C. Litka's Blog, page 63

Among the Islands

I painted this piece with the idea of using part of it as the cover for The Lost Star's Sea. I will probably paint more pictures of the Pela to see if I can improve on this one. I did take a picture of this last night inside and without a flash that came out very yellow. I just played around with it anyway in Gimp and came up with this very pulpy version of the cover:


It gives you an idea of how the bigger painting can be used for the cover. I applied my favorite filter in Gimp, "cartoon" to get the sharper, dark outlines and just faded the painting behind the title box rather than make a solid title box. Still, as I said, this is just playing around -- and the bird is still in the bush as far as the book goes. However, I'm 8,000 words into the last section, so progress is being made. (Knock on wood.)

February 2017 Progress Report

I'm happy to report that work on The Lost Star's Sea is progressing nicely. I finished the first draft of penultimate episode, Windvera, on the 24 Jan. and it's second draft on the 31 Jan. I'm fairly happy with the section. At least I'm happy I have something. Hopefully when I return to it for the third draft in May or June I'll still find that I'll have little to do. I've now started writing the concluding episode, The Dragon Kings, which will wrap up not only The Lost Star's Sea, but the adventures and misadventures of Wil Litang. I'm budgeting six weeks for this section just to be on the safe side, since I want to make sure I've tied up all the loose threads that I can while making it as entertaining and as satisfying as possible, especially since it will be more like the conclusion of a “Who done it” mystery rather than the explosive climax of a thriller. I've got its broad outline well in hand, and have started going over the scenes in my head forming them and trying to put them into their proper place so that everything gets covered, flows smoothly, and is not tedious. I day dream up dozens of variations for every scene – and go over them dozens of times before I write them. And then when I do try to set them down in words, they usually come out differently again – so that I have to rewrite parts of scenes, over and over to get them as true as I can. It is not an efficient process, but a lot of the fun is in thinking about scenes and viewing them over and over from different angles. And then, when I have the words, going over and over them to make them sound good, and clever.

As things stand now, in the mid-March to early April time frame, I should be set to put the final polish on three sections, now probably a year old from first draft, and start the proof-reading process. I don't expect that to take too long on my part, though getting them through the first proof-read will take a week or so each, and then I'll send them out, one at a time every 2-3 weeks to my beta and early readers. Assuming all goes well, we're looking at a July – August release date. If all goes well.

Yes Another New Cover

It's that time again. Time for a new cover for The Bright Black Sea. I've been wanting a more "space opera-ish" cover for some time. I was thinking of having one ready for the release of its companion volume, but that won't be to late summer -- and only if all goes well -- and I really didn't want to wait that long. So this is it. For now. I pulled some 50 old paperback books off my book shelves -- back when they painted paint on paper book covers -- to see how they handled metal and such. However, this type of work isn't my strong suit, and it shows. This is probably not the last cover. I was using thick acrylics for this, and generally illustrators use opaque watercolors for painted illustrations. I might try using liquid acrylics on paper which should allow me to get more details in -- if I can actually draw extra details. Draftsmanship and patience are not my strong suit. We'll see. In the meanwhile, we have a picture of the Lost Star and an Omni-V jump fighter during the extended battle on the way to Boscone. Collect them all!

