Jordan Castillo Price's Blog, page 11

Vic has answers. Not necessarily the right ones…

So I’m looking at my old LiveJournal blog, which I don’t plan on renewing, and thinking about transferring some of my favorite posts here.

I spotted a shot of the paperback cover from Briefs from about 14 months ago. It feels longer to me…maybe I’m aging in Bob Zigler years.

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Have you read Briefs yet? With PsyCop #9: Agent Bayne coming out next month, it’s the perfect time to revisit these shorts that span the series. Of the 20 stories, some are pretty rare, and four are totally new, including Coffee O’Clock, about the tender moment Vic and Jacob make their move-in official, and Witness, a post-FPMP novelette.

Find PsyCop Briefs Vol. 1 ebook at your favorite online store

Paperback available on Amazon (Note that every time I look up this link, Amazon shows me underpants. Every. Single. Time.)

I also spotted this gem of a post. It was fun to read the columns again. If you have any new questions for Vic, send them my way. He might be convinced to answer some more.

[image error]What do you do when your Netflix won’t stop buffering? Why is your cat making that noise? How do you get rid of mayo stains???

Ask Vic!

Ask Vic #1

Ask Vic #2

PsyCop 9 Status Report

Woo hoo, I’ve finished my third draft of Agent Bayne and I’m about to embark on my final read-through to get the novel to my line editor tonight! I’m still on-track for a January release. If all goes well, I should be able to put up a pre-order by Christmas.

[image error]Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

A valuable lesson

So I’m working on a novella where the worldbuilding involves a complex system of barter. My main character is told, “People who don’t haggle might come off like a sucker. No one respects a sucker.”

I don’t know about you, but I hate haggling. I want the price to be the price, and to pay it and be done. But that’s not how the world works. And I also hate feeling like a sucker.

Lately, I’m trying to institute a system of rewards for when I meet my goals. (See a recent post about setting habits. I get a sparkly sticker on my day planner when I do the writing sprint. Silly, but tangible.) As a big reward for finishing the rough draft of PsyCop 9, I splurged on an espresso maker. But when I went back to the Amazon page as I was setting it up, because I remembered there were useful tips in the reviews, I saw the cost of the machine was almost $20 less than when I bought it three days ago.

I really hate feeling like a sucker.

I also really didn’t want to box it back up, send it back, and rebuy it. Because then I’d eat $11 in shipping, and blow an hour trying to get it back in the box. (It was really hard to unbox.) Plus it seemed unethical, because I’d already washed the whole thing and it couldn’t be resold as new. So I wrote a nice letter to customer service asking if they could refund me the difference.

I got a canned response saying basically, no.

Annoyed, because I DON’T WANT TO BE A SUCKER, I endeavored to research my options. I saw that many credit cards offer price protection. I’m chagrined to say I paid with a debit card, so no soup for me. But you bet your bippy I set my Discover card my primary payment method for future purchases.

So, please take some benefit from this expensive lesson I learned: it’s worth checking what benefit you have on your cards and which payment method is set as your default.

(I then went and checked to see if my big spendy computer still cost the same as when I bought it. It does. Phew.)

*I think the novella will be ready by Valentine’s day. Can’t wait for you guys to read it!

Photo by Flооd on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Night Owl Or Early Bird

So are you a late night person, or an early riser? I often wonder how much of this propensity is nature, and how much nurture. I remember being the first one to pop out of bed early in the morning ever since I was a little kid. Nowadays, it’s a real struggle when I travel to different time zones for conventions and run the risk of starting my day at 3 AM and crapping out by 8.

Today I was pretty tickled to sleep past sunrise and get up around six-thirty. I find that my day tends to lag after I’ve worked for about four hours, maybe five. Right now I’ve eaten lunch and I’m running the risk of losing myself down an Internet hole. Sometimes I go to water aerobics around now as a delightful midday break.

Right now? I am really close to finishing a project, and hoping that scribbling down a quick blog post will help get me back into the writing saddle!

Habits – Breaking or Making

Wouldn’t it be great if building the habits you wanted was as easy as brushing your teeth? I can’t imagine going to bed without doing it, and in fact I’d get out of bed and do it if I forgot. Because, yuck. But other things I’d like to do just sail past, and before I know it, the day is over…and it’s time to brush my teeth.*

I’m reading The Indie Book Marketing Crash Course and the week 1 assignment is to figure out a habit you’d like to instill, and figure out the trigger for that habit. (Grab the book if you want to learn more, it’s currently free.) My habit of choice is a 15-minute timed writing sprint to prime the ‘ol pump. I was pleased when I thought of the habit. It’s small enough to not psych me out but important enough to spark useful productivity. But I found that deciding on the habit wasn’t enough. I had to link it to something else.

