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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

Writing Wibbles

First, let's welcome the new visitors to the free-range insane asylum:

• Patricia Lynne—one of my writing buddies, and she's from Michigan too (so you know she's cool).
• Garrison James—writer, designer, artist. Check out Hereticwerks, where he blogs a long-running serial.

Feel free to look around. But watch out for that little inmate, he’ll distract you with cute and steal your phone.

I haven’t done a lot of writing this week. I poked at a few things, and that was about it. But…

As part of a rather impressive 2013 publishing (and writing!) schedule, we’re getting the novella formerly known as Chasing a Rainbow ready to publish. It will probably drop in January, after the holiday craziness has subsided. We’ve finally settled on a title we all can live with, The Crossover, and now we’re thrashing away at the cover art. Turns out the Wikimedia Commons is a good place to start, and (if you have a concept that can be expressed in a photo) you can often find what you’re looking for. People on the mailing list are going to get a sneak peek this week; once we nail down the details (by next week, I hope), we’ll share the official cover with everyone.

Hot on the heels of The Crossover, will come the first novella in the Accidental Sorcerers series. Since I’m about 90% done with the next one in the series, there will be excerpts. The cover art for that one will be difficult or expensive, I'm afraid—It all but demands an ice dragon. Then, come spring, Pickups and Pestilence should run down all the mysteries I left hanging in White Pickups. By then, the co-op should be a well-oiled machine, and we’ll be churnin’ out the titles.

If you have any writing (or reading) news, feel free to drop a comment!

Writing Wibbles

Just a little writing to wibble about this week. I’ve been cheering on everyone participating in NaNoWriMo, though.

I’ve learned something about my internal writing process this week. I’ve been a “pantser” (i.e. writing my the seat of my pants), as opposed to a plotter, for a long time. So I would think of a pivotal scene, write it, then fill in the spaces in between the pivots. I always thought of it as “organic story development” rather than “pantsing” though.

So for reasons as different as the stories themselves, I thought I’d try plotting several of my upcoming story ideas. Even though I gave myself permission to change the outline as I went, I found myself getting bogged down early on. It was the gigantic word-bomb that Mik and Sura dropped on me that helped me figure out why. They forced me to write the beginning and the end of Accidental Sorcerers 2, and left that long dry in-between for me to finish on my own. When I have an outline—which for me means chapters and scene titles laid out in Scrivener—I feel like I have to start writing with the first empty scene. I need to add a little organic fertilizer to this non-organic story development, and make myself write the scenes where I know what’s happing now. That will help me fill in those ever-smaller in-between spots.

First attempt was a success. It took 20 minutes to write the first 30 words. Then I got 100 more down in the next 10 minutes. An hour later, I was up to 1,200 words. Always something new to learn!

A little Green Envy Press news: Angela Kulig has released her Skeleton Lake preview novella, The Skeleton Song, free on Amazon. I edited it, so you can blame me for any remaining typos. ;-)

Meanwhile, I’m hoping to have two Termag novellas out over the winter. Pickups and Pestilence should be out come spring, and that’s just the beginning…

Writing Wibbles

It is with great pleasure that I welcome EJ Hobbs, a former FAR Manor inmate, to the online version of the free-range insane asylum! EJ is trying to devote more time to writing, so go check out his #FridayFlash for this week and give him some encouragement. Drop him a comment, all that good stuff.

With the White Pickups blog tour dwindling in the rearview mirror, the Accidental Sorcerers decided they were done tormenting me for a while. I’m going to try getting a #FridayFlash out this week; maybe a new “On the Georgia Road” segment, to tie into the fall tourist season in full swing here in Sector 706.

But Mik’s and Sura’s story, which doesn’t have a decent title yet, is about 2/3 done now. I have place settings or topics for at least three more stories, so this might make a nice little series of novellas. I think the hardest thing will be keeping them out of each other’s bedrooms remembering to age them properly as the story line progresses. I suppose, now, the overall arc becomes a coming of age story, while they have lots of interesting adventures (and everyone thought the age of adventures was long over, haha).

In between, I’ve been working on an expanded version of UW-401, the “pre-zombie apocalypse” #FridayFlash. This too, I think, will end up in the novella size range. That one, I’m writing by hand, while the Accidental Sorcerers get the keyboard. Interesting, how different stories want to be drafted different ways. I should break out the old manual typewriter some time and see what stories want to be literally banged out. With any luck, I’ll finish both of them by the end of November.

