009-06-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

This is the third day since my departure was announced to the front office. Three days I was supposed to spend answering questions and helping my coworkers get ready for the transition. Here's what's happened so far:

1)My coworker has spent most of that time training someone else to do his job. He basically expects to dump most of the work onto this person. Which, I believe, is exactly what will happen.

2)I have done no training of anyone. Theoretically that's no big deal, because this guy is supposed to be able to do my job when I'm on vacation. Trick is, he's demonstrated time and time again that he can't do my job when I'm gone. Again, after the 12th it's not really my problem.

3)They still haven't announced it to production. I don't know why. It's awkward.

4)I serve as CSR for a handful of clients. I was told to not contact any of them, that my boss will be taking over those accounts and he'll handle the transition. Some of these guys are submitting jobs and I am technically coordinating, but they'll be mailing after I leave. I'm trying to get my boss to deal with these things but he's just not willing. It's weird. I think he should interact with these people as soon as possible. He's only told people he absolutely has to tell. I've tried to talk to him about upcoming jobs and client patterns, but he just doesn't want to hear it.

I can't figure it out. But then again, there are a lot of things that they do that just boggle the mind, so I guess this is nothing new. In fact, this is pretty much why I'm leaving. At least they're consistent.

Book news, book news. The new book is going well. I wrote a lot last night. I've just been cutting off chapters where I felt it was appropriate for the narrative flow, but that's ending up with some inconsistent lengths and, frankly, some very short chapters. We'll have to see if that reworks itself as I go along. I have also removed guns but kept cog-driven carriages and monotrack railroads. Also turbine driven flight packs. And the magic is fun to write. I just hope it's not too confusing.

More Locus Shenanigans

2009-06-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

This isn't that big of a thing, but it made me happy so I thought I'd share. Locus does a listing of all the forthcoming books, separated into US and UK. There's a complete list of books by publisher, with the title, author and month of publication. Before that they do a listing of selected books by author, which tends to be your bigger names and anticipated releases. At the top of the first page of this feature they put thumbnails of some of the covers of the forthcoming books. So in the US section I'm under the complete listing, though oddly enough it lists Oct '09, when the catalog shows it as Sept 29th. Well, that's practically October, so I guess that's no big deal.

But in the UK forthcoming books section, I made the "Selected Books by Author" listing *and* the thumbnails at the top. I'm sure this has as much to do with Jon Foster's brilliant cover as it does my brilliant novel, but it's good to see some coverage within the industry. Some small part of my fragile ego was worried that the book would appear and then pass without comment through the public's conscience.

For kicks, here are the other books that got the cover-as-thumbnail treatment in the UK section: Stephen Baxter, Robin Hobb, Terry Prachett, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Asher, Kristin Cashore and Steven Erikson. If you don't know who any of those people are, you should look them up. Oh, and then there's this Tim Akers punk.

I guess the fact that I appeared in the UK section just further confirms the fact that I'm a famous (American-born) British author. And it sure is a pretty cover.

Changing my commute

2009-05-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I just served my two weeks notice at my job. I've been here for almost twelve years. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I haven't been happy for a while, so I'm relieved to be moving on. At the same time, it's a big step. I don't know how my new job (of course I have another job lined up. Good lord.) will interfere with my writing schedule. Hopefully not at all. Hopefully it won't be a transition fraught with stress and peril. Hopefully I'll just be able to slip into it and keep moving. We'll see.

Anyway. I'll whine more about how many words I've written or what narrative block I'm tangling with later on. For now, I'm just glad to be mobile. And I'm looking forward to looking forward to my job again. We'll see how long it lasts.

Good bye, Philbert

2009-05-26T11:35:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm back on the job after most of a week off. Got a lot of writing done on Wednesday, less on Thursday, and then pretty much just played WoW the rest of the week. I mean, I mowed the lawn, I did house stuff, but I put in some pretty significant numbers in Azeroth.

I am pleased to announce that the floss-bit has moved on. So that's a significant development. Other than that....not much. I mean, there's a great deal to talk about. You'll hear later. For now, things are clean and cool on the surface.

Sorry it's not much of an update.

Minus Duck

2009-05-19T09:39:00.001-07:00

Well, scratch one convention appearance. I was hoping to get panels at Duckon, since it's just down the street, and they've got Jim Butcher as GoH this year. No luck. They actually have too many panelists. So much for extremely local support. No hard feelings, of course, but I'm disappointed. Hopefully Windycon will be more amenable.

I have some other news that is lovely and joyous and completely something I can't talk about yet. Soon though. It is good. And less than three months until the book is out in the UK! And Australia! Prepare!

That's all I've got this morning. Updates as they arrive.

Philbert the Floss-bit

2009-05-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

There is a piece of dental floss in the middle of the hallway of my office. It's been there for a little over a week. It's in such a position that every employee walks over it several times a day. It got there because someone flossed their teeth in their office (nice) and then threw it away, and the guy who empties the trash did a poor job of it and it fell out. I haven't touched it because it's become an interesting social experiment for me. How filthy will this place get before the bosses will do something about it? My guess is "Quite".

