Writing Wibbles

As you have certainly realized by now, I changed the blog template. Some readers have told me the contrast (or lack thereof) made it hard to read, and I chafed at the hassle of trying to make the sidebar wider. The old template, called Abrasive, was a third-party template. I was able to tweak a few things—most notably moving the tags to the top, and putting comment links at both top and bottom—but at last, it was time to move on. The new Blogger-supported template is from awesome.com, and I customized it a little: the online tools let me make the sidebar wider (yay!) and change the background. I now have a little nicer-looking mobile template. I had to hack on the HTML to put a comment link at the top, but haven’t yet figured out how to put the share buttons up there without breaking everything.

OK, on to the writing stuff…

Water and Chaos is still with the editor. I hope to get it back this weekend, then finish it up next week. If all goes well, it will be in Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords before the July 4 holiday, and the other stores after a couple weeks. Sales at B&N are pretty slow, so far, but the Nook Press webapp is cool enough that people need to support it. If you find a typo a few minutes after publishing (yes, this has happened to me), you can edit the book on site—no edit/respin/upload cycle to go through!

Now if you’re on my mailing list, you’ve already seen the cover and blurb for Water and Chaos. If not, you’ll get to see it tomorrow. I’ll have it on this blog, the Green Envy Press blog, and Goodreads. So while you’re waiting… why not sign up for the mailing list? If you want to get in on the announcement fun, leave me a comment with an email address, or email me at lkollar at gmail dot com, and I’ll shoot you some attachments. Book bloggers interested in a quick-ish read (it’s about 44,000 words) can get an ARC by request.

My brain is already on vacation, although it doesn’t start until July 6. I’m going to try spending the entire vacation reading instead of writing. I have a lot of catching-up to do.

Addendum: Thanks to Jim C. Hines for linking to my Writing Wibbles of two weeks ago. It’s one of the most-clicked of these columns to date!

Multiple awards

Last week, I received two different awards from three different people. So thanks to +Helen Howell and +Tony Noland for the Super Sweet Blogging Award, and Catherine Russell for the Sunshine Award! So I’m going to combine these into a single post.

Super Sweetness

For this award, the acceptance speech is pretty standard:

• √ Thank the person who nominated you.
• √ Answer the five “Super Sweet” questions.
• √ Include the picture in your blog post.
• Nominate 13 other bloggers. Wait. Thirteen???
• Notify your nominees.

So here’s the five questions:

• Cookies or Cake? Cookies. They’re portable and easier to hide from 3yo grandkids who want “just one bite!”
• Chocolate or Vanilla? Chocolate. 'Nuff said!
• Favorite Sweet Treat? White chocolate macadamia nut cookies.
• When do you crave sweet things the most? Mid-afternoon. A chocolate cupcake to go with my coffee—just the thing to keep me awake.
• Sweet nickname? The wife calls me “Hun.” I don’t know why; I haven’t pillaged a single village.

Sunshine

Here’s the rules:

• Include the award’s logo in a post or on your blog.
• Link to the person who nominated you.
• Answer 10 questions about yourself.
• Pass it on to a few cheery souls.

The questions:

• Favorite color? Yellow.
• Favorite animal? Sprite, my daughter’s overweight and highly cuddly cat.
• Favorite number? 13? It seems to be lucky for me.
• Favorite non-alcoholic drink? Unsweet tea or diet coke.
• Favorite alcoholic drink? Rum. Straight. Beer is a close second.
• Facebook or Twitter? Twitter. Period.
• Passions? Writing, the beach, passion itself…
• Prefer getting or giving presents? At this stage of life, giving. Especially if it’s something you know they like.
• Favorite City? Hm. I think maybe Decatur, GA, because if I ever leave here that’s where I’d like to live.
• Favorite TV Shows? Old stuff like Hogan’s Heroes, Max Headroom, X-Files. I don’t watch much TV these days.

OK, Who’s Next?

I’m going to cheat. Whoever hasn’t gotten one of these awards already, claim it!

Writing Wibbles

The Pickups and Pestilence launch party is over, the prizes have been handed out… and White Pickups is still 99¢. I think I’ll wait for the holiday weekend to finish before resetting the price. If you’ve been sitting on the fence, you still have a few more days to get it at a discount!

I’ve finally begun the post-beta phase for Water and Chaos. The final third of the title describes the situation pretty well… maybe that’s a little exaggerated, but there’s a fair amount of work to be done. One of the beta readers went in deep, and found a lot of things that the editor would have caught… but the tighter everything is before edit time, the quicker that should get turned around!

Formatting eBooks has suddenly become a hot topic in the last week or so—it’s shown up both in a Goodreads forum I frequent, and in my Twitter feed. Strange, how all this is coming together all at once… I’m working on a “Best Practices” document for work, right after diving in and producing optimized files for Pickups and Pestilence. I thought I’d share the beginnings of some general principles for setting up eBooks here. Be warned: I do get somewhat dogmatic about this stuff. Most of you who read this blog are younger than I am, and you guys are supposed to be the generation that “gets” computers. ;-) Just sprinkle IMO, IMHO, or IMNSHO as needed.

So… what I call the First Principle of formatting eBooks, is widely known in programming circles as the Principle of Least Surprise, or the Principle of Least Astonishment. When producing eBooks, this simply means Respect the defaults. All of them. People expect to be able to set their font, type size, spacing, and so on, in their eBook readers. You need a very good reason to override that expectation—children’s books and comic books are two good examples. Fortunately, this makes your job easier, too—your CSS (styles) is shorter and easier to maintain.

