R.L. King's Blog, page 3

SHP is Awesome Indies Approved!

Got a nice review today from Awesome Indies, a site with the purpose to “Identify and honor independently published books that meet, or improve on, the standardofbooks published by major mainstream publishers and their imprints.”

Check it out!

The book is listed on their site, and I get nifty badges for the cover and my website. These guys get a lot of respect in the indie community, so I’m proud to be included!

(Teaser) THE FORGOTTEN: Chapter 1

The new, improved, revised, edited, and generally improved version of The Forgotten (Alastair Stone Chronicles, Book 2) will be released within the month. As a teaser, here’s the all-new first chapter!

THE FORGOTTEN
(Alastair Stone Chronicles, Book 1)

Chapter 1

Alastair Stone felt the doctor’s gaze on him the moment he entered the office. Its intensity was almost a physical thing. He couldn’t blame the man, not really: it was hardly an orthodox course of treatment, calling in an occult expert...

Borrowed Time is out…and another Stone Chronicles tease

I can now check another item off my bucket list: my Shadowrun novel, Borrowed Time, is officially out in the wild and available for purchase in ebook form at Amazon and Drive Thru Fiction (and probably elsewhere as well–I haven’t checked yet).

Check out this awesome review from Diehard GameFAN!

This has been a dream of mine since pretty much when I started playing Shadowrun in 1989, so I’m feeling pretty darn good right about now.

In addition to the Shadowrun goodness, there’s also a little n...

Back Cover Reveal: Stone Chronicles #2 – The Forgotten

As I prepare the next book in the Alastair Stone Chronicles series for publication, I plan to do little reveals that I’m hoping will generate some interest. I haven’t announced the release date yet, but it won’t be long now!

In the first reveal, here’s the back cover, including the blurb. I got my first proof back last week–there were still a couple of issues I needed to fix so I had to order a second proof, but the back cover looked fine.

And here it is!

(click for bigger version)

As with S...

An Interview with Dr. Alastair Stone

Just for fun, here’s an interview with the titular protagonist of the Alastair Stone Chronicles series.

Dr. Alastair Stone: Your Tour Guide for Things that Go Bump in the Night
by Christina Wu, Daily staff reporter

For this week’s Faculty Spotlight, we’re talking with Dr. Alastair Stone of the Occult Studies Department.

I caught up with Dr. Stone at Bela’s on University Avenue. In his long black overcoat, Pink Floyd T-shirt, jeans, and Doc Martens, the 31-year-old professor doesn’t look at al...

Motivation: It’s What’s for Dinner, or: Silly Graphs for Fun and Profit

Okay, I admit it.

Sometimes I have a little problem with motivation.

Actually, that’s sort of like saying that Disneyland has a little problem with cartoon mice. I can be lazier than a bed of sloths (really!) wrapped in feather pillows.

Cute, huh?

The thing is, when I’m focused on something, you can’t dislodge me with dynamite. When I’m on the track of a story, I spend every waking minute (well, you know, the ones when I’m not doing the day job, being hassled by the cats, and making sure my dear spouse knows he’s my favorite non-fictional person in the whole world) either pounding away at the keyboard, or thinking about what I’d be writing if I were pounding away at the keyboard.

This is how I can write 100,000 words in a month. This is how I turned in the first draft of my Shadowrun novel three months early and made my editor happy (happy editors are good things—even better than sloths).

But that’s if I’m motivated. “Motivated” could mean a number of things, but it usually comes down to one of two: either somebody’s paying me to finish something by a deadline, or I’m really excited about what I’m working on. When it’s both (see previously mentioned Shadowrun novel) then that’s when the magic happens. I dunno if it’s good magic—the readers will have to decide that. It might be the kind of magic that produces frogs and green goo and unsettling mutations, but the point is, I get stuff done.

That’s when I’m motivated, though. When I’m not motivated, shoving the cats off and dragging my butt from the couch become somewhat more daunting than trying to convince Barack Obama and Sarah Palin to go have a malt together (I’m pretty sure that happened in an Archie comic, actually. But I digress.)

Hey, I write fantasy…

One of the things that gets me the most un-motivated is being stuck on where my story is going next. When that happens, I convince myself that the whole thing stinks, it’s swill, it’s garbage, and why would anybody in their right mind want to waste their valuable leisure time sucking down my words when they could be watching Game of Thrones or teaching their cat macramé or pondering why there are actually people in the world who think taking emotional leave from work when a boy-band member leaves is a thing you can do?

I give up. Make your own damn plant hanger.

Fortunately for me, I’ve got a way to get my motivation back—or at least to fake it till I make it. It’s really stupid, but it works. So what is it?

NaNoWriMo, and specifically their silly little word-count graph.

