Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 57

Kicking the Kickstarter for kicks…

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like Kickstarter has hit its peak of newness, and we’ve arrived at the point of desperation for new projects. Sure, the media still manages to find stories of famous people who couldn’t find corporate investors for their creative projects, and who use their fan base to fund a new idea with a few million dollars. But those are the cherry picked examples, the kinds of successes that most normal people won’t get even if they have a really good idea.

Which is not to say they all have good ideas. I’ve seen some good ideas, of course, but I’ve also seen someone who proposed making a Lego mural of a video game level, and they requested something like $75,000 to buy Legos. Another made up a collectible card game about CPUs, which I’m sure some nerds will love, but will also ignore that they’re basically taking someone else’s intellectual property and using it on a desperate attempt at milking money from tech heads and CCG fans.

I fear the day when I come across a dude’s proposal, and he’s like, “It’s been my life’s dream to make a life-size replica of Long Dong Silver’s penis out of chocolate chocolate chip cookie dough and film my wife eating it slowly. Please help fund my dream!”

I’m not saying there aren’t good ideas left, but maybe you should just stop if you’re looking at Kickstarter and your line of thinking is, “I need money…what’s a good idea for generating funds?” The good idea should come before the need for money.

And don’t even get me started on the guys who steal an idea from someone else, then steal some working images from more artists, and put together a scam campaign. Cause I could dedicate a few post to what I’d like to do to those assholes.

And on a completely unrelated note, here’s a progress report on my editor’s Indiegogo campaign. We’ve got 18 days left, and we’ve collected $165 for Tara. Our goal of $555 means that we still need $390 to get her properly paid for Roll the Bones. The book is pretty much ready for release, with the cover image paid for and artsied up nicely with words and stuff, and I’ve already finished going over Tara’s editing suggestions.

This is actually the first time that I’ve finished a book and had time to spare before the release date. Folks who donate to the Indiegogo campaign will be getting the book a few weeks early, and you’ll be getting some bonus ebooks, depending on how much you contribute. And, did I mention that the raffle winner will also get homemade cookies from Tara? No? Well she’s making up your choice of cookies if you win, or if you donate $50 to the campaign. So far, only one kind soul has, and Tara is making them gluten-free chunky peanut butter cookies. WEhich sound so awesome, they make me drool just writing this.

Movie review: Troll Hunter

We got the Blu-Ray for Troll Hunter a few weeks back, but I’d read some unflattering reviews about this being yet another found footage film like The Blair Witch Project. After having watched the film, I feel that’s a bit unfair, as this movie is more like Cloverfield, only with a less shaky camera and a much better attempt to actually show the monsters.

The story starts with three college students, Thomas, Johanna, and Kalle, who are on the trail of a man named Hans, who appears to be a bear poacher. The students are initially trying to track him to find out why he is poaching in the town of Volda, but their chase soon begins to reveal that Hans is dealing with something much bigger than a bear. Hans’ truck is covered in claw marks that no bear could make, and his camper trailer stinks of something muskier than a bear.

After a week of pursuit, the trio finds Hans running away from something, and as he sees the kids, he shouts “Troll!” and keeps running. Thomas is bitten, but not badly enough to need more than minor first aid. On the other hand, their car is mauled and unserviceable. Hans offers to take them home, and then makes a more compelling offer: he will let them film his troll hunt.

One of the blurbs on the box compares this movie to Jurassic Park, and I’d agree with that. When the trolls are on screen, I was never scared. This is not to say the trolls looked fake. But like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, these beasts filled me with a sense of awe and fascination. Of course, if I saw trolls for real, my reaction would be closer to the students’ screaming terror. But in the comfort and safety of my living room, my attitude was a bit more laid back.

Hans works for Norway’s government in secret, and he reports to a bureaucrat named Finn. Finn’s job is to keep the existence of trolls a secret. Like most middle managers, he’s not very good at his job, leading to some laugh out loud moments during his bumbling efforts at blaming bears for troll attacks.

Hans makes it clear that something very unusual is happening to make the trolls leave their territories, and that this kind of mass migrations is extremely rare. When the reason is revealed, I felt it was logical and satisfying as an answer. The writers put some thought into the science of trolls, and they didn’t just make up some CGI monsters and have them chase people around.

Something else I really liked was Hans’ answer when Thomas calls him a national hero. Hans doesn’t feel like a hero at all, and he feels his job is dirty and cruel. Late in the film, he explains why he feels this way, and it makes his character more real for me. He’s not a larger than life adventurer, but a man given a job, one he’s grown tired of.

The film does not have a happy ending, but then this is foreshadowed at the very start, so I wasn’t too upset about it. I’d feel differently if I had the impression of being tricked, but again there’s no trick here, just a fascinating story that brings to life fairy tale monsters with amazing results. Although Hans says these monsters have nothing to do with children’s stories, there is a really funny moment when he uses goats as bait to draw a troll out from under a bridge. I got it, having read the story of the three billy goats many times. Hubby, however, was completely mystified over why I was laughing suddenly. So I think your level of enjoyment will depend on how well you know troll fairy tails.