This leads to the second principle: KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly!). A work of fiction isn’t a complex technical document, and I’ve formatted many of those in my day job. You have paragraphs of body text, section breaks, chapter titles. Plus a few special things you’ll do in the title page, and various highlighting in the body text. Each of these gets a “class” name. You should have a dozen or less, all told, including the classes used only on the title page. The other part of KISS is to eliminate anything that isn’t absolutely required to format your book.

More to come later. Lots of eyeball-melting details.

Winning!

I appreciate all who came by to offer well-wishes, or even just to enter the raffle!

So who won?!

You really want to know? OK…

Kindle 4: Bessamy S.
$20 Amazon gift card: Chuck Allen
All my eBooks: EJ Hobbs
Pickups and Pestilence: Erin Albert

Congrats, everyone! I’ve emailed the winners using the addresses they left in the rafflecopter… so if you don’t get your email, check your spam filter or contact me here. I’ll get the prizes out as soon as I get confirmations.

Indie Life/Writing Wibbles

Welcome to the Indie Life edition of Writing Wibbles. Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.

In last week’s Writing Wibbles, I described my mobile writing station that consists of a smartphone, Bluetooth keyboard, and +Evernote. I was delighted when +Katherine Hajer used that post as a springboard to talk about ferreting out the root causes that keep you from writing.

Katherine made a good point about my post: I didn’t present it as a “this is how you get more writing time” post, but rather “this is how I get more writing time.” There’s a zillion “writing tips” blogs and websites out there. Sometimes, advice on one site conflicts with another’s—but they all agree I’m doin’ it w0rNg because I edit as I go and often revise previous passages while I write new ones.

This month, I want to say hello to writers just getting started, unsure of how to find an audience and how to develop as a writer.

This is what worked for me.

When I decided I wanted to start writing intentional fiction¹ again, after a long hiatus after college, I already had a blog. It seemed like a good place to post a few short stories I had sitting in my desk, and I did. Not much came of it, but infinitely more people read them on my blog than they could have in my desk.

Later on, I joined Twitter, and one day I stumbled across something called #FridayFlash. The premise is simple: write a piece of flash fiction (1000 words or less), post it on your blog, and tweet links with the #FridayFlash hashtag (and don't forget to add it to the collector). I met many of my bestest Twitter buddies through #FridayFlash.

Writing flash fiction helped me develop as a writer by focusing on the moment, and what’s important in that moment. Flash doesn’t absolutely require elements found in longer stories, like plot or character development, but it’s cool if you can fit them in. I know artistically-talented people who can sketch a few lines and make you see so much more; a skilled flash writer can do the same in a handful of words.

There’s an unwritten rule of #FridayFlash: if someone comes by and leaves a comment, it’s a courtesy to do the same for them. You don’t need to be on Twitter to get involved; just hit the collector and check out things that look interesting to you.


One thing I realized when writing short pieces: 2000 words might be a short story, but it’s a hell of a long blog post. And there were longer stories wanting to get out. Like FAR Future.

While I was writing flash, I was also writing much longer pieces, and began serializing them on my blog. Soon after I finished FAR Future, a flash piece called White Pickups blew up into something huge and I was off to the races again. Then, I discovered TuesdaySerial. It works much like FridayFlash: put up your latest episode, tweet links with the #TuesdaySerial hashtag, add a link to the collector. After White Pickups came Accidental Sorcerers and others. Somewhere along the line, I was invited to join the TuesdaySerial staff.

If you’re brave (or just crazy like me), you can start serializing a story before it’s done. It does give you an incentive to keep writing, and sometimes your readers give you ideas for subplots or can help you get unstuck. Serials don’t get the readership that flash does, simply because serials require more dedication on readers’ parts as well as the writer. But serial readers can turn out to be more dedicated fans in the end.

Feel free to share what has worked for you in the comments. Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

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¹ My dayjob is technical writing. Some of that turned into fiction, but not by intent.

Writing (WINNER!) Wibbles

Let’s get the cool stuff out of the way first—the One World, Two Ages raffle results! I’ve emailed the winners, and am looking forward to giving out stuff:

1st prize: Jim Zarling

$20 Amazon gift card
Accidental Sorcerers eBook
White Pickups eBook
Water and Chaos eBook (ARC)
Heroes and Vallenez, eBook by Angela Kulig (ARC)

2nd prize: Nicole Lee

Accidental Sorcerers eBook
White Pickups eBook
Water and Chaos eBook (ARC)
Heroes and Vallenez, eBook by Angela Kulig (ARC)

3rd prize: Tony Noland

Accidental Sorcerers eBook

Congrats—and happy reading—to all the winners!

I must have been crazy to commit to releasing two books, even if they were “only” novellas, two weeks apart. But things are going well enough since then. Both books had minor issues in Smashwords that prevented them from getting into Premium right away… but Accidental Sorcerers has already made it to iBooks. Funny, how Smashwords implies it’ll take Apple longer than any of the other stores to list your Smashwords book, but it’s actually the fastest in my experience.

So how are the books doing?

I put The Crossover on Smashwords Sunday night to get it a little head start, and to have a link already pre-digested for Amazon when I obeyed their suggested to “tell us about a lower price.” Since Smashwords doesn’t seem to have a problem with revealing numbers, I’ll say that 82 people (as I type this) have downloaded their free copy in the last three days. That’s a little better than one per hour. I’m hoping it’ll really take off once Amazon price-matches.

