Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 39

Pushing a boulder for fun and fitness, but not profit

So, I’m kind of stuck on the revisions for Alice’s series, and I’m taking a three day weekend to regroup before starting over. While I’m happy with the direction of the main story, I feel like the narration is weak when it comes to descriptions of locations and characters. This means even more delays before I can get around to my editing list, and that I likely won’t be writing anything new for the rest of the year.

As I’m doing nothing today, I decided to clean up my Twitter stream to get rid of the anti-social folks who’ve automated a continuous feed of ads. I did this by going to profiles and seeing what they’d been tweeting for a few pages, and it’s because of this that I noticed a number of writers have given up recently. I don’t mean that they went quiet on Twitter. I mean they gave up writing because they couldn’t build a big enough audience to support their work. This follows an announcement a few days ago from a reviewer I know who’s given up on blogging book reviews because they can’t see it having any positive effects.

When I saw that announcement, I’d begun thinking about whether I should call it quits too. But I couldn’t see doing it, even if I have low sales and a low audience here on the blog. I just enjoy writing too much to give up. HOWEVER, I am giving serious thought to removing all of the Mystical World Wars books from my vendors and declaring it a failed experiment. Aside from the first two books of the Campaign Trilogy and Blood Relations, very few of the books have ever sold much. It’s been harder and harder to think about new stories in the series because of how poorly every title has sold over the last few years. My writing plans called for an additional 20-30 novels covering a global resurgence in mystical races. It was perhaps too ambitious a project, and while I’m a believer in writing for myself, the fact is, I really have been writing these books for myself. Even hubby gives me a wincing look when I ask him to read them.

Pulling those titles might give my other books a better chance of standing out, and it would free my mental palette to work on series that might have a better chance of one day picking up an audience. Plus, I have to admit it’s become an intimidating list for new readers. It’s much easier to sell someone a series with four or five books with a definite conclusion, and at this point, the series has spun out to so many tangents that I keep losing track of characters. War and Peace is less confusing.

I feel conflicted about this because I love many of these characters and want other people to get to know them. But I’d hate to write more books when I know they won’t sell. It’s a lot of work making a book beyond getting the words down. There’s months of revisions and editing, money spent on covers, and time invested in promoting links. For all that work, it’s soul crushing to spend so much time on a project and not see anything come out of it.

I’m still debating over whether to pull the books or leave them up in the hopes of one day returning to the series. If I do decide to pull the books, it will probably be in December. Then in 2014, I can take stock of what titles I want to promote, and what books in my editing queue will be released and in what order they’ll go out.

Like I said, I can’t see quitting writing altogether, but I’ve lost my drive on Mystical World Wars, and I’m having trouble planning for new books, or even for editing the two books still in the queue. I don’t think it’s fair to readers to push books that I won’t give them closure on, and I can’t deny I’m slowing down in my output. I’ll give this more thought, but you can probably expect another update before I yank those titles.

So that’s it for now. I should have another book review up in the next few days, and possibly a review of GTA V in the next month or so. Gab at y’all later.

Book review: The Trouble with Fate by Leigh Evans

Before I start, I want to give a reading update that won’t be included on my review at Goodreads. I’d said a few times in previous posts that the two books I was reading weren’t very good, so you might be wondering “Zoe, did you change your mind?” No, I changed books and started reading this instead. I’ll go back to the others soon enough, but I figure, why not have a positive review every once in a while?

So, The Trouble with Fate is about Hedi Peacock, or Helen Stronghold from her old life. Hedi has had it rough because she watched both her parents get killed, and her twin brother was stolen by the fae and carried to their dimension while she was left alone in a burning house. Being half fae and half werewolf, she’s a hunted abomination, and so she’s spent most of her life on the run from werewolves, and from humans. Her only companions are Lou, her full fae princess aunt, and Merry, a fae spirit trapped inside an amulet.

Working as a barista for Starbucks, she’s rudely surprised by the return of Robson Trowbridge, a werewolf who she’d had a crush on as a child. His presence leads to her losing her job, and she goes home to discover Lou missing. She learns from the landlord that her aunt has had a nervous breakdown, leading to the police arresting Lou and taking her to the hospital. Hedi returns home, only to discover a werewolf hunting for her. And things get steadily worse from there when the same pack of wolves kidnaps Lou from the hospital. The wolves claim to want Merry, but Hedi sees photos of the amulet they want, and she’s seen it before…hanging around Trowbridge’s neck.

Hedi sets out to steal it and fails, and a raid by the wolf pack forces the two into a partnership. As the story plays out, the two get closer to each other, and closer to uncovering the werewolves’ reasons for wanting the amulet.