If the Launch Cannon appears in the Wibbles, it means more of my stories have escaped the friendly confines of the blog. It begins with the recent #FridayFlash It Begins, which coincidentally uses the main characters and situation in UW-401. The editor of the Were-Traveler actually asked me to submit it for her “Alternate Zombie History” issue! Go check out the other stories, there are some really good ones in here. From ancient Egypt and Rome, to WW2, to other big moments in history, to the near future, the dead are walking. Perfect for Hallowe’en, right?

And a #FridayFlash from last year, Assignation, got itself cleaned up for an appearance in the Best of Friday Flash, Vol. 2 anthology. This marks my first fiction available in print, and that’s kind of exciting. You can drop 10 bucks on a paperback (which includes an eBook version), or 5 bucks just for the eBook.

And somewhere in there, I’ve been doing some editing for Green Envy Press. I thought I had an ambitious set of launch goals for next year—Angela is pushing for even more! I really need to stop procrastinating and get the Pickups and Pestilence draft out to the beta readers, that’s like the biggest of the bunch so far.

So, Lord willing and the Internet don’t fall over, I’ve got at least Pickups and Pestilence coming out in the spring, along with the to-be-retitled Chasing a Rainbow, both Accidental Sorcerers stories, and UW-401 scattered throughout the year. I’d planned to start on Wings: Unfurled before now, but with a couple more royalty direct-deposits the wife might give me some time to get it done!

Come back tomorrow, when I’ll post a pic of Mason in his Hallowe’en outfit.

Writing Wibbles

With the White Pickups blog tour in the rear-view mirror, I heave a sigh of relief. There were a large pile of guest posts to write, plus an interview. As I type, there’s still two days to enter the raffle. You can’t win if you don’t enter!

October is the crazy month. Well, they’re all crazy months at FAR Manor, but October stands out as the real moonbat. It’s not Hallowe’en so much as that it’s tourist season in Sector 706 of Planet Georgia. That, and the “change of season” feeling that we don’t get much of the rest of the year. So it’s natural that I get the Biggest Word-Bomb Ever, or at least my personal biggest, in October. Perhaps I should explain…

If you’ve been around a while, you might have read at least parts of Accidental Sorcerers, a serial I've been blogging for a while. What is on the blog is about half of a completed novella, roughly 30,000 words. But that’s not all of Mik and Sura. Not by a long shot. I’ve had an idea for a second novella for a while now, and took a shot at writing one scene. One. This story really puts Mik and Sura through an emotional wringer, and frankly those two voices in my head got angry. Very angry. And while they may be kids, they can do magic. One has summoned an Elemental Dragon, and lived to tell about it; the other one gets the urge to set people on fire when they cross her. They chained me to the keyboard and made me write the ending (with the resolution), then sent me to the beginning where they were having a really good time at first. I call it a word-bomb, because it didn’t really feel like a Download from God like I’ve had a few times in the past. Still, 17,000 words in a week was mentally taxing. At least I excerpted a little of it for my #FridayFlash last week.

So I’m over halfway done with this story, and they’ve left me to muddle through the middle. Anyway, I need to finish beta on the first story, and then get the second one up.


I got a rather pleasant email from Amazon this morning. My first royalty “check” is going to be direct-deposited toward the end of the month. Nothing huge—I’ve sold about a dozen copies each of White Pickups and Xenocide—but it’s a start. The wife is suddenly realizing that I could have a little income out of this… so maybe I’ll get more time to write? Let’s hope.

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

“A” is for Apology (and Awesome)

A couple weeks ago, author Sue Grafton (she who writes the alphabet mystery series, beginning with “A” is for Alibi) stepped on a landmine while doing an interview with her local newspaper. When asked what advice she had for aspiring authors, she said (in part) that self-publishing is “as good as admitting you’re too lazy to do the hard work.” When the interviewer mentioned the success of John Locke, who also lives in the Louisville area, she doubled down:

The self-published books I’ve read are often amateurish. … a ‘wannabe’ assumes it’s all so easy s/he can put out a ‘published novel’ without bothering to read, study, or do the research. … Self-publishing is a short cut and I don’t believe in short cuts when it comes to the arts.