As for Accidental Sorcerers, it plodded along until the blog tour got going. Since then, it has been climbing Mount Rankings pretty steadily, sometimes taking a step back before taking two steps forward. It seems like the purchases have been increasing along with the ranking, which keeps it moving pretty steadily. After two weeks and a day, it has come this far:

I really need to stop checking the numbers every waking hour, but it’s so much FUN when they’re moving in the right direction! Besides, some funny things turned up. At first, Smashwords was doing fairly well keeping up. Every third Amazon sale, I’d get a Smashwords sale. Then Amazon kept going, and Smashwords didn’t. And, on average, I see a book returned for every 31 sales. That’s more entertaining than annoying—I figure someone hit the wrong button, or might have sent it to the wrong Kindle (forgetting that you can pull a purchase to any of your Kindles from the cloud or archive).

It’s also doing much better than White Pickups, which leads me to wonder why. The Truckalypse gets great reviews, but not many sales. I can think of four factors, ranked by my guess at probability:

1. I’m right about a 99¢ eBook being an impulse purchase.
2. I got some good (i.e. popular) blogs lined up for the blog tour. The interview with Patrick Satters was retweeted a LOT, for example, even if he said it didn’t get the usual volume of pageviews.
3. The cover art doesn’t do the story justice. (This is Angela’s #1 guess.)
4. More people read YA Fantasy than adult paranormal.

It’s most likely a combination of factors, perhaps all four, with different weights. We’re working on a White Pickups cover art reboot, as part of the run-up to launching Pickups and Pestilence in April. If sales immediately take off, I’ll move #3 up to #1.

And I owe everyone who has bought my books so far (and in the future) a huge THANK YOU!

Blog Tour: One World, Two Ages

Celebrating the Accidental Sorcerers launch, and the upcoming launch of The Crossover, I proclaim the blog tour to be on the road! Both stories are fantasy novellas, set in the same world of Termag, but in different ages.

Get it now!

In Accidental Sorcerers, magic is on the wane. “Folk grow in knowledge, and a little in wisdom, and the Principle of Necessity demands that magic steps aside.” Even so, Termag has only taken the first baby steps toward a technological future. Thus, there are fewer sorcerers in the world. Into this world comes Mik sim Mikhile, who turns out to have an incredible amount of magical Talent. Mik ends up apprenticed to a sorcerer, the clumsy (but kindly) Bailar the Blue. There he meets Sura, the sorcerer’s daughter and first apprentice. Love blossoms, and adventure follows hot on its heels.

The life of a sorcerer in this age is supposed to be sedate, but Mik and Sura must not have received the memo. And Accidental Sorcerers is only the beginning! Their second adventure, Water and Chaos, is coming this summer. And there’s a third on the way, with ideas for others.

Available Jan. 29!

Eight hundred years before Accidental Sorcerers, the Age of Heroes came to a close. The adventurers, warriors, mages, and Captains were still doing what they were doing, but things began to change.

One of the most well-known historical figures from that moment of time was Captain Chelinn, known as “The Madman” to his detractors. In The Crossover, he and a friend, Lodrán, end up by coincidence on a hostile flotilla. They pair up to thwart the actual goal of the flotilla, to recover one of the Eyes of Byula, but end up in a completely different world—ours!

Later in life, Captain Chelinn wrote several books. One of them, An Account of Different Worlds, captivated a young Bailar to the point of distraction. Perhaps, in a future Accidental Sorcerers story, we’ll hear what Bailar thinks of us.

But for now, you can read the books and decide what you think about them. Hit the rafflecopter for some neato prizes, and make sure you visit all the other stops on the tour:

Sunday, Jan. 20: Patrick Satters
Tuesday, Jan. 22: Taryn Raye
Wednesday, Jan. 23: Tony Noland
Friday, Jan. 24: Angela Kulig

Bookmark this post, or leave it in a tab in your browser, so you can hit each stop along the way. I’ll add last-minute entries (if any) as they arrive.

And now… the raffle!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Indie Life/Writing Wibbles

First off, I’d like to thank Ali Cross for linking to the Indelibles page. This matches up well with my normal “Writing Wibbles” column, which I like to do on Wednesdays anyway. So, on to the post…

Do you think 2012 was a good year for writing? Publishing? Anything?

Overall, I have to say I’m pretty happy with it. I published my first novel, White Pickups, in August. Sales haven't been what I'd like, but it takes time to get things off the ground. I kept on writing, finished the sequel (Pickups and Pestilence, scheduled for release in April), and wrote several novellas.

Too awesome to
not post again…

Two of the novellas are being released this month, one of them next week in fact! I’m excited, can you tell? Next week kicks off the two-week One World, Two Ages blog tour (link goes to a post with covers and blurbs). Having released a much larger work already, I have a pretty good feeling that this will go smoothly. Last-minute edits are happening now, and I just learned that Smashwords is now accepting EPUB uploads—just in time!

So those long droughts, when nothing seems to happen, aren’t really droughts. Those are the times we lay the groundwork for the next story, or take care of all the non-writing things that need to happen before Launch Day. Writing stories is definitely not the thing for someone who expects instant returns on everything. No matter how tempting it is to just blast something out there, we owe it to ourselves to get it right. We aren’t going to be lined up and shot, if we release something a week later to get those crucial copyedits done, right? (Besides, I have the Launch Cannon, I can shoot back.)

I’m looking forward to seeing what the other writers have going today. Hop back to the Indie Life page and see what they’re talking about…

DOUBLE COVER REVEAL!