For the most part, I enjoyed this story, and I’m already looking forward to reading the sequel, The Thing about Wolves. Hedi is an interesting character, being short and rubenesque instead of the typical thin Minnie PR heroine. Trowbridge is kind of a stereotypical PR bad boy, but at least his reasons for being so broken make sense and help to flesh out his character.

However, there’s a couple things that bugged me about the story. The first is that the world building seems to be all about penalizing supernaturals to make them kind of pathetic. Hedi can’t use her magic without causing herself physical harm, and she can’t let humans touch her because “there’s a law” that makes it painful for skin to skin contact. Oh, but werewolves aren’t a part of this particular law, BUT there is a law on the werewolf side that says fae and wolves shouldn’t interbreed. Oy vey.

Werewolves aren’t really that big of a deal either because they have so many limitations. Hedi has even more limitations because she’s a little of both. So for a fantasy, there’s a lot of “no you can’t” that makes the supernatural races less interesting to me. I don’t want to imagine being these people. I feel sorry for them being saddled by so many rules that seem to exist strictly to cause more pain. It’s like the author thought, “How else can I torture these people? Oh! I’ve got it! MORE RULES!”

The other problem is the sex. The author goes into explicit awkward detail for sex that goes badly, and yet the follow up encounters that supposedly go better are just two-sentence knock-offs with no detail. It’s frustrating that the writer wanted to show only the lousy sex in all its detail, but then clams up on details about good sex.

These are actually minor complaints, and so I give The Trouble with Fate four stars and would recommend it to fans of paranormal fiction who’d like to read about a heroine who isn’t a stick-thin supermodel. Just keep in mind, the one halfway decent sex scene in the book will dump a bucket of cold water on you right when things were getting interesting.

Random shit and thoughts on Goodreads changes

I know I’ve been kinda quiet lately on the blog, but I’ve actually been quiet everywhere. I stopped using Facebook a while back since it didn’t feel very productive, and I haven’t felt like promoting much on Twitter either. I’m paying for that silence with really low sales, but I can’t work up the energy or the drive to get back to the “buy my book” routine. I really hope I can find my motivation once I get some new books out, but that might take a while . I’ve got a list of books I need to edit, and some of those include books I already published.

I’m having a lot of problems with fatigue, and I often drop for three hour naps in the middle of each day. It takes me an hour or two after waking up to get productive again, so I have to use the time I have wisely. Writing a blog post means spending a few hours on editing, and a lot of what bugs me is covered by other bloggers with bigger audiences who make their points more succinctly than I could. So I haven’t been doing as much ranting or rambling because I prefer to invest my energy into my creative writing instead.

The project I’m devoting my time to lately is revising the Alice the Wolf series. It’s a bit frustrating because I’ll feel like I’ve got the first couple of books up to a semi-complete state, meaning they’re ready for beta reading, and then I’ll find something in the third book and go “Wait, I need to fix that in the first book.” So I type more notes on the first pages of books one and two, and I’ll go back through them again and again. After I finish this refining process, I can start looking for beta readers and move on to editing the other stuff in my queue. Then maybe I can get around to releasing new stuff. At the rate I’m working, this might not happen until after the start of 2014.

Moving on, we got a kitten. Stella is a striped tabby with grey and black markings, and she’s slightly psychotic. I’m sporting a few hundred new holes because of her antics, and every day, she helps me find God. Usually by screaming “Augh-Goddamnit!” She’s a cute ball of fluff, and I love her, really. But sometimes I find myself fantasizing about giving her a permanent swirly in the toilet.

Which is funny because even though she’s a demon in the house, I’ve been able to put her in a harness and walk her outside on a leash without her going all schizzoid. It’s apparently very rare for a cat to walk on a leash, and people constantly stop to ask if she tolerates leash training, or if she gets along with Toffi. They stop to pet her, and then we talk. I suppose this is good in one way, in that I’m finally getting some regular practice for talking in Italian. I’m not always able to say what I’m thinking though, and it’s very strange being so full of words, but trying to cram them down into a smaller vocabulary.

Last night I complained to hubby how everyone insits that their language is very easy to grasp, and it’s only the other languages that are hard. People who make that claim forget about their parents reading them picture books to give them their first words. They forget about all those spelling tests they flunked, all those grammar and reading classes they hated. They forget it took them some sixteen to eighteen years to get a full appreciation for the rules of their language, and so they lose empathy for someone coming to the language with only a limited vocabulary and zero understanding of the rules of grammar. I’m not saying English is easier than Italian to learn, because English is a pain in the ass to learn. But I’m sick of my friends here asking me why I still can’t talk in full sentences. With one friend, I’ve begun pointing out that she’d meant to learn English for the entire time I’ve been here, and she hasn’t done it yet either. It’s a sore spot, is what I’m saying.

