Bob Defendi's Blog, page 2

Updates on Books 3, 4, 5, 6, and Beyond

All right. For a long time, I've been playing Dying Light. I started it in October as my Halloween game and it's a long game. Also, my schedule is busier now, both socially and writing-wise, so I don't often get a solid day of playing on any given game. Part of that is that my "game" time has partially been taken up by some roll20 character sheet design that I probably shouldn't have let myself get roped into. But that really is just all on a personal note. It hasn't really affected anything professionally. It's mostly taking longer because it hasn't affected anything. I'll keep taking nights off from it to work on writing stuff. I can't finish an 80-hour game in two weeks anymore, barring a major staycation.

So, updates! Book 3. I noticed that I hadn't heard anything from my publisher for a while. It turned out to be my fault because when I nudged the publisher about it, they asked me if I'd ever sent them the signed contract. I checked and found out that I, in fact, hadn't. I merely thought I had. So I sent that in and received my editorial assignment. We'll start that in earnest right after the holidays with a tentative release date set next year.

Book 4. I've been sitting on Book 4 while waiting for movement on Book 3 (not realizing that was my fault). I'll run it through their style guide this week and send it in.

Book 5. The first draft is done. This will be my project as soon as I finish Dying Light, or sooner if it looks like a risk I won't finish Dying Light in time to finish Book 5 before my Christmas Break (I try not to do be draft revision during my actual vacations, so I'll want to time it to be done before the 21st, which is my first day off, or better yet, the 20th which is the night my vacation starts.)

Book 6. This was my big push of NaNo, and I hoped to have enough of it done that I could kinda take December off, but the fact that it's a comedy and that whole rib/lack of sleep thing through a wrench in that. Still, I haven't missed a writer's group so I'm still on schedule, and I just passed the midpoint in the novel, so it's coming along nicely.

Beyond...

I don't know what happens beyond book 6 yet. I don't intend to stop DbC novels, but I might well take a break and start alternating in other novels. I might try to take them in a slightly new direction. At the end of book 6, I feel like they want to branch out. Book 6 is kinda my Return of the Jedi (in more ways than one). I'm not sure what the series looks like after. I'm curious to figure that out.

Hopefully a few of you are too.

Wow

So you're probably expecting a final NaNo update, but instead, I'm going to talk about ribs and degenerate into a discussion on health. Feel free to skip it if spinal health isn't your thing. On Thanksgiving, I dislocated 3-5 ribs. The experience was...let's say...bracing. This isn't the first time its happened, but it's one of the worst, and I couldn't breathe when I lay down to go to sleep every night. Friday a friend's wife managed to pop the three worst ribs back into place, which allowed me some relief, but I still had a great deal of trouble sleeping. I went to the chiropractor on Monday, but that didn't take and so I went Wednesday again.

The offshoot is that I'm just starting to get something like real sleep again. The vertebrae that caused the initial problem, sending the muscles into spasm and pulling the ribs out of their positions, still keep pinching nerves. I don't know how long it will be before I'm completely back to where I was, but I'm working on it.

I made the observation during the worst parts, in a moment of despair and pessimism, that this always seems to happen when I'm on vacation. Then I started to wonder if that was something other than just confirmation bias, but something about taking a week off work that messed up my back. I think it came clear Monday after my chiropractor appointment. I went home and sat in my comfy chair and within 20 minutes my back clicked out again. I used the restroom, then when I came back, I didn't put the footrest up (my comfy chair is a recliner). An hour later I felt much better. Now, a year or two ago, I had the back of that chair rebuilt, better than new, with extra reinforcement for back support, so I'm pretty sure it isn't a matter of it just being old. I think it's just that any recliner, unless its a solid chair sculted to a spinal shape, requires your postural muscles to hold your back in position. A weekend of that isn't a big deal, but after five days, my back snapped out of place, unable to handle it.

So I think that's the key. I got the chiropractor to give me a set of excercises to strengthen those muscles. Hopefully they will be better before christmas. Either way, I'm going to spend Christmas break alternating between reclining and sitting up, so that those muscles don't have to work for very long at one run. I think that's a plan.

Oh, and I didn't finish NaNo.

I'm on Vacation!