Living in the free-range insane asylum all these years has rubbed off on me, it seems. Why else would I plan to release two stories in one month? The stories are related, and give rise to the blog tour name: One World, Two Ages. The tour will run January 14–29, with the stories released at either end. Slots are open, so if you want a guest post or to do an interview, put dibs on those dates now!

Oh, the covers? Yes, let’s talk covers. And the stories that go with them.

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Accidental Sorcerers
(Fantasy novella, YA)
Release: January 15

I’ve blogged roughly half of this story, and it’s been one of the more popular #TuesdaySerial stories I’ve had to date. In this latter age of Termag, sorcery is on the wane, making way for inventions of the folk. The Stolevan Matriarchy is the primary power, at least through the western half of the continent, and the seat of the Conclave of Sorcerers. A winter raid by rival Westmarch sets events into motion…

Invaders just across the river. A powerful spell hidden in a child’s rhyme. When an untrained boy awakens an ice dragon to protect his village, and lives to tell the tale, not even the Conclave of Sorcerers can predict what happens next.

Accidental Sorcerers brings to life an unforgettable tale of love and loyalty in the world of Termag. Feel the magic!

A sorcerer’s life is supposed to be fairly sedate in this age, but the apprentices Mik and Sura find their lives anything but sedate. But love and loyalty is some of the strongest magic of all, so I wouldn’t bet against them. I’ll be coming back to these kids, since I already have the second story (Water and Chaos) drafted out and ideas for at least four others.

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The Crossover
(Fantasy novella)
Release: January 29

This story had the working title Chasing a Rainbow, but there’s already a few hundred books out there with that title. Angela Kulig (the marketing wiz for Green Envy Press) and I both have many forehead-shaped dents in our desks, first from coming up with a replacement title, then from fixing up a cover.

This story takes place about eight hundred years before Accidental Sorcerers, at the end of what Mik and Sura (and their contemporaries) call the Age of Heroes. The city-state Ak’koyr, on the northwestern shore of the Gulf of Camac, has been the center of western civilization (they would say all civilization) through much of the age. Mounting a punitive expedition against Eastern marauders, Ak’koyr’s Avenger Fleet impresses a handful of unwilling adventurers as common labor. One of them, Lodrán by name, runs into Chelinn, an old friend with a colorful history. Then things get strange…

The warrior-mage Chelinn and his friend Lodrán have visited many strange places. But when a curse goes awry, sending them to a world where mundane devices have supplanted magic, nothing is familiar at first. Then, after rescuing a merchant, they find themselves embroiled in a far more dangerous situation.

As hundreds of lives hang in the balance, two heroes and their new friends must use all their talents to foil an evil plot—and survive until they can catch a rainbow and return home.

The Crossover transports classic fantasy characters into a modern-day setting. Neither Earth nor Termag will ever be the same!

The nature of this story makes it easier to draw contrasts between Earth and Termag. The magic that allows one to crossover to another world, also allows that traveler to speak the local language. Gotta love magic, huh?

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Now it’s your turn…

What do you want to know about Termag, these stories, or the characters? We’re all ready to assign slots on the blog tour, and take those interview questions.

If you’re a book reviewer, and want an ARC of either (or both) titles, hit the “Contact Me” link at the top of the page.

Monday Musings

We’re definitely in the Countdown to Christmas. A week and a day before the wrapping paper flies. Mason is old enough, this year, to understand the whole presents and Santa Claus thing. Of course, he had to get sick… and he’s always uggggly when he’s sick. We’ve heard, “Am I on the naughty list?” a few times. He just wants cars, and I mean the Hot Wheels kind. We could get him ten of those, wrap each one, and he’ll think he hit the Presents Jackpot come the 25th. It reminds me of Daughter Dearest—we could get her twenty bucks worth of puzzles, back in the day, and she was happy as any kid on the Big Day.

It’s been too long since icicle lights were the Big Thing for decorating. They’ve finally come up with a new “must have” light set: the waterfall/cascading kind. Well, Mason does love the extravaganza of lights outside, and we’ve made a few adjustments with wiring so we don’t blow those tiny fuses in the first string of lights this year. Pictures will be taken once the last set of lights are hung.

The clever and talented Angela Kulig is almost done with my cover art. It’s going to be glorious. I just hope it’s all ready by Wednesday, so I can wibble about it.

This evening, a couple hours after we put Mason to bed, he came up the hall saying, “there’s a problem, there’s a problem.” After a little cuddle, he let us know that his projection nightlight had cycled off and he wanted it back on. With the moon and stars once again glowing on the ceiling, he went right back to sleep.

Very Inspiring Blog Award

I wonder if it’s for longevity as much as anything else, but Cindy Vaskova and Helen Howell both tagged me with this one within a day of each other! Nominees should write a post that:

1) Links back to their nominator
2) Reveals seven things about themselves
3) Nominates 15 more bloggers (15???)
4) Displays the award’s logo on their blog.

OK, what seven things can be said? Yeesh, this is harder than I expected.

1) Last week, I turned 18. For the third time. ;-)
2) I get annoyed when people want me to do something they’re capable of doing themselves.
3) When writing novels, I will switch between hand-writing and typing as it suits me.
4) Remember “The Thing” on The Addams Family? I do that with Mason, except he calls the hand a “spider.” It can be either fun or annoying, depending on his mood.
5) While I can envision a graphic, I really suck at drawing it out. Very frustrating.
6) I can get by on much smaller amounts of meat than most of my countryfolk.
7) Sometimes, I’ll think out loud. Wife then wonders what I’m talking about.