I will admit that the found footage theme causes problems at times, such as having to watch events through a broken camera for roughly ten minutes, or the sometime shaky chase scenes becoming a bit confusing. But the actors give me the impression of being real people, and unlike The Blair Witch Project, which teased the viewer but never showed anything scary, Troll Hunter delivers plenty of troll action to make the shaky camera work worth it.

So, if you’ve been avoiding this because of a bad review about the camera, please reconsider. This is not nearly as shaky as Cloverfield, and Kalle is a much better cameraman. When the camera does get unsteady, it’s because Kalle is either running for his life or shaking with fear. So in this respect, it lends another aspect of realism to an already realistic film.

I give Troll Hunter 4 stars out of five, and recommend it to anyone who grew up reading about trolls in fairy tails. You will love this movie, and even if it ends badly, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

So, I conducted an experiment…

I should be going to sleep, but between depression and heat, I’m not able to shut off my brain. On Twitter, I decided to try and make a promotional push for Sandy Morrison & the Pack of Pussies. My intent was to keep tweeting until I had at least one sale. I got many retweets, and my store stats went from 4 page views to 131. But no one bought a copy. To put that in perspective, most of my my other books get around 1 sale for every 20-30 page views. This book has had a lot of page views since it was first released, and it’s still only sold single digits.

The book has a professional cover, and the blurb was put together with help from a blurb doctor. The story is YA adventure, and when I put the manuscript on InkPop, the response from teen readers was positive. And yet, even promoting the story in a trans support forum, I couldn’t sell it. Even if I have 1,000 followers, plus RT going out to a wide cross section of avid readers from every walk of life, no one wants to read my story. I’ve sold more copies of books about lesbian vampires, gay zombie hunters, and even a sexual predator with an underage girlfriend.

I…I don’t know what to do with my depression over this constant failure. I’m transsexual. More than anything else, I want to show people that we can have interesting stories worth reading. I wanted to offer a story about a character without making it preachy, and without making her trans condition the central theme of the story.

In the past, and even tonight, I’ve had straight people tell me, “Oh, it’s a niche market book, so you should market that to trans people instead.” What this says, whether people realize it or not is, “We don’t care about you. Go back to your own kind with this crap.” And what makes this even more sad is, I can’t get any of “my own kind” to read it either.

So right about now, just like Sandy, I feel dirty and unwanted. This hurts because if I sold bondage porn or incest or rape erotica, I’d have an audience. So how do I come to terms with being this unwanted? Do I just not do anymore trans stories because nobody, not even my own people will read them? Do I give up on writing stories that mean something to me because my characters aren’t good enough?

Things like this are why, even when people tell me how “cool” I am, I just feel broken and filthy. Because I’m a transsexual writer, and nobody will read my story with a transsexual character.

So much for “write what you know.”

Guest Post: Becka Sutton

Regular readers will recognize Becka’s name, as I’ve often mentioned her helping me with promotion ideas. Becka is also a WebLit author, and has converted the first arc of her series, Dragon Wars, into an ebook and a print edition. She’s going on a blog tour to promote the book’s release, and today, she’s coming to my blog with some handy dragon survival tips. Since I’ve already talked about surviving zombie and werewolf attacks in my own quirky way, this post should fit right in here.

So, without further ado, here’s Becka…

Thank you, Zoe, for hosting me today.

You know, I was sitting here thinking about what should I write about and drawing a blank. Then it came to me: dragon attack survival tactics! I mean by now everyone knows how to survive the coming zombie apocalypse but what do you do if you’re going about your daily business and suddenly dragons attack? It’s every bit as likely but no one seems to be planning for a dragon invasion.

Here’s the best advice I can give you.

1. Do not be tempted to try and placate them. Sure it starts with livestock but next thing you know, you’re tying virgins to poles in your garden pretty much every day.

2. If caught in the open, run away and seek shelter. That’s right: run away as fast as you can unless your day job involves heavy artillery. Dragons are huge flying lizards with tough hides so unless you have a surface to air missile up your sleeve (and if you do, how big are your sleeves?) getting somewhere the dragon can’t get to you is your best chance.

3. Do not shoot at a dragon with a bow and arrow or a normal gun unless you’re a) a superb shot and b) can clearly see the weak spot they supposedly have. You’ll only annoy them otherwise and annoying the giant flying lizard is not the path of wisdom.

4. Obtain heavy weaponry – and people who can use it – as quickly and expediently as you can.

5. Avoid hiding places that could act like wind tunnels or chimneys. Dragons are highly intelligent and breath fire so such places can easily become killing zones if they scent you out, even when they can’t get inside.

6. By the same token, make sure your dragon apocalypse hideout is fireproof. Hydroponics in the basement is also recommended so you can avoid going out.

So that’s my dragon survival tips. What would yours be?

(Editor’s note: Comments are open for those who wish to chat with Becka.)

___

Becka Sutton is a self-described crazy cat lady, but she’s not very good at it: while she is crazy she only has one cat. She was born in Britain in 1972 and has lived there her entire life. In her early teens she started scrawling fantasy stories in exercise books her mother bought her to stop her scribbling in her school books. She hasn’t stopped writing since, and she credits writing as the outlet that allowed her to recover from the nervous breakdown she had after her parents died.