Beta Readers

The long march to complete The Lost Star's Sea, the companion volume to The Bright Black Sea and conclusion of Wil Litang's adventures is nearing its completion. I'm hoping that by the end of February I will have reached the end, in first draft. Like The Bright Black Sea, and perhaps even more so, this story is episodic, which is to say, its a series of fairly self-contained stories in chronological order. The first episode is the Castaways story that I release last summer. There will be seven more which I am planning to send out one at a time to any beta readers interested in reading them. Castaways is done, and at the moment, the next three episodes are just about ready to be proofread, I need to go over them one last time for a final bit of polishing – hopefully minor. The next two episodes are a bit rougher, in 2nd or 3rd draft mode. With any luck, they'll need only one more draft and then a final polishing. I'm halfway through writing the penultimate episode now, and may even have a 2nd draft of it done by the end of this month. Which leaves only the last episode to write in February/March. I know what I want to do in the last episode so I am looking forward to writing it, so that I'm fairly confident that I'll have a good 2nd/ 3rd version of it done by the end of March. All of which is to say, that I'm hoping to start sending out, episode by episode, versions ready for my volunteer beta readers to go over in April (2017).
I'd like the nearly final version of this book read by volunteers who would give me feedback on the typos they encounter, and the questions or any criticism they wish to offer on the stories. Hopefully by doing this I will avoid the mistakes of my first novels, and will eliminate as many typos as possible. However, like all my books, I plan to release The Lost Star's Sea as a free book, so that I don't even have a free ebook copy to offer to any volunteer proofreader/beta reader. I have only my heartfelt thanks and “editorial mention” in the book itself naming and thanking any proofreaders/beta readers who help make the book better. In the unlikely event that I go to print with any of my books, I would send signed copies to all the beta readers who contribute to this book. But, as I said, this is unlikely, and should not be taken into account when volunteering.
The flip side of this is that because I have nothing to offer but thanks, and will be releasing the book for free, I would be glad to send out these sections to anyone interested in reading the not-yet-final, and slightly rough version with no strings attached. You can simply sign up to receive a copy with no obligation at all to contribute anything in return. They can simply be considered advanced copies.
I will have my in-house proof reader, my dear wife, read through each section before I send it out. I am very prolific with typos and very blind to them, so that I believe she corrected hundreds of typos before I sent Castaways out to my volunteer beta readers – who found perhaps 50 or so more typos and suggested so points to clear up. Which is to say that these sections should be close to publication quality, but may well still have a significant number of typos. They might also have formatting errors, since I will be doing a simple down and dirty epub conversion if you choose to receive the stories as an epub (for reading on you ipad or non-kindle ebook reader or app). (Smashwords and Amazon do their own conversions.) I will also offer it as a PDF for reading on a computer/ tablet as well.
If you think you would like to be a volunteer proofreader, beta reader, or just read an advanced copy of the story, episode by episode over the course of a few months, Send me an email at cmlitka@gmail.comand I will put your name on the list. (I will only use this list for this purpose. My marketing effort consists of pretty much doing nothing.) I will send out an email when the first section is ready for to be sent out, so that you will have a chance to confirm that you want to receive it – if all goes well, some time in April. You need not commit to anything, and can decide what, if anything you want to contribute after you receive the section.

If you have any questions, just drop me a line. I will provide more details closer to the time when I will be sending out the advanced copies.

January 2017 Progress Report

I met my December goal by finishing the first draft of the short episode entitled "The Floating Jungle" by the 12th of December. Which was a good thing since the flu knocked me off my feet for a week and the holidays prevented any further writing. After Christmas I went back and re-wrote large sections of it to try to bring it up to snuff.

The first draft is always the hardest, since you are pushing into the unknown. I generally try to get down what happens and as much dialog as possible, but it's rough and often just sketched in. In the second and third drafts I find that I often have to re-write whole sections to not only make them sound better, but make more sense as well. I hate plot holes, and try my best to see that everything flows naturally. The characters can make mistakes and miscalculations, but not to such a degree that it is out of character. You have to make the plot fit the characters, not the characters to the plot. Then, hopefully, after the third (or fourth) draft, I convert it to an epub and read the it on my iPad, which is much more like reading it as a book than on the computer screen. I highlight words and sentences that  need a little work. That done, it's off to my volunteer proof readers.

I'm hoping that The Floating Jungle will be an easy third draft and I can put it in the queue to be read on the iPad. I've started the next to last section, "Long Street, Windvera" with the hope of having a first or second draft done by the end of the month. This was the problem section for quite a while as I did not have a plot for it. I do now, though it is a more modest one than I originally envisioned.

In February I should start writing the rip-roaring conclusion to the Lost Star's Sea and the whole Litang saga. Actually, I don't think it will be all that rip-roaring. Some danger and mystery, to be sure, but I'm looking to wrap up as many loose ends as possible with as much humor as I can bring to the story. There are a lot of loose ends to tie up, and I think I can have a lot of fun tying them up. I already know the last line of the book.

Of course, these last two sections are birds in the bush, and the last two I've written are probably a ways from being good enough, so nothing is certain. I'm hoping to wrap things and release the book up by late summer 2017. Truthfully, I'll be very glad to wrap it up. Right now writing seems to be a lot like work. And I do this for a "hobby", so work is the last thing I want to do. Writing a 300K word sequel to a 300K+ novel is not something I'd want to do again. Indeed, as of right now, I have no plans to write another book. That may change, but then again, it may not.

So that's were things stand at the moment. I'm getting my 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours of writing in every day, so we're making progress. And if you keep doing that, eventually you reach the end. That, anyway, is what I tell myself every morning. (Though once I start writing time flies. It's just getting up and going over to the computer to start the process that takes and effort.)