As you can imagine, the indie/self-published world launched a thermonuclear strike. One author suggested the opposite is true: “Self-publishing means finding your own proofreader, finding your own editor, finding your own cover designer (or designing your own), doing all your own marketing and sales work, etc. Having a publisher is lazy as all you need to do is write a half-acceptable book and allow your publisher's editor to make it sales-worthy.” Along with the vitriol, several indies took the time to educate Ms. Grafton on the new paradigm.

And, instead of locking herself in an ivory tower, Ms. Grafton took the time to listen. She had a look at what’s really going on outside the traditional publishing world. Then, instead of issuing a “sorry that offended you” non-apology, she gave us a real one. I’m quoting at length below, but go read the whole thing.

[It] wasn’t my intention to tar anyone, if the truth be known. … I am uninitiated when it comes to this new format. I had no idea how wide-spread it was, nor did I see it as developing as a response to the current state of traditional publishing, which is sales driven and therefore limited in its scope. I understand that e-publishing has stepped into the gap, allowing a greater number of authors to enter the marketplace. This, I applaud. I don’t mean to sound defensive here…though of course I do.

I don’t understand the mechanics of e-publishing and I still don’t understand how you can earn money thereby but I realize now that many indie writers are doing well financially and netting themselves greater visibility than I had any reason to believe.

My remark about self-publishing was meant as a caution, which I think some of you finally understood when we exchanged notes on the subject. When I’m asked for advice I warn many writers about the charlatans lurking out there. … It’s clear to me now that indie writers have taken more than their fair share of hard knocks and that you are actually changing the face of publishing. Who knew?! This is a whole new thrust for publication that apparently everyone has been aware of except yours truly. I still don’t understand how it works, but I can see that a hole has been blasted in the wall, allowing writers to be heard in a new way and on a number of new fronts.

I will take responsibility for my gaffe and I hope you will understand the spirit in which it was meant. I have always championed both aspiring writers and working professionals. I have been insulated, I grant you, but I am not arrogant or indifferent to the challenges we all face. I am still learning and I hope to keep on learning for as long as I write.

Talk about grace under fire—this lady (and I don’t use the word lightly) has it! Personally, I wasn’t much offended by the original comments; I simply dismissed them as the griping of someone too lost in (or too tied to) the old paradigm to see how the landscape was changing right under her feet. I was pleasantly shocked to see her take a look around and adjust her footing. I can only hope I’m that nimble when the next change comes around.

So while “A” may be for Apology, it’s also for Awesome Author. Perhaps the traditional publishing industry has currently veered into the weeds, but there are still lessons that we can learn from it. One is to accept bad reviews, whether for our novels or newspaper interviews, fix what we did wrong to the best of our ability, and get back to writing.

Writing Wibbles

The current Twitter tempest, at least in the writing world, swirls around the issue of paid reviews. In a rare moment of unity, both the indie world (represented here by Chuck Wendig) and the traditional world (Shelf Awareness) agree that the practice is a little icky. To be specific, Wendig calls it “scummy” while SA says “depressing.” (Both posts link back to an article in the NY Times, about the proprietor of a review mill that was recently shut down.)

Review mill! Green energy!

Wendig raises the question, we can all be sure that [this will] reflect more prominently on self-published authors above all others, right? Well, the traditional publishing industry could cite it as another reason to shun indies, except for one problem: buying and selling reviews is long-established practice. A Twitter friend has a small-press book out, and her publisher paid Publishers Weekly to review it. The Times article mentions Kirkus, “a reviewing service founded in 1933.” That’s 79 years ago, if you don’t feel like doing the math yourself, a time when not even science fiction could conceive of something like the Kindle. If the review mills are scummy, it’s only in that they tend to accentuate the positive (which, to authors using such things, is simply providing value for the money).

Before I go any further, let me say I haven’t bought any reviews for White Pickups, nor do I intend to. The honest 5* review it got is better than anything I could have afforded, and it even points out a couple flaws (dammit! why didn’t I write that down when I thought of it?). But if you tilt your head to the right and squint, buying reviews (whether from PW/Kirkus or a review mill) becomes a marketing expense. I don’t have confirmation, but rumor has it that a certain number of reviews (50?) is supposed to draw the attention of Amazon’s algorithms and they start recommending the book. From that angle (remember to tilt your head and squint), review mills are targeting algorithms rather than people. Scummy, yes, but people are always going to try gaming the system when there’s money to be made.