He has a visual

2009-05-12T14:13:00.001-07:00

I forgot my glasses today, so I probably should be spending as little time staring at this screen as possible. I should be sitting in a dark room with my eyes closed while the knots in my irises uncoil. But I don't think anyone believes that'll happen. Anyway.

I'm beginning to see that a lack of local friends is kind of important for the writing thing. I mean, if I didn't have the day job I could probably manage a social life, but it's not practical in the current situation. You really have to abandon everything in the name of a good book, and that's not easy. A habit I have to get back into, sure, but a habit that I remember not being very pleasant. Maybe that's what's getting in my way. We'll see.

A cool thing: Randy Pausch was on the bridge of the USS Kelvin.

Plumbing, Writing, and the eternal complaint

2009-05-06T07:07:00.001-07:00

Well, the shower is now functional. The tiles weren't properly affixed on the floor, and water was getting down there and washing out the grout. They had to tear out part of the floor and re-tile it, but everything seems to be working properly. I'm relieved.

This year is going by so quickly. I had expected to be most of the way through the second Veridon book by now. There are obvious reasons that hasn't happened, but I'm having serious trouble starting this other book. I keep changing my mind about it. I must have written chapter one three different times, for three entirely different books. The problem is that none of the things I've written so far particularly interest me. That's no good. Too many other frustrations and distractions to really settle down. Doing this as a second job really is kind of a bitch.

Anyway. It's May. Three months until the UK release. And since the US release isn't until the end of September, it's practically five months until I'll see it on local store shelves. What can I do in five months?

A league of extraordinary standards

2009-04-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

Why are book endings so hard? So often I'll be reading a book, happily exploring the world that the author has created, and then some rogue plotline comes tumbling out of the underbrush and plows through everything and then we're sliding down a scree of bad dialogue and awkward coincidence and it's just...frustrating. This book I just stopped reading held a lot of promise, and it's done well commercially, but the ending is just a shambles. Very disappointed.

I don't claim to be any kind of solution to this. People contact me to say they're X far through the book and gosh they love it and I would really have to jump off a bridge to ruin the book. And so far those people have been happy with the ending of HoV, but I want to be clear. A book is a complete package. If you like the whole thing but didn't like the ending, you didn't like the book. In the same way, you should never force your way through a book you're not enjoying just because the ending *might* justify it. Toss it. Tell your friends to not read it. It's the only way to get authors to write better books.

Eva Forge and the city of Ash

2009-04-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty good weekend. On Saturday my wife and I went to fly a kite. Our town is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and as part of that they organized an attempt at breaking a world record for most people flying kites. We were shooting for 1000, had 1100 sign up, but the wind sucked and it sounds like we only managed about 800 at the critical moment of counting. That's okay, though. We had fun.

The only thing that sucked about this weekend was that we broke our shower again. Well, not exactly. Turns out the contractor used the wrong kind of grout on the floor tiles in the shower, and it all washed out, so now the tiles are loose. They came by today, had a "d'oh" moment, and will be re-grouting our shower tomorrow sometime.

I spent a lot of time working on an outline for the next book thing. I have publishers asking for this thing, but I don't want to distribute outlines that aren't up to my potential. If that makes sense. So I'm still polishing it. I originally started the project thinking I would write a grand old epic fantasy, but I'm pretty sure I'm not cut out for such a thing. What I've ended up with is.... what? Epic fantasy cut with urban fantasy wrapped in steampunk and shot through with crime noir. Something like that. Mostly I'm just not letting myself be bound by old conventions. I want there to be elevated trains. I want the city to float. I don't want mounts, mounted combat or electricity. I don't want the main character to have to travel as part of her quest. I don't want quests. I want a single POV character. I want people in normal clothes, but also armor, but also sunglasses. I want punks with guns. I want a paladin with a double handed sword, incanting the rites of her dead god as she runs through the rain, chased by some kind of clockwork beastie. I want a drowned goddess floating through sewers. I want airships powered by tornadoes.

Anyway. It's going to be interesting.

Get up in the morning

2009-04-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

This brings me joy. Absolute *joy*.

Sometimes we just need a good memory

2009-04-14T09:03:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid there was this grocery store called the Fresh Market. It was sort of a forerunner of Whole Foods or similar. Lots of good food, kind of expensive, but really unique stuff. It was just far enough away that it was a special trip to go there. As I age I've come to appreciate good, fresh ingredients, but this was when I was a kid. And as a kid, the thing I remember most about the Fresh Market was the jelly bean display. I suppose these days it would seem pretty mundane, but for me it was great. Gourmet beans of every type in plastic containers, and big old scoop to get them out. I loved the way their shells clicked against the scoop, the smooth rustle as they slid into the bag, their weight in the plastic. I loved eating them one at a time.

Anyway. It's a good memory for me. That is all.

