Michael Montoure's Blog, page 5

Cult Horror in Seattle/Tacoma this Weekend: “John Dies at the End” and “Blacula!”

I may be slightly sad to be back in Seattle’s gray climes after being down in Los Angeles this past weekend for the Gallifrey One Doctor Who convention, which was fantastic as always, but I have to admit, this is a pretty great place to be for a horror movie fan. Not only do we have constant access to the thousands of titles available for rent at Scarecrow Video, but we also have ongoing theater programming like Jason Miller’s “Bad Movie Art” at Central Cinema and Justin Giallo’s monthly ”Grindhouse Theater” at Tacoma’s Grand Cinema.

This week, there are couple of shows coming up that looked like way too much fun not to mention to you guys. First, we’ve got John Dies at the End, based on a completely gonzo horror novel by David Wong of Cracked.com, and directed by Don Coscarelli, the man who brought us Phantasm. If the movie can bring us even half the high weirdness that the book did — and in Coscarelli’s hands, I have no doubt it will — it should be one hell of a ride. That’s going to be playing for one week at the Varsity Theater.

Then down in T-Town, we’ve got the classic exploitation film Blacula at the Grand. I’ve been meaning to see this one for years. You might want to jump on this one — it’s only going to be playing this Friday and Saturday.

I’ve already got my tickets – John Dies at the End on Friday night, and Blacula on Saturday. Wanna join me?

Buy your tickets for the Friday 7:10pm showing of John Dies at the End
Buy your tickets for the Saturday 9:09pm showing of Blacula

Breaking into the Top 100 — Just Barely

For the last three days of January, I made Permanent Damage a free download on Amazon, and asked people to spread the word to help the book make it into the top 100 free books. Here’s how that went.

(This post may end up going into way, way more detail than you actually want. If you skim it all and skip to the results at the bottom, that’s fine. I’m trying to be very transparent about my writing and marketing efforts this year, for the sake of other writers who want to try some of the same things, and for any fans who actually want this level of crunchy detail, but I’m also doing it for myself, so I can look back at these posts later and see how effective various tactics have been.)

Getting Ready

I wanted to handle this differently than I had other giveaways in the past. This time, instead of just announcing the giveaway on Twitter and Facebook, I wanted to submit the details about the giveaway to websites that list upcoming free book promos. There are several of these sites: some of them will only list your book if you pay to be listed; others offer free listings and also an optional paid premium listing; others charge no such fee at all. Since this was the first time I was going to be taking advantage of these sites, I decided not to spend any money on getting listings this time.

Out of the couple dozen free-book-listing websites that I submitted to (and yes, a list of those will be forthcoming), eight of them actually listed the book: Book Deal Hunter, eBookLister, Freebooksy, Free Digital Reads, Free Kindle EBooks, the KindleBoards blog, Pixelscroll, and Super E-Books. There were other websites that picked up on the giveaway on their own, such as Spec Fic Daily.

The other thing I did to get ready was something I only thought of at the last moment.  I took a good long hard look at my book’s description on Amazon. I’d been using the same text I had on the back cover of the print version:

A dead woman’s offspring must face the legacy she left them. A child who can raise the dead unlocks a secret world of others just like him, and a man who finds blood coming through his ceiling learns that not all problems go away by themselves. The dead have their unfinished business — but can they be trusted? Ten more unsettling stories to be read in the dark.

As far as descriptions go, it was all right, but as a piece of persuasive marketing copy, it really lacked life and energy. I rewrote the description to be more enticing. I’ll talk about how I approached that rewrite in another post.

Fear and Loathing on the Social Media Campaign Trail

I did post about it on the usual social networks as well, of course, by which I really just mean Twitter and Facebook. I mean, I did post about it over on Google Plus, too, but honestly, that’s probably about as effective as shouting down a well. I didn’t do anything to promote this giveaway over on Goodreads, because I don’t really know how to use it properly. Not as a writer, at any rate. I have literally thousands of “friends” over there that I don’t really know how to reach without being labeled a spammer, and every time I try to research this, I mainly find other writers complaining about the same frustration. Hopefully I’ll figure it out eventually.

