Andrew Gates's Blog, page 10

Milestones on Three Big Projects

A lot of big milestones have come together in the past few days. I’ll outline them each here:

Kangblabla! Cover Art

Cover art is [mostly] finished for my upcoming space comedy short-story collection called Kangblabla! It did not take long to put this book together, since two of the five stories collected were already written for the Pew! Pew! collections. I took those two stories, then added in two short 5,000 word pieces and one even shorter 2,000 word piece and bundled it all up. Talk about a fast book to put together!

For the cover, I wanted to emulate a Jack Kirby comic-booky style. I wanted it to be reminiscent of old Marvel Avengers covers, but still have some quirkiness to it to show that it is a comedy.

I recruited Lloyd Ladera for the artwork and had Sarah Anderson do the design and text. This is the end result:

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What you see above is the front cover and Kindle cover, but the full paperback cover still has to be finished. Right now there is no spine or back-cover design, but that is in progress now.

Kangblabla! has no set release date and I do not intend to put it up for pre-order. My plan is to simply release the book when it is ready, which I anticipate being either this month or November.

101-Day Running Challenge Story

On the non-fiction side of things, many of you may know that I write for a local publication, Run Washington Magazine. I don’t usually write about it on this blog, but one story in particular is pretty close to me and I am very proud of and I wanted to share it here:

https://www.runwashington.com/2018/10/16/friend-compete-in-101-day-running-challenge/

Unlike most of the stories I write, this one is actually about me and something that I did over the summer. I am very excited to get this story up and out there for the world to see.

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Battle Planet: The Champion of Earth

Now that I am finished writing The Color of Water and Sky series, I’ve started working on my next sci-fi book, which I’m calling Battle Planet: The Champion of Earth. I eluded to it briefly in my previous post about future projects, but now it is officially in progress!

The premise is this: Five humans are kidnapped at random and brought to a gladiator-style fighting arena in space where they battle monsters for survival.

The idea for this story was inspired by a couple of things: Planet Hulk, The Hunger Games, Thor: Ragnarok and to a degree even the movie Atomic Blonde. And I based main character off of some cover art I saw for a different book, which you can see below:

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In short, there are a whole lot of different elements mashed together here in the story Battle Planet. From sci-fi, to old gladiator stories, to even a bit of Cold War bits.

I am now 13,000 words into writing Battle Planet and still early on in the story. I’m having a blast putting this story together.

One thing I am really looking forward to about this book will be my ability to advertise it. Right now I am discovering that The Color of Water and Sky is difficult to advertise. The title does not really say what it is about and the subject is so niche that I really have no way of knowing how to reach an audience interested in post-apocalyptic deep-sea zombie survival space-operas. Just describing the premise is difficult. Battle Planet on the other hand tells you a lot about the story in two words, so I expect that selling it will be much easier.

That’s all for now. It’s been an exciting couple of days. As always, check back here for more details.

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Hive First Draft Completely Finished (2nd Longest Book in Series, Barely Shorter than Iris) + Lots of New Announcements

Hive is done! At least, the first draft is. And despite being the fastest one written, it’s one of the longest ones. The final draft comes in at 145,764 wordcount and 248 pages in Microsoft Word.

Obviously wordcounts change from a first draft to a final draft. That makes sense. For instance, the first draft of Iris was 170,812 words at 305 pages. The first draft of Kholvaria was  137,068 words and 246 pages. Now in their final iterations, Iris is closer to 160K and Kholvaria is closer to 140K. So the point is, this is all subject to change. But one thing that I am fairly confident will be consistent is: Hive will be a long book and it will likely remain the second-longest in the series.

I finished the final chapter the other day and worked on the epilogue today and yesterday. Writing the epilogue was exciting and I’m proud to say I’m finishing the series on a good note. Sometimes when a series goes on for a long time, the plot can grow too big to have a nice resolution or the story gets too muddled and there are thousands of unfished plotlines dangling. But The Color of Water and Sky wraps up nicely and ends where it should. It’s not like a comic series that stretches on and on and never ends. There is a proper ending.

Hive is the last book in the series, but of course, that’s not to rule out the possibility of something else in the future. Prequels or spin-offs are always possible and I did tease the idea of a short story collection set in the world of Water and Sky months ago. That is still very much an idea I am toying with. But as far as the main plot goes, it is done. This was intended to be four books and four books it is.

The next step for Hive is going to be editing, formatting and cover art. That’s a fun time.

You’re probably wondering what’s next after that. With the series over, I’m sure you’re hankering for more. Well, do not despair! I have more news!

