Chauncey Rogers's Blog, page 4

A Nightmare & An Update

Dreams are strange things. I don’t worry too much over what they might mean, but I certainly enjoy talking about them.

The other night I had a dream. It turned into a nightmare, but from my experience that’s how all nightmare’s go. You never start out in a nightmare; rather, a dream becomes a nightmare. Sometimes it happens slowly, and sometimes the change feels instant. I guess it’s just a reflection of life in general. Fortunately, not all dreams become nightmare–another reflection of life.

In my dream, I was visiting a high school literature class to discuss my writing with them. The entire junior class was reading one of my books (though I honestly can’t recall if it was Home To Roost or Cleaving Souls).

At first, it was very exciting. But then the longer I talked with them, the more I realized that very few of them cared what I had to say. It dawned on me that my book had become another one of those much-loathed required readings, like A Separate Peace or The Scarlet Letter. And if that were the whole dream, it would have been strangely sad, but I wouldn’t have called it a nightmare.

The nightmare began when I noticed that even the teacher thought my story dull and drab. She said that the only reason that they were reading it at all was because someone in the school district was making them. When I asked more about it, the teacher said that someone (she never said who) had basically destroyed their family and their finances in support of my book, and bought copies for the entire district. It had wrecked that person’s personal life so badly, that Child Protective Services had to take their kids away, and now the school had to take care of the kids all the time.

So that was pretty awful.

But then the teacher released the class for the day, and took me to the room I would be staying in, courtesy of the school. Where was it? At the school. What was it? The school cafeteria.

The high school emptied and made that magical transformation from a lively school to a dusty mausoleum (and if you’ve never been in a school after everyone else has left, then trust me, that’s exactly what happens). Also, it was suddenly night time.

The school had provided me with a sleeping bag that smelled faintly of urine, and had me bed down atop one of the cafeteria tables. All the lights were off except one: the lights to the adjacent hallway, visible through a series of windows set in the far wall. The rustling of the sleeping bag and sound of my own breathing echoed in the cavernous room. Rather uncomfortable, but not necessarily scary.

But then I heard children crying. Not high-school age, but small children crying for their daddy. I realized that they must be the children of my patron, now wards of the school district.

“Your daddy isn’t here,” someone said, “but the man who made him go away is. Do you want to see him?” Somehow, I knew that he was referring to me, and I prayed that the children would say no.

They didn’t.

The lights were still off, except for the hall light. In the quiet, I could hear the fast drumming of little feet running, and a series of too-thin shadows scurried down the wall of the adjacent hallway, flashing from one window to the next as they ran towards the cafeteria’s doors. The kids weren’t crying anymore; they were coming for me.

I wanted to shout out that they couldn’t come in–that I didn’t want to see them at all–but I couldn’t speak.

The cafeteria doors banged open, but nobody stood in the doorway.

I heard little feet again, this time close by, moving slowly in the darkness. I could feel eyes on me as I lay atop the cafeteria table.

Then one of the kids whispered, “We want to touch him.”

I tried to scream, tried to yell for them to get back, but I couldn’t. All I could do was breath, and so I breathed as loud and as hard as I could, until I woke up panting.

Now, it may sound like a pretty stupid dream, but in that moment, it was terrifying. However, once the moment was over I was able to calm myself and go back to sleep. Sometimes silly things are very upsetting. Being silly doesn’t make them not upsetting, and being upsetting doesn’t make them not silly.

Makes me think of my three-year-old daughter. She gets upside-down about plenty of dumb things, but in the moment they’re very upsetting to her. I’ve found that it can be helpful to her if we show that we understand her feelings, and then try to put those feelings into perspective for her to see. She’s often able to recognize that whatever is upsetting her really isn’t a big deal and actually can be managed, and she calms down.

It seldom goes as smoothly if we skip the part about sympathizing.

So my thought for today is that we should try to understand and sympathize with people. Before we jump in and tell people what they should or shouldn’t do, or how they should solve their problems, we should first take a moment to try and understand what they’re feeling and thinking.