I posted about it a few times per day on Twitter, and re-tweeted other users’ mentions of the giveaway. I also tweeted the link daily at various free-book-listing accounts. I got a pretty decent number of retweets doing this; as I often read, it definitely seems to help to add “please RT” to your tweets. Many thanks to (deep breath):

@11spygod11, @AaronGritsch, @baxterpm, @BearHill, @BookYrNextRead,  @DoomCheez, @einsteinsarcade,  @GLHancock, @jbturnerauthor, @jinachan, @lokheed, @lunalindsey, @masoch667, @mcglk, @nerdettedesigns, @nevtelenuriembr,  @PhilHornshaw,  @RyanSeanOReilly, @Seattlejo, @ShaneKPONeill, @SPMiskowski, @squidlarkin, @timothycward, @wiccaworkz, @windbourne, and @Zenfearie44.

Over on Facebook, it’s a lot harder to see how much impact I had, largely because Facebook is one big tangled nightmare of poor user interface design choices and confusing privacy settings. Also, I posted about it both from my fan page and my personal account, and the promotion options and reporting tools for each of those are a little different.

On my personal account, I was able to pay something like seven bucks to “promote” my post, which apparently makes it more likely that the post will show up higher in my friends newsfeeds, or, you know, show up at all. (I’m not really thrilled Facebook has done so much to throttle back how much your friends see your posts in the first place, and how they now want you to pay to fix that problem, but let’s not get into that too much.) Apparently, the end result of that was that “three times as many” saw my post because of the promotion, but they don’t tell me how many people that is, exactly. Three, maybe.

Meanwhile, over on my fan page, out of my 200+ fans, 46 people saw my original post. On the first day of my giveaway, Facebook tells me there were 60 people talking about my fan page (and the giveaway, presumably), and that their posts were seen by 1,935 people. Which seems fairly decent.

I’ve tried to track down the people who shared the post about the giveaway, and this is what I was able to find, so many thanks to these people and to whomever else I might have missed:

Andrew Hummel-Schluger, Anna Armstrong, Carolyn Wolfe, Hollie Butler, Jackie Dempsey Lyon, Jonathan Paavo Sari, Judas Borbón, Kate Newman, Linda Roberts, Lisa Hellie Linderman, Liz Speedie, Llyra De La Mere, Lori Dyann, Pete Lazzaretti, Rob Cabe, Rick Keeney, Ross Skilling, Sally Lyons-Abbott, Sandra Odell, Snow Dragonwyck, and Steve Feldon.

I think this was the best response I’ve ever managed to get from asking people to share anything on Facebook, and I think it might be because I was asking people to help me reach a specific, measurable goal. Or maybe my fan base is just getting larger and more enthusiastic. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled to see this level of response, and I love you guys and I can’t thank you enough.

Results

So did I make it to the top 100 free books on Amazon, or not?

The answer is yes! . . . Very, very briefly. permanent damage had 3,199 downloads,  and that put it all the way up to #97 on the free books list, in the wee small hours of January 30th. I woke up briefly at 4:30 in the morning for no good goddamn reason, and figured I would check my standings as long as I was up. I’m glad I did, because when I crawled back out of bed again at 8:30, the book was back down to #103, and it slowly declined from there. (Amazon updates their sales rankings every hour, I believe.) I wish I’d had the presence of mind to get a screenshot when it was at #97, but I was barely functional at all, so I’m afraid you’re going have to take my word for it.

Here’s what I did get a screenshot of, later that day:

Now, don’t get too excited for me — Horror Anthologies is a very, very tiny category on Amazon. There are only about 40 books in the entire category, so I knew I’d end up in the top 100 there, at least. Heh. But still! Doesn’t that look great, one of my books at the top of each column? It might seem like a minor victory, but I still feel like I should print that out and have it framed.

Actually, it’s more important than you might think; from what I’ve read, ranking highly in a category, any category, makes it more likely that Amazon’s algorithms will pick up on your book and start recommending it to people. That was largely the point of this entire exercise — to get the attention of Amazon’s recommendation engine.

And it might already be working. I’ve already had as many sales in the past week as I did in all of January.

So what does all of this mean?

Since I wanted to be able to track how effective my social media efforts were versus the book listing websites, I made sure to use a link shortened by bit.ly when I posted to Twitter and Facebook so I could track how many people clicked on the link.