If you follow this blog regularly, you know that I recently wrote about the idea of putting my comedy short stories together and releasing it as a collection. Well, it just so happens that I’ve written a few more comedy short stories in the last couple of days. First I wrote a story about fraternity brothers in space, then I wrote a story about a shy man living on an asteroid and then I wrote a story about an intergalactic post office. They’re all pretty funny, or at least they make me laugh. They’re all three pretty short too, around 5,000 words each, but combined with the two stories I did for the Pew! Pew! collections, that gives me five good comedy stories to work with at a total wordcount of 44,516. In other words, I have enough content to put together a small book!

None of this is abstract or theoretical. I’ve decided that this collection will happen. In fact, work is already underway on designing cover art for the collection, which might be released as early as November. I’m still working out details like pricing, but I think having a collection of comedy stories will be a good addition to my repertoire and will provide an alternative to people who don’t want any of that dark and gritty stuff.

So that’s two book releases in the next couple of months. What more could you ask for?

Well… Since I’m dropping news bombs, here is a list of ideas I have planned in my head for projects that may or may not happen after Hive is released. I haven’t written anything yet, but these are just things floating around:

Atlantia (A Color of Water and Sky Anthology)

This would be the aforementioned short story collection with stories set in the world of Water and Sky


Battle Planet: The Champion of Earth

The first book in a series about humans being abducted and taken to a faraway gladiator fighting ring on an alien planet. I’m also thinking of making it set during the 1980s


Battle Planet: Escape from [insert cool place or name here]

The second book in the series mentioned above, but I’m toying with the idea of having it be a prequel to the first one set during ancient times


Apex Predator

Set in WWII, a fighter pilot or a boat captain or someone like that crashes on an island in the south pacific and hides in a dark cave that leads to a cavern where sightless monsters live. Think King Kong but the whole thing is in the dark

Those are the ideas I have in my head. Maybe all of them will happen, maybe some of them will happen, maybe none of them will happen. Who knows? I don’t. Right now I’m just focusing on getting through the current projects I have going on. Then, after that, I’ll see where my crazy mind takes me.

Somewhere eventually along the line, a long-delayed project that I’m not aloud to talk about is going to get released too. I’ve written something in collaboration with a pretty big name that I can’t talk about yet that’s been done and ready to go for well over a year now. I’ve been paid upfront for writing it already, which is great, but it’s still not released, which is a bit frustrating. Making money is wonderful and all, don’t get me wrong, but I’d still like to see this special project out on the market. I can’t say anything else about it since it is a secret, but know that there is something else floating around that may or may not come out at any time (the last update I heard was that it might be released around January).

Sorry if that was a bit cryptic, but I bring it up to let you know that there are a lot of things happening and that just because The Color of Water and Sky series is finishing up, it does not mean I am finished releasing books. You’ll see a lot more.

I know that was a lot of news at once, but there will always be more announcements to come. As always, check back here for the latest.

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Last Chapter of Hive is Done!

The final chapter of Hive is finished and boy does it end on a high note (or should I say a “Hive-note”?).

I’ve already gone through and re-read the whole thing to proof read it. The finale is so exciting, so explosive and so action-packed that it’s thrilling to read again and again! It’s also the longest chapter yet, coming in at a whopping 20 pages in Microsoft Word and 12,469 words, which is the length of some entire short-stories.

Of course, none of this is set in stone. Now that the final chapter has been written, I still have an epilogue to write and I still have to go through and edit everything. So it is likely the final chapter’s wordcount will change. But still, that gives you a ballpark.

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Now that the main story is done, there are a couple of things I want to focus on in my edit-through.

The first is 1) Ophelia needs more time. As you know from reading the series, she is a pivotal character, but in my initial draft, I definitely put her off to the sidelines more than I should have.

The second thing I want to focus on is 2) Ikharus’s personal worries and concerns. He is concerned about the world and his Chiefdom through most of the story (rightfully so, since he’s the leader), but I can tell he needs more personal weight. So I want to focus on that too.

So those are a couple of priorities I have during my edit-through. I’m sure I’ll also think of more things as I go.

Now that the final chapter has been written, things should move pretty quickly. This is the stage where exciting things begin to happen. Things like previews, cover art and stuff like that should be rolling out in the next few months, with a December release date looking more and more likely.

As always, check back here for more details!

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Hive First Draft Nearly Finished

The rough draft is almost done! It’s three chapters to go, followed by an epilogue for Hive (so think of it as four more chapters if you want). Then my rough draft will be complete.