Her other interests include reading, listening to music, attempting to draw, growing her own vegetables and looking after the aforementioned Pumpkin cat.

No, you can’t read the novel she scrawled as a teen – she burned it long ago because it was awful.

Why would anyone sign up for this?

This morning, I’m up at the buttcrack of dawn thanks to heavy rains keeping me up all night long. I got onto Twitter and found someone I follow, @WendySparrow, asking some familiar questions about writing, like when does this feel rewarding, and would publication finally bring with it any sense of “having arrived”?

I think where she is now is where I was at the start of my months-long phase as a disillusioned artist. Where I am now, I see writing as the journey itself, and there is no actual destination except The End. And once we reach The End, we need to not dwell on it for too long. Writers have to keep changing their goals and reorient themselves to new ideas. Maybe some new ideas are for characters we’ve already created, and we’re able to continue a previous journey to a new destination. Maybe sometimes that new idea is a choice about whether to submit this new story with a publisher or send it to Lulu. But every idea always comes back to The End, and once we hit that point, it’s time to move on. The alternative is becoming stuck on our past failures and successes.

People who read our stuff never will see our work the way that we do. We’re so emotionally invested in each project, and we will spend months polishing each project to get rid of anything that doesn’t fit what we mean to say. But no matter how concise or verbose we choose to be, the written language is not able to convey what we mean clearly to readers, and their interpretations of our words can be so vastly different from what we mean to say that reading reviews can sometimes be a little depressing when we see how often people miss the points we wanted to make.

Because of my many, many past failures, I have not submitted anything to a publisher or an editor in a long time. Really, who wants to submit to people who care so little that they won’t even acknowledge the submission was received? I get so sick of published writers saying it’s a learning process, as if the editors and agents were sending us all personalized explanations for what we did wrong. But 99% of all submissions I’ve sent never even got a form letter rejection. I don’t learn a damn thing from being ignored, except possibly that there’s no point submitting my stories.

And yet, I recently had an editor express interest in the WIP I’m working on right now. It’s not an offer to publish. It’s an offer to read the completed story and then consider if it might be a good fit for one of the publishers they work for. This could very well pan out to a rejection, but it stands to be a personal rejection with some advice attached. And in this way, yes, there is a chance that I could learn something about the submission process. So I consider that as being worth a shot.

On the same day that this offer was made, I found a new publishing imprint looking for stories with trans characters, and I inquired about the possibility of sending something self-published, Sand Morrison’s book. They said that if it had been published and then sank from view, they might look at it. And that is a pretty good description of what happened to my book. So this is something else I’m looking at and debating. Do I want to invest myself again in another submission process?

And again, on the same day that I talked to this new publisher, I saw another editor say, “When we look at your submission, we also Google you to see if you’ve had any crazy behavior.” And I debated saying anything before replying, “Then I’m screwed, because I can’t hide the fact that I’m crazy.”

And I really don’t mean to say publishers discriminate against the mentally ill, even though they kind of do. They put incredible pressure on us to market our own stuff and be likeable and easy to present to the public. But I don’t know many writers who don’t have bad days, even those who have no mental illness. I know a lot more who have some kind of problems, be it a bi-polar disorder, chemical depression, multiple personality disorder, or schizophrenia. And the thing that doesn’t seem to get across to the publishers and editors judging us is, there isn’t a way to just shut off a mental illness. There isn’t a way to just push through a bad day, and sometimes, we say or do crazy things that we’ll later regret.

And no, we do not “know better.” We suffer from brain problems that cause us to blow problems out of proportion, and we overreact to little shit. We can’t help that, because WE’RE CRAZY. Even the folks taking medication can forget to take a dose, or they can have their medication suddenly stop working. So while I’m not trying to make excuses, I am pointing out that some people practice zero tolerance for mental illness and judge us as if we should be able to fake sanity all day, every day. They have unrealistic expectations, to say the least. And yeah, that is a little bit discriminatory.

Everybody has bad days. EVERYBODY has bad days. If you work for a cool boss, you get to keep your job even after you blew up over a little problem and turned it into a major issue. If you work in a cool job, your co-workers will say, “Everyone needs to vent sometimes.”

But if you’re a full-time writer, you don’t have a boss in the traditional sense, and you don’t have co-workers. When you blow up, people don’t say “Everyone needs to vent.” They say “Oh look, another entitled writer had a meltdown. Let’s all point and shake our heads at their inability to keep themselves under control. Don’t they realize that we will judge them for every little thing they put online?”

This angers me because I want to ask, don’t they realize that most writers make slave wages while juggling the roles of writer, editor, and promoter? Don’t they know already how lonely and depressing this job is? Haven’t enough writers talked about their feelings of isolation that readers could develop even a smattering of empathy?

A while back, I got published for real. Got the contracts signed, got books out on the market, and got some lovely reviews, including an amazing analysis from someone who tore apart every line in the book and then chose to read between the lines too. It was the closest I ever came to validation. And then, in asking if I could pay for the entry fee to a book award using my sales, I got back a letter from my publisher that said the company was losing people because of me. I learned how few of my “co-workers” wanted to deal with me, and I learned that my publisher had so little confidence in my work that I couldn’t even pay my way into the award nomination by giving my publisher the money to make up the cost difference between my sales and the entry fee.