And now here’s my update:

Cleaving Souls is almost ready for launch! It’s going to be released on Tuesday, Oct. 10, in both ebook and paperback format. I’m pretty excited for that, especially since some great reviews have already rolled in! (And few things are sweeter than a positive, unsolicited review.)

The only thing left to do before the release is revamp the blurb. It’s not too bad now, and I might end up keeping it, but I’m still stewing over making it a bit longer and less generic. But I’m not sure. Blurbs are tricky for me, because I really don’t want to take away anything from the story–I’d rather my readers gets to discover everything for themselves.

For anyone else who’s excited enough to want to post about it, I’ve made some simple promotional material. Feel free to use any of it on whatever social media platforms you use.

In other news, I won a self-publishing book cover art contest (first and second place in the horror category, and first place in the thriller category). As you may or may not know, I go against all sound advice and make my own book covers. I think they turn out well, and I have a lot of fun doing it. Perhaps sometime I’ll have to make a book-cover-creation-process post, featuring different iterations of one of my covers.

That’s it for now. Happy readings!

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Thoughts on Friendless Orphans as Heroes

I’ve been reading Ready Player One lately. In it, a friendless orphan boy named Wade Watts makes some friends and saves the day. (That’s my prediction, at least. I haven’t finished yet. No spoilers!)

I’ve also read the Harry Potter series, where a friendless orphan boy makes some friends and saves the day.

And then there’s the Percy Jackson series, where a friendless boy separated from his parents makes some friends and saves the day.

Or the Artemis Fowl series, where a friendless boy distant from his parents makes some friends and saves the day.

Okay. Enough. You get it.

The conclusion here is obvious: if you want to make friends/save the day/be a hero, you must…. Sever ties with your parents and friends (or have them killed).

But really, there are at least four practical story-telling reasons why our heroes often share these traits.

It makes the hero sympathetic and excusable.

You know what gets our sympathy? Pathetic things, like kids without support from friends and family. Having no friends or family is an easy way to create an underdog protagonist, and it also excuses them for being messed-up weirdos. And we want them to be a bit messed up or quirky. And if they make mistakes–which, hopefully, they do–then we can forgive them easily. After all, they’re losers/orphans! (Cue Aladdin: “I’d blame parents except he hasn’t got ’em!”)

It gives them plenty of room for growth.

With no friends or family, there’s usually lots of room for growth: personal, social, and financial. Saving the world often involves financial growth for the hero, but it’s the personal and social growth that we really love as readers. Both of those are brought about by the hero’s friends. These friends are often totally awesome people–characters we might like even more than the protagonist. Why? They accept our sympathetic protagonist in spite of his or her faults, and then help the protagonist become a better person. They’re exactly the kinds of people we would want to be friends with! Plus, they’ll usually save our protagonist’s life a few times, or solve important riddles, or other such things.

It (sometimes) motivates our hero.

This isn’t always the case. However, sometimes the villain just happened to have killed the hero’s family and friends (Harry Potter). Or, perhaps, you need to find your missing parents (Artemis Fowl). Or maybe, you’re just trying to connect with your dad (Percy Jackson). You could even be trying to prove something to your new friends (Wade Watts). At any rate, being a friendless orphan can often help give the hero some extra drive.

It simplifies the story.

Yes, ’tis true. Reason number four is woefully practical, but incredibly important from a story-telling perspective. Indulge me as I elaborate.

You see, characters add complexity to a story. The more characters, the more relationships and subplots the writer, reader, and protagonist must juggle around. Here are some lovely illustrations to…illustrate…my point.

If you have your hero and one friend, there’s only one relationship to manage. Too easy, perhaps. You’re more likely to see this kind of setup in a story that isn’t about relationships as much. Take high-octane action movies, for instance. They’re not as much about characters, be it their growth or relationships. They’re more about how many bullets and explosions a single character can survive. The hero will have one friend, usually for banter and eye candy.