This week is me watching streaming television, playing with my entertainment setup, and trying not to get carpal tunnel syndrome playing Dying Light. There will also be the eating of turkey. And perhaps reflecting on thankfulness and the like.

As writers its very important to recharge our batteries. When I first started as a professional game designer, I had a 100,000-word month during an already busy time. At the end of that month, one of my publishers contacted me, after I'd turned in one of the books to ask me if I was all right. I still think fondly of her because she didn't think, "Bob is a crappy writer," or "Bob has lost his edge," but "Bob doesn't turn in work like this unless he's broken."

That's when I learned that I can push myself too hard, and that I need to take time for myself sometimes. I'll get pneumonia. I'll burn out. Then again, sometimes I write blog posts when I intended to just write "I'm on Vacation," scribble a single line, and then stop.

Because we're writers, and we might have a problem. But recognizing it is the first step, right?

NaNoWriMo Week 2

So, NaNo, week 2.

I finished last week with the question about how week two would be and what it would hold. If you've looked at the counter on the right, you'll see it went just about as well as week 1. Except that I didn't have a dental emergency. Although the filling from my first dental emergency did fall out, so I did have a dental event. I just decided it wasn't worth my time to get fixed. There was always a question about whether it would hold. It was a gamble, if a seventy or so dollar one.

But enough on whether or not I have a rough spot on my tooth. We were talking about NaNo. I put up another five thousand words or so last week. Was home sick two days, although that didn't necessarily impact my production very much. Writers Group went well. Didn't seem impacted by the fact that they were mostly NaNo words, which worried me some. I'm confident in my ability to write more dramatic fiction during November, but as I probably mentioned last week, this is my first time trying comedy, and comedy is hard.

So. Week three. I have a huge number of demands on my time this week. It seems almost every minute of it is booked, so writing time will likely have to come from my sleep cycles. Let's see how it goes.

NaNoWriMo Week 1

Wow. NaNo can be hard. :)

I've won NaNoWriMo two or three times in the past (to "win" means that you completed it, finishing more than 50,000 words by the rules of the contest). I have a full-time job each time, but at no time was it a high-demand job. In the past, my NaNoWriMo pattern went like this:

I set my novel goal at 100,000 words. I tore it up for the first three-quarters of the month, hitting my daily goal pretty much every day (or making it up the next day if I didn't). Then, around Thanksgiving, I'd take the day off to spend time with family. About that same time, I'd flame out, but at that point, I'd be in the 70k word range. I wouldn't go back to writing the book in November, or for the rest of the year for that matter, because I'd have enough material to feed my Writers' Group well into January.

Other writers would watch my progress and send me death threats.

There are two main things different about this NaNo.

1) This time I'm writing a comedy. Comedy is much more difficult to write than Drama/Action. Once I've outlined a dramatic work, I know pretty much how every scene looks. Things change as I write them, of course: no battle plan survives contact with the enemy and no novel outline survives contact with the word count, but a drama actually benefits from NaNo here. When you have a great idea while you're writing, your ability to execute it well is aided by having less time to forget it between having the inspiration and having the opportunity to execute it. There are exceptions, of course, but I'd say I forget far more great ideas than I have great ideas become more spectacular by germinating over time. The idea can still germinate over time after you write it into a book...that's what second drafts are for. A forgotten idea is often forgotten forever.

But comedy. If I know what I'm writing, I write a thousand words in about forty minutes. So if I'm trying to hit two thousand words in a day because it's NaNo and I want to be a little ahead, that's less than an hour and half of writing. Round up once you add in pulling things up, getting the outline ready, firing up iTunes, getting my drink and the like.

Comedy on the other hand, usually takes at least twice as long. Often longer. There's a joke, I think in book two, where I say, "There was enough blood to fill Wembley Stadium with pudding." That joke took me an hour to research. First I had to come up with the idea of the joke, which probably took me five or ten minutes. When I hit on the idea of making a blood pudding joke, I decided that I needed to come up with an analogy for blood pudding. After a bit of noodling, I decided that it needed to be a sports analogy and it should be hyperbole about volume. I went through every sports arena I could find in Scotland looking for one that a US reader would recognize by name, and finally decided that there probably were none, and while I don't explain my jokes in DbC (unless explaining them is the joke itself), they have to have some chance of landing. Then I expanded my search and found Wembly stadium, which has broad, international name recognition. Finally, I researched the penetration of blood pudding to determine that while it's a Scottish dish, it is certainly still eaten in England, at least enough that I felt good making the joke. When Howard Tayler, professional humorist, complimented the joke and I told him it took me an hour to research, he just said, "Welcome to my world."