I’m trying to read more in Italian lately, and this too is a very humbling experience. I read aloud, and hubby corrects my pronunciation. It’s a very slow process for now, and I stumble over words all the time. One of my constant complaints is that it took Bart Simpson two month to learn French by listening to people speak during his exchange program visit, and I’ve been in Italy for nine years and barely know how to read or speak the language. But I’m determined to keep at this reading habit, so maybe 2014 will finally be the year that I become bilingual.

One thing that I’m finding is helping is to read books I’ve already finished in English and know I like. So I’m not going to abandon the book because I don’t like the story, and it’s just a slower process trying to sort out new words. Currently I’m reading Lasciami Etrare, or Let the Right One In. After this, I plan on buying the Italian versions of Twilight, Generation Dead, and Shiver. And maybe after I’ve got a better grasp of grammar and Italian idioms, maybe I’ll practice my translation skills using my back catalog.

Then I can be ignored in two languages. (Ba-dum-pish.)

So, the last thing I want to bring up is, after Amazon bought Goodreads, they’ve apparently made the decision to start moderating the site by erasing reviews AND bookshelves that focus on author behavior instead of on the books. So people can’t shelve an author under “Totally a bigot”, “Writes about abusive relationships”, or “Deserves to be raped in prison.” As usual, people are screaming censorship because they can’t say whatever they want on a corporate hosted web site. Because freedom of speech is being able to say whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want, without anyone questioning you or moderating your shit. (Unless you’re in any minority, in which case, you should watch your tone.)

The thing is, people act like there’s no easy way to tell their friends how they feel about an author without these Goodreads reviews or bookshelf titles. That’s some myopic bullshit, people. You can go to Facebook and make a note about authors you don’t like, and you can promote that note on every other social network including Goodreads by attaching the link to a status update. You can open a YouTube account and get a cheap webcam to promote your hate of certain authors and their views, or you can get a free WordPress blog and make blog posts on the authors you hate. If you want to say an author you’ve never read and hasn’t even been published should be raped in prison on your blog, there’s a 99.9% chance that post won’t be erased. (It’s still hate speech, and shock of shocks, most terms of service specifically prohibit this.)

I also find it hypocritical that you’ll bitch and moan about a controversial book and work to get it pulled from a bookstore like Amazon so no one can read it, and that’s fair. You claim it’s not really censorship when you get books banned because the “store can stock the books it wants.” But if your opinion on an author is being pulled from a service run by the same store, suddenly that’s censorship and it’s tyrannical abuse of your freedom of speech. No, it’s really not, and if you want someplace to complain, you can always get a free blog or a vlog and go at it. If an idiot like me can set up a blog and a YouTube account, it can’t be that hard, can it?

Since I’m on the topic, this means that when you review a book on Goodreads, you have to talk about the book and why you hated it. You can’t talk about the author’s behavior and then conclude, “And that’s why I won’t read this book.” Cause if you do that, it’s going to get erased for not being relevant. You want to claim that’s unfair to you? No, it’s not, and you’re just expressing outrage for having your entitled opinion erased from a place where it doesn’t belong.

Besides that, if you haven’t read a book, why are you leaving a review for it? You don’t like Becca Fitzpatrick or Cassandra Clare? Fine, go rant away in a blog post about it. But when you write a review about the author in the space meant for reviews of their work, you’re failing to tell other readers what’s wrong with the work itself. The thing is, you’re always free to rip apart these books based on your standards. Hell, just go look at my Goodreads review of The Hunger Games, or my more recent review for Witch Way to Turn. I ripped those books apart without saying anything about the author. My reviews will stay up because even if they’re mean, they’re at least relevant to the material I’m reviewing.

When you go to the entry for Ender’s Game and write a two-page screed about Card’s homophobia, you’re not adding to the discussion. Really, from the reviews I’ve seen, there’s plenty to criticize in the work itself without attacking Card for his bass-ackward social views. If you want to complain about Card’s books, write a review. If you want to bitch about his support of NOM, make a blog and fire away. But don’t be surprised when a site dedicated to book reviews deletes your irrelevant ranting because it has nothing to do with the book you’re attacking. That’s not censorship. It’s called moderation, and it’s about goddamned time that Goodreads learned what that word means.

Game review: Lethal League

I’d recently learned about Lethal League by Reptile Games through an article from Kotaku, and they have a video of two players doing a tournament game playing for the first time. I tried the game out myself, playing Versus mode against the CPU and the Challenge mode, and now my wrists are killing me from playing with keyboard controls. I’m not complaining, mind you. I loved the game, and I’ll be going back for another round as soon as my wrists stop throbbing. First, let me gush a bit and try to convince you to go check it out.