What little sense of validation I had was lost, and I struggled for a long time to define what it is that I want out of my art. I will rarely get any sense of connection to my readers, because they only see my writing as a way to pass the time. They do not see it the same way I do, and they won’t spend much time dissecting the work to glean what I was really trying to say between the lines. Very few will write to me to tell me what they felt as they read it. Of those that do, some will completely miss the point, leading to depressions worse than the continued silence generates.

This is why I feel so conflicted now about sending out work to publishers. It’s got nothing to do with the waiting, or with the editing and revising process. When I did get published, I went through the whole routine of edits, proofing, and waiting. I went through the review requests, and I tried to do my part to promote the work before and after it came out. So I can honestly say this is not about me being impatient with the slow publishing process.

No, I’m scared of making it all the way through again, only to have the publisher say “We changed our mind because we don’t care for what you said on your blog today,” or “We’re pulling your book because of your last twitter rant.” I’m scared that I can have my only form of validation ripped away from me not on the merits of my writing, but based on my inability to always say nice things.

I’ve got no problems thanking people for reading my stuff. I’ve tried to make it a monthly habit to mention that I got more sales, and then thank people for those new sales. When people reach me on Twitter to say, “I read your book,” I’m quick to thank them for giving me a chance. I can be personable and grateful to my readers at the drop of a compliment.

But I can’t not be crazy. I can’t hide what I am for the sake of my would-be employers. Knowing this, it’s even harder to consider going through the submission process because I don’t want to be accepted only to have my contract pulled because of my latest blog post or Twitter rant. Again, as it were.

But this is what writing is, besides being my attempt to make sense of the world around me. It’s a never-ending process of putting creations out in the public, always with the understanding that they will be judged harshly and misinterpreted a dozen different ways. Part of that process is having people look at me as a person and judging me based on what little information they choose to look up. There are people who will walk away from me just reading my sidebar bio and discovering I’m trans and bi. Others may read a review of a story and judge me based on some other person’s opinion of one of my many books.

But you know what? Those are sad people. They’re shallow and quick to make snap decisions without knowing anything about anyone. I really don’t want those people reading my books if they’re going to make shallow snap decisions like “I don’t like this book because the main character is too gay.” These are the people who I can’t reach no matter what I say, and I can’t devote energy or thought to them. That way lies deep depressions and week long drinking binges, and I prefer saving my rum for the weekends.

So, I don’t know if I’ll submit Sandy’s book to that new publisher or not. But I will send this new WIP to the editor who asked to look at it. There’s no harm in soliciting their opinion, and even if my story doesn’t work for them, I have a chance to get a pro editor’s opinions. It’s a learning opportunity that I can’t afford to pass up.

I can’t ever claim I’ve got this writing gig sorted out, and I’m never going to start dishing out advice about whether to pro-publish or self-publish. But I am coming to terms with the lonely nature of selling myself and my art. It may not be success or even progress, but it is helping me keep things in perspective. And for a crazy person, sometimes that’s the best I can hope for.

Random updates…

This has been a mostly decent week for me, though I’ve had a few problems with weather-related fatigue. I still managed to get about a third of a new novella written, although I have no idea what the title for it is. I don’t even have a working title, so I’ve been saving the file to my desktop as Unnamed Werewolf Story. I haven’t had this much trouble naming a story since Touched, and it’s driving me nuts because every idea I have is lame as fuck. Seriously, the muse is offering shit like Moonsong, Under a Sparkling Moon, and How to Date a Werewolf. Gag me with a werewolf paw.

I had tentative plans this week to buy Resistance: Burning Skies, but just like Unit 13, the demo refuses to play in English. This time, instead of French, the game comes up in German. I know it’s just a coincidence, but I will note how both games with a lack of proper language support are FPS games put out in half-assed fashion. Both titles clearly needed more effort put into them before release. Anywho, this means no new game reviews until after Gravity Rush drops June 13. By then, the American gamers will all have had a chance to gush over it, but at least I can give my impressions for the readers still not convinced.

On a side note, I think it’s weird how I don’t know any other language besides English, and yet, I can identity many languages after just hearing a few words. A good example is when I first heard Aganju in Lumines. I immediately looked at hubby and said, “That’s Portuguese, isn’t it?” And it is. (I Googled the song.) So, I may be a linguistically ignorant person, but I apparently know just enough to tell the difference between various languages.

In other video game news that’s slightly guitar-related, last year, I was getting all hyped for Rocksmith, an Ubisoft game that promised the ability to plug my guitar into my Xbox and play along with their songs, scales, and chord progressions. This idea was so awesome that I bookmarked the preorder page on Play.com and checked back every day for months. And every few months, Ubisoft would push back the release date. I decided to check the other day, and the current preorder page lists the release date as October 11, 2012. I still want the game, but I’m starting to think Ubisoft is just trolling me and other wannabe guitar heroes.

