Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 30

Episode 23: #LoveWins

In the 23rd episode of Writing in Real Life…

Celebrating #MarriageEquality with some more talk about marriage, as well as an appreciation of single people. Plus: Life in the Age of Screeching, Barry rants about the future of publishing, and Morgan wants ice cream.

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Last Chance for a Signed ARC of After the Red Rain!

One more chance, people! Just one.

I’ve given away four ARCs of After the Red Rain signed by Peter Facinelli, Rob DeFranco, and yours truly. I have one left. And I’m going to give it away…

…to one of my newsletter subscribers!

It’s been a while since I’ve sent out a newsletter, but I’ll be doing so on July 15. That newsletter will contain instructions on how to enter to win the ARC. So, if you’re a subscriber, keep your eyes peeled for that newsletter hitting your inbox! (If you’re not a subscriber, of course you can sign up before July 15!)

Now, since we’re closing in on the publication of the book and since I want the ARC to arrive before then, I’m going to be a hard-ass about this. When I notify the winner, he or she will have three days to get back to me with an address. Otherwise, I’ll pick another winner.

Good luck!

Newsletter Sign-Up Page

Sneak a (Big!) Peek at After the Red Rain

The folks over at Amazon have posted an absolutely free preview of After the Red Rain, weighing in at a whopping 128 pages! That’s something like one-third of the book, so you’ll definitely be able to get a feel for the story!

You can download it to a Kindle or, if you don’t own a Kindle, Amazon has free apps and a free reader that works in your web browser. So, y’know, no excuse not to check it out!

The End of I Hunt Killers

So, I was cleaning up some old files on my computer today and I stumbled across a file titled “End of final book” in a folder labeled “KILLERS.” The folder was stuffed inside yet another folder that hadn’t been touched in quite a while. This was all stuff that had been forgotten and neglected for years. This happens sometimes — I take some notes on ideas or notions, then file them away and decide to go in another direction.

Anyway, I’m going to show you exactly what “End of final book” contained. Here goes:

“You’re him! You’re the Boogeyman!”

“The Boogeyman? No, no. They call me Ugly Jazz. And I’m doing what I love to do: I hunt killers.”

And there was screaming.

A lot of screaming.

It went on for a long, long time.

Until it stopped.

So, yeah. Way back when I first developed Killers, I had this brief, crazy notion that the series would end with Jazz having forsaken Connie and Howie and everything normal in his life. Instead, he goes underground and tracks down Crows…and kills them in horrible fashion.

I’m glad I ended the series the way I did, but now you’ve had a little look at an alternate universe.

Episode 22: Younger, but Not Right

Episode 22!

Morgan and Barry cheat at binge-watching. The only fashion name Barry knows. Some serious discussion about writers, math, and finances. Morgan loves being married. Barry’s still reading a book he doesn’t like.

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WIRL Episode 21: Poop Happens

Another week, another episode of Writing in Real Life, starring yours truly and Morgan Baden!

A brief but necessary colloquy on baby poop. The paradox that is Morgan. “How is your book coming along?” Why they got married. The horrors of The Lull and the related wisdom of Mr. Thomas Petty. And you should totally watch The Leftovers.

Please: send us feedback, subscribe/rate us on iTunes, and follow us on Twitter!

Another Chance for a Signed After the Red Rain ARC!

So far, three of the five ARCs of After the Red Rain have been given away. With two left, a new contest has launched, this time on Tumblr!

Want the ARC, complete with autographs from all three authors, including Peter Facinelli? Just put on your Tumblr cap and get to posting!

http://barrylyga.tumblr.com/post/121603635213/win-a-signed-arc-of-after-the-red-rain

Tales of Incompetence: Microsoft

Yes, it’s time again for Tales of Incompetence, wherein I, your humble host, rant intemperately about some corporate stupidity that should never have been visited upon me.

I have previously ranted about UPS and Hertz. Today, I turn my own personal Eye of Sauron upon the benighted souls at Microsoft.

The other day, I tweeted thusly:

FYI, @Microsoft EVERYTHING about your process to buy, download, and install @Office is an abomination. I'm a writer and words fail me.

— Barry Lyga (@barrylyga) June 13, 2015

Evidently, words rallied, and here we are.

My wife recently upgraded her laptop to a brand-new 13-inch MacBook Air. When migrating her files over from her old laptop, she of course included the copy of Microsoft Office she had bought and paid for years ago.

However, Office wouldn’t work on the new machine. It demanded a product key. She dutifully scrounged around for her original Office packaging and entered the product key. In fact, her Office package included three product keys so that Office could be used on three different computers. She tried every single one of them — multiple times — and none of them worked. It’s not as though she had gone over her allotment of product activations; she had three keys and two computers. And the only thing Office would tell her is “This is not a valid product key.”

Well, it clearly was, but Office didn’t know it. She tweeted at Microsoft for some guidance and heard nothing back. So she shrugged and decided to buy Office anew. After all, her old version was quite old. Why not upgrade to the latest and greatest along with the new laptop?