Lethal League is a “combat baseball” game where you hit a baseball at an opponent who can either dodge the ball or swing to hit it back at you. You can hit it straight by just swinging at it, or you can hit the shift key and the down or up arrows to send the ball flying at an angle. Pressing the up key also allows you to jump, so you can jump and swing to hit the ball up, down, or straight across the screen. Every swing that connects makes the ball travel faster, and once it’s going fast enough, it will have little flames trailing off of it and distort into an oval.

The premise is very simple, but playing the game against the CPU is hard. Not hard in a cheap way, but hard in the sense that you’re trying to catch a computer opponent off guard. Think of Pong, but instead of bouncing the ball off a paddle, you have to hit it with your bat. Unlike Pong, the ball won’t go off the sides of the screen and score you a point. It bounces off the top, bottom, and sides of the screen, and the first player to hit their opponent 11 times wins.

At this point, I’ve only managed to score 3 times in a game against the CPU, and every time I managed to land a blow, it felt like a major accomplishment. Perhaps because more often than not, it was my own volleys rocketing back at me that got my dumb ass knocked out. Timing the arrow press and swing at the same time is tricky, and sometimes a volley I’d meant to fly up would go straight, bounce off the side, and hit me in the face before I could draw the bat back from my last swing. More embarrassing was swinging only to realize a second too late that I hadn’t turned around, so I get clocked in the back of the head. Hell the CPU didn’t even have to move to score points in some of these volleys. No, I was my own worst enemy. Typical.

Ahem, anyway, Challenge mode is just you on the screen, and the objective is to try and get the ball going as fast as possible without getting knocked out. Which sounds simple, but once the ball is bounding at angles, I often jumped to swing, only to mistime my jump and catch a beaner right in the back of my noggin. So much like playing the versus mode, the Challenge mode is simple to understand, but hard to master.

Graphically, the game is kind of like something from the NES days. The music is much better than the 8-bit tunes of the era, and the sound effects are too. The game doesn’t need fancier graphics, though, and I think some of my enchantment with the game is the graphics giving me that nostalgic feeling for older console games.

If you’d read the Kotaku article I linked, you know that Reptile Games has announced that they will be making a “proper” release of the game with an added four-player versus mode, support for controllers, and some new special abilities, though they haven’t said what those will be. I will be looking forward to playing this on a controller so I can play longer without blowing out my wrists in a few rounds.

But, what you won’t get from the Kotaku article is this nice added tidbit: I contacted Reptile Games on Twitter and asked if they would consider releasing the game on PS Vita, and they said they would. That’s not a promise it will happen, but it’s given me another indie title to look forward to. Lethal League would be perfect for a portable game, as the rounds are lightning fast and you can play a game in a few minutes during the commute to work. Playing online against a friend could be loads of fun too. The game is highly addictive, and if it comes to Vita, I can say I’ll be picking it up very soon after it comes out.

I give Lethal League 5 enthusiastic stars, and I look forward to seeing what the full release will add. But even for the flash game, I cannot gush enough. Here’s a game with no plot, simple graphics, and game play which is easy to learn, but hard to master. So if you’re looking for something to waste some time with, I’d recommend you check out this little gem.

The woeful ballad of the workaholic

This is going to be a short post, but I just want to put this out there to explain why I’m always writing new stuff. Put simply, I’m a workaholic, and not even retiring has done much to change that. You’d think that a decade after being out of normal work, I’d be over this problem, but no, it’s still with me.

Less than one day is all I lasted before suffering from depression because I wasn’t working. I need to rest in the worst way, and I know this. But to the voices in my head, a day off is a sin of the worst sort. It’s a day wasted, and I tend to beat myself up pretty badly over this. My sense of value is tied to being able to point to some accomplishment I made during the day, and on writing days, that’s a word count. On editing days, it’s a page count. But on days off, getting nothing done means having nothing to show to the committee of judges living in my head. It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve been working constantly the last few months, or that I’ve got a huge queue of books to edit. The voices get pissy because I’ve dared to rest.

They also get mean, even if what they say isn’t all that logical. I hear things like “If you died tomorrow, this series won’t be finished.” And that’s stupid, because even if I worked today, there’s still a lot of books that won’t get finished if I die tomorrow. Plus, writing all the time without rest is stressful, and would likely lead to me dying faster, thus leaving more projects incomplete. And at the rate I’ve been going, I’ve suffered from fatigue attacks almost every day. I collapse on my couch and suffer spasms in my back muscles that make it feel like I can’t breathe, or like my heartbeat is tripling. So clearly, I’m overdoing it and need to slow down a bit.