I still suck at guitar, by the way. I practice chords and scales, but it still isn’t natural to me, and I can’t do a single chord progression and stay in a proper beat. I also still can’t tell which notes are which, not listening to them or reading them from sheet music. I feel like I’m going to be about 50 before I lean how to play right, and then all I’m going to know how to play is John Denver’s Country Roads…slowly. It’s things like this that make me wonder why anyone ever called me a genius, because I’m just about the stupidest person I know.

I haven’t talked much about this year’s garden, but yes, I am doing the garden again. I’ve got carrots, onions, tomatoes, strawberries, basil, oregano, rosemary, and thyme. Not quite as much stuff as last year, but during the summer, watering everything was really a struggle. So this year I scaled back just a little bit to make my hobby more manageable.

I want to bring up the Indiegogo campaign for my editor. We’ve got 26 days left, and we’re at $140 of $555. Someone even donated $50, meaning my editor will be baking cookies for them to go along with all the ebooks they’ll be getting as incentives.

I want to be happy about this because this is about $140 more than I was expecting us to have at this point. But it’s hard not to compare our campaign to my other online friends, and right now there’s like 10 projects I’m helping to promote that are celebrating being over their projected goal with plenty of time to spare. This led me to have a bit of a depression this week, and it didn’t help that one of my regular readers didn’t know I was promoting a campaign. This despite my tweets on the topic and my many reminders here.

Which brings me to the topic of promotion again, because I don’t know what to do to help improve my visibility. I think promoting more often is a mistake, because it turns people off, and then I start losing followers. I can’t go back to Facebook, first because I hate the company, and second because I don’t want to build up a list of writers who will spam me for their stuff. I don’t mean timeline updates, which is cool. I mean blog invites, virtual blog parties, and invitations to group discussion about their books. I get so burnt out by all this “me-me-me” crap, and it makes it even harder for me to sort out what to put on my own update timeline because I don’t want to be egotistical like that.

I’m sure there’s a better way of promoting, but nothing I’ve tried is quite as effective as doing nothing at all. Which is a puzzling puzzle that has me pulling at my hair and screaming “Why is this so fucking hard?!”

And that’s the update. Time for me to get back to this novella and sort out how to introduce the bad guys.

Maybe a little too picky…

So, a short blog post by Tony Noland has me thinking about one of the things that’s sucked about becoming an addicted writer. All three of his points had me nodding, but the second is turning over some gears in my head:

2. Reduced tolerance.

I used to enjoy lots of different kinds of books, including genre works of science fiction, horror, fantasy, etc. Now that I’ve been writing it myself for a while, I get irritated with some of the books that are held up as leading examples of the field. I know how the sausage is made, and it’s made me lose my taste for it.

I wish I could say it’s just the leaders of the fields that I’ve gotten turned off of, but I’m finding it really hard to finish a lot of the books I read these days. It’s not so much that the writing is bad and I’m giving up because the story isn’t good. The problem is, it’s not the story I want to read.

I got started writing precisely because I found so many of the same cliches showing up in all fiction, regardless of genre. I wanted to make something to stand apart from the crowd, and I feel like I’ve accomplished that in many stories. (Though not all of them.) But the problem is, the little things that used to be minor speed bumps are now major problems for me because I keep seeing them over and over. Instead of skimming over the parts that irk me, I drop the books altogether.

This really frustrates me, being so picky about what I read that I rarely get to finish a book anymore. And yet, even when I say, “I’m going to finish this book no matter what,” I will typically hit some passage that sends me to the living room to rant at hubby about how delusional fiction is with these stupid cliches. Once I’ve really worked myself up, he’ll cut me off to ask, “Why are you still reading it?” And then that’s another dropped book.

I don’t mean to be so picky, but I’ve spent years tearing apart my rough drafts, asking questions about why this character did something crazy, or why a scene is extraneous and if there’s a way to make it more relevant to the core story. I’ve had my silent editor picking on my stuff for so long, I can’t get the fucker to shut up when I get into someone else’s work.

Something else I’ve noticed: I now shy away from book discussions. I feel like I’m no longer part of the conversation because if I complain and someone notes that I’m a writer, they’re instantly dismissive of my opinion. They’ll say “You’re not looking at it the way a reader would.” Which is not really true. I’m pretty sure most of my complaints about character motivations and plot consistency were still the same back before I became a writer. But now that I am writing all the time, I’m perhaps more verbose about the reasons why something doesn’t work for me. I spend more time analyzing what I don’t like than I do thinking over what pleases me about a story. And once it comes time to post a review, I really have to struggle to recall what parts I liked.

Then there’s these books I bought from people I know online. I feel immense pressure to complete and like what they produce, because I’m going to be talking to them again real soon. I remember one story I bought from a friend, and within five pages, it became clear that he not only didn’t have a clue how drugs worked, he couldn’t be bothered to do basic research. The drugs were a MacGuffin, and I knew it, and yet, I couldn’t go on because I’d seen this guy make lectures about how writers needed to do basic research, and clearly, he couldn’t practice what he preached. So even when he had a new book out, I couldn’t bring myself to buy it because I didn’t have faith in his skill anymore.