December Progress Report

November has come and gone. Did you get your 50K word novel written?
I certainly wrote 50K words, but deleted half of them. However, I'm happy to report that I still ended up with 27,000 fairly decent words and that having written so many of them over several times, I ended up with a pretty solid second draft of new episode in The Lost Star's Sea saga. (I hope.) I'm glad to have it a'stern. It wasn't an easy piece to write. I wanted a brisk, lighthearted, fast action episode, and it didn't work like that. After half a million words, you can't make your characters do what you'd like. They have to be who they are. I felt that I had to force myself to get through it. Hopefully that doesn't show.
I've now started on the next episode. I'm hoping this one will be the lighthearted adventure I wanted to write – a short, simple adventure – say 15K words. Since I know what I want to do, with any luck, I should have it done by the end of December, even with all the holiday comings and going.
After this one there are only two more episodes that remain to be written.
For the penultimate one I want a fairly long picturesque travel piece across a large island with relatively primitive civilization, sort of like traveling 200 to 300 years ago through many parts of the world. I have the locale well pictured in my mind along with an idea for a new character I'd like to write about, but I currently have no story line to go with the journey – which is a problem. I can't just do a travelogue of wonders – there has to be some sort of plot, with dangers to faced (or avoided if Litang has his way) and something worthwhile to win, during that journey. I have one idea, but I'm not sure how it can, or if it can be fleshed out yet. The good thing is that I have a month to think about it (while I walk in circles around my basement, since it's now too cold to go out on my bike). Worst come to worst, I could probably just skip this episode entirely, since it doesn't include anything relevant to the main thrust of the story and move on to the concluding episode – which I have well in hand. Or I could buy some time and write the last episode before the travel one.
I'm happy with the way the story wraps up, especially since the plot I decided on for this volume made it rather hard to tie both volumes together. Luckily, I found a plausible way to tie up a lot of the loose ends from The Bright Black Sea, and some explanations of the mysteries of the Pela I tossed in this story along the way for "color" as well – back when they were still mysteries to me.
My goal is to have everything done in first/second draft by the end of March. Including the Castaways story I've already released, I currently have some 207K words written in pretty close to final form, and the last three episodes should add 100K more words (or more, given how I write) so The Lost Star's Sea should be a fitting companion volume to The Bright Black Sea. If all goes as planned. We'll see.
If anyone is interested in reading the next to final draft of these stories to provide volunteer feed back, proof reading, or just an early read, send me an email and I will put you on the list. There's no obligation to do anything since the book will be released for free, so I can't even offer you a free book.  

The Bright Black Sea Ver.3.4 is released

I've released version 3.4 of The Bright Black Sea. I would like to thank Walt for pointing out some typos that remained in version 3.3. I corrected those as took the opportunity to add a few sentences to deal with a couple of small things issues that I wanted to address.
The first was that as the story evolved, medical technology sort of evolved as well – and I had Captain Miccall dying on page 1 while at a full medical center. I added a sentence to explain that – Miccall was old, over the "Unity Standard" life span of 200 and a decade or two more years. This life span is limited by biological factors and the ability of the med-machines to manipulate older cells. And perhaps by Unity policy as well.
I should mention that the human specie in these stories, which are likely set some 80K years in the future, are “homo stellar” rather than homo sapien. In addition to being far more tolerant of weightless conditions than current humans, they have a far more robust body and immune system in order to tolerate a wider variety of non-Terran worlds. I would assume this was done by design rather than by evolution. I should acknowledge that by keeping my characters very human and familiar, in effect, turning a blind eye to 80,000 years of social and technological evolution, I'm cheating. The humans 80,000 years from now, if they exist, are likely very different from us – but I have no interest in exploring just how.
The second place I added a few sentences is where the Lost Star is accelerating on it's interstellar voyage to Zilantre. I have them accelerating to “Mark 7”, more than twice as fast as normal, and so the pseudo-gravitational effect of inertia would be something like twice what than they were accustomed to during normal acceleration and braking. I wanted to mention that effect in passing. While I tried to keep my cheating with physics to a minimum, I did not go so far as to calculate just how fast the ship needed to be going, and how fast or long it needed to be accelerated to reach that speed. From my research it seemed that you can get pretty far, pretty fast by accelerating at 1 gravity for extended periods of time, so I don't think it would have been much more than that, it's just that being used to free fall, any gravity was a pain for spaceers – though being homo stellar, they could easily adopt to it after prolonged periods of weightlessness.
Again, thanks to Walt and all the others who have helped make the story more enjoyable for the readers that follow them. Once The Lost Star's Sea is nearing completion, hopefully this coming spring, I will be putting out the call for volunteer beta readers. I'll offer more detail when it's closer to the time, but if you think you might be interested, just email me at cmlitka@gmail.com and I'll put you on the list to get the details.