But buying a “real” review can be pricey. Factor in the hours spent first reading the book, then writing the review, and even at minimum wage you could be looking at over a hundred bucks. The Times article mentioned Kirkus charging $425, for example, and that sounds about right for a professional. If I was out of work, I’d probably take $400 to write a review, but I wouldn’t inflate the rating.

Personally, if I had the money to buy reviews, I’d spend it on editing instead. Better yet, I’d spend the time writing something that rises above the crud, leaving indies in awe and publishers grumbling how they could have done better. Back to Scrivener now…

Writing (and Launching) Wibbles

Launch Cannon! Source: openclipart.org

Finally! I’ve been busy with the Launch Cannon the last few days. Amazon’s always an easy target: load and fire at bedtime, wake up in the morning, direct hit. Smashwords takes a fair amount of re-calibration, since you have to use DOC shot instead of MOBI. But once you get everything just so, you see results in minutes instead of hours. (That’s not including Premium, which takes a while longer.)

In between those two, I took aim at a new target: the Nook Store. I thought it would be another easy target, maybe a little longer to confirm than Amazon, but Scrivener generates clean ePUB files just as easily as MOBI. That one turned out to be a misfire. Some of my tax info didn’t get entered properly, and I got hung in "Pending Account Verification" limbo for a few days. Finally, yesterday, the Pubit site put up a banner saying "call us, we sent you an email." I didn’t get the email until after seeing the banner, but whatever. After figuring out what needed to be fixed, I fixed it.

The upshot is, I’m hoping White Pickups will be available at Nook and iBooks in the next few days. If you can’t wait to get your ePUB fix, Smashwords is happy to take care of you.

So here are the various virtues and failings of each eBook store, as I see them:

Amazon: very easy to deal with, biggest eBook market, multiple countries, CreateSpace for paperback. Not much control after uploading.

Smashwords: easiest avenue to iBooks, 70% commission on 99¢ eBooks, coupons provide lots of pricing flexibility. Insistence on DOC files is a huge PITA for non-Word users, you need a PayPal account (no direct deposit).

Nook: growing market, easy upload from Scrivener (ePUB). Takes longer than Amazon to get your Nook eBook into the store.

A little more administrivia to deal with. But now that White Pickups is rolling out, I can re-focus on Pickups and Pestilence. I sketched out what needs to happen in the final third of the book, which includes the final climactic confrontation, and started writing a little of it yesterday. If everything goes smoothly (haha), I should have it done by spring.

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…

---

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

Writing Wibbles: Pick a Blurb!

At long last, I’ve received the edits for White Pickups. Or half of them, at least. It’s not that I’ve done nothing while waiting—she gave me some general things to look for a while ago, and I finished those last night. Now it’s on to the marked-up edits!

My #TuesdaySerial wrapped up Season (Chapter) 3 of Accidental Sorcerers yesterday. The story itself is complete, as a 30,000 word novella, and I think I’m going to publish it after a little cleanup. (I’ve run half of it on the blog so far.) There will be sequels—one is already half-formed in my head—but I have other nuts to crack before I can tackle that. But I can try to nail down a blurb while waiting for betas, cover art, and editing to happen, right?

For your consideration, I give you three possible blurbs. There is some overlap, of course. What I would like is your honest opinion: which one would most likely get you to say, hey, that sounds interesting, I think I’ll download it? (Keep in mind that this is a YA Fantasy work.) What edits would make it stronger? This isn’t a strict one-two-three choice, though—if you think two or all three have good parts, and you want to combine them, that’s a valid choice too.

So here they are…

---

1

Now comes the hard part…

The Age of Heroes is a distant memory. Folk are increasing in numbers and knowledge, and sorcery is slowly fading. When an untrained boy awakens an ice dragon to defend his village from an invasion, living to tell the tale was the easy part. Now Mik is apprenticed to the kindly but clumsy sorcerer, Bailar the Blue. He has found a calling in sorcery, and love with the sorcerer's daughter Sura.