Here’s one of the most common setups. Our hero has two buddies, making three relationships. It’s enough characters for them to play off each other a bit, or have a love triangle, or for one to die, or whatever. Plus, people just like the number three, and triangles make for good art.

Once you have four characters, it jumps to six relationships, and you start to see where some of the complication comes into play. See, each of the characters needs to have relationships with one another. Our hero knows and interacts with pink, brown, and green, but pink also interacts with brown and green, and so on along all the characters. Four is still manageable, but eventually things get out of hand.

Five characters, and you have ten relationships. You can see that the number of interconnecting relationships increases greatly from four to five.

At six characters, there are fifteen relationships, and it’s starting to become a mess. I won’t go on, but hopefully it’s clear that the number of characters increases the number of relationships greatly–even if you’re only adding one more character.

Of course, you can have minor characters that are tied to only one or perhaps two other characters, but you can’t maintain a great number of interconnected main characters. Making your hero a friendless orphan allows them to make new connections (which we as readers love to see) without things getting too entangled.

So, who cares?

Well, I do, as both a writer and a reader. If you’re a writer, you should care, too. If you’re a reader, you might find this interesting.

But as human beings, perhaps we should all be interested. Because the sad fact is, in the real world most orphaned and friendless people don’t become world-saving heroes. They struggle, and they often struggle more than the rest of us. The world-saving friendless-orphan stories we love are all works of fiction. The true stories of the orphaned and friendless are tragic and lonesome, more often than not.

But there’s something that we can do.

We can be those awesome sidekick and support characters–the ones that befriend, accept, and love the friendless orphan, help them solve their problems, and maybe even save their lives a few times.

So try and reach out to one of those friendless and family-support-lacking types. Try and be the awesome sidekick character for them. They might reject your kindness or mistreat you. Just try to remember that they are sympathetic characters in a sympathetic struggle with lots of room for growth.

And if you’re having a hard time, consider that you’re the sympathetic hero of your own story, with lots of room to grow. Then find your friends, and start growing.

 

Thanks for reading some of my thoughts today. In other news, I launched an ARC copy of Cleaving Souls on Smashwords today. You can pick it up for free right now from there. I also made the preorder page for it on Amazon, with the ebook and paperback launch date set for October 10. Anyone who reads and reviews it is officially awesome. Those who do that and buy a copy are awesome+!

And the other bit of my writing news is that I got another review for Home To Roost. My dad told a lady about it, and she bought a copy and read it on vacation. Liked it so much that it dominated the vacation conversations, apparently. Then she was talking to a complete stranger about it, and ended up giving the stranger her copy, she wanted her to read it so bad. Imagine that!

 

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Moving Forward

Hello there!

Well, my last post was a rather sad one, about having to scrap 30,000 words worth of manuscript. Still kinda feel that one in my gut, to be honest, but I’m also happy to say that it was definitivamente the right thing to do. Also happy to say that I’m at 16,000 words for the newer manuscript, which hopefully is something like 1/5 of the way done.

This new pass at the novel is far more streamlined, has an adjusted point-of-view, new personalities on my protagonists, a lot of complication cleaned up, and a different age for the reader. A lot of changes, and all for the better.

In other news, Cleaving Souls is nearly ready for publication. I really probably only have an hour or so of editing left to do on it, then send it out to as many beta readers as I can get my hands on while I mull over the official blurb and back-cover material. Oh, also, I’ll need to typeset the print edition, and make sure the e-book is clean and shiny. But I did those things myself for Home To Roost, so they shouldn’t take too long. I haven’t heard any complaints from my readers regarding formatting for Home To Roost, and I’ll assume that means I did a good (enough) job. It looked legit to me, at least….

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Tough Decisions

There’s a principle of economics called “Sunk Costs.” The way I understand it is this: even if you put a bunch of time into something, if the end product isn’t going to be worthwhile, then ditch it. This can be painful because of all the time you’ve already invested, which will now essentially go to waste.