Me? Well, I’m tech support in our family, but I had no idea what to do about the snafu. I’ve been Microsoft-free for a decade. I offered to poke around online and see if I could fix the problem, but she just went ahead and bought the new version of Office.

It’s 2015, so of course we no longer install software with something as prosaic as an optical disc. Instead, at the local Apple Store, she bought a smallish box that contained a slim instruction fold-out and a card with a product key. The box was probably twice or three times as large as it needs to be, so lets add environmental waste to the list of Microsoft’s sins.1

I volunteered to install Office for her, and that’s where the fun began.

The Getting Started card in the box told me to go to “www.officeformac.com/download” to begin the process.

Meanwhile, the card with the product key on it told me to go to “www.office.com/mac-download.”

Le sigh.

Now, if you’re even remotely Internet-savvy, you probably assume that these two URLs resolve to the same page. And they probably do. But how difficult is it to have two pieces of paper in the same package contain the same information? Not an auspicious start, Microsoft.

I closed my eyes and picked one, then began the process of downloading the–

No. Not quite.

See, it’s not enough that my wife paid cash money for a little card with a product key on it. No. Before Microsoft would let her download the software she had paid for, she first had to set up a Microsoft account.

What’s a Microsoft account, you ask? Great question. Answer: Who the hell cares? She’s writing a novel in Word, not connecting to a Microsoft cloud service. She has no need for a Microsoft account. No need at all. But Microsoft won’t let her download the software she’s already paid for until she creates one.

In order to create said account, Microsoft requires her email address, her full name (???), her birthday (allegedly to “make certain” she uses age-appropriate software — I was unaware Microsoft produced porn2), and a blood sample. I’m kidding, of course, about that last bit.

Why, Microsoft? Why does she need to tell you this information? You sold her a unique product key, so it’s not for security/anti-theft purposes. And she has no desire to use any of your cloud services, and said services are not mandatory, so it’s not for that. No, I imagine that somewhere in the bowels of your Redmond HQ, a tallyboard increments with every new Microsoft account and some VP’s bonus depends on that number going up, even if the accounts lie fallow and unused. And thus, the absurd requirement.

So, the software downloaded–

Or…wait. Did it?

I checked her Downloads folder and didn’t see a .dmg file. Or, rather, I saw a few of them,3 but none that were from Microsoft. Or even from that day.

I was puzzled, to say the least. But I’m a ninja, so I poked around and I realized that one of the .dmg files had been downloaded mere moments ago, even though for some reason it said that it had last been modified on April 24, 2014.

That file was named “X19-49597.dmg,” which meant it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with oh, look, I opened it and it’s the Office installer.

For real, Microsoft? For f**king real? What in the name of Bill Gates’s ball-sac are you thinking? For the love of Odin, why on earth would you name that installer anything not “Microsoft,” “Office,” “Install,” “Software,” or some combination of those words?

I mean, I just can’t process this. I can’t comprehend it at all on any sort of human level. What in the world possesses a company to name the installer for its product with a meaningless alphanumeric string? Even Adobe, the poster child for bad installer experiences, has the decency, the foresight, and the good sense to name its installer “AdobeFlashPlayer_18_a_install.dmg.”

Anyway, I proceeded without further annoyance, and my wife is now running a nice, clean, fresh install of Microsoft Office. May [insert the divine being of your choice here] have mercy on her soul.

Truthfully, all of the necessary information in the box could have been printed on a single sheet of cardboard no larger or thicker than a modestly priced greeting card.What on earth would that be like? I shudder to imagine it.Honey, if you’re reading this footnote, your tech support guy is here to tell you that you should delete those .dmg files once you install the software on them.

Making Life Difficult for the Right Reasons

I‘m a pretty lazy guy, so I generally try to arrange my life (both work and otherwise) so that things go as smoothly and as easily as possible. When it comes to writing, for example, I try to hand in the cleanest possible manuscript to my editor. It’s less work for everyone that way, and believe me — the Catholic/Jewish guilt kicks in big-time when I see the mistakes I missed.

Sometimes, inevitably, I end up making more work for everyone. It’s bad enough when that happens by accident…even worse when it’s on purpose.

Let me explain. And forgive me for being oblique, but I’m talking about a book that isn’t out yet and trying to avoid spoilers!

My editor on the forthcoming Secret Sea had a problem with…let’s call it Plot Point A (PPA). This was something that happened late in the story that made the ending possible, and the specifics of it unnerved her.

We talked about it quite a bit. I really liked PPA. A lot. I could see her point, but I wasn’t convinced it was an issue. Still, she was insistent and I decided to see what I could do.

It turned out that I was able to convert PPA into Plot Point B with very little work. Many of the specifics were still the same, but the unnerving stuff had been excised. Liz was happy. I was happy. The book went into Production.

Did I say I was happy? Ha! Idiot. First rule of Barry’s Life: Barry’s never happy for long.