A sorcerer's life is supposed to be sedate in this age. But Mik, Sura, and Bailar find themselves facing unlikely hazards—and learn that the bonds of loyalty and love are stronger than any foe.

---

2

Invaders across the river. A powerful spell hidden in a child's rhyme. When a 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 is a story of sorcerers living in an age when sorcery is on the wane, and learning that love and loyalty is magic that never loses its power!

---

3

“Maybe there’s other kinds of magic.”

When Mik awakened an ice dragon, he had no idea of what he unleashed. He just wanted to protect his village from invaders. Surviving the attempt, he becomes an apprentice to the kind but clumsy sorcerer, Bailar the Blue. He and his fellow apprentice, the sorcerer's daughter Sura, soon find that there are other kinds of magic.

A sorcerer's life is supposed to be sedate, but the three of them are soon beset by unlikely hazards. In their struggles, they learn that love and loyalty is the strongest magic of all!

---

Oh, and “go back to the drawing board, they all suck” is a valid answer. I hope I don’t hear it though. ;-)

Finally, I kind of like When a 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. as a logline. Thoughts?

Writing Wibbles (the Handwave)

Trying this on Thursday, just for grins.

A few weeks ago, Tony Noland wrote a funny little blog post about hard sci-fi versus soft sci-fi. Around the same time, someone else wrote a “zombie science” rant about not focusing too much on how the zombies “work” (and I wish I’d saved the URL). Depending on how the author approaches it, zombie fic could be considered a sub-genre of SF as well as horror, but that’s not important. What’s important is that they all (including hard sci-fi) make use of a literary device called the handwave (it’s a technical term).

Like any literary device, the handwave is important but often abused. To understand why it has that name, imagine sitting down with an author who’s talking about her story while you’re plying her with questions about different details. Sooner or later, she’ll wave her hand and say something like, “oh, that’s just a given.” In the story, a handwave glosses over (or outright dismisses) details about the starship’s hyper-drive, or how a zombie can rot indefinitely. Some handwaves are necessary to prevent long tedious infodumps, although an infodump itself often handwaves certain details.

Some of the worst handwaves can be found in classic SF, some of which Isaac Asimov collected in an anthology called Before the Golden Age. By “worst,” I mean those that are so obviously handwaves that they threaten to throw a modern reader out of the story. “The world is unready for this information,” or even referring to a crucial ingredient as “X” (see The Skylark of Space), are classics. You don’t see handwaves that obvious in modern fiction, fortunately.

Soft sci-fi depends heavily on handwaves, but a deft writer can make them seamless. Over the weekend, I read Cherie Reich’s novella Defying Gravity. This is definitely soft sci-fi, even a romance with a sci-fi wrapper. She used three or four handwaves, and only one stuck out. The others went by so smoothly that I didn’t notice them right away. That’s how ya do it, folks. Keep them smooth, don’t let them jar the reader out of the story.

Use it, don't abuse it.

Writing Wibbles

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (link goes to eBook download page). Yeah, that was a slog. I learned a couple things, though:

• Writing styles have changed a lot in the last 70 years. Lovecraft wouldn’t get much love if he started writing that way today. If dialog was water, I would have died of thirst reading the Complete Works. Perhaps this book isn’t meant to be read cover to cover, so much as used as a reference. Because it’s an eBook, it’s easy to search.
• Cthulhu was prominently featured only in the story that introduced it, The Call of Cthulhu. After that, it got a few mentions. Amazing, how much fan fiction and the like has been written about one character in one story.

But Cthulhu aside, Lovecraft is one of a few authors that I can think of, where commentary and fanfic have surpassed the size of the original work (shoot, even Stephen King ripped off some of his pantheon… read Crouch End sometime). Other authors in this rarefied club that I can think of might include: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, (perhaps) Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, (probably) Shakespeare, and the Bible.

It’s interesting to note that four of the seven authors are known for writing horror. I wonder what that says about not only readers in general, but literature commentators.

As for my own projects, White Pickups is coming along. I’ve (once again) postponed the launch date, but it’s going to happen before too much longer. The good thing is, since an editor is looking it over, I now plan to launch the paperback (through CreateSpace) around the same time as the eBooks. Before, I planned to get the eBooks in circulation for a few months, then sponsor a typo hunt before updating them and releasing the paperback.