Today I spent a bulk of the day working on it. I managed to write a full chapter and a bit of another. I got a lot of words in today. And speaking of words, here’s a fun fact:

The unfinished draft of Hive is already longer than the complete book of Veznek. The book is currently on track to be longer than Kholvaria, but likely shorter than Iris. That would make Hive [predictively] the 2nd longest book in the series once it’s finished, which seems pretty likely to be the case.

Despite the length of the book, the per-chapter page count is actually lower than the other books. In this case, the fact that there are more chapters make up for the fact that the chapters are shorter on average. Much like Cassidy, the story moves pretty quickly and visits a huge variety of different locations. Hence the need for shorter chapters and more of them.

I am pretty excited that the book is starting to come together. Now that an end is close to sight, I am starting to think that a December release date could be possible. I’d LOVE to get it released around that time, ideally before Christmas. With people getting Kindle readers as gifts, December 25th is often a big day for book downloads. I also know that the sooner I get books released, the sooner I see a hike in sales across all books, not just whatever is new.

In general, sales have slowed a LOT lately. This is the slowest month of sales I can remember in a long time. But I’m not surprised. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new release and now that the two short story collections are no longer on the market, I’ve definitely seen a drop in customer traffic. I guess I didn’t realize how many of my sales were driven from the Pew! Pew! collections, but it does make sense.

But again, it’s all the more reason to get Hive out as soon as possible. When that book comes out, I know I’ll see an uptick. December is the goal right now and I’m sticking to it.

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Frat Bros in Space – Hilarious New Short Story Written in One Day

Last night as I went to sleep, I thought of a hilarious premise for a short story and something that I could definitely include in the short story collection I’m thinking about putting together, Kangblanga!

When I woke today, I finished an article I was working on for Run Washington Magazine, then immediately after that, I got to work on my new short story. I worked on it straight from beginning to end until I finished the whole thing. Then I even went back and edited it all through.

I’ve been laughing about it throughout the day today.

Without further ado, the premise is this: An extraterrestrial grants four fraternity brothers access to unlock all the knowledge in the universe. But the only catch is, the gate to infinite knowledge can only be opened by a virgin. And since they are all frat bros, none of them are willing to admit that they are virgins, so they just stand at the gate and argue. Meanwhile, all four of them are virgins the whole time.

I’m laughing even just typing that plot summary. Something about frat bros in space is just so hilarious. Oh, I am really proud of this one!

Here is the blurb I’ve written:

It’s 1999 at College State and Gordan is ready to score with his crush during a party at the Sigma Delta Purple frat house. But the event is suddenly interrupted when an extra-terrestrial arrives, granting four boys the opportunity to unlock all knowledge in the universe. The catch: the knowledge can only be claimed by a virgin… and no frat brother is willing to admit that they are.

The story comes out to just over 5,000 words, so it’s not long at all. It’s a very short story, more like a bit or a sketch than anything else. For that reason, it will make a good addition to a short story collection.

Here is a preview of Sigma Delta Purple:

 

“Will the Real Slim Shady please stand up?” the crowd chanted as Eminem’s new track blasted through the $30 speakers taped to the ceiling of the dimly lit fraternity house on Fraternizer’s Row.

The house smelled of cheap beer. The scent was literally embedded into the wood of the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Even breathalyzing the air itself would have given a positive read.

Gordan jumped up and down to the song, then fisted the air to the tight beats, careful not to spill any of the beer out of the open can in his hand.

“Yo, G-Man!” Paul “Paulie-Boy” Fatone shouted, waving his free hand.

“Yo,” he replied. He stopped dancing and pushed his way through the crowd until he met up with Paulie-Boy.

Paulie-Boy was a classic Italian stereotype. He had thick black hair, a short stocky build and tanned skin. What he lacked in stature he made up for in smooth coolness. Paulie-Boy had a way with the girls, everyone knew it. He bragged about sleeping with so many girls, sometimes multiple at the same time. There were even rumors going around that Paulie-Boy was only two girls away from sleeping with the entire Alpha Epsilon January sorority house.

“Hey man, this party is the bomb!” Paulie-Boy said, smiling.

“Thanks.”

Gordan had done most of the work to set up the party. He had procured the drinks, the food, set up the music, everything. This was his creation, his baby.

Paulie-Boy leaned in close, keeping his voice down, or as down as he could with the music and revelry blaring around them.

“Hey, I just saw Christine walk in. She’s lookin’ fresh!”