One year, one year in

2009-04-06T12:58:00.001-07:00

This weekend was Adepticon. I went at the invitation of Vince Rospond, he of the mighty Black Library. Also the GoH was Chris Roberson, who was there with his wife Allison Baker, so we got to sit around in the bar and talk business stuff and generally commiserate about Solaris and life. It was good. They're good people. And I think there may be hope for Black Library. We'll see.

The bathroom is nearing completion. Fiddly bits left. Maybe by the end of the week, but again, we'll see. I'm ready to have my bathroom back. Shutting off half the water in the house seems to have done strange things to the pressure. We hear sounds at night. It's all passing strange.

And Scions of the Scholar are kept locked away in a Prison Library.

2009-03-30T13:28:00.001-07:00

Well, today marks four weeks since I learned about Solaris' potential sale. I still don't know where we are with that. Much activity, then weeks of sitting around knowing there's activity happening somewhere else, activity that quite directly impacts your work, but not able to even see that activity. There is frustration to that. Whatever. There are worse things.

I explained the cosmology to someone on Saturday (at my monthly D&D game) and it went well. It's the first time I've tried to explain how the magic works to, well, anyone. They thought it was cool, and understood how the world worked clearly enough. He was even saying stuff like "Oo, that means they would want to know how the ascension worked and that means..." and I would follow up with Yes, and here's how I've worked that into the story. It's good to see enthusiasm for a project when really, it's just a bunch of ideas and a couple paragraphs.

I also feel like I'm getting my DM skills back. I used to be good at that, but I've been out of practice, and for the last few years there's been a lot of frustration associated with gaming sessions. But now I've had a couple sessions getting used to the new rules and am starting to remember the whole roleplaying thing. So that feels nice. And people seem to be enjoying themselves.

For those of you thinking about switching up from 3.5 to 4, allow me to offer my "positive review." A lot of the things that disturbed me about the game seem to smooth out the deeper you get into the level progression. And it takes the players some time to get used to the idea of how things work differently. At level one through four you're really kind of limited in what you can do. It feels like you're just using the same powers over and over again, because you don't have many powerful tricks in your bag. But the higher you get, the more stuff you have access to. The experience deepens. So it's good, and it's certainly easier to DM.

Unless there are zombies. That's a different plan.

2009-03-25T11:52:00.001-07:00

At management's insistence, I went to a seminar on the upcoming Intelligent Mail Barcode this morning. It was a beginner's course. I knew more about the transition than the presenter, who couldn't answer any of the audience questions. It was a waste of time. And you know what, I don't really want to know anything more about the IMB. I don't want to know about the specifics of the Move Update, or what I need to do to get our company in compliance for full service PostalOne! processing. I don't care how you create a mail.dat. I want out. Thank you.

The plumbing inspection on the bathroom failed yesterday. That's technically pushed drywall back a day, but they showed up anyway and started installing everywhere except the shower. That's fine, and now the plumber is doing his compliance repairs. Hopefully the second inspection will go better.

I finally had a good session of writing last night. I can't imagine how much production I could manage if this were what I was doing during the day, rather than what I was doing for an hour after dinner when I'm tired, or during lunch in this incredibly uncomfortable office.

I have a plan in my head of how this year is going to go. It isn't what I had in mind a month ago, but it's a good plan. Just a lot of work, and work I wasn't expecting. Gears I didn't think I would be engaging. Anyway. It's what I've got.

At least it's raining again

2009-03-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

My wife is reading a themed anthology at the moment, and we got to talking about it over breakfast on Sunday. She expressed...frustration at one of the stories, and I asked "Who's the author?" She didn't know. The author is everything, I said. Doesn't matter if you like stories of a particular type, the author is going to bring their own particular style to it, and if you don't like that style you're not going to like the story. So I went and got the anthology and we looked up the author. Sure enough, one of the people on my long list of authors I won't tolerate. One of the people I blame for the resurgence of lazy genre writing. Lazy in that particularly clever, literary, completely lacking a plot kind of way. It was good to have a blind sample confirm my own bias.

Got a lot done this weekend, but none of it was writing. Well. Very little. But having the one bathroom demoed means that we're down to one toilet, so I spent parts of Saturday and Sunday disassembling and then reassembling our third toilet. I'm not good with tools. I'd rather not tell you what happened when the top came off the intake valve stack. It involved water. We also had to buy the door knobs for our new cabinetry, and towel racks and whatnot. Much driving, and walking, and comparing similar colored knobs. I recommend avoiding oil rubbed bronze. It's hard to match, and if the match isn't good enough it looks really weird. And I got to watch some basketball.

So that was my weekend. I'm going to try to make a better go of it this week. D&D on Saturday, and I need to gather my thoughts and write out some encounter cards and stuff.

Her name is Eva

2009-03-20T09:47:00.001-07:00

It's funny. I spent a couple days working out all the names. Thought I had it. Then I sat down to write and just couldn't do it. Too typical, my names. So I changed them all, and changed the way I think about the naming in the world, and that changed something about how I viewed the world in general. And then I could write. Probably just my brain, looking for excuses to not be creative.