As for the sequel, Pickups and Pestilence, I finally realized what I was missing to wrap up the last part of the story. I’m hoping to get out of Termag and it’s fertile story-soil and finish that up. I don’t think it will take two years to get that one out the door now.

I never did get around to putting Xenocide in the Kindle Select program. I really ought to do that.

Writing Wibbles

Last week’s big news was that the Department of Justice went ahead with an expected suit against Apple and five of the “Big 6” publishers, alleging collusion and price-fixing of eBooks (aka the “Agency Model”). I held off writing about it until this week, mainly because I already had a post queued but also because I wanted to see if any more information came out. Oh well.

As expected, the publishing industry and their media outlets are crying Doom and Disaster. A website called Shelf Awareness, staffed by industry insiders, had this to say:

In a clash of concepts about what best serves the reader — the lowest possible prices or a healthy, diverse book industry — the federal government … came down on the side of the book as a commodity.

In other words, high eBook prices are a requirement for “a healthy, diverse book industry.” I understand the desire of a long-established oligopoly to preserve the status quo, but it’s a pity they can’t be more upfront about their motivations.

The problem is, there are laws against collusion and the DoJ provides prima facie evidence of how publisher executives “jointly acknowledged to each other the threat posed by Amazon’s pricing strategy and the need to work collectively to end that strategy.” If you can’t survive under laws that have been on the books for over 120 years, and aren’t enforced too well anyway, you’re not trying hard enough. In the end, it’s ridiculous to demand that eBooks be priced higher than hardcovers (especially when you’re explicitly forbidden to pass that eBook around the way you can a hardcover). I’ve opined before that the Agency Model was an attempt to kill eBooks; now it’s a failed attempt.

The idea that the producer dictates retail prices flies in the face of the capitalist system (that publishing executives undoubtedly support as long as it benefits them). The “S” in “MSRP” means “Suggested,” after all. Everyone in the chain, from the raw materials producers to the booksellers, tries to cover their costs plus some margin — or voluntarily takes a hit on margins (or even a loss) to gain some longer-term advantage. I doubt that even Stephen King would, for example, tell publishers that his books must sell for a certain price — so why should publishers tell Amazon what they can do?

[I should point out that, long-term, I’m not convinced that Amazon’s intentions are all wonderful for authors or readers. On the other hand, given what Barnes&Noble and Borders did to indie booksellers, I don’t weep much for their predicament now either.]

I think there’s still a role for Big Publishing, but they’ll have to update the way they do business. In my opinion, they could start by treating authors as partners rather than chattel. The average advance is the same as it was 30 years ago — i.e., much less when factoring in inflation — while book prices (and executive compensation) have increased accordingly. The games publishers play with sales figures are well-documented, and it’s funny how those “mistakes” never benefit the authors. Those kind of issues need to be addressed, instead of clinging to a business model that’s incompatible with new technology. In the Depression years and afterwards, it was possible for many authors to make a living from writing, even by writing short stories for the pulps. Top-shelf novelists were the rock stars of their day. By shooting for the lowest common denominator, the publishers have brought this new world of Amazon on themselves. IMO.

Under the current circumstances, going indie seems to be the smart move. A friend of mine cleared twice her dayjob pay in March, and circumstances are now pushing her into writing full-time. She’s a talented cover designer, and her books aren’t full of typos, so that helps. Not everyone gets that kind of success, but I think people who put a lot of effort into their work have a better chance of success by bypassing the publishers. When publishers acknowledge that they’re no longer the 800-pound gorilla, and start acting like they know it, the pendulum will begin swinging their way again.

Writing Wibbles

Let’s start by welcoming a new follower to the free-range insane asylum: Caine Dorr, author of the Masked Marauder Matinee serial and the Paladin Brigade webcomic! Your badge is on the table. (Did you bring comics? The inmates like comics…)

Cranking in beta feedback on White Pickups is going about as expected: slower than desired, faster than I should have expected. There’s several scene rewrites, mostly in the early going, that are taking the most time. I was hoping to drop the whole shebang on my editor come Sunday, but that’s not going to happen.