I’ve heard of writers working themselves to death, either by wearing themselves down to the point that a cold or other illness knocked them down, or by some health problem created by sitting all the time, like blood clots forming in the legs that lodge in the heat or lungs. Since I’m taking estrogen as part of my HRT, I’m actually at a heightened risk for this, so I do need to take it seriously and not always have my butt planted in my seat. I tell myself that, but the judges in my head must be from some major corporation, because they just don’t care about little things like health problems.

But there’s also the push to do something else because “That last story you wrote won’t sell well, so we have to do something that will sell.” This mental push is much harder to ignore because nothing I write sells well. I’m okay with that most of the time. I know I write weird shit, and that my stuff isn’t likely to go mainstream. This does not mean I wouldn’t like to have at least one or two books that did sell well enough to allow me to live off the royalties, and so I’m always trying to think of a story that appeals to me, and that might have a wider appeal in the market. At times, I thought I’d done that, like with The Sole Survivor’s Club or Saving Gabriel. Alas, they just didn’t work out.

But getting off that tangent, I find it very frustrating to put up with this internal abuse, and even knowing the cause, I can’t get it under control. I hate that the only way to shut up these voices is to always be working on something all the time. I can’t even go on a vacation without feeling guilty about it, and it’s not so great working when I’m tired and more likely to make mistakes.

So if I seems a bit pissy on Twitter or in my next few posts, know that part of it is because no matter what these damned voices in my head say, I am not working on anything for the next week. No editing, no writing, and now peace for me. I guess it’s true what they say. There’s no rest for the wicked.

A writing update, and a vaction planned

Yeah, I know, I haven’t been updating the blog much. I haven’t been doing much of anything except for writing this month. Today I finally completed the fourth Alice the Wolf book, Hungry Like the Wolf, and it’s a whopping 197K. Yes, that’s right, 197,000 words. It’s so big, I’ve decided to split the book and make this a five book series. When I first started plotting this series, my thinking was, there’s four werewolves as antagonists, so that’s four books. Well, that plan went to hell because one of the four wolves turned out to be a charismatic leader who built up an army of werewolves in a bid to overthrow the men in black. Then in the last book Alice came out by shifting during a press conference. Totally did not see that coming.

The last book will still be pretty huge after I’ve split off the first 46 chapters and expanded it to give more scene time to one of the four antagonists, although I have no idea what to call that fourth book just yet. But for the most part, I like how this series progressed. Alice is a kickass werewolf who can get downright scary as times, and as she builds her own pack, she proves that she’s also a capable alpha. Peter was more of a lone wolf character who preferred to handle his problems on his own, but he never had problems as big as Alice does toward the end of the series. His biggest case had him facing a coven of vampires. Pfft. Alice has to face an army of thousands. Now that’s a real challenge.

I say I like how the series progressed for the most part because there’s one thing that Alice handled differently than Peter that I’m not sure if it will work or not: the sex scenes. Despite Peter’s narration covering some of his darker sexual thoughts, when it came to sex with various characters, he was more inclined to keep the details to a bare minimum, even going with a “fade to black” in some cases. But Alice opted to go with more information during these senses, and as times it feels to me like it’s a bit much. I ran with it throughout the series because Alice is supposed to be a different narrator, and her style isn’t supposed to be the same as Peter’s. Also, in these scenes, there didn’t feel like a proper place to do the fade to black. So I let Alice tell her story, and I got out of her way.

Then we got to the ending, which was supposed to be ambiguous. The way the muse and me planned it was that you wouldn’t know if things worked out for Alice in her relationships or not, but there was always hope that things could get better. Kinda like how Peter’s series ended, really. Above all, the ending was going to be without a sex scene. Well, with ten chapters to the end, Alice announced, “OH YES THERE WILL BE A SEX SCENE.” I argued with her and said, “The muse has my back, right, muse?” And the muse said, “I don’t know, maybe this should end on a happier, sexier note.”

I’ve never won a fight with a character, and I’ve got no hope of winning one of these fights when even the muse agrees that the original ending isn’t the best way to go. But even a few hours after writing the ending, I’m worried that it’s going to piss people off, not turn them on.

I don’t know, I guess I’ll have to wait and see what the beta readers think once I’ve sent the series to them. If they don’t make a big deal about the extra details, I’ll just leave them in and ignore any bad reviews I get. It’s not like I have to worry about sales at this point, right? (/sarcasm)

Anywho, with the completion of this series, I’m going on a vacation, and I won’t be doing any new writing for September. I also won’t be doing any editing for at least a week. I’ve been writing almost non-stop since May, and I’ve written five books in four months. (Six if you consider that I’ll be splitting this last book into two full-sized novels) While this kind of productivity is great for my publishing queue, it’s been a huge strain on my brain and my body. I rarely have a day where I don’t crash from fatigue for several hours, and I’ve gotten so used to back and shoulder pains that at times, I almost forget what it’s like not to be in pain.