Sure, there are plenty of other word-count trackers out there. Most of them, though, seem to be plug-ins that you associate with your blog, which, when you’re not motivated, represents another step on that long high slog back to getting your book on track. If I can’t be arsed to work on my book, why on earth would I fiddle around with under-the-covers blog stuff?

The NaNo one, though, is different. It’s right there on their page for one thing, and it keeps track of your progress on a little bar graph. You can see clearly whether you’re hitting your total for the day, and there’ve been plenty of days when I’ve forced myself to just keep writing—anything, even if it’s crap, even if I know I’m just gonna scrap it—to avoid disappointing that little bar graph by having it hit below the quota line for the day.

Sweet, sweet motivation

I look forward to the various NaNo things every year (the main one in November, the “Camps” in April and the summer) because I know that silly little graph is going to get me back on track. I wish they had it all year. Seriously. I don’t care whether I actually finish my project on time or not, because by the time the month is up, I’ve forced past whatever block is plaguing me and I’m back on track. I can go on without the training wheels now, Dad!

Wheeeee!

So, just to see if anybody’s reading, and try to make this thing a little more interactive: what’s your secret for finding motivation when you don’t have any?

 

A Note on Worldbuilding, or: Why there are no cell phones (yet) in my books

One of the first things people tend to ask me when they read my books is, “How come they didn’t just pull out their cell phone at such-and-such point?” or “Why does everybody go to the library, and read newspapers? Why didn’t they just look stuff up on the internet?”

As every writer of modern fiction knows, today’s technology can be a pain in the keister when you’re trying to keep people from knowing everything before they’re supposed to. Nothing messes up a good situation like having Joe phone up Sally and say “Hey, I’m stuck in traffic and I’m gonna be late, so don’t go to the haunted house until I get there, ‘kay?”

Different writers deal with it different ways: for example, Jim Butcher, in The Dresden Files series, establishes that wizards can’t be around technology because their magical energy disrupts it. That’s a brilliant way of dealing with the problem, but unfortunately not one that other writers can get away with duplicating (especially when they’re swimming in the same urban-fantasy pool). So that’s out.

Others simply come up with excuses for why the tech isn’t around when it’s needed: no signal, forgot to charge the phone, left it at home, lost it, etc. This is probably the best way, as long as it’s not used to excess. If the characters are always losing their phones or forgetting to charge them (especially characters who are supposed to be relatively intelligent and organized) it starts looking suspicious.

Same thing for the internet. A lot of the mystery about creepy situations and spooky creatures goes away when the characters can simply Google up other sightings, or put out the call for other people to talk about their experiences. Again, the author can choose to ignore or downplay it, but that isn’t realistic unless their characters are either very old, Luddites, or living in an area where the net isn’t readily available. None of which is true for mine.

So I picked a different way around it: set the stories in an alternate world, just this much off from our own. I mean, heck, I’m saying magic works in this world and people buy that, so why not buy that various events have occurred (which you’ll see in Book 2) that led to a worse economic situation and a slower adoption of technology than in the “real” world? That way, I can get away with having a world with modern-day attitudes about things like sexism, homophobia, and racism (that is to say, they’re all still problems, but not nearly as much as they were in pre-internet days) without having cutting-edge tech getting in the way. What it most definitely does not mean is that the world of my stories is the equivalent of the ‘70s or ‘80s in the real world. Nobody is running around in bell-bottoms or over-teased hair. Nobody wants to see that, least of all me! Things like clothing styles are comfortably in the 21st century.

Will technology come into the world in my books? Absolutely. It’s actually already there—people do have cell phones and the internet exists, but tech is probably at about an early-‘90s level where the average person doesn’t see the need for it yet. People who need phones (like doctors and real-estate agents) have them, and people can get internet access if they want it but there’s not a lot out there yet that’s of interest to the general public.

The good news for me is that when I start bringing it in, it will come faster than in the real world, so I can start planning the later stories to account for things like internet searches and ubiquitous cell phones. On my terms.

But for now, I want to preserve the mystery for a little while longer.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Crap

The number-one thing I took away from spending the day yesterday consolidating two storage lockers down to one:

I have too much crap.

It’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate when you’re the kind of person who attaches emotional significance to physical objects. I’m not a hoarder—not even close—but I’m definitely quite a fair distance along the Packrat Spectrum. I’m fine with getting rid of things. We got rid of a ton of stuff yesterday in the course of cleaning out the lockers, and I plan to get rid of more. But even so, that still leaves many boxes full of items that were important to me a long time ago but got packed away and only get looked at on the rare occasions that we have enough time to visit them and spend some time.

Which is almost never. There’s almost always something more fun to do than “Hey! Let’s go to the storage locker and poke through old musty boxes!”