I’m waffling on some of the scene additions: should I add a brief scene where Cody’s parents drive off? What about the initial clash between Charles’s group and the bashers in Midtown? The latter especially gets retold by Charles and Cleve later on, at separate moments, so I’m not sure it would add anything to the story. When it doubt, leave it out is probably the best policy.


What makes a story a story?

On Monday, Sonia Lal tweeted a link to a Guardian article that asks Why are English and American Novels Today so Gutless? The author laments the lack of political novels.

The question I have is: is a political story that’s ONLY about politics worth reading? Even 1984 was more about two people rebelling against the oppressive regime than the politics itself. Many people who don’t read science fiction like to say it’s all about… well, “rockets in space” was the catchphrase a generation ago. But very few people, even those who enjoy sci-fi, would enjoy a story only about rockets in space. The rest of us would (if the story is written well) care more about the people on board that rocket. The only exception I can think of is a short story by Vernor Vinge, called Long Shot; I read it back in high school, and that was about the AI onboard rather than the ship itself.

A month before I was born, in 1958, Isaac Asimov had published an essay called The Thunder-Thieves. Sputnik and Vanguard were in orbit; digital computers and other technical advances were either on the way or already on the scene. So many things were happening, that were once thought the realm of fiction, people had begun openly questioning what was left to sci-fi. Asimov’s reply was, “The answer: Everything!” Because sci-fi (and by extension, all genre fiction) is about people. The genre simply defines the background, against which the characters interact.

So while White Pickups (and moreso FAR Future) have their moments of politics — and they both come down solidly on one side of the fence — I wouldn’t characterize either one as a political novel. Nor would I call them “gutless.” But I suppose that’s in the eye of the reader.

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.

Writing Wibbles

In the words of the immortal Thing, it’s wibblin’ time!

Like most writers, I tend to run hot and cold on my own work. On one hand, perhaps more often than warranted, I think I’ve got a set of pretty good stories in the pipeline. People who read them have positive things to say about them; all they need is some cleanup and I’ll be smokin’ up the charts on Amazon.

Then there’s the other hand — what I call writer angst, for lack of a better term. “My writing’s crap, my stories are crap, my ideas (writing and otherwise) are crap. Why am I even bothering with this?” I was going to say I’m particularly susceptible to this phase, but (judging from what I hear from others) I’m neither unique nor particularly notable in that regard. (See, even in self-deprecation I’m only mediocre!)

I have two equal and opposite theories about writer angst:

• One, it’s a necessary prod to improve, whether that means a particular story or writing in general. Once through the woe, I can pick up the work and set about making it better.
• Two, it’s an excuse to be lazy. If I can convince myself that the work is crap, beyond redemption, then I have an excuse to avoid the hard work of making it better. If I can convince myself that I’m wasting my time writing, I could move on to non-writing projects (that I will also shelve as crap later on).

Often, perhaps more often than not, the angst turns out to be unwarranted. Last year, I submitted Assignation to the Best of FridayFlash (Vol. 2) anthology. I edited it, had Brooke Johnson critique it, edited it a little more, then sent it off. And started second-guessing myself immediately. When months went by with no word, and about a dozen stories (not mine) were listed in a “Reader’s Choice” poll, I assumed the worst. But Monday morning, I got an email to let me know it had been accepted! Emergent Publishing is handling publishing and distribution; I’ll let you know more when I know more.

The boost couldn’t have come at a better time, in my opinion. I’ve been doing a ton and a half of second-guessing about White Pickups lately: should I cut it (and the sequel) down to one novel? should I just dump it entirely and focus on the current shiny writing thing? or just give up altogether? And what about… Mary Lou?

The boost from one little email has reinforced a couple of blog comments I’ve received lately… in short, White Pickups is in no danger of finding a permanent home in the drawer. I’m drafting an action plan to get it out of the garage (so to speak) and then finish Pickups and Pestilence. In short:

1. Print out the whole book, giving my old laser printer a thorough workout. (done, and I finally figured out what to do with that ream of pre-punched paper)
2. Edit with an eye to fixing (if nothing else) one major issue I’ve heard from two beta readers. If that leads to combining the two books into one, so be it (but I don’t think that’s going to happen at this point).
3. See if the other tenor at church, who has some editing chops, wants to make a pass through it.
4. Format it and get it uploaded before I have a chance to change my mind!
5. After a few months, have a “typo hunt” contest, then roll out a second eBook edition and a paperback.