OK, on to the impossibly large number of bloggers. Cindy pretty much nailed everyone I’d want to tag, and then some. So… if you have a blog, congratulations! The prize is yours!

Winners!

The White Pickups blog tour drove off, and left two winners in its wake:

2nd place, a copy of White Pickups: Jess Richardson

And the Grand Prize winner: Laura Hill
That big ol’ pile of loot includes:

• White Pickups by Larry Kollar (um, that’s me!)
• Being Human by Patricia Lynne
• Snapshots by Patricia Lynne
• The Violet Fox by Clare Marshall
• Within by Clare Marshall
• The Skeleton Song by Angela Kulig
• Dust of the Dead Sea by Angela Kulig
• Pigments of My Imagination by Angela Kulig

If you’re one or the other, and haven’t seen my email yet, check your spam filter? (Actually, one winner has already responded.)

I appreciate everyone who entered and followed the trucks around the blog tour… without, you know, actually climbing in one…

White Pickups Blog Tour!

One of the benefits of joining a publishing co-op is that I get a lot of help with promotion. Oh, did I not mention that? I’ve joined a publishing co-op! It’s a very new thing, and we’re all still feeling our way forward, but we’re all pooling our not-writing skills, so everyone benefits.

Once we really get going, I think we’ll have a top-notch operation, and be able to match or beat anyone on quality.

Blog tour. I was talking about a blog tour. Yes, White Pickups is taking an online road trip of its own…

It’s amazing how quickly this all came together. I had to blast out four guest-blog posts in a week, and of course the one that came first was the absolute hardest one to do. But meanwhile, Angela Kulig, the marketing expert at Green Envy Press, was lining up tour stops and had time to throw together a short video. Check it out…

There’s goodies to be won! In addition to an eBook copy or two of White Pickups, there’s a slew of other books from some of the other Green Envy Press authors in the pile. So here’s a list of the wonderful bloggers who are helping out:

Oct 12th: http://www.faeryinkpress.com/category/blog
Oct 14th: http://jamiebmusings.webs.com/
Oct 15th: http://www.sonyaclark.net/
Oct 16th: http://www.patricialynne.com/
Oct 17th: http://safireblade.com/
Oct 18th: http://www.angelakulig.com/
Oct 19th: http://www.smreine.com/
Oct 20th: http://www.hmjacobs.com/

You’ll get to read guest posts, the “craziest interview ever,” and other fun things, so don’t forget to follow that truck!

And now… the Rafflecopter giveaway! Rafflecopter giveaway Don’t forget to enter, there’s plenty of good stuff to win!

Writing Wibbles: The "Look" Challenge

Just as I was about to start thinking about what I wanted to wibble about this week, Patricia Lynne tagged me with The Look Challenge. This one is fairly easy: find the word look in your WIP and post the paragraphs.

Seeing as I finished the first draft of Pickups and Pestilence last week, it’s definitely a work in progress. I was going to post a teaser anyway… so I searched for look and it appears twice in the Prologue. Perfect! Here it is, with both instances of look underlined…

The gypsy—so Cody assumed—laid three cards on the table between them, the first one sideways. Cody’s gaze was fixed on the table; all he saw were her hands and the cards she dealt. “The three pestilences,” she said. “One is past, yet all three are to come.” The sideways card was WAR. From its center scowled the grim visage of the late Rev. Carlton Worleigh, huge desecrated Bible in one hand, huge pistol in the other. A bullet hole in his forehead, and a pickup bearing down on him from behind, completed the picture. Cody remembered well.

The second card was LOCUSTS. They walked on two legs and carried tiny jars. The third was VERMIN. On it, rats, flies, and other creatures chewed garbage and gardens alike. Behind the vermin, another pickup lurked.

“How—what—” Cody began, but the gypsy’s left hand swept the cards from the table as her right hand laid a new card in the center of the table, face down.

“Behold the King,” she said, tapping the card with a lacquered fingernail. He turned the card over: the King of Clubs. The King’s hair was dark and straight, and hung long on the sides. It framed a thin, familiar face, one he saw in every mirror.

“I thought I’d be the joker,” he said. He tried to look up, but the table held his gaze.

“The Joker is among you.” The hands, old and bone-thin but not gnarled or spotted as he would have expected, laid three more cards to the king’s right: the Queen of Hearts, sideways; the Queen of Clubs, upright; the Ten of Hearts, beneath the first queen. “The queen who was. And the queen who will be.” Sondra’s homely face, the one he longed to see again, lie in repose. In her hands, she clutched a scepter… or was it a rifle? His vision blurred a moment, hiding the face of the other queen. The third card needed no explanation. She’ll get over it. Or not, said the fallen Queen, with a snicker.

Before Cody could respond—dreams have no pause or rewind—those hands were in motion again, arraying cards to the King’s left. “You will know her by the blood on her hands.” The Queen of Spades, whose hard young face had seen too much too soon—and indeed her hands were red. Instead of a crown, a diamond gleamed between her breasts. To her left, a haughty King, sideways, a sword piercing his chest. Peeking from underneath the Queen was a Jack. “Beware the one who will try to draw you to her, for her consort will stand aside. That way lies discord. Destruction.” The Jack seemed to slide even farther under the Queen, not wanting to be seen. “But stand firm, and her children will be of your realm.”