Unfortunately, knowing about sunk costs and the math behind it doesn’t make it any less painful.

Earlier this year, I was working on a space opera. I had mixed feelings about it. Writing was going slow in places, but I persevered. I finished it, and then… chucked the whole thing. 120,000 words. But it wasn’t good enough, I won’t publish something that isn’t good enough.

The flaws were too deep for mere editing to get them out, but I plan on coming back and rewriting the story someday. Just not today.

Well, I’m having to scrap something else right now. I’m 30,000 words into a novel, and I realized that I’m telling it the wrong way. I need to change the point of view, get deep into one of my character’s heads, get rid of a bunch of the cast, and then change the tone of the story. Once again, too radical for edits to fix. Just start from the bottom.

It’s painful, but I believe it to be the right call. Time will tell.

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Book Release Plans

Ta-da! Cleaving Souls is almost done. Rough draft. Check! First round of edits and revisions. Check! Second round of edits and revisions. Check!

Now I just need to contact early readers, distribute copies to them, plan the release schedule, makeup release materials, contact book bloggers for a blog blitz or tour, organize with said bloggers, and record and edit the audiobook.

Geesh.

I’m also expanding out and trying my hand at editing some other people’s work. Gotta keep those editing skills sharp (or sharpen them up, as the case may be.) And I’m still plowing into the rough draft for The Glass Heist.

It’ll be interesting to see how my hard-earned experience with publishing Home To Roost affects this next book release. Fingers crossed for good things!

And speaking of good things, I’m looking forward to another blogger’s review of Home To Roost, this time on Southern Today, Gone Tomorrow.

In more personal news, we saw some family for the eclipse, which was great. There was a lot of cloud cover, so we didn’t see the eclipse, which was less-great. But oh well. We’ll just plan more carefully for the 2024 eclipse, I guess.

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Countdown Sales Experience

Well, I tried my luck with another marketing thing. Two, actually.

The first was to lower the pricing on Home To Roost from $3.99 to $0.99 for a week, just to see if that would boost the number of sales coming in from advertising on Amazon. Which I suppose it did. They jumped from zero to one. It’s something!

The other thing was to try tweeting about it with the #99c tag. To make a confession here, I have very little idea what I’m doing on Twitter. I’ve had an account for a long time, but used it very little. In fact, my tweet about the sale was the 18th tweet I’d ever made, and probably the first one I’d made with a real hashtag on it. I’ve been meaning for the past two days to look into using Twitter as a more effect platform for connecting with readers and other writers, but have yet to do anything about it.

Anyways, the tweet went out and… I got another sale! Was it related to the tweet? Probably not. But it might have been. But probably not.

So basically, a week of putting Home To Roost at $0.99 has almost passed, and I’ve made two sales. Once Amazon takes their cut, I made a whopping $1.40 or so. Again, it’s something!

But this is all a great learning experience. I’m making very different plans for how and when to release Cleaving Souls. Hopefully I’ll be able to apply this wisdom to miraculous effect!

 

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Apps, Chickens, Sheep

I made a decision just now: I will not be using the WordPress mobile app to create blog posts. Here are my reasons:

I don’t think that it syncs well.

That’s pretty much it, actually. Everything else would be fine. But I’d just written up a nice little post, published it, went to check it online and…..nothing! So I checked it on my phone, and it had the design for site a mashup of its current design and its former design. Yikes! I waited for a while, and the post never did show up on my computer, so I’m just ditching the app when it comes to writing posts.

But what I had posted about was this:

We had a nice little book club meeting. My wife is a member in a small book club, and they gave Home To Roost a try. We had the club members over to our place for a luncheon and a tour of the actual locations in the book, given by the author, yours truly!

I wish I’d prepared for the tour better. Maybe come up with some more amusing anecdotes or something. But it was muggy outside, and I was nervous, and it was probably for the best that it didn’t last too long.

I did make a great chicken cake, though! (Don’t worry, it wasn’t a chicken cake. Just a chocolate cake with a picture of a chicken on it.)