Another example is the book I’m currently slogging through a few pages at a time. This is a sequel, and I LOVED the first book. But here, the story wanders away from the characters I like to follow a bunch of people that I couldn’t care less about. So, what do I do? Skip the second book and attempt to read the third with these huge information gaps? Force myself to read something even though I feel bored with it?

Finally, there’s books that I got told, “You have to read this series!” So I try the first book, and I wonder what drugs my friends are doing that made them think this was a decent story. And let’s be clear: most of the people who pitch books to me are other writers. In theory, they should know quality, and I should have a halfway decent chance of enjoying the same stuff that they do. But that theory rarely holds up in practice.

I don’t want to be this picky, and it isn’t like I don’t have free time to spare on reading. But the more I write, the harder it’s become to push myself to pick up new stuff from other people. I’ve tried making a schedule and saying, “This is the time that I will read,” and when that time rolls around, I always have something else to do.

One last thought on this: I’m becoming more jealous of even trivial successes. This isn’t so much a side effect of writing more. Rather it’s my failure to pick up new readers that’s to blame. So I read something that irritates me, and this nagging voice whines, “Why was this so praiseworthy, and my stuff isn’t?” I don’t want to think like that. But as much as I hate doing it, I can’t seem to stop myself either.

Being a writer is a lonely habit, and even though I want to be a part of the community of readers, I no longer feel connected to other folks by common interests. So, for all these reasons, sometimes I wish I’d never picked up the writing habit. Not because I suck at it, but because I now suck at being an avid reader. That feels like a tragic loss to me, the inability to get lost in new worlds and new ideas without tearing them apart.

So yeah, that’s enough to make me wish I’d never picked up this dirty habit of needing to write to fill the empty spaces in me. Those spaces used to be filled by other people, and even if sometimes I had issues with a story, at least I was able to finish what I started.

Yeas, it’s another sales report…

Amazon’s sent me a payment report for this month, and I decided to wander over to the KDP site to check this month’s sales. I’ve got sales in the US, the UK, and Germany. Of course I want to thank all my buyers, but I want to take a moment first to thank the folks in the UK and Germany who are buying my books. The US market is still where I get the bulk of my sales from, but for a while, there wasn’t any reason to check the other country reports because I never got anything except a blank screen. But during this year, there’s been a new trickle of buyers outside the US, and it feels really good to see I sold something in Germany, even if it’s just one copy of Peter the Wolf that sold.

Folks in the US still carry the bulk of sales every month, and this month, y’all picked up quite a few books. Peter got some love there too, but so did Sandy, Amber, Vicky and a few others. (It’s early in the morning, and my brain is fuzzy.) That’s not enough to hire an army of minions, but definitely enough to pay for another cover. And, that’s not bad.

I do not want to seem ungrateful for this continued success, but I would like to ask y’all Amazon buyers in the politest way possible, if you’ve read a book from me and want to help me get more sales for it, a short review would really help me out. A few kind words from you carries more weight than all the words I use pimping my stuff. So please, do think about posting a review to let others know what you thought of the story.

I need to annoy you with a reminder that we still need contributions to pay my editor for Roll the Bones. We’ve had 3 donations totaling $45, so we only need $510 to meet our goals within 35 days. Although the incentive packages are loaded with my ebooks, I will be seeing no royalties from this campaign, and whatever we collect, minus fees from Indiegogo, will go to Tara to help her cover her debts and take care of her kid.

Those of you who already donated, thank you. And thanks to everyone who’s shared the link to the campaign too. It’s hard for me to do this kind of campaign on my tiny low-traffic platforms, so every signal boost and link means another chance to reach new people. So if we meet our goal, it’s only because of all the help you folks provide. Even if we don’t make our goal, Tara will get a partial payment, and I’ll resort to giving her a larger percentage of my other sales until she’s paid up for Roll the Bones. Then we can start worrying about paying her for working on Thicker Than Blood.

So, closing out this progress report, I wanted to point out that I have a few more free stories posted up for your perusal. They’re over in the sidebar under the books, but those links are kinda tiny. So I’ll mention them here and offer them as a small sign of my gratitude. For your reading pleasure, I offer two novelettes, Eddie’s First Circus and Served Cold.

Eddie’s First Circus was published on Kindle, but I’ve taken it down to offer y’all a free sample of my dark fantasy writing. Served Cold was a revenge story that I wrote on spec for a crime fiction anthology. I was told my story was being held for possible inclusion, but the book never came out, and the publisher went out of business due to the owner having serious health problems. (This happens a lot in small-press publishing. Either there’s too many sick people starting up publishing houses, or small-press publishing is bad for your health.) Anyway, Served Cold is what my husband calls one of my darkest stories, while Eddie’s First Circus is…slightly less dark. But it’s got a kid who talks to animals, so that’s kinda cute.

Both stories feature deeply troubled kids trying to deal with problems in their lives, but while anti-hero Jessie Mendoza opts to do something positive for his little brother Eddie after the murder of their mother, the protagonist of Served Cold, Andrew, chooses to take a convoluted path toward revenge against a bully.

And so, there you are, free fiction. The ePub file is DRM-free, so feel free to convert the file to whatever version you need. And, one last time, thanks for your continued support.