“What?” But now the hands laid four cards above the King that was himself. They were marked A, and Cody at first thought they were Aces. But instead of suits, the faces of Tina, Reverend Patterson, Ben, and Jason looked back from the center of each card. “The Advisors. Neglect their wisdom at your peril.”

“Wait a minute!” Heedless, the hands were a blur of motion, dealing cards beneath the central King.

“The Knights of the realm and their Ladies.” Again, these cards were not part of a normal deck; the men were marked Kn and the women L. Most of the faces were familiar: Tim and Sara, Johnny and Rita, Cleve and a grinning Elly. The fourth Knight carried a bow, and was younger even than himself. Although Cody had never seen his face, he immediately recognized this Knight as one of his own tribe. There was no Lady next to this card, but the Ten of Hearts lay exactly between the center King and this new Knight. As he realized this, the gypsy tore the Ten in half. “This one is torn, only thus to be made whole.” She laid the halves together, and it was at once torn and whole. “But these things are uncertain, and this one thus exists in both states until the day the question is resolved.”

“What question?”

No response but a flick of the wrist. A card floated among and above them all: the Joker. But this was no ordinary Joker. A grey hood, supported by the bill of a ball cap, shadowed all but an enigmatic smile. Orbs like juggling balls circled the hood, spinning and tumbling, even as ink on paper. The Joker is among you, he thought, and the dream dissolved into a chaotic jumble.

And now, the hard part: tag five more people. Fortunately, there’s a lot of writer friends working on a lot of different things, so I don’t have much trouble coming up with five:

John Wiswell, at The Bathroom Monologues
Fel Wetzig, at The Peasants Revolt
Helen Howell, at Helen Scribbles
John Xero, at Xeroverse
Craig W.F. Smith, at The Fantasy/Reality World of a Writer

Five people, four continents—not bad!

Writing Wibbles

Every time I sit down to write a blog post, it seems like I get distracted by shiny writing things. So, let’s start by welcoming the newest visitors to the free-range insane asylum…

• Alyssa McKendry — she blogs! she writes! she’s 13!
• Jazon Dion Fletcher — author of Skull Flowers, which sounds whimsically interesting…
• L. G. Keltner — “aspiring writer and mother.” (Does that mean she aspires to be a mother as well as a writer? Hm. Both of them involve creative endeavor, and the results of both are often referred to as “my baby.”)

Badges are on the desk. Someone forgot to recharge the Tasers, so don’t get too close to the inmates!

I know, White Pickups hasn’t left the garage… yet. The editor got tied up with other stuff about a third of the way through, but most of her comments were recurring things. I went through the rest of the book, tidying up based on what she’d been saying, and I finished that over the weekend. At this point, I really feel like the book is ready to go. I’m going to have her give it one quick pass though, to (ahem) pick up anything I missed. Then I load the Launch Cannon and open the Crown Royal! It’s not definite for July 28, but it’ll be pretty darn close.

I’ve not been idle while waiting for the edits. I finished Accidental Sorcerers a while back, and it’s a 30,000 word novella. I have a beta reader lined up, and she’s about Mik and Sura’s age—so it’ll be good to see what misconceptions about YA I have.

Speaking of YA, I followed a link to a Guardian (UK) article interviewing an author about Why teens in books can’t swear. This led to a brief but fun discussion with G.P. Ching and Sonia G. Medeiros. Age ratings might be a coming thing, to help parents find appropriate reads for their kids. Of course, they had both read Stephen King as teens (I was in college when I first read The Dead Zone). I’m keenly interested in find out what kind of audience White Pickups is going to have¹. The language and sex definitely push it into the “17+” camp—but since it revolves around high-schoolers, I expect there will be younger people reading it as well. Cody is a moody teen, who uses strong language. He’s also sleeping with Sondra, and they are both quite happy with that arrangement. I’ve said all along that this could have been YA, if I’d figured out how to clip out the strong language and sex scenes without diluting the story.

Anyway, once I fire the Launch Cannon, there isn’t much call for a break. I still have to finish Pickups and Pestilence, and start Wings: Unfurled (which won’t have a problem being YA). A sequel to Accidental Sorcerers wants to get onto the waiting-to-write-this list, but it hasn’t really told me enough about itself to qualify just yet. I’ve been working on my Termag wiki, and I might make it publicly accessible so I can work on it from not-home. Plugins for the wiki software would let me deploy a Termag-specific blog, and let readers comment on pages even if I have editing locked down. One thing at a time, though…

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¹Yes, I’m being optimistic and assuming there will be a general audience for my book.

Writing Wibbles: Kreativ Blogger Award

Thanks to Helen Howell for passing the Kreativ Blogger award to me! (When she releases her young-reader book Jumping at Shadows, you’ll want to get it for your kids. The book, not the award.)

As part of the acceptance speech, I have to tell you 10 things about myself. If you’re on a diet, you might want to read before you eat—knowing me, some of these could be appetite suppressants…

1) I prefer not to use the syllable “Win” in conjunction with Microsoft products. Because they generally don’t.

2) In college, I had a small article published in Byte magazine, and several in Micro.

3) If you count user manuals, I’ve had about 15 million books published. I’m guessing maybe 1500 of them actually got read. :-D

4) When I was on the cross-country team in high school, I would run about 5 miles a day. That was… oh, 35 years and 80 pounds ago.

5) During those runs, I often had to detour into a brushy area to take care of business. I’d come home a couple pounds lighter.