So I don’t care what great idea the muse comes up with in September. I’m not doing anything more involved than an occasional blog post. Even if I will be editing some books, I plan to do these in shifts of a couple hours at a time, not these all day cram sessions I’ve been doing to get this latest series done.

When October rolls around, I’ll let the muse decide whether she wants to tackle that final Zombie Era Novella, or see if she’s still itching to work on a two-novella sequel to The Life and Death of a Sex Doll, which is already tentatively titled Sex Doll Divorce and Family Planning.

And I swear, I really will try to read during this break. I know I haven’t posted a book review in forever, but I’ll give fair warning: the next couple of reviews are likely to be negative judging from my impression of the stories up to this point.

Oh wait, one last thing. August sales took a major dip. A lot of that is my fault because I didn’t do much promotions on Twitter, but I think another part of it has to do with the summer slump. My great sales in July came because one reviewer went on a shopping spree to buy a bunch of my books all at once, and without them, July would have been slow too. Still, in August, I got only 8 sales. Unless one of my fall releases does well, it’s not looking so good for me to get a new PC or a new PS4. Which is a bummer, but eh, them’s the breaks sometimes.

I do want to thank the folks who bought books this month, because without you, there’s no point in releasing new stuff. I’m hoping to release another book in September, so we’ll see what that does for the sales figures.

And thanks once again for reading my blog, and for all your support. Y’all are the inspiration to keep me clacking away at this keyboard day after day.

August updates, so you know I didn’t die…

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’m still alive, although even there I’m not on as much. If you’re following me here on the blog or Facebook, you might be wondering if I’ve suffered some horrible tragedy and/or died. Well, obviously, I’m writing this, so the death option is out, and the only tragedy I’m suffering through is a muse who won’t leave me alone for a day off.

You may recall in my last post, I was writing book 3 for Alice’s series. The day after I finished it, the muse hit me up to start book 4. I asked her about a day off, and she laughed and said “You’re so funny. NOW GET BACK TO WORK.”

Sometimes writers on Twitter tell me they wish they had my muse. I don’t believe they know what they’re asking for. It’s a bit like saying “gee, I wish I had someone to torture me.” And this is turning into torture sometimes. I’ve been hitting an average of 8-10K per day, with occasional downshifts to rest my aching wrists or my fuzzy brain. Even on the downshifts that I considered my days off, I still got 3K added. This is why I’m almost 100K into Hungry Like the Wolf, and why I will finish the entire Alice the Wolf series before the end of summer.

Once I finish this, I’m going to have to send the muse packing to Tahiti so I can work on editing. In addition to needing to edit some released books to catch typos, I also have to start going through my queued books and get them ready for release. It’s rather a large stack at this point, and every time during the summer that I’ve tried to work on it, my taskmistress muse has sabotaged me with another new book to write. Which would be awesome if she was pitching some guaranteed bestseller. Alas, it’s just more weird shit. And okay, I like writing weird shit. I just won’t have much luck selling it.

I’m not even sure what to categorize Alice’s series as. It’s not horror or paranormal romance, and it’s only rarely worthy of the label dark fantasy. Someone suggested calling it urban fantasy, but Dallas Pennsylvania isn’t exactly a sprawling urban jungle. I’d jokingly call it suburban fantsy, but I need a category already listed on Amazon and Kobo, and I doubt they’ll add in a new genre for little me. Despite there being a lot of high school life, it’s no more YA than Peter’s series was. I can’t market it to the Twilight crowd, to the horror junkies, to the romance readers, or to the fantasy lovers. So yeah, even as I finish writing the series, I’m anxiously wondering “who exactly was I supposed to market this to?”

But returning to my muse and her new ideas, she’s pitched a sequel to The Life and Death of a Sex Doll, continuing the life of Ashley Braun in Sex Doll Divorce and Family Planning. I’m sure the muse would love to get me to work on this right after I wrap up Alice’s last book, but I’m serious about not writing anything else until I’ve done some edits and revisions to get the new books ready for sale, or at least closer to ready.

And now a reading update. I’ve completely lost my momentum on my reading goals thanks to Insurgent by Veronica Roth and Finale by Becca Fitzpatrick. It’s hard to believe these books were written by the same writers as the previous books in their respective series, because they’re both awful. I’m still trying to force myself to read them, but with every chapter, I just shake my head and ask “What happened to the good parts?” When I finish these books, I hope to regain some momentum with other books, because I’d still like to read at least 30 books this year.