Christine, Gordan thought. He tried his best not to show it, but he suddenly felt nervous, not because he didn’t expect her to come, but because he had been hoping for it all night long and wasn’t quite sure what to do when and if she actually showed.

This whole party had really been his way of trying to set up a situation between them. Gordan had is eye on Christine for weeks now. The freshman brunette liberal arts major had come to College State on a soccer scholarship. They were in the same Intro to Introductions 101 class together, a gen-ed requirement for all students, but he hadn’t yet found the courage to talk to her yet.

This was his chance.

“Come on, go say hi!” Paulie-Boy said, shoving him toward the direction of the kitchen.

“As if! I don’t even know where she is.” Gordan searched the area, but with so many people, it was impossible to find anyone in the crowd.

“She just walked in so she’s probably going to get a drink. Look in the kitchen.”

“Did she come with anyone?”

“Yeah, a couple of Delta Delta Delta girls.”

“Just girls? No guys?”

“No guys,” Paulie-Boy replied, shaking his head with a smile. He motioned toward the kitchen again. “Go,” he said. “Have fun!”

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Hive 2/3 Written + Update on Short Stories

Progress on the novel Hive continues. The draft of the upcoming fourth part in The Color of Water and Sky series is now 2/3 written! It’s fun to work on this project, despite not having as much time lately to write. But when I can work on it, I get a lot of writing in at once.

In my last entry on this site, I wrote about how it was difficult to find time to write in my summer schedule. Another part of the reason I have not been writing my books is because I have also been working on two new articles for Run Washington Magazine, which you can read here:

www.runwashington.com/2018/08/30/novas-cross-country-program-started-fast-with-a-motivated-coach/
www.runwashington.com/2018/09/04/burke-lake-a-tale-40-years-in-the-making/

In addition to those two Run Washington stories, I’m also working on another one now, which should be out soon (still not finished writing it yet). So there has been a lot of writing lately on the magazine-side of things.

I’ve also been doing a lot of reading lately. I just finished the book Ready Player One and absolutely loved it. I thought the book was brilliant, incredibly gripping and fun and I can’t wait to see the movie adaption that just came out. Right now I recently started a new book called The Games, which has been described to me as The Hunger Games meets Jurassic Park. I’ve only recently started that book, so I am not yet sure what I think of it.

In other news, the Pew! Pew! short story collections have all been removed from Kindle. This is not a surprise, as there was always a pre-set end-date for these limited release collections. And although the collections are no longer available on Kindle, the paperbacks are still available for sale. Now that the collections have been pulled from Kindle, that means the rights to the two stories I contributed now come back to me.

All in all, I made a couple hundred dollars off of my two stories being in those collections. I can still make a bit more money off of future paperback sales, but without a digital presence, I don’t expect to make much more from those stories anymore.

Now that I have the rights to those two stories again, I’ve been thinking about republishing them as part of a different collection – this time with all my own stuff. I was thinking about maybe writing two other comedy short stories and including all four together in one collection all my own, which I would call Kangblanga!. This is still just an idea, but as of now that is what I am toying with. Balls have more-or-less started rolling on this, though nothing has been committed yet.

As for the immediate future, you can and should expect a lot of progress on Hive in the next few days, as well as a new Run Washington story out soon. As always, keep checking back on this blog for all the newest updates.

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Progress Slowed Significantly on Hive

Sorry for the delay in writing any updates on this blog, but the reason for that is that there haven’t really been any updates.

For the last few years, summer has consistently proven to be a busy month for me both at work and in my social life. I have more going on at home and more to do in general (and I don’t even have kids yet!). As a result, my writing has basically stalled.

Through the last few months, I have had a few positive writing achievements. I was able to write three new articles for a local magazine. Though this isn’t work on Hive, it still kept my writing juices flowing to an extent.

To stimulate sales, I ran a few short promotions. I reduced the prices of two books and did see a spike in sales during that time and the brief time following. I’ve also had a lot of success with KU reads lately (that is people who read pages of my book using the Kindle Unlimited subscription service – think Netflix for books, where I get a fraction of a penny for every page read). It is not unusual for me to make more money from KU reads than from book downloads, and this past few weeks is no exception.

Today I did get some writing in, after a long period of not being able to do that. I’m a bit over the half-way point in Hive, but as I’m writing it, it occurs to me that it might need a more heavy editing than any of the other books so far. I’m not editing as I go as much as I used to, so I’ll have to go back and do that in more detail later.