6) My first attempt at writing was when I was 12. It was a Hardy Boys knockoff, and I think I only wrote about 3 chapters. But as part of the effort, my mom gave me her old “portable” manual typewriter and a typing textbook she’d kept from high school. By the time I abandoned that first attempt, I could touch-type. (I keep thinking I should post a photo of that typewriter. Think “netbook, ca. 1955.”)

7) In college, I had a job as a “galley hand” (cook’s assistant) on drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. My uncle Sonny was a cook for one of the service companies, and he got jobs for my brother and me. I completed my first novel that summer while sitting in a bunk, far out of sight of land. The whole thing was hand-written on scrap line-printer paper, and I still have it.

I thought I’d have to winnow 15–20 facts, not struggle to think of 10…


8) For several years, from late childhood to early adolescence, I would narrate my life to myself as it happened. My brother would say something, and I’d mentally add “he said” when he finished.

9) I nearly left the wife over the purchase of FAR Manor. I didn’t want to buy it for several reasons, not the least of which were the easily visible issues with the place. The decision already made on her part, she ignored every objection on my part. I’ve so far been right about everything regarding the house.

10) I wanted to retire when I was 40. It obviously didn’t happen.


Okay, now comes the other hard part: pass the award onto some other bloggers. There are some who come to mind immediately, but either never started blogging or gave it up (Jen, Janet, I’m looking at you). But fortunately, there’s a lot of other choices. I’m going to throw in my reasons for giving each recipient their award as well. So…

• Andi and Jim Ferguson at 40 Acres, More or Less (daily photography)
• Boran’s Saturday Painting Palooza (a weekly painting series)
• Kendall Grey (for her unorthodox views on publishing)
• Patrick Hester (a podcasting Hugo nominee, and another early serial writer)

I’m looking forward to reading your acceptance speeches!

Writing Wibbles

Hey look, a new follower slipped in at the last minute: Sonya Clark. A couple weeks ago, I got a peek at the first part of her novel in progress, Freak Town. It’s going to be a winner.

Early this week, Tony Noland blogged about his fond memories of OS/2, a highly advanced operating system for its time to be sure. It got me thinking about my own fond memories, of Amiga and the old Tandy laptops, and some of the writing I did on those older systems… much of it now forever lost.

My first instinct was to lament the obsolence of file formats, but that’s not really the problem — most of the files from those days were plain text with a minimum of formatting. Even with a binary file format, it’s not that difficult to recover the text out of a file if it’s not compressed. On OSX, you could drop into the Terminal and use the strings command to clean out the crud; then fix the rest in your favorite editor.

No, the real problem is media. CP/M had a format, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, and some I’ve forgotten each had their own format, incompatible with the others (but in all cases, susceptible to bit-rot). Even in the case of the Tandy 600 laptop, whose 3-1/2" floppies can be read in MS-DOS, who has a floppy drive these days? CD-ROM isn’t exactly permanent either, even assuming the physical format hangs around. With the proliferation of tablets, and pocket computers that happen to make phone calls (I’m typing this on my iPhone), that’s not a given. In a lot of ways, it’s more likely that stories typewritten 30 years ago are more likely to survive than something typed into a personal computer 20 years ago.

So, as writers, what can we do to make our deathless prose really deathless?

The technical answer: nothing, really. The farther back you go in time, the fewer works survive. The vast majority of books in a bookstore are no more than a few years old, with some very popular exceptions. Project Gutenberg has done a wonderful job of locating and digitizing works that have passed into the public domain, but the vast majority of their titles are from the 19th and 20th centuries. Go farther back, and you’re in the realm of the “classics” — exemplary works that survive on merit — but the oldest complete works are around 2500 years old. At around 3800 years of age, the Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest known written works of all, and is only fragmentary.

Perhaps the best we can do is plan for decades, maybe a century or two, and hope that our descendants find our work worth distributing forward from there. We have the Internet for decades, and paper (preferably acid-free) for centuries. As long as eBook stores carry our work, we’re good for the short-term. I don’t worry too much about a new eBook format superseding the current ones — both MOBI and ePub are ZIP archives containing HTML files (with some control files that determine the order, among other things). HTML has been around since 1991, and any browser can display an HTML file written even 20 years ago. Even if HTML is superseded later on, the files are plain text with well-defined markup elements.

While copyright laws allow for longer and longer periods before a work finally passes into the public domain, there’s nothing stopping a copyright owner from abandoning copyright earlier — or releasing the work under a Creative Commons license — and then placing the work on Gutenberg or archive.org, which are intended for the long-haul. If longevity is the goal, copyright may be the enemy.

That’s decades…what about centuries? Our civilization could crash, or our grandkids could just decide the Internet uses too much electricity to maintain and pull the plug. Say what you might about buggy whips, paper and similar media has survived civilization reboots. Keep it away from fire, use acid-free paper so it won’t eat itself, and maybe that story will catch on with future generations. Maybe not likely, but certainly possible.

Which brings me to my own deathless prose. :-P I’m still editing White Pickups, and I’m about halfway through. Not as far as I liked, but at least as good as I hoped. I’m afraid this bad boy is going to break 100,000 words by the time I crack open the Crown Royal (which is waiting for Launch Day) though.

Changing It Around

I didn't set out to do this, but various failures over the weekend kicked off several minor technology changes today. It's like my gadgetry forgot to stop pranking me once April Fools' Day ended…

The old iPhone earbuds I've had since the 3G days are officially worn out: the left earbud has very little audio coming through. I don't know why I put up with that as long as I have, especially since I have a working pair of iPod earbuds (no clicker) and some higher-end things. I'd love to use my Bluetooth stereo headset, but it's good for about six hours and I need at least eight to get me through the workday. Right now, I'm using a pair of Future Sonics in-ear 'phones that I won some years back. I miss the clicker to start/stop my music (or answer the phone), but better that than no left channel.