As for finishing Pickups and Pestilence, I should do what I did with both White Pickups and FAR Future: write past the place I’m having trouble with and fill in the in-between when I figure it out. Fortunately, I don’t think I’ll have the same problem with Book 2 that I have with Book 1.

By the time I get all that done, I might know how Accidental Sorcerers continues… and maybe I can get the Wings trilogy started too.

Writing Wibbles (Conversation with Mik sim Mikhail)

It’s wibbling tiiiime!

Before White Pickups had ambitions of being a “real” novel, I posted episodes on Monday — and on occasion, side-episodes called “Conversations” on Tuesdays. They were, as you might expect by the title, conversations with various characters in the story. They provided a little backstory for the spotlighted characters, and helped me figure out their motivations.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been caught up in the world of Accidental Sorcerers lately. As I’ve been writing, Mik has told me a little more of his own backstory. I was planning to just do a data-dump, but that’s no fun to read. So… I have a little bonus treat for those of you who read these little status updates about my writing. I speak in italics in these things, for some reason.

Conversations: “Accidental Sorcerer” Mik sim Mikhail

Um… how do you greet each other here?

“Is this thing on?” is a popular greeting.

What does that mean?

Never mind. I was joking. Just talk about yourself.

Well, I’m Mik sim Mikhail. I come from Lacota, a little farming and ranching town near the Laughing River. We’re part of Stolevan, or the Stolevan Matriarchy if you want to be formal about it. I guess everyone knows about what happened with the ice dragon, right?

Right. Why not talk about your life before that?

Is there really that much to tell? My mother’s a baker, and my father’s a roustabout. That’s someone who does anything that’s needed on any of the local farms or ranches. I had a pretty normal life for a kid in Lacota. I went to school through the winter, and worked on my aunt's ranch during the summer.

What was school like?

They teach you to read and write, work numbers, some of our history. There’s lessons about gardening, cooking, and mending for people who don’t learn it at home. It was my last year of school, so I would have been apprenticed — well, I guess I was apprenticed. Just not where I expected.

Where did you expect to end up?

I was hoping to get apprenticed to Mattu, the local merchant. I would have had a chance to travel, maybe see Queensport some day. The kids all get to write down three choices, and the mentor — master — talks to the kids to see if they’re suited for the work. If I got passed by, I suppose I’d have ended up working for my aunt.

You worked a ranch. What was that like?

I spent five summers there. My aunt is… unique. Some of the folk who don’t like her say she’s part-goblin, but nobody dares say it where she can hear! She won’t read this, right?

She won’t.

Well, I can see where folk might get that idea about her being part-goblin. She’s almost as wide as she is tall, and she can out-wrestle and out-curse a blacksmith. I saw her do both, but she’d cuff me if she knew. I saw her take on an angry bull once, and that bull learned who was boss around the ranch right quick!

She sounds like a hard woman.

Only if you made her mad, and that took more than you might think. I mean, if she told you to do some chore, you’d be all right if you at least tried. She’d make you do it again, but she’d show you how to do it right. But if she thought you just walked off it, though, watch out!

One thing about the ranch: there wasn’t any “men’s work” or “women’s work.” There was just work, and whoever was around did it. I’d be peeling potatoes in the kitchen before breakfast, then pitch hay in the morning and herd cattle in the afternoon. Come evening, everyone was expected to mend and stitch. She said I wasn’t any good at sewing, but I could put a keen edge on a knife. So I’d sharpen the cutlery or fix broken handles, and she and the others would do the sewing. And she’d drink beer and tell dirty jokes too. I didn’t understand those for a long time. Now that I do, I can’t tell them to anyone.

Did you get any kind of special treatment, being her nephew?

No privileges, if that’s what you mean. She wouldn’t let me back down from anyone though, be it a ranch hand who thought he could boss a kid around or a cow who thought she could do the same. I got banged up some at first, but I learned how to get the better of them. Maybe that helped with the ice dragon.

Now that you’re an apprentice sorcerer, what’s next?

Well, I hope Sura and I stay together. I know being a sorcerer is dangerous, but so is being a rancher. Or a merchant, or a soldier. But it’s not so bad when you have someone to watch your back, eh?