Jason Rodriguez's Blog, page 13

Second drafts - they can take your story in weird...

Second drafts - they can take your story in weird directions. 

Publicly thanking my go-to team of readers. I now really, really like the way this story is turning out.

January 21st!

"But now I’m splitting my fee three ways, and since my fee is two candy bars a day that means I need..."

“But now I’m splitting my fee three ways, and since my fee is two candy bars a day that means I need to work a case for three days in order to get the same amount of candy I used to get for working one. On the one hand, this arrangement will help with my zits as I get older. On the other hand, I really like candy bars.”

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When we last left Detective Know-It-All (in my short story collection, The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains), he formed an arrangement with Sally, the new class president, and Ricky Ricks, the former class bully to create a detective agency. How’s Detective Know-It-All making out with his new arrangement? You’ll find out on January 21st, when “Detective Know-It-All and the Once-Pink Bear Bear” premiers as the back-up story to Reggie & Reggie & Becky & Reggie’s Monster.

Yeah, the title changed - and the new cover’s going to be kind of funny, too (here’s the old one). Second drafts are wonderful things. 

Getting some positive feedback, decided to release this January...

Getting some positive feedback, decided to release this January 21st. Could be a back-up story in it, potentially another Detective Know-It-All.

2013 is underway, kids. I love you.

2012

At the beginning of 2012 I made a promise to myself: To try harder. Well, I think I accomplished that…with some minor set backs.

In January, I got my black belt in kung-fu. I also found out that my story with Scott White, “Pinocchio, or The Stars Are Not Wanted Now,” would be published in Dark Horse Comics’ Once Upon a Time Machine anthology. I also submitted the final script for my story with Charles Fetherolf, “The National Pastime ” for inclusion in Fulcrum Publishing’s District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington DC.

Good. Start. 

In February, I tore my ACL in kung-fu. I didn’t know that was what happened, however, as my doctor told me it was no big deal and I should just lay-off kung-fu for awhile. So I took up running. In March, I ran my first 5k. By the time May came around, I was doing ten-mile runs. However, I noticed my lateral motion was not improving and got a second opinion, which is when I discovered I tore my ACL.

Meanwhile, I decided to commit to a series of sci-fi shorts for kids to be released for the Kindle every month. I managed to release one every month, starting in July. Those shorts are…

The Girl Who Could Live In Yesterday
The Little Particle That Could (with Noel Tuazon)
The Monster Hunter (since declared PD)
The End of Stars
The Boy Who Could See Through Mountains (which also contained “Detective Know-It-All and the Glittered-Up Glue Stick” and “Rocket Ruiz Builds a Warp Drive”)
Pinocchio, or The Stars Are Not Wanted Now (with Scott White, which also contained “Anita’s Dreams”)

I got surgery in August following a trip to Disney World with the niece and nephew. Rehab was terrible. However, under the haze of Percoset, I somehow managed to land a three-book deal with Fulcrum Publishing for a series of graphic novel anthologies about the colonial New England and Mid-Atlantic regions.

District Comics and Once Upon a Time Machine were both released to rave reviews. District Comics was even named one of the top-20 books of 2012 by the Washington Post. 

In December, I started going back to kung-fu.

So, with a little knee surgery messing it up a little bit, I can say I definitely tried harder this year. 

2013? Try even harder. I need to deliver the first Colonial Comics book by September. I have six more children’s shorts to launch. By the end of next year, I will have those collected into a single edition, hopefully with a publisher putting it out. And I think I’ll finally submit a comic to the Magic Bullet. 

Never stop moving forward, right?

Today was terrible.I’m probably going to get kicked out of Kindle Direct Publishing for doing...

Today was terrible.

I’m probably going to get kicked out of Kindle Direct Publishing for doing this as it’s a violation of their terms but I see a lot of my comics friends on FaceBook talking about how we need to stop portraying guns as weapons that heroes use in the stuff we write that’s aimed towards kids. I couldn’t agree more. So here’s my story, The Monster Hunter, which is a YA story about the negative consequences of guns, free forever. 

I don’t care what you do with it. I am officially declaring this story as part of the Public Domain. Read it, print it, illustrate it, print it out and spit on it. 