The Amateur Author Report

Six months ago I posted the results of my first year in self-publishing -- sales, free downloads, rating, and review numbers. ( http://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-window-to-self-publishing.html) 
In that post I also placed my experience in the context of self publishing as a whole. Rather than wait another year, I thought I'd update those numbers at the year and a half mark, since we crossed a significant milestone this month – 10,000+ downloads of my stories.
Here are the download numbers: 12 mo.   18 mo.     last 6 mo.A Summer in Amber                  2,222     3,075      853Some Day Days                         1,139     1,445      306The Bright Black Sea                 3,176     4,855    1,679Castaways of the Lost Star          ----     1,108    1,108 (3 months)
Total books distributed:                6,537    10,483
These totals include a few books sold, either in the non-USA Amazon store where they are not price-matched, or in the case of The Black Bright Sea, from 10 March to 1 Sept during which time it was on sale for $3.99 on Amazon until some time in July when I reduced it to $.99 for the release of Castaways of the Lost Star. I sold about 30 copies of The Black Bright Sea during that 6 month period. All together I may have sold a bit over 55 copies world-wide of all my books in the last year and a half, putting my total royalties well into double figures! (Four, if you count cents.)
A fair chunk of the 4,000 books downloaded in the last six months can be attributed to the release of The Bright Black Sea sequel, Castaways of the Lost Sea, which bumped up downloads across the board as well as contributing it's 1,100 copies to the total. In May I was thinking of not releasing a book in 2016, but since Castaways has a fairly stand alone story arc and was long enough to be released as a sequel on its own, I decided to go ahead and release it as this year's book.
I'd like to thank all of you for downloading, reading and rating my stories. I hope you discovered some new, and pleasant worlds to live in for a few hours. And as always, I enjoy hearing from you. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me.

How Indie are Indie Publishers?

The recent Author Earnings October report, that tracks Amazon book sales, showed a steep drop in the market share and earnings of indie published books. This is the first time in the nearly three years they been reporting indie published ebooks have declined and came as a shock to many indie publishers. No one knows why sales declined. Nor if this is just a one quarter bump in the road or the shape of things to come. However, several reasons have been suggested for this drop in sales. Some indie authors believe Amazon is miscounting pages reads in its Kindle Unlimited program, not only reducing author earnings for books in that program, but because page reads also factor into the sales rank charts, fewer page reads can depress a book's ranking, making it less visible which results in fewer sales. It has also been suggested that other tweak in the way Amazon promotes books have recently favored traditional publishers' books. Others suggest that traditional publishers, large, medium, small, and Amazon, are now more effectively competing with indies published titles – using social medium and special sale prices more aggressively. One last suggestion is that the book promoting newsletter BookBub is featuring many more traditionally published books than it did in the past, and that it now too expensive for indie publishers to place paid ads in the newsletter to promote their books. I gather that BookBub was a major selling engine for indie publishers. However, no one knows for sure. We'll have to see how it all pays out. Still, it did get me to thinking about just how independent indie publishers really are that minor changes in their retail channel or promotional opportunities can cause a 20% dip in sales.
The short answer is not very. When you come to think about it, how independent can any ebook publisher be when they do 73% to 100% of their business with one retailer? Amazon controls about 73% of the ebook market, with iBook, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, and Smashwords dividing the remaining 27%. So even if an indie publisher puts their books for sale in all the viable ebook stores, they still are relying on only half a dozen retailers – a very narrow base to build a business on.
But their dependence goes deeper than just the limited retail channels. It goes right to the heart of their product. Indie publishers produce a digital file on a hard drive which has little to no intrinsic value. It may have potential value, but no commercial value until it is placed in its retail container – an ebook format – which is owned by the retailers via either a proprietary format or through their DRM software, and then sold exclusively in their stores. In essence, indie publishers are simply content providers for a handful of retailers. And indeed, they actually provide this content for free, in exchange for a cut of any sales their content might generate, though they have no say in how their content will be sold. Amazon, for example, displays competing books on every book's product, and will gladly sell ad space on a book's product page to competitors as well. Amazon is simply selling books. What book it sells doesn't matter to Amazon and the more books it has to offer – the more competition the book producers must face – the better it is for Amazon.
Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program perfectly illustrates how little clout indie publishers have with Amazon. To get in the program – which allows subscribers to read an unlimited number of mostly indie published books for free – publishers must agree not to sell their ebooks in any other ebook store. In return Amazon pays these publishers each month for however many pages it determines have been read in each book. The entire process is a black box, completely opaque to publishers in the program. Not only does Amazon alone decide what rate they'll pay out each month, but publishers have no idea how Amazon counts their pages read – the sort of deal you get when you have no negotiating power at all.
The bottom line is that indie publisher' business is dependent on Amazon and a few smaller retailers. Amazon can promote and sell the products they carry however they like. And even if indie publishers expand their offerings to paper books and audio books, Amazon is still the major seller of these versions as well, commanding about 50% of the print book market. And since it is extremely hard for indie publishers to get their paper books into brick and mortar stores, Amazon would likely sell upwards of 95% of any paper and audio books produced as well. In short, indie publishers are simply Amazon suppliers of a commodity that is not, and unlikely ever will be, in short enough supply for indie publishers to have any control of their market, or indeed, commercial product.
I suppose it can be argued that this has always been the case. Authors may have many more options to sell their work to big, medium and small traditional publishers, but seeing that they pretty much have to crawl through the eye of a needle to get anything published, they are just as dependent on the whims of large corporations as indie publishers. But at least the select few who do sell their work are paid up front for their work, and, at least in the past, offered a contract that provided some financial security – something indie publishers completely lack. The truth is that being an author is a poor business choice. That, however, has never kept people from writing, nor is it likely to prevent authors from self-publishing.