Apparently, during the three days of the giveaway, that link was clicked just 165 times. 22% of those clicks came from Twitter, and 16% of them came from Facebook. And if you want to know even more information, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why you would, you can have a look at the stats for yourself.

So therefore, my social media campaign only accounts for a mere five percent of my downloads, and that’s assuming that every single person who clicked on that link ended up downloading the book.

This tells me that listing the book on the giveaway websites was definitely worth doing, and I will definitely be doing that again the next time I do a giveaway. It makes me think it would even be worth it to spend a few bucks to get some premium listings on said sites.

If I were just looking at the numbers, I’d be forced to conclude that it’s not really worth doing any promotion on social networks at all. But I don’t think that’s true. This campaign definitely got people talking about the book, and passionately recommending it to their friends. That kind of word-of-mouth, once it spreads, will do more for my books than any recommendation engine ever could.

Not to mention, because of that personal connection, it brought me new fans who contacted me to tell me how much they like the book. One of them told me right after he read the very first story that it “rivaled Etchison’s ‘The Dead Line’ and Ligotti’s ‘The Frolic’ in terms of sheer impact.” That’s insanely gratifying feedback.

I’m definitely winning hearts-and-minds, but I’m not really winning the numbers game just yet. 3,199 downloads is not bad, but I commonly hear about other writers getting about 15,000 to 20,000 downloads during a free promotion.

I don’t think there’s really a problem with my methodology. I also really don’t think there’s a problem with the quality of the work I have on offer. So why were these numbers so low, relatively speaking?

I strongly suspect it’s because of something I’ve heard for years — that short story collections just don’t sell as well as novels do. I can’t seem to find any hard numbers to back up that “rule,” but I don’t really doubt it, either, and I think that relative lack of popularity might also affect how many copies of an anthology you can giveaway, too.

It’s going to be interesting to see how these tactics work when I do get a chance to apply them to a novel.

Anyway, thanks for reading about all this marketing wonkery. and if you’re one of the people who did help pass the word about this giveaway, thank you so much, I couldn’t do it without your help.

Actually, Yes, Please Do Pirate My Book

By now you’re probably wondering, so how did the book giveaway go last week? The short answer is: not bad. Pretty good, actually, although not phenomenally good. I’m perfectly happy with it. I owe you guys a real post about this sometime soon, one with details and real numbers — but I kind of had the wind knocked out of my sails by a particularly rough Causality shoot this past weekend. You can read one person’s side of how that all went down over on the Causality blog.

But anyway! Speaking of, uhh, sails, and, you know, sailing ships and all that, let’s talk about piracy! (Man, that might be one of the worst segues I’ve ever tried to pull off in my entire life.)

Chuck Wendig, unwholesome Internet god, has declared today to be International Please Don’t Pirate My Book Day. (There’s a hashtag for it, too, for all you Twitterians out there: #dontpiratemybookday.)

Now, when I first saw this, I was all ready to crack my knuckles and set to work typing a long screed about how Wendig’s thinking was still mired in the ideologies of the last decade, but then I actually went and read his blog post, and … it was quite reasonable, actually. And he linked to a YouTube video of Neil Gaiman talking about the subject, and that was even more reasonable, God dammit. How am I supposed to be able to argue with people on the Internet if they won’t do me the courtesy of being wrong?

Both Neil and Chuck realize that when people pirate books, and their books spread even farther and farther, the net result of this is that more and more people start buying their books. That might seem weird to you, but studies have shown that it’s the truth. It’s almost like — and this is totally weird, I know — if people try something for free, and they like it, they might end up spending money to get more of it!

Or, and this is the even weirder part, they might end up spending money to get a legitimate copy of that same thing. I can certainly personally attest to that. One of my favorite bands of all time is Placebo. I first heard their music in movie soundtracks, and thought, “hey, these guys are awesome.” And so I went and downloaded a bunch of pirated MP3s of their songs off the Internet. (This was in the days of the late, lamented Audiogalaxy.) I listened to them over and over again and passed them around to my friends said “hey, you need to listen to this.” And later on, when I was less of a broke-ass young punk, I bought every single one of their albums, went to their concerts whenever they came to Seattle, and bought some seriously overpriced concert T-shirts. I don’t think I’m unique in this at all.