The iOS Twitter client has become increasingly annoying, especially since IT has made Twitter's webapp unuseable. I need the ability to manage my lists from my phone if I can't use the webapp (or the official OSX Twitter client, for that matter). The last straw was yesterday, when the app decided to not update my Mentions anymore. I downloaded the free (ad-supported) version of Echofon this morning and like it better already. I can manage my lists, and the ads only appear in the primary timeline. The only two drawbacks so far: you have to switch out of Lists to tweet (unless replying/RTing) and I don't think new followers appear in the Mentions column like they do on the webapp.

Finally, I've started using Evernote instead of PlainText to write draft blog posts and story scenes while mobile. The Evernote app doesn't have ads and pulling a draft out of Evernote into Scrivener is about the same amount of effort as pulling it out of Dropbox (where PlainText saves stuff).

Technology can be such a PITA. I'm editing White Pickups on paper, and the only thing I have to worry about there is Mason snatching the pen out of the stack and thereby losing my place.

Writing Wibbles

The #1 thing, as always: new blog followers. It is with great pleasure I welcome my fellow #TuesdaySerial staffer and home maintenance slave Tony Noland to the free-range insane asylum! Tony, your badge is on the table — there’s a stun gun too, but the inmates are cowed by your mad tiling skills so you probably won’t need it.

You may have noticed a slight change in the bylines here on the blog. I’ve been slowly working toward this for a while now, first on Twitter and new sites… so here I bid a fond farewell to my FARfetched alias. Something you have to do when you want to get your writing out there, is to go by your actual name (or a reasonable-sounding pen name). I’ll still keep my AIM email for a while though.

Okay, on to the writing stuff. I’ve started a new serial in the Accidental Sorcerers world. The story (the latest #FridayFlash) has done pretty well so far, with a solid pageview count and more comments than any other story has received since early December. Many of the comments were requests for more, and by Monday evening I ended up with a 4700-word story in five parts. I hope the rest is as well-received.

For this story, I tried to apply lessons learned from listening to PodCastle 194: Their Changing Bodies.

1. Get to the point quickly. About 20 minutes in, I nearly turned off the podcast, because it felt like it was just meandering around in teen angst. Fortunately, turbulent traffic kept me from following through, and five minutes later I was hooked. I don’t want to give away the story line; go give it a listen. Subscribe to PodCastle while you’re at it. One of the good things about having an hour commute is that I can almost always listen to a complete story without a break.
2. Make visuals count. One of the things I noticed about Their Changing Bodies was that every line had a purpose. There were a lot of lines that could have easily been amusing throwaways, or just nice detailing, but they all contributed to the plot in some fashion.

I might not have racked up a perfect score on #2, but it did prevent me from including several throwaway lines. There are one or two things that will be picked up in later chapters… which might get missed by readers who don’t go back and read the whole thing again, but I’m hoping that I’ll have a short YA novel when all is said and done. I do need to impose some kind of arc on it, though.

While I’m not making lots of progress on my so-called “front burner” projects, Accidental Sorcerers is a fun world to write in and at last keeps me writing until one or the other projects boils over.

Writing Wibbles

Welcome to the chatter of a not-so-famous author (for now, heh heh)… Famous and other not-so-famous authors, and of course all readers, are welcome to share their own musings in the comments.

Some time in the last week, Tales from FAR Manor reached the 40,000 pageview mark. Actually, it reached that mark a while ago — stats only go back to May 2009 and the blog has been around for four years longer than that. I figure a lot of that traffic is spambots, judging from what lands in the moderation and spam filters.

Oh, speaking of pageviews: Three Sprites, One Silent has edged past Geek vs. Zombies as my most-viewed #FridayFlash story — the current count is 204 to 203 right now.

My Monday post about iBooks Author has done pretty well. It’s likely one of the most retweeted essays I’ve posted to date. If I wasn’t writing so much fiction, I’d try to turn out more essays like these. But there’s only 24 hours in a day, and I usually get less than one of them to spend writing.

So… maybe I’m not-so-famous now, but you never know, right? I’m sure if my stories get any serious traction, I’ll have people asking me things like “where do you get your ideas?” The answer is the question — or to make it easier to parse, the answer is “the question.” That’s how I handled the “one prompt, three genres” challenge: I looked at the picture and asked three questions:

• what’s a stump doing in the water? (Three Sprites, One Silent)
• what’s in that hollow? (Feast)
• what was on that tree before it was cut and flooded? (Initials)

White Pickups was originally a piece of flash fiction. I asked, “what happens next?” and 150,000 words later… More recently, I got feedback from Craig W.F. Smith’s beta read on Chasing a Rainbow. One of his comments was, “opens it up for sequels.” I thought to myself, “what would happen next?” and I got the answer in a Download From God. I figure while I’m waiting to get unstuck on Pickups and Pestilence, I’ll see where this goes. I don’t have even a working title for it, but do think it’ll run about 12,000 words.

[UPDATE] Now that it’s Thursday, I can share some new news. I’ve joined the TuesdaySerial staff! There’s an interview with yours truly at the link. If you’re writing (or podcasting) serial fiction, be sure to leave a link in the collector on Tuesdays, midnight to midnight (Eastern US time).