Yummy Chicken Cake

In other news:

I think I’m going to dedicate some time to learning the ropes of some social media tools that I’ve ignored up until now.
I need to start being a little more cautious in how I phrase and share opinions on other people’s blogs. I know I’ve been guilty of leaving too long of comments, and perhaps some other sins as well.
I had to put my sheep in time-out today. My three-year-old was jumping on the trampoline, and the sheep decided to attack her from beneath. She ran under the trampoline and was headbutting directly beneath my daughter, which was very alarming for her. Lots of tears. Ba-a-a-ad sheep.

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What am I doing here?

Okay peoples of the internet, it’s time for me to decide just exactly what I’m doing here.

Not here on earth. I’m not wanting to launch into some big existential conversation or anything. I just mean here, as in here on this blog.

Originally, I’d hoped to mostly keep it to publishing and writing news. Make it about being an Indie author, and the process of trying to make that work for me. But I suppose it’s high time that I reevaluate what that means.

The truth is, I’m not a very successful author yet. I’m working to change that, but for now, I’m still trying to break into triple digits on sales, and it’s been almost four months now. I haven’t lost hope, but I’m realizing that for me to post regularly on this blog, or even semi-regularly, I might have to include some other things.

Things about myself, outside of writing, perhaps.

And so I’ll probably start doing some of that. At least, I will for the foreseeable future.

At first I’d wanted to avoid doing much of that, because, well, it seemed pointless. Then, as I was looking into different book bloggers’ sites, I found this one, by a wonderful person named Kerrie.  She really opens up to her readers in her “About Me” section (which is where the link will take you), and it was such a nice change. Most of the blogger profile pages I’d come across were very guarded. “I’m so-and-so. I like fish, but I hate fish. LOL!” And that was about it. But because Kerrie was willing to share more about herself, I took greater interest in what she had to say.

Now, writing about myself might not have that same effect, but I still want to do it for two reasons.

I think that the world will be a better place when people open up with one another more. If we’re open with each other, then we might understand one another better. And when we understand one another, we will probably be far less likely to hurt one another. I’m not saying I feel misunderstood or anything, but I do hope that by opening up a bit more, maybe somebody else will feel inspired to do the same, just the same way that I felt inspired to open up after reading Kerrie’s blog. (That’s my altruistic reason.)
I need things to talk about. You’re supposed to post semi-regularly on a blog to keep it rolling. Once a month does not qualify as semi-regularly, I’m pretty sure. So, I guess I’ll just talk about myself and other writerly-related things. (That’s my shallow reason.)

And now I’m off to update my “About Me” section. Then I’ll probably do some editing on Cleaving Souls, and then work on an Amazon Marketing Campaign for Home To Roost.

Peace!

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My Free, Passive Marketing Experiment, Day 2

Well, yesterday was day two, as the post’s title suggests, and I’m starting to think that maybe this isn’t the brightest idea I’ve ever had. Granted, I didn’t think it was all that brilliant to begin with–more interesting. I suppose it’s given me something to write about, so it’s not a total loss.

Obviously, it didn’t go too well.

I set the book down at about 10:15 AM. Then I started looking into book sales for Home To Roost. I was going hither and thither on the internet, getting into whatever kind of free book promotions I could find (for those interested, here’s a listing here of places that do free book promos, except, only some are free, and only some are still working).

I got a bit too engrossed in what I was doing, because at some point between 10:30 and 11:00, Home To Roost disappeared. *GASP*

Now, this wouldn’t have been all that big of a deal, since a paperback is less than $12 (just kidding. $12 is a big deal.) But this wasn’t just any ol’ copy. This was the very last, final edit copy. The one where my wife finally found the last few sneaky typos and marked them. The one that I was going to use to make the last corrections on Home To Roost‘s manuscript, because you can do that when you’re using Amazon.

I didn’t exactly panic, per se, but I was concerned.