NaNo is about writing fast. But this is my job. DbC 6 cannot suck because I wrote it during NaNo. I wrote one of my favorite trunk novels during NaNo. (It's at Baen right now, made it past the slush pile, and had been under consideration for a couple years). I don't slack on quality just because it's November.

2) I have a much more demanding job now. The first day of NaNo, I had a dental emergency. While the work itself wasn't too traumatic, when you aren't scheduled, you spend a lot longer in the chair because they work on you between the other patients. This time, it amounted to two and a half hours. I have a bad back, and this crippled me. If you know me, you know that I can't completely survive without pain pills, but I've come a long way. There have been times when I've needed to take six a day. I'd gotten to the point where I was taking them maybe one or two a week and I've gone two or three weeks taking none at all. After that dental visit I'm back to two or three a day, and likely will be for a month, until I recover.

Days two and three came in the first days of a big rollout at work, and I'm the point of the spear. The first of those I worked ten hours. The second I worked nine. So I can't just clock my eight hours and leave anymore. I have big boy responsibilities these days.

Still, I managed more than 5k words the first week, so I'm happy. You can see my joy on the widget to the right. You can also track my progress there, and compare my progress against your own.

Lets see what week 2 holds!

FearCon and NaNoWriMo

I spent this weekend at my first FearCon, which was fun. Except for the fact that I didn't bring any horror books to sell. I didn't actually confirm that I'd be at the convention until just a few days before and so I didn't have any of my horror anthologies there. You see, at almost every convention I do, there are about ten people selling those same anthos, and so I just direct people to one of them, and sign them when they come back to me. But with this being FearCon's second year, it wasn't really on my radar yet and so it sort of snuck up on me. While I was more than ready for my panels, I didn't have my supply of product ready for sales. But I don't go to these things to make a profit, so that part didn't really bother me.

My two normal panels went well if the noise levels were a little sub-optimal. We met great people. I think we imparted some good knowledge, and I'm pretty proud of what we did. In of Choose Your Own Apocalypse game, I played the werewolves again, and I won. There's a video of my Facebook feed of me singing Werewolf of London, should you really want to see it.

Also, I've decided to do NaNoWriMo this year. I have participated in years because I'm almost always mid-project when it begins, but this year I just learned about the Zokutou clause, which allows for people who've already won Nano to count words of works in progress (not prior words, you're just allowed to start counting whereever you are when November starts). I'm about 25k into DbC 6, so I'm just going to pick it up right where I am and start from there. I'll post my word counts to twitter to help inspire my Nano peeps.

That's it for this week. I hope everyone's stoked and ready for Novemember!

FearCon and an Update

So, it appears that I'm going to FearCon here in Salt Lake. I scheduled the time off a month ago, but I found out that I was actually scheduled...yesterday? So yes. I'll be a FearCon. I'll be selling books at a booth. I'll be at two panels plus a Choose Your Own Apocalypse Panel. There will be a musical number. If the audience seems into it, there may be dancing. We'll see. I've never been to a FearCon before. They are fairly new.

As for the book update, Audible rejected the audiobook for minor technical issues I won't bore you with. I've sent it back to the producer, but the offshoot is I suspect it will be at least another two weeks before it releases. So I'll officially announce book two in the next day or two. Expect a series of punch-drunk tweets. It's been a very, very difficult week.

I've got nothing else. It's going to have to be a short one.

Two (Or One and a Half) Out of Three

When Death by Cliché released, I believe all three formats of the book came online the same day. I had a feeling this wasn't going to happen with this book. For one thing, I believe we turned in the audiobook a bit later this time than last, so it hasn't had as much time to go through the approval process. For another, I've become more pessimistic. So since I haven't announced the book yet, let me start by updating on the three formats and where they stand as of the writing of this blog post.