The problem is, I had four books open, which is my way of pushing through one bad book. I get tired of it, so I read the others to make me forget why I’m hating the other book. Only now, I’m hating all four books. I dropped the two “horror” books (and I use the term real loosely because they’re not even remotely scary, or interesting) to focus on these two series books, and even reading one chapter from each is feeling like a homework assignment. These were sequels to books I had to stay up late to finish, so I’ve stuck with them in the hopes of them getting better, but ugh, right now, this reading thing is not working out nearly as much as the writing.

And I got so bored with reading, I decided to buy the Mechromancer character for Borderlands 2, just to have something to do. I still despise the writing and the “humor,” and the game is still glitchy as fuck. But I need a distraction, and one FPS is the same as the next once you look past the surface.

My first impression is, meh, the coding is still lousy. The Mechromancer’s robot is able to fly though wall or travel underground, but will hang on doorways, and sometimes stands right in front of you doing nothing but blocking you view even when you’re in a clusterfuck of enemies. Which is to say, it’s the same programming quality I’ve come to expect from Gearbox Software games.

Setting aside the glitches, the jokes, and the plot, the killing has been somewhat therapeutic this time around. I’m focusing on accuracy over quantity of ammo, with my primary weapon being a very slow loading sniper rifle. I have rarely used rocket launchers, even against bosses, because with my current critical hit bonuses, I can turn a 524 point bullet into a 3346 point one-shot kill. So even for bosses and mini-bosses, it’s often easier for me to sit back and snipe. Why bother going to the inventory to load a rocket launcher when I don’t really need the extra firepower?

I’m currently at level 25, and I’m about to complete the game without doing a lot of the side missions. Regardless of where I go in the story missions, I get little skull warnings next to the enemy health bar that the character is dangerous and higher in level than me. Which is a bit of a joke. Oh, that giant robot with shoulder-mounted missile launchers is dangerous? Three critical shots later, he’s just a scrap heap to me. So is the enemy AI that awful, or am I just that good? (Here’s a hint: I’m not that good.)

But so, that’s where I am at this point. I don’t know yet whether there will be a release for August or not. If there is, it’s going to be a coverless book, and I’m not going to put much effort into promoting it. I need to save money for a lot of covers for projects that have better chances of selling, and I need the time away from promotions to edit. But once I get around to the release after that, I should be able to devote more time to begging for readers.

Oh, wait, that’s the other thing. July ended with me getting 37 sales and 9 positive reviews ranging from 5-3 stars. It’s not quite my best sales month ever, but it was my best month for reviews. A caveat: most of those sales all came from the same person, and July was otherwise very slow across all my vendors. We can safely call Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life a flop, since it only sold three copies in the first month of release. Tobe White can’t seem to catch a break anymore than Sandy Morrison could. Of course 37 sales, whether from one customer or a group, is still a good amount to report when the previous month I’d only sold a third of that total. But I’m expecting the summer slump to affect August too, and that’s yet another reason why I’m a bit meh about promoting stuff lately.

And that’s my report. Hopefully after I finish writing this last book for Alice, I can find some time to blog between editing sessions.

Another review for Saving Gabriel this month, and a writing report

Rebbie Reviews posted another positive review for Saving Gabriel, so this month has been full of good news. Lots of good reviews came in, and this has been a great month for sales. I even got a nice email from a reader, and these days, email is just that place where people ask me to donate to their cause or buy their book. Seriously, it’s rare that anyone emails me unless they want money, so an email from a fan is like spotting a unicorn while walking my dog during a blue moon.

If y’all ever wondered if there was a positive side effect to good news, the biggest benefit it has is keeping my motivation to write high. I’ve completed 10,633 word today for In the Mouth of the Wolf, and even if I should slow down for some reason, I’m going to finish the novel this month. I only need to write the fourth and final volume to complete Alice’s series, and because it’s been coming together so fast, I’ve already begun working on the covers and logos. I’m seriously considering releasing book one and the omnibus edition in the same month and dropping the next three books in the following months afterward. The omnibus will give a discount to readers willing to buy all four volumes at the same time, while the books coming out monthly are for the people who want to wait and see if they like the series.

Another advantage to writing the books so closely together is, it’s easier for me to recall what needs fixing in the previous books before they go out. I’ve been so devoted to Alice that I left out some bit characters and will have to go back and add scenes for them. But most of what’s left is minor fixes and adding physical descriptions for characters and locations, and adding actions to conversations to avoid “flapping head syndrome.”