It’s so easy to forget about them when they’re locked away, but as soon as I break one open and start going through it, I realize that it contains about 70-80% stuff that I don’t give a damn about anymore (if I ever did) and the remainder consists of things I’d forgotten I owned, but now that I see them, I don’t want to throw them away. It’s funny—I have a much harder time getting rid of papers and the written word than I do with other objects. Which means I have boxes full of papers—old stories, gaming character sheets from games I played in college, that sort of thing. And every single one of them brings back memories.

When I mentioned this on Facebook yesterday, an old friend with whom I have a lot in common (we’re both only children, neither of us have kids) suggested a great idea: just go once a week, pick a single box, and go through it. I had never thought of this, but I think it will work for me. The project looked so daunting when I stare at that wall of boxes (literally—we stacked them in about a ten-by-ten-foot space up to the ceiling, and they filled two rows and a few to spare), but one box a week? I can do that. She also pointed out that if I don’t deal with them, eventually somebody else will have to. And who knows who that will end up being? Most likely somebody from Dan’s family, since there aren’t many left on my side that I have contact with anymore. A sobering thought, but also a liberating one: I can do this! One box a week for a year is fifty-two boxes. That’s got to be pretty near what I’ve got in there. Even if I can manage to consolidate that to a third or a half of what’s there now, that’s significant progress.

So next week, after I recover from yesterday (and Dan recovers—he and a friend did most of the heavy lifting and toting), we’ve got a new plan! Or, as I called it when my friend who suggested it in the first place also suggested we make a promise to each other that we’ll both do it: the Sisterhood of the Traveling Crap (with “traveling” being defined as “traveling to the dump. Or the nearest Goodwill.”)

Borrowed Time cover is up!

The cover of my upcoming Shadowrun novel, Borrowed Time, was revealed to the world today, and it’s a beauty! I’ve been staring at it for quite some time now, so I’m happy that it’s out there where everybody else can see it, and I can stop dropping vague hints about how creepy and cool it is. Check it out!

Drifting away

Do you ever find yourself drifting away from something you used to be passionate about? For me, it’s a bittersweet feeling, with part of my brain trying desperately to hold on to the passion I used to feel (“you spent so much time doing this–and now you’re just going to throw all that away?”) while another part, logically, admits that interests change and evolve (“you’ve got new things to be passionate about now.”)

I used to be obsessed with World of Warcraft. I discovered the game at the end of 2006, a couple of months before the first expansion (Burning Crusade) was released. I was a complete MMORPG virgin, having never played one or even really seen one before. My sole experience with MMOs was an article I read in a local alternative paper about how Everquest was so addictive that people were losing their jobs because of it, and I vowed I would never be one of those addicts. Then came that “South Park” episode. You know the one: “Make Love, Not Warcraft.” I watched that, and thought Wow. That game looks pretty impressive. I think I want to give it a try.

And so I did. And thus began a rabbithole that took me further and further down for the next four years. I became one of those addicts. No, I didn’t lose my job. I didn’t lose any real-life friends (though I did neglect real-life relationships in favor of online ones). I coped with my addiction quite well, all things considered. But there was only so much time in the day, and two things I loved fell by the wayside: writing, and Shadowrun. I didn’t mind, because I was having fun. I made new friends, including some who have become good real-life friends. I convinced some of my real-life friends to play. Everything was good. I leveled characters, I raided, and submerged my life into this shared fantasy world. This went on for around four years, and several expansions.

Then, at some point, it stopped being as much fun. My beloved guild, the top raiding guild on our backwater server, died. I moved to a different server and joined a new guild, which was great. I made some new friends. But then, inevitably, that guild began to decline as well. Many of the best raiders left and switched factions. The guild is still alive, but it’s much smaller now and only runs a single ten-man raid team. I began to realize that the game is just the same thing over and over again: level characters, get stuff, run dungeons, get better stuff, ad nauseam. Even for the most devoted of fans, it gets old. I staved off the boredom for a while by running old raids with a friend, and that was fun–but we both got the mounts we needed, so the challenge went away again.

I realized today that I’ve barely thought about WoW at all in the past couple of months. I’ve only played a couple of times, and I haven’t missed it when I was away. I started writing again in 2011, and discovered that creating my own worlds was more fun for me than playing in somebody else’s. I got back into Shadowrun again, both playing it and writing for it. I wrote a Shadowrun novel. We restarted our game, and I reconnected with old real-life friends. Every time I thought about going back to WoW again, I realized two things: I didn’t really want to, and there was no way I was going to get sucked back into another online addiction again. I got some good friends and some good memories out of those four years, but…yeah.

Getting back to that bittersweet feeling, though: it’s never easy to let go of something that you cared deeply about, even if you don’t anymore. At least it is for me. I won’t end my WoW subscription. I’ll pop in every now and then to help out a friend or just to see how things are going. But my main, my beloved blood elf death knight, is still level 92 (out of 100) four months after the release of the new expansion. And I can’t make myself care.