A while later, I began having Revision Regrets. PPA had been perfect. PPB was watered down and wishy-washy. PPA was strong and memorable. PPB was bland and generic. I wanted to go back to PPA, but I had trouble justifying it. The book was in Production, after all — changing a major plot point would be a lot of work…and at the end of the day, Liz would still be unhappy. One of us was going to be dissatisfied and while I didn’t want it to me, I also didn’t want to add insult to injury by changing PPB back to PPA and making Liz work to do it!

I hemmed and hawed. And then, one night when I couldn’t sleep,1 the solution popped into my head.

I realized, in a flash, that what I had thought to be Liz’s objection to PPA actually wasn’t her objection. She didn’t have a problem with the action itself — she was bothered by a character’s thoughts about the action.

Well, hell — I hadn’t really delved all that much into the character’s thoughts anyway. I was much more focused on the action of the moment. I realized that with two lousy lines of dialogue, I could have kept PPA and satisfied Liz, all without compromising the integrity of the scene.

I wrestled with this overnight, then called Liz first thing in the morning. (I’m sure editors love nothing more than early morning phone calls from authors giving them more headaches.) I explained my solution.

“Barry!” she said. “Oh my God, that works! That works!”

She got in touch with the managing editor and got back to me right away — as long as I could make the modifications by the end of the week, we’d still be on schedule.

And so I jumped in. Now, based on what you’ve been told so far, you might think, What’s the big deal? It’s just tweaks, right?

I wish! Whenever you modify something that speaks to character motivation or plot, you run the risk of either missing some references or inadvertently adding something that contradicts the new world order. In theory, you should re-read the entire book, just to be sure. In reality, there’s rarely time for that.

In this case, I targeted the specific scenes that I knew had to change. Then I read them over, changed them, then read every scene after them, through to the end of the book, just to be sure that there were no “ripples in the pond.”2 Fortunately, the changed scenes were late in the book, so I only ended up re-reading about 150 pages.

Then, since the plot point required some very specific wording, I was able to do a quick search through the manuscript to make certain that anything that happened to foreshadow the plot turn earlier in the story also matched up.

With any luck, I managed to change and tweak everything that needed to be changed and tweaked. With further luck, the Production folks won’t have any trouble incorporating those changes into their current workflow. The worst case scenario is that I’ve screwed the pooch and will have to make a lot of manual changes on the page proof copies…and those mistakes will go uncorrected in the ARC (Advance Reader Copies), thereby baffling early readers.

*gulp*

So, was it worth it? Was it worth the extra work on my part and on the part of the folks at Feiwel & Friends? Worth the risk of screwing up the ARC?

Well, yeah, I think so. At the end of the day, I owe my readers and myself the best book I’m capable of writing. If I can make a change that will make the book better and don’t make that change, I’ve abrogated my artistic responsibility. I feel bad that I’ve made Production hustle a little more, but I can’t apologize for wanting The Secret Sea to be the best book it can possibly be.

Come Spring 2016, you can tell me if I’ve succeeded.

Which is when all great ideas happen, kids.In other words, if I changed something blue to something red on page 200, I had to make sure I didn’t have someone still calling it blue on page 500.

After Leaving Las Vegas…

I moved from Las Vegas to New York years ago, but on days like today, I realize that Sin City still has its hooks in me. And has probably warped me for life.

The mercury is going to hit the nineties today in the Big Apple.1  That’s hot. A friend of mine said, “Today will be a roaster.”

But the funny thing is, when I first saw the forecast, my initial thought was, “Oh. Ninety degrees. Not bad.”

This is what happens, I suppose, when you used to live somewhere with days up around 110 or 115 degrees.

It’s been years since I’ve lived in Vegas, as I said. Years since I even visited. But there’s still a part of me that judges temperature by Vegas standards.

Here’s how the heat in the desert can mess you up: When I lived in Las Vegas, I would frequently go for a run in 90, 95 degree heat.

Why? Well, because I would look at the temperature and think to myself, Ninety-five? That’s like twenty degrees cooler than yesterday! Time for a run!

And ten minutes later, I’d be gasping for breath, thinking, Why am I dying? And the answer would occur to me: Because it’s &%^ing ninety-five degrees outside, you &%^ing moron!

Beyond the differences the humidity (or lack thereof) causes, it’s the numbers game that messed with my head the most. Because even though I know that it’s going to be miserably hot today, there’s a part of my brain whispering, “C’mon, Barry. It’s only ninety. That’s nothing. You don’t even need to turn on the air conditioning.”

*sigh*

At this point, I’ve been gone from Vegas long enough that I imagine this temperature agnosia will continue to persist. So, to those of you who know me, please forgive me when I seem constantly caught off-guard by how damn hot it is outside.

And now I’m going to go install an air conditioner in my daughter’s room. Because even though my brain refuses to believe it’s going to be noticeably uncomfortable today, I’m pretty sure Child Protective Services would frown on Roast Leia.

That sentence works a lot better if you picture it being read in the voice of an old-timey radio announcer. Just trust your Uncle Barry on this one, kids.