So I’m going to go a little beyond Wendig’s grudging acceptance — I’m gonna say please, by all means, do pirate my books.

No, seriously. If someone told me, “hey, did you know people are downloading Permanent Damage off of some skeezy little pornography-ad-laden Russian torrent site?” — I would fist-pump the air and do a little end-zone dance. Because I would know I have arrived. I would know that there is enough demand for my work that people are actually stealing it. I would know someone read my book and thought, “I bet other people would like a copy of this,” and uploaded it.

Hell, like I was saying, last week I went to a lot of effort to make sure as many people as possible did download my book without paying for it. It was kind of like reverse piracy. I raised high the Jolly Roger, set full sail, matched course with your ships, and threw my treasure over onto your decks.

As Cory Doctorow once said, “you can’t monetize obscurity.” Would I like to be making a living from my writing someday? Yeah, of course. In order to do that, I’ll need to become well-known, and in order to do that, I need to just accept that a certain percentage of my work will need to be circulating around out there for free. Either with my knowledge, or without it.

Help Me Get “Permanent Damage” in the Top 100 Free Books at Amazon!

Man, I have been busier than a long-tailed cat in a rocking chair factory this week, between trying to finish editing my novel Still Life in time for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest (didn’t make it, but that’s okay, I’m happy with the work I did), working on some new props for a CAUSALITY shoot this upcoming weekend, and putting together a campaign video for the fundraising campaign for a Doctor Who party at Norwescon.

So what I’m getting at is, I meant to have this post up earlier this morning. But there’s still plenty of time for you to help!

From now through Thursday, my anthology Permanent Damage is available as a free download on Amazon.com. I did give away some copies of this book back when I first launched it, but this time, I’m running a much more aggressive campaign to get the word out. I’ve contacted a couple dozen websites that list free book giveaways. (And yes, I’ll be posting a list of those websites here sometime soon. Watch this space.) That’s getting me much more download traffic than I’ve had before.

But I still think we can do even better than that, and I need your help! I’d really like to see if we can push this book into the Top 100 Free Books at Amazon!

How does this help me? The more of these books we give away, then the more often it will show up down in the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section on other books on Amazon. it makes the book “discoverable,” in other words. If this were a bookstore, it’d be the difference between having my books stocked somewhere up high on a shelf and having a table display.

If you’ve already read Permanent Damage, then you know it’s worth recommending to your friends. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, go download a copy right now, and then recommend it to your friends! Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/PermanentDamage Please copy this and paste it into a Facebook post, a Tweet, an e-mail message, anywhere and everywhere! I’ll make this even easier:

If you’re on Twitter, just click the link to this Tweet and hit the “Retweet” button.
If you’re on Facebook, click the link to this post and hit the “Share” button!

What’s in it for you? Well, all your friends will know how cool you are for pointing them to my work before anyone else does. And you’ll have my eternal gratitude!

Wait, what? You’re telling you that’s still not enough? Man, you people are mercenary. Okay, I tell you what — you spread the word about this giveaway, and let me know you did it by commenting on this post, and I’ll enter you in a drawing to receive a free download of a pre-release copy of Still Life, as soon as I’m done editing it. I have no idea yet what route this book is going to take to publication, so you could be seeing it months or (God forbid) years before anyone else does!

Go! Go, my little winged monkeys! Let’s spread some fear, shall we?

Reaching Toward The Light

I’ve only managed to get in about three, maybe four hours of useful work today, and to be honest, I’m feeling kind of lousy about that. But I just don’t really have the energy to continue, and it’s getting kind of late in the evening as I write this, so I’m writing this blog post so it will feel like I did at least did one more productive thing today.

My year of writing full-time is off to kind of a slow start. I’ve been both depressed and sick, and it’s been kind of a struggle to keep my head above all that.

So what have I been working on? I’ve got another book giveaway coming up on Amazon — Permanent Damage will be a free download on January 29th, 30th, and 31st. In the past, when I’ve run giveaways, I’ve announced them here, on Facebook, and on Twitter, and I’ve managed to get a few hundred downloads here and there. That may sound like a lot, but it’s really not enough to effect the Amazon rank of a book very much. So this time, I submitted the book to a couple of dozen websites where you can announce giveaways like this, and we’ll see what kind of difference that makes to my download numbers.