I’m truly, truly sick of this shit.

"The subjects are diverse, ranging from the founding of Washington’s first newspaper to the Army..."

“The subjects are diverse, ranging from the founding of Washington’s first newspaper to the Army Medical Museum to the 1860s iteration of the Washington Nationals baseball club to religious-vision janitor James Hampton, the Bad Brains and Officer Darron Jackson, the designer of the Metropolitan Police Department’s 2009 commemorative inauguration badges.”

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District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington DC gets profiled in Roll Call! I wrote the baseball story mentioned above with artist Charles Fetherolf! And what’s that little bit at the end…

In the meantime, he’s working with Jason Rodriguez — who wrote “National Pastime” for “District Comics” — on another project for Fulcrum Publishing that follows in the District anthology’s footsteps.

“It’s early, early colonial stuff in New England,” he said. “Jason Rodriguez is heading that up. I’ll enjoy handing over the reins and being just a contributor.”

And he’ll even get to return to his roots for it. Dembicki is a longtime resident of the Washington area, but he’s originally from Connecticut, and he will be working with the state’s historian on his contribution to what is tentatively called “Colonial Comics.”

“They’re very interested in making this a historically relevant book,” he said, in a way “that you can only convey in comics form.”

After twelve years living in the DC area I get mentioned in Roll Call! I made it, ma! I. Made. It.

I posted this photoset, showing the process behind Page 1 of...

I posted this photoset, showing the process behind Page 1 of Pinocchio, or The Stars Are Not Wanted Now, a couple of months ago but figured a re-post was in order to let you know that you have one LAST chance to download Pinocchio, or The Stars Are Not Wanted Now for free. People keep downloading it so it would be stupid to let the promotion end. 24 hours ago it was at 578 downloads. Right now it’s at 725. My offer still stands, by the way, to post my most embarrassing story if it gets to 750 downloads and to record a new Drunken Wine Critic is it gets to 1,000. 

You do not need a Kindle to download and read the book! You can read it on the Amazon Cloud Reader at https://read.amazon.com/. Since it’s in Kindle Format 8 you technically can’t read it with the Kindle for PC app but I was able to and I understand other folks were, as well.

If you got a Mac there’s a Kindle for Mac app as well. The book’ll also work in the Kindle for iPad app and the Kindle droid app.

This is the last free day that Amazon allows me to have so, after this, it won’t be free again until March. Get it.

"It’s almost 3:30am and it’s been a relatively quiet evening. Then we run into the first major..."

“It’s almost 3:30am and it’s been a relatively quiet evening. Then we run into the first major trouble of the patrol. There is a loud man shouting at a group of about 6 other men a block away. He’s obviously agitated, walking quickly and screaming at them. He has a bulky jacket and a red backpack. One of the men he’s shouting at is a homeless man we spoke with earlier in the evening, who is in a wheelchair with only one leg. Phoenix rapidly breaks down what he wants everyone to do. He has Cabbie get ready to dial 911 and warns us all that he can’t be sure but the angry man could be armed. It’s strange that he’d be so confidently aggressive to a large group of people and it would be easy to hide a gun in his jacket. Phoenix lays out where we should run to cover in case a gun is pulled. I begin recording on the second GoPro but make sure to always have a car or lightpole roughly in front of me. This is getting a bit scary.”

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Chris Piers wraps up his four-part profile/interview with real-life superhero Phoenix Jones.

I have to admit - I was kind of making fun of him before he flew out to Seattle for being a Phoenix Jones fan. The whole thing just seemed pretty silly to me. Chris was at my house a couple of days before he left, showing me YouTube videos of the crime fighter and I just kept saying things like, “He’s suspicious of everyone and he probably creates the escalations just by being there.” He reminded me of this kid Jose I knew growing up who would pretend to be a cop all the time, pinning us against walls and confiscating our bikes. 

But there’s really a lot more to the man than the cowl. Chris sums it up pretty nicely:

It all serves to throw into sharp relief the difference between a comic book superhero and a real life superhero. The fictional hero gets to see the car first, then the thief. The fictional hero gets to break up a drug deal because he knows it’s going down. The fictional hero gets to knock out an aggressive man without worrying about any legal consequences or danger to bystanders. The real life superhero must tread a much more delicate line. But the drug dealers that had to walk on at the beginning of the patrol? The group of people who were not attacked? The homeless people given clothes and food? Those are real results.