All in all, now that summer is coming to an end, I do believe I will have more time to get back to writing again. Progress should proceed quickly from there out. The sooner I can get finished with writing Hive, the sooner I can get back to doing all sorts of fun things like getting cover art designed and trailers made. That’s the fun stuff.

In the meantime, stay tuned. Thanks for reading!

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Random Action Scene Comes out of Nowhere

It’s been a busy month and I haven’t had as much time to work on my writing as I normally do, but in the last few days I’ve made tremendous progress on the fourth book in The Color of Water and Sky series, or at least the rough draft of it. I’m pleased to say I’ve reached the half-way point in Hive.

An interesting thing happened during the last chapter I wrote. What started as a simple “character x meets with character y” in my outline somehow evolved into complete madness as I wrote it. I don’t want to give any details away, so I’ll choose a different example, but imagine that this happened:

Imagine I’m writing a fantasy story and my outline says, “a character walks to another character’s house.”

But as I write it, I think, “hmm, maybe this character should meet someone along the way, just to make things a little more exciting,” so I add in something like a bandit along the character’s walk.

Well now the bandit has a sword and starts to engage the character. The main character fights back. Suddenly I have an action scene where I wasn’t planning to have one before.

But wait… if I have an action scene in my book, I need to up the ante. I need to write something the audience has never read before, so I decide to throw a magic metal space dragon in there! Yeah, that’s cool!

But oh no, this is no setting for an action scene. I’m going to go in now and change it so instead this happening in some forest somewhere, our characters are standing on the edge of a steep precipice overlooking a pool of lava.

And there you have it. What started as “a character walks to another character’s house” has somehow now become the biggest action scene in the book.

That’s basically what happened while I was writing Hive. The chapter comes out to 16 pages in Microsoft Word and over 10,200 words (which is the length of some short stories). But as excessive as this may sound, I have to admit, it’s a really good chapter, one of my favorites in fact. Throughout the last few days, I could not stop thinking about how I was going to add to it. I know readers are going to love it and I’m super happy about how this chapter has evolved into what might be one of my strongest chapters in the entire series.

Funny how stuff works out that way.

As always, check here for more updates on The Color of Water and Sky series.

 

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I Have a Commercial!

In case you missed it, a commercial for The Color of Water and Sky was released online on Thursday and already has 300+ views. Check out the video below!

 

This commercial came together rather quickly in less than a week and cost me a grand total of $52.50 including tax. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that’s a GREAT deal!

So far, page reads on Kindle Unlimited have picked up a lot since the commercial was released, though overall book downloads have remained about the same. Still, an increase in page reads is significant (I get paid about $.004 per every page read) and in the case of longer books like Iris, I’ll often make more money from page reads than I do from downloads anyway.

Take a look at the awesome commercial! And in case you missed it, you can also check out the cheap trailer I made myself for Iris way back in 2016, which has just shy of 800 views:

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Hive now 1/3 Written

You read that headline correctly. One third of Hive is now fully-written, or at least the rough draft is written.

I started working on Hive before Veznek was already released, so it’s not like this has all come together in the last few weeks. Still though, the writing process is coming along quicker than it has with other books.

One reason this book is coming together so quickly is because the story plays out much more straight-forwardly compared to all the others. In Iris, much of the book was world-building. Kholvaria also had to do a lot of world-building, plus started to deal with some splintering plot-lines a bit. And Veznek was complicated through the fact that every character was in a totally different place. With Hive, our splintered plot-lines begin to realign and now that we’re onto book 4, most of the world-building has already been done.

In my outline, I divided Hive into three equally lengthed Acts. Much like the popular “three act structure“, Act 1 provides the setup, Act 2 provides the conflict and Act 3 provides the resolution. But unlike the classic structure, my Acts are equally lengthed. I’ve broken from the common rule that Act 1 should be your shortest section, that Act 2 should be about 40% of the story and then that Act 3 should be the last 20-30%. I’m messing with those ratios here, but I’m doing it in a way that makes it very neat and easy to write. Everything follows a neat and easy-to-follow outline.

It also helps that I genuinely enjoy telling this story. I’ve already written about how much I enjoy writing the space battles in Hive. And man, it’s fun! Another part of what makes writing Hive so fun is connecting all these plot threads. I love it when two tangential plotlines finally collide. It’s like the moment all the Avengers assemble in New York for the first time.

So with a straightforward plot, an easy-to-follow outline, awesome space battles and a bunch of characters getting together, I expect that the full book will come together rather quickly.

Obviously I will let you know more as I know it. Until then, keep on checking back here for more info!

Take care!

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