What's up with the Lost Star's Sea?

The short answer is not much. However, as winter closes in, the writing season opens up. Trapped in the house, I have little to distract me from writing. Well, actually I have a lot of things that I could use to distract me, but a lot less in winter than in summer.
To bring you up to date on the project, I can report that the next three episodes, The Shadow Marches, The Mountain of Gold, and The Voyage of the Lora Lake, are nearly completed. Each needs to be read over on my ipad, and polished up a bit before being proof read. Worst come to worst, they would be available for release in 2017. Together they total over 125K words, each running something like 40K words each. (That's about half the size of The Castaways of the Lost Star.) The problem is that while I hope that readers would find each of the stories entertaining, they are very much “Act 2,” which is to say, none of the over-arching issues and mysteries get resolved. Given this, I am very reluctant to release them as I think they would be a disappointing installment in the series. (Which is why I released the Castaways episode as a stand alone one – it at least had a beginning, middle and end – though not the final end.)
The bad news is that up till now I've not been very fired up to embark on writing the final series of episodes. And since writing is not a job for me, I've no pressing reason to write until I'm fired up. I think there's a risk that if the story is written as a job, the lack of enthusiasm might come across in the story. There are, however, two pieces of good news. The first is that I'm slowly getting more fired up to start and I am spending lots of time daydreaming about the story. This is a fairly long process because I generally have to daydream up dozens of versions of every scene to get something that works well. But that's half the fun. There's far more to every story than what gets put into words – plus many alternate histories…
The second bit of good news is that I just completed an 8 page, 6K word outline of the remaining story. I don't need this outline to write the story, but I wanted to set it out just in case the story never get written. While I have no reason to suspect that I'm at death's door, at 66, if I did not wake up tomorrow morning and it would raise few eyebrows. And then there's the chance that I'll never be able to write it for some other reason short of death. In either case, I want you, my readers, to know what happens to Litang and all his friends. And well, I'm also pretty amazed at how it all fell into place. It is my practice to toss a lot of little items into the mix to serve as color and just for the heck of it because they sound interesting, only to discover later on that I could use them as a key feature of the story. Botts is a perfect example. I knew I might be able to use it, but I had no idea how until the perfect time came to introduce him. So, now, when I found that I was able to use a lot of those little things I had tossed in The Bright Black Sea as well as the Castawaysto tie up a whole lot of loose ends in the story that I had no idea how, or even if I could, I was pretty proud of myself. And well, I hate to deny you the chance to see how amazingly well I managed to do wrap things up and answer a lot of questions I would've though I might have had to leave hanging should worst come to wrorst. Hopefully you'll get to read the whole story, but at least the truth is out there. Or in my Lost Star's Sea file, anyway.
So the plan is to finish the last half of the story by the end of March. I'm going to try to do a very complete job of the first draft this time around, so that I can cut down on the number of subsequent revisions. Up to now I was more concerned about getting the story down than how it read. I save that part for the next two or three or six revisions. Now I'm hoping to get it down to three – a second run through and then a polishing version. The target date is early fall 2017, about a year from now. I started the third part of The Bright Black Sea at this time and had it out in September, after half a dozen rewrites. So it should be doable, if all goes well.

The Lost Star's Sea will conclude the adventures of Wil Litang.