I decided “first thing when I sit down at the computer.” That seemed to be the key to making it work. Because even if I’m dying to check my email or Facebook, I can do the fifteen minutes first. Typically it turns into more, too, which is exactly what I want.

*I do brush my teeth more than once a day

A PsyCop 9 Cutting Room Floor Snippet

Progress Report

I’m pleased to update that I’m working on my first content edit of PsyCop 9: Agent Bayne and I’m still on track for a January release. I haven’t decided yet whether to run a preorder; I know lots of folks like the convenience but I hear so many horror stories about preorders gone glitchy and serving up the wrong file. So we’ll see!

In the meantime, here’s a Vic/Jacob kiss from the cutting room floor. I had to change the tone of the scene and couldn’t use it after all.

Agent Bayne
cutting room floor

I turned in Jacob’s arms, fit myself up against his chest, and angled my head for a real kiss. He smelled like winter and his lips were cool, but they warmed against mine soon enough. He ground himself against me, slid his tongue against mine, and the countertop was a solid weight at my rump. We’d never done it on that particular countertop, I realized—and if that’s where we were headed, I wouldn’t complain. But no, it was just a kiss. And that was fine too. Jacob and I would be seeing a hell of a lot of each other now, and I was only slightly worried about the implication of joining him at the office. After all, what was sharing an office compared to sharing a bed?

He hung up his suit jacket and strapped on an apron while I leaned against the counter and watched him go through the spice rack and pick out the seasonings with no help from a recipe, as confident in the kitchen as he was between the sheets. Jacob could be a bit much for some people, but when the two of us were on the same page, I truly enjoyed spending time together. And now we wouldn’t have my frustration over my pointless police work hanging between us. True, my duties wouldn’t be anywhere near as satisfying—I was no longer a homicide investigator, and would only be serving as a supernatural exterminator for the FPMP building. Once I got rid of the resident repeaters, it might even be a little dull.

Maybe I was ready for dull. It would be a hell of a lot better than racking up more weeping, wailing murder victims with no chance of bringing them justice.

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Treat yourself to a PsyCop tee! Available on Amazon in the US with free Prime shipping, and at JCPBooks Merchandise with additional styles and international shipping.

Mechanical Issues

I have an appointment at the car dealership today, and I just had the random passing thought, What if I accidentally showed up in my bathing suit? Because usually when I go somewhere in the middle of the day, it’s the pool.

Then I thought, And what if my mechanic is wearing this thing I found on Amazon?

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Really, the possibilities are endless.

All Hail the Space Bar

So I was futzing around with Adobe Bridge today. It’s the least glamorous of all the Creative Suite, basically a way to view and organize files. But many years ago I realized it had some secret powers I could use to optimize my day job workflow. Back then I had a bunch of scanned documents with weird names and half of them upside down. I figured out a way to rename them all and rotate the upside down half with a few keystrokes. So I knew Bridge probably had many secret powers I was unaware of.

One of my readers gave me a tip that Lynda.com (the freaking awesome learning site) might be available through my local library. (Please feel free to brag if it was you!) At the time, it wasn’t available. Now that I’ve moved to a different system, it is. So I hunted down a course on Bridge on Lynda.com to see how horribly I was misusing it nowadays.

Holy crap. Within the first few videos I learned that I could touch the spacebar while I’m browsing for a full-screen preview.

DANG

What would you do for $100?

I was flailing around in the pool today at water aerobics. I don’t teach anymore…I’m enjoying myself as a participant again. (This is a very good thing.) Anyway, I was tooling along when I realized I could go a little harder. And then I thought, “What if we were all wearing heart rate monitors and whoever worked the hardest today got $100?”

Obviously there was no hundred dollars. But it was such a tangible notion that every time I felt myself just faffing around, I thought “A hundred dollars,” and got with the program.

I wonder what else I could bribe myself to achieve for a nonexistent hundred bucks. But it seems to me it can’t be overused or, with no reward coming, the tactic will eventually backfire.

[image error]Photo credit: Old Shoe Woman via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-SA

Bestselling Tee of the Week 10/30-11/6

One of my PsyCop tees was my top selling Tee on Amazon this week, hooray!

I have a fun story to go with it. I was shuttling to the airport after GRL and was sitting with someone I’d met in passing the night before, so he asked me about what I wrote. When I told him my biggest series was PsyCop, he didn’t say, “Oh, I’ve heard of it.” He said, “I’ve been seeing T-shirts everywhere!”

My readers are so awesomely supportive