Turns out, I didn’t need to be. After a few minutes and a couple (rather embarrassing) conversations with librarians, I found the copy. It had been scooped up to be re-shelved, and then dumped with the books that the library was selling. No trip to the lost and found.

Oh well. I guess I should just be thankful it wasn’t the garbage.

I may need some time before I do this again. Maybe a different library. We’ll see.

In other news, deciding to make my book free has been interesting. As I mentioned, I spent almost the entire day yesterday trying to get it involved in promotions. A word of advice to other newbie Indie authors out there: don’t haphazardly give your book away for free. I would have been much wiser to plan this out a bit. Most places let you schedule a month in advance. Many of them require you to schedule at least 3 days in advance. So make a plan, mark it on the calendar, and then start trying to get in on promotional things.

This time around, I’m only doing free options. In the future, I might just bite and try some of the $15 or $30 dollar promotional packages. We’ll see.

But, as for results, yesterday my book climbed from #1,293,234,674,103 (not really, but it was some big number) to #140sh in the Horror genre, and to #8 in the literary mystery and thriller genre on Amazon (of the free books, that is).

I’ll be curious to see just how high I can get it before the promotion period ends at the end of the day Monday. Hopefully, some good will come of this.

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My Free, Passive Marketing Experiment, Day 1

It’s a simple plan, really, inspired mostly by my wife and my sister in law.

What happened was this: my sister in law was kind enough to purchase a copy of Home To Roost, even though she’s not an avid reader. That’s fine, of course. She had said copy lying about her home when a friend came over. The friend saw the copy on the coffee table, was drawn in by my brilliant cover design (I’ll let you decide if that’s sarcasm or not), and asked about the book. My sister in law, who hadn’t read it, told her what little bit she knew. Her remarks, combined with the blurb on the back, were enough to get her friend to ask if she could borrow it.

A few days later, that experience had translated into another 5-star review. Hooray!

My wife, after hearing that story, has joked about leaving copies lying around for people to see. And then I thought I’d actually give it a try, in a limited fashion.

See, I work in libraries often. I pick a table, pull up a chair, set up my laptop, and write for hours. So, what I’m going to do is bring a copy of Home To Roost with me to the library, set it out on a table, and just keep an eye on it while I work–see if anybody glances at it, picks it up, etc. Maybe it will be revealing, maybe it won’t.

Today was a won’t-be-revealing kind of day, I decided.

I set up to write in my usual place, and left the paperback a good twenty feet away, on a separate table. I’d only been working for about ten minutes when I got my first interaction between the paperback and a library patron.

Unfortunately, it was also the last.

Some young people–I want to say that they were homeless based on their level of grunge, but it can be hard to tell with millennials–came and sat around the book. One of them, a tired girl in a drab hoodie, glanced at the book. Then set her Mountain Dew next to it.

The group had apparently come to the library for a ten-year-old’s version of a feast, because they proceeded to pull out candy from their backpacks. Red Vines, Peanut Butter Cups, Jelly Beans…it seemed everything was represented. Then they ate candy, drank soda, and watched loud videos on their phones, alternating between ones where people were screaming, and ones where people were laughing.

Eventually the girl fell asleep. The guys took turns going outside for a smoke break, one of them always standing guard over their candy-wrapper horde while the others smoldered their cigarettes away outside. The lot were kind of like a group of dragons. (What is the term for a group of dragons, by the way? I don’t know. I’ll make one up.) The lot were kind of like a fantasy of dragons.

Anyways, one by one, the candy got to them. Just before I left for the day, the last one slipped into a sugar coma on the library’s couch, my book lying between the lot.

I packed up my computer, then sneaked between the sleepers and recovered my paperback, then went home. As soon as I arrived, I adjusted the e-book price of Home To Roost from $2.99 to FREE, but only for the next five days. I suppose, after how things went at the library, I felt like I still needed to do something. This is all experimental, anyways. All in the name of science. Whatever.

Anyways, get it while it’s hot. Or free.

And hopefully, tomorrow’s library experiment will go better.

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