The kindle version came online on the release date. Since it was available for preorder, that isn't particularly surprising. The paperback came online Friday, but its metadata doesn't match the kindle version, so they don't show as different versions of the same book (for one thing, the title displays differently). I told the publisher about that Friday night, but it's just been the weekend since then, so they haven't had time to fix that. The audiobook is still pending approval. If I remember DbC correctly, I expect that will probably pass approval sometime this week. Next at the latest. Unless it's rejected, of course.

I still don't want to make a big push without having all three versions to sell, and there's no reason to make a big deal about it. The people who really want copies are already buying them, so I can wait. I'm patient. I probably don't get a lunch break tomorrow at work, but I'll likely set up my book release party the next day.

In the meantime, the beta for Fantast Flight's Legend of the Five Rings RPG came out, so I've been reading that and building a character sheet for Roll20. That's devoured a lot of time and distracted me nicely. Tonight after I finish this post I'll get to go back to playing my second Halloween video game, which will probably be my last Halloween videogame. It's Dying Light, and it's huge. It will likely take me past Halloween itself. I'm enjoying the game, it's just big. It was a present from my friend Dan Willis.

But that's it. Most of my time right now is distracting myself before real sales numbers come in. The waiting can devour the corners of your sanity, and my sanity has never been great to begin with.

Or at least that's what the voices claim.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

This week (theoretically when you read this) Death by Cliché 2: The Wrath of Con releases. I'm not sure if all the formats will release at the same time. I'll probably save my big release announcement for either when all three formats are out or for when two of them are out and I know that the third will be on a considerable delay (if Audible sends back the audiobook for formatting work, for instance). Anyway, I write these in advance, so you might well already know the answer to that question before me. Perhaps I'm already annoying you in my social media stream. More likely, the formats are coming available in stages and I haven't said anything to announce the book yet.

I finished DbC 4 yesterday (as you read this). I'll parse that through the submission doc for the publisher and submit it pronto. Then I'll play my Halloween games (a yearly tradition) a little break before I start DbC 5's big edit.

This isn't a big post. The week before a release is a weird, tense time for me. I'll likely be more verbose next week.

A New Trope

Last week I started my big edit of Death by Cliché 4: A New Trope, prior to turning it in to the publisher. The timing came about because of two specific details. One, Comic Con was over, and I learned at FanX that if I draft a book during a Con I will wreck my health, and two, I needed a very specific expert critique for DbC 4 and I wanted an unbiased read on it, so I couldn't tell the people in question why I needed their critique. This meant none of them were especially motivated to finish. Critiquers are fickle. It's not at all unusual for me to have three or four (or even nine or ten) people not turn in a critique for every one who does, and since I didn't want to tell the people why I needed their feedback, this was no exception. It was Tuesday night last week before someone came through and I finally received the feedback I needed. The feedback was a green light to go forward. The reader in question had a couple good notes unrelated to the question I asked, but important to her perspective, and I was happy to receive them, but I totally didn't screw up where I was terrified I'd screwed up. So that was good.

Now: I'm done being all vague.

As of this writing (Sunday night), I'm almost halfway through the draft by word count. I am SO happy with how the book has shaped up. The book is my tribute to my great love, Star Wars, but to keep it from being too derivative I took it back to the original source, not watching A New Hope again, but instead watching Lucas's inspiration for the film, The Hidden Fortress, (and also Kagemusha, because I wanted to ruminate a little more on the plight of a double in Asian society). I'm really happy with the book at the moment. I feel like it's dancing in and out of the script of A New Hope in strange and interesting ways. At least one of my readers thinks so. We'll see if others do as well. It might be my best book.

I mean, until we get to five, of course. And then maybe six. We'll see. You hope you just get better at this as you go.

But let's get real. Even the Michael Jordan threw a brick once in a while (Not that I'm comparing myself to Michael Jordan, although I might write better than him, I haven't checked). Part of me is cringing and waiting for that moment of failure. It's easy to think that your career will be a steady hill to climb. It's harder to think of it as peaks and valleys and that your second book might be less successful than your first, or that your fifth might bomb, or that you might have to burn your first pen name at some point and start over, as some authors do. But these things happen. Of course my second book isn't out yet. I'm just discussing theoreticals. My second book is far superior than the first. Not that the first is bad, but there's ten years of experience between the two.

So I'm borrowing trouble.

I think I did this right before DbC released too.