So, yeah, maybe some of the videos is Phoenix inserting himself into a bunch of drunk people being drunk. But even if the guy has a 10% success rate, it’s still better than my success rate, which is zero, because all I do is watch the YouTube videos and make snide comments.

"Phoenix told me that when he first started out he went out solo and his tactics seem closer to what..."

“Phoenix told me that when he first started out he went out solo and his tactics seem closer to what you’d see in a movie than what they do now, walking the streets to offer public assistance. One of the first times Phoenix went out, he hid under a large bridge waiting for some biker gangs to show up that were dealing drugs. He set up a trip wire that knocked one rider off his bike and fired a paintball gun full of marbles at the men. He then tossed a smoke bomb and went in to tie them up but everyone was getting up by then and he had to run away.”

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Part three of my friend Chris’s four-part profile of real-life superhero Phoenix Jones. In this installment, Chris actually dons a bullet-proof vest and goes out on patrol.

It is pretty insane.

Let's Do The Numbers

I like to post a bit on Amazon numbers after a free launch and although Pinocchio, or The Stars Are Not Wanted Now’s free promotion has extended another day (more on that in a bit), I already wrote the bulk of this post before, well, more on that later.

So at around 11PM last night my new collection racked up just shy of 375 downloads and slowed to a crawl. That was a good number as far as I was concerned. Publishing exclusively to the Kindle via KDP cuts out your Nook and other eReader audiences and doing all of the panel magnification stuff in Kindle Format 8 cuts out a large portion of your Kindle audience so…I effectively cut out a very large percentage of customers. And even though I say, “You can read this book in the Amazon Cloud Reader!” which literally everyone reading this post has free access to, I still get a lot of, “I don’t have a Kindle!”

Anyways…so, yeah, I was satisfied. Sort of. The panel magnification thing is a pain in the butt and it took me about 30 hours to format an 11-page comic. That’s a whole lot of time. Now, granted, about 15 of the hours were spent figuring out how to do it, 10 were spent doing it the long way, 2 were spent doing it the short way, and 3 were spent debugging, testing, and tweaking, so future comics will be a lot easier but, still, this was time consuming as all hell. 

And I normally don’t mind time consuming, but I’m currently editing three books, teaching three classes, and have a day job. So I was getting extremely cranky.

So this post was supposed to be about trade-offs in time spent developing something vs. downloads but then, last night at 9PM, I made an almost-jokey post about the things I’d do if I got 400, 500, 750, and 1000 downloads which originally resulted in 3 new downloads. Then, at around 11:15 or so, mar-see-ah reblogged that post and a couple of minutes later inothernews reblogged it from her and, well, Tumblr loves a challenge. 

So far I’ve uploaded some old drawings (1 and 2, the 400 download unlock) and I’m scanning in some old poetry tonight (the 500 download unlock). I decided to run the promotion one more day in the hopes of getting some turnover. At the time of writing this, 12-hours after the reblogging began, we’re at 578 downloads. And I’ll keep my promise on 750 and 1,000 if it gets there by the 3AM EDT. 1,000, for super longtime readers, is a new Drunken Wine Critic video, something that people still ask me for. 

So, what did I learn? First, I learned that I have a pathetic bit of reach. I mean, truly pathetic. I thought I had some reach but one guy puts something up at a time when most east coasters are sleeping and it gets over 200 downloads in 12 hours whereas I push hard on blogs, websites, social networking and emails and get 375 downloads in three days. But that’s OK. I’ve been out of the game for about three years, really, and I just need to make new contacts is all. I got a year and a half before the first Colonial Book comes out so there’s plenty of time for that.

I also learned that all the reviews and pushing in the world from mid-audience social networking people can’t hold a candle to a superuser. I was talking to an editor friend yesterday morning and he’s pushing his own book and I just said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had just one reddit superuser in our back-pocket? No more contests, no more promotion to the point of begging…”

Well, looks like last night’s little burst proved that theory. 

I need to fill up some back pockets, I guess. 

I need new pants. I usually like small back pockets.