I’m pretty sure the muse will want me to do the fourth book before I can get back to writing the last book of the Zombie Era series, and from there, I have to write book two in the Sin City trilogy, book three in the Sandy Morrison series, book four in the Tobe White series and the final book in the untitled series for Vicky the vampire and Amber McKenzie. It’s going to keep me pretty busy though the rest of this year, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. I won’t be running out of ideas to work on, and hopefully having out new books on a regular schedule will bring in some new readers for all these series. Or, that’s the working plan. Gotta keep stretching that long tail out.

I’m still reading other peoples’ stuff, albeit at a slower pace. But then it’s hard to find free time to read when I’m consistently hitting 8-10K a day. Any day now, I expect someone to notice and mail me my prolific author badge. That’s a real thing, right? It’s not? Well I can imagine it will happen. I’m good at using my imagination.

Sudden sales report…and a ramble about promotions and flops

I can’t say sales are doing badly now. Eric, the reviewer from Frodo’s Blog of Randomness, sent me a message early this morning that said, “Check your sales.

New host blues, but I got happy news too…

Well as I predicted, my efforts to move from Infinity Cloud to Dreamhost resulted in me blowing up the blog. I think I’ve got everything sorted out, but I had to use a new theme, so the main site will look a little different from now on. (Well, not for you mirror blog readers, but you know what I mean.) I honestly hope to be with Dreamhost for a few years, because this moving once a year gag is getting old fast. It’s a small comfort that this time I moved because Infinity Cloud is going out of business. At least I can say they were a good host, and I will miss them. As it is, when I switched to them, they volunteered to move my blog for me, preventing a similar explosion from my prior moves.

So, remember how I said I was going to read before I had a new writing project? Didn’t happen. The muse gave me two days off, and then started me on In the Mouth of the Wolf, book three in the Alice the Wolf series. As I make my way through this series, it occurs to me that my muse is often very cruel to main characters. By the point we’re at, Alice has a lot of scars, both physical and emotional, and she’s bed-ridden due to the FBI trying to solve her problems with the wrong choice of medical treatment. She’s lost loved ones and been forced to take on responsibilities that shouldn’t be hers to bear.

And yet…for all this suffering, Alice has come out of the ordeal a stronger person than Peter did at the conclusion of his series. In book three, she’s just turned eighteen, and yet she’s already a veteran of war, a capable alpha who’s earned the respect of her packmates, and a loving den mother. (By way of adoption, in case you were wondering.)

Alice’s story is very emotional for me, and the last few chapters, I’ve had tears and sniffles while trying to write about Alice’s losses and setbacks. It’s been a great series up to now, and I’m really happy at how vastly different it is from Peter’s books. Alice and Peter do have some things in common, which reflects his influence on her during her formative years. But aside from a few superficial similarities, Alice is stronger than Peter, and I’m happy to say his prediction about her was right. She’s a better wolf than him in almost every respect.

So, moving along, I said on Twitter at the start of the month that I hoped to get a few more reviews. As of tonight, I’ve had six new reviews, all of them positive. Three are on Amazon for The Campaign Trilogy, including my first review for Redemption Lost. I also got a review for Saving Gabriel from Bisky Scribbles, and a review for Peter the Wolf from Frodo’s Blog of Randomness, both of them glowing. I’ve also been told to expect another review soon, so this month has been really good for reviews. Sales haven’t been nearly as good, but I think I’m hitting a summer slump, and there’s not much I can do about that. I haven’t sold anything at all in the Amazon UK store, and that’s a bit frustrating after they were one of my better sales sources the last few months. Hopefully they’ll be back in the fall to pick up my new books.

As much as I want to put out a book in August, I will need to take time to edit some of my past releases. Typos and mistakes have been brought to my attention, and I’m not the kind of writer to fire and forget and leave those mistakes in my work. On the positive side, this is one thing I really like about ebooks. If I was still doing print releases with ISBN numbers, correcting mistakes would end up being expensive, and would result in multiple editions on Amazon and other vendors. But I can just fix the errors and upload a new version. And despite there being these mistakes in my work, reviews rarely mention them. I like to think that means the strength of my stories is high enough that readers can overlook the occasional missing letter or punctuation mark. Which doesn’t forgive the mistakes, of course, but it does feel nice to see my readers reacting to my work in positive ways.

I’m still trying to read and get out more reviews, but I think the problem is, my current reads aren’t drawing me in as much as I’d hope for. I hope to get past this slump soon, and maybe I can get out at least two more reviews this month.

And that’s it for now. I do want to thank the folks who bought books this month, and to the folks who took the time to write reviews. Your constant support has kept me motivated, and I’ve been able to write a LOT more in the last few months without needing more than a few breaks between novels. This means that once I can get back to releasing new stuff, you’ll have a lot of new books to look forward to. Once again, thanks for giving my stuff a chance, for your continued support, and for reading my blog.