Ramble on social media and self-publishing…

I’m taking a day or two off from fictional writing to clear my head after completing the rough draft of Thicker than Blood. So this mostly means I stare at Twitter and read whatever links catch my eye, or I chat with folks to pass the time. True, it’s not really productive, but usually it’s a great way to unwind.

Last night, I talked to a writer who is far more well known than me, and she was upset over some of the hateful things she’d seen on social sites. I knew what she meant, and I expressed sympathy and suggested that sometimes it was just better to pull back and stay offline for a while to avoid the stress.

This got me thinking about two things, as it usually does. The first is that, holy shit, I talked to a famous writer, and I felt like we had a connection, even if it was just for a brief exchange. Every time some big-time writer responds to me, I’m struck again by how social media enables me to talk to anyone, anywhere. And sure, lots of folks don’t ever respond. They probably get so much incoming chatter that it would be exhausting to answer everyone, or even a small section. So when some celebrity writes back to me, there’s this moment of admiration I have for the technology that makes this possible.

But this writer brings up the bad behavior of a lot of people, and then I have to think about all the downsides of the technology. This enabling platform gives a lot of people an over-inflated sense of entitlement to speak out on everything that annoys them, and they feel they have the right to bully other users of any given platform under the banner of free speech. They declare, “I have the right to say these things,” but never ponder that the hateful comments they make reach another human being somewhere on the other end of the connection.

It’s not just new social media, but all of the online experience that causes some people to disassociate their behavior from any consequence of their “free speech.” So gay bashing is okay. Sexism is fine. Racism is acceptable. Some people who claim they don’t go in for this hate speak have no trouble mocking the young or the elderly, perhaps feeling that ageism isn’t a real ism. and taken together, all this hate feels like an endemic shift in peoples’ ability to relate to anyone not inside their social clique. There’s no self-examination where these people ask, “But what are the results of my online behavior?”

It’s no secret that I’m highly volatile online, and my always online nature means that regulars have seen me in my up phases and in the midst of my worst mood swings. But I actually don’t like being angry, and over the years, I’ve pulled away from many social platforms because I got tired of feeling angry just surfing through my timeline of so-called friends. And I say so-called because in a list of a few hundred people on a social network, there might only be 4 or 5 who are actual friends who I spoke to regularly.

To be clear, a lot of those friends were decent folks. I’m not trying to paint with a broad brush and say “Everyone is fucked.” But there’s days when my stream would be full of petty shit and constant prejudices, and even if someone called them on it, wait an hour and the dissenter was deleted. And it’s these people who live in a perfect wind tunnel that are the most entitled. Being online as an equal isn’t about sharing opinions. It’s about musing on their nitpicks with other people. And if you got a problem with that, your opinion doesn’t matter.

So now I’m down to Twitter, and yes, there are days when my stream is so vile and toxic that I have to close Tweetdeck and go kill something in a video game to vent. But then there’s other days when I learn so much about the world around me, and I get little snippets of peoples’ lives, both the famous and the regular folks. I get a constant stream of reading recommendations when people post reviews, and I get crazy recipe ideas when someone posts their latest gastronomical experiment.

But, I don’t really see Twitter as a great promotion platform for myself. Maybe I could tweet my own stuff more often and get better results, but I’ve been finding that I get better result by NOT promoting my stuff than I do by pushing it.

Which leads to my other topic. See, it’s been floating around Twitter the last two days that the average ebook author makes less than 500 sales. And, in pondering my years-long slog through the fields of self-publishing and self-promotion, I tallied up that I’ve sold quite a few more books than 500.

How? How did this happen? For the life of me, I do not know. Every attempt I made at marketing has been abysmal, and my efforts at creating hype for my work has never been met with more than the barest whimper. It’s not just a matter of sales. My pitches didn’t generate interest in any of the places I tried. I’ve been in forums, talked to people in games like Second Life, hung out on a lot of social sites, and got involved with Project Wonderful to attempt banner advertising.

And here’s the brain bender. While I was promoting, my sales would tank. Then I’d predictably enter a depression and wander away for a few weeks, only to come back and find I’d made sales. Not on the titles I was promoting, just random sales from all over my back catalog. I’ve rambled about this phenomena before, how my inaction seems more effective than anything I do to sell my stuff. And this is why I’m constantly puzzled by social media. I love Twitter and the level of interaction I get out of it. But despite my being a Twitter regular for years, I still have yet to see any project explode with interest from my followers. I’ve learned not to mistake a follower as being a potential reader, because every project I pitched got hideous sales results. Every time, I’d tweet a bit more often, usually making a once an hour single blurb tweet with a link and a request for a RT. And I can get RTs. But getting traffic and sales from those retweeted pitches is not so easily done. And, the people who RT aren’t buying the latest book, either.

And yet…I wait a few months and release something else, and suddenly that book I promoted two months ago gets a few sales. The books with no covers pick up a few sales, even though I never advertised them. What doesn’t sell? The thing I’m currently waving around, trying to get your attention with. Of course.

I’m getting to the point of accepting Twitter solely as my source of social interaction. Sure, I’ll still put up a link to a project, but I no longer rush to my link stats to see what effect my ad had. History had taught me already, they have no noticeable effect on traffic or sales.

But, what Twitter does is give me a constant stream of new ideas and new inspirations. It gives me a sense of connection to the world in profound ways, and even if I can’t be real friends with every one of my followers, there are many followers who I would call friends. Every once in a great while, one of my Twitter friends will say they’re coming to Milan, and I get the chance to meet them in real life. I don’t know if I could have this level of connection if we were all still using snail mail to write to pen pals. (Yes, I had pen pals before I knew what the internet was. My first serious anime collection was set up by mailing blank VHS tapes to a pen pal and having him dub his fan-sub tapes for me.) Certainly, I don’t think I could write a letter to a big-publishing writer and have it replied to. I’m just one more letter in the pile that will be handled by an assistant. But online, I have an equal chance of being acknowledged and included in any discussion, even if my social ranking is much lower than the other people involved in the conversation.

So, combining these two topics, I look back at all the forum exits, the deleted social media accounts, and my disastrous sales efforts, and I ask “if I’m so lousy at my job, how am I selling more books than the average ebook authors?”

And there’s two answers. One is, the average author is probably over-selling their products. They likely have a blog where they only talk about writing, which attracts a blog audience of other writers, but does not necessarily mean they’re readers or folks willing to share links. In fact, a lot of those writers visiting the blog will likely be making the same constant “me-me-me” promotional pushes. So the problem here is, they’re tooting their horn too much.

And, the other factor is, I have a long tail sales model that’s starting to pay off bit by bit. A person sees my name next to a retweeted link, and instead of clicking it, they Google me and end up on a random book link at Amazon or some other ebook store. They read that blurb, and then, they’re interested enough to buy. There’s no directed action going on here. It’s the wandering nature of social media users that draws their curiosity, and I can’t direct their attention to this link or that. In a way, it’s almost like people have to stumble over me before they notice my work.

I’m not saying this a bad thing. In fact, my own methods of discovering new music and new books and games comes more from the random tweets shared by customers than any self-promoted linkage does. I don’t really care if this author says their book is really good, because all authors think that, even the crummiest hacks. Nobody has ever said, “Here’s my latest book. It’s shit, but you should buy it anyway.” But if someone I follow says, “I just read this, and it had me up all night,” I will go check out the blurb and consider buying it. If someone I know liked it, there’s a chance I might too, so why not check it out?

If there is a sure-fire way to promote a book online, I think it relies as much on luck of the draw as any conventional publishing deal does. Certainly, having a good book helps, but an overenthusiastic promotion campaign will make any good book look just like all the crap titles being promoted online. It’s almost impossible to tell what will be good based on self-promotion, so folks filter out promotion except from the writers they really love. So a promotion from me doesn’t look any different from the guy working for Del Rey.

Which gets me back around to pondering the value of sincere fan promotion. Friends offline and online both value this sincerity from fans. Looking at successful books, both pro and self-published, the real secret of their success is in those fans who picked up the story and loved it enough to gush. But how did those initial fans get plugged into the work, if not through the authors themselves? More importantly, how crucial was the authors’ social network presence in securing those early fans?

If followers cannot be mistaken for readers, then they also cannot be arbitrarily labeled as fans either. Which makes any social media platform harder to study. I cannot say for instance, why I sold so many copies of Touched and Blood Relations, or why NINJAWORLD continues to sit unsold to anyone. All I can say for certain is that it’s not me moving units. So, how did I sell over 500 books if all I’m doing is stumbling blindly?

I don’t know. All I know is, I’m grateful for the people I connect with online, and I’m grateful for their support, even if I don’t always understand the connection between their help and my ballyhooing.

Thicker Than Blood is done!

Despite the many gory distractions offered by Mortal Kombat, a nasty cold that came out of nowhere, and Mother Nature’s many sincere efforts to kill me, I have been cranking out steady word counts and edging my way closer to the end of Thicker Than Blood, the fourth and final Peter the Wolf book. Today I worked through my cold to write an impressive 6,500 words and complete the rough draft at just over 78K. The book will be a bit longer after I revise it, I’m sure, but I don’t expect this to stretch into the 90K range even with added visual information.

I feel very good about the ending, which is not a happily ever after. Peter’s suffered a lot through the four books, so a totally happy ending wouldn’t be fitting anyway. But there’s a note of hope implying that Peter will one day overcome the things his parents did to him.

Even as I’m closing out Peter’s story, I have ideas for a series for Alice, but I’ll have to leave those on a back burner and come back to them after I’ve put out some other stuff first. I have tentative plans to make a YA werewolf fantasy next, something a little less dark than Peter’s world, and using a very, very different wolf mythos, hopefully unlike anything previously written on the topic.

While I’m talking about Peter’s series, I would like to remind y’all that I’m still trying to pimp my editor’s campaign for Roll the Bones, book three in the series. I know with us indies, it’s sometimes risky to look at a series until you know it’s done. Well I swear to you, this series has an ending. And, it’s a good ending, too. So if you want to help pay my editor for book three and make it more worth her while to read book four, we can get this project done a little bit faster.

Thanks again to everyone who has given signal boosts on the campaign, and to the fine folks who have already contributed. We’ll be getting the rest of the series out to you soon, promise.