Oh, and I spent this past weekend doing panels at Rustycon. I did a panel on British television on Friday, ended up not making it to a panel on Saturday about maps in science fiction and fantasy (I just felt too sick to make it back down to the con, and didn’t really feel qualified to speak on the subject anyway), and then wrapped things up on Sunday with a panel about formatting e-books. My fellow panelists and I did our best to make the process sound as simple and non-intimidating as possible, but I don’t think we really managed to.

The main thing I’ve been working on is revising my novel, Still Life. I’ve handed the book to a couple of beta readers and I’ve been getting their feedback on it. I’m trying to see if I can actually have a finished, polished draft in time for the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition. The deadline is January 27th, and trying to get the book done by then is actually kind of a ridiculously aggressive target, and I’ll be honest — I haven’t even decided for sure if I want to submit the book to that contest, or if I want to try submitting it to a different publisher, or whether I even want to just go ahead and self-publish it. But if I don’t have the book done by then, I can’t submit that contest, so I’m just going to go ahead and see if I can hit that deadline and then I’ll decide at the last minute what I actually want to do.

If I decide not to, or if I just simply don’t have it done in time, then oh, well — I’ll still have put in a lot of work on a major project right at the beginning of the year. The deadline is helping to keep a fire lit under me, if nothing else.

It’s coming along pretty well, I think. I just finished my first pass over the manuscript, and I’ve taken copious notes and figured out where all the problems are with it. I polished up some of the rough spots as I go along, and I’ve identified whole big chunks of chapters that need to be just torn out and rewritten. There are a few plot devices that I simply think don’t work, and I have some simpler ideas for tying things together that I think will work out quite nicely.

There’s still a lot left to do, and that — and my depression — are what’s making me think I’m not working hard enough. But honestly, I have to acknowledge that I’ve done quite a lot.

Quote of the Day

“If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

Report Card: Looking Back at My Goals for 2012

In early January of 2012, I posted a list of my writing and publishing goals for the coming year. Looking back on them, I don’t think I did too badly. Here’s a look back at what I thought I’d accomplish, and at how well things turned out. You might want to go back and read the original post first for context.

Get back to a better blog posting schedule. I defined this as posting “at least twice a week.” I just went back through my archives and did a quick count, and it looks like I posted a grand total of 57 times last year. That’s just slightly better than once per week, but you know what? I think that’s a pretty respectable average. I may have fallen short of the actual target number, but I don’t think I did too badly. I’m gonna go ahead and give myself half credit for that one.

Post video content. Yeah, this one I completely dropped the ball on. There are a couple of readings that I recorded, including my reading with fellow writer Luna Lindsey, that I still haven’t dug out the tapes for, cleaned them up, and uploaded the results. Zero credit for this one. I feel bad about that, but really, all of my video-related energy has gone into …

Do everything I can to get Causality Season One finished. Yeah, this one I feel good about. We’re still not done with Season One, but that’s certainly not due to the lack of effort on anyone’s part, let alone my own. The delay has more to do with the difficulties involved in coordinating the efforts and schedules of such a large and growing group of talented people. I’ve worn an entire hat rack worth of hats so far on this production — everything from writing and producing to prop building and set design to being a general errand boy and occasionally, a caterer. (Never doing that again. I think I’ve successfully discovered the most thankless job in all of independent film.) I’m even trying to talk my co-producers into letting me handle some of the post-production work, which has been an uphill battle so far, but we’ll see. Full credit on this one.

Finish and release Still Life. This is the novel that grew out of my story “One Last Sunset.” To be honest, I barely touched it. I gave it a once over, polished a couple of lines here and there, but overall, I’m going to have to give myself zero credit on this one, especially considering how much work there is left to do. I finished the first draft of this thing years ago and I really need to get off my ass and get it out into the world.

Get my individual short stories up online. I said that I would have at least twenty of them, and I’m not going to go count right now — I can tell you off the top my head I only have about half that. It turned out to be a lot of effort, and I’m not 100% sure that it’s worth it. They do sell, albeit slowly, and it is nice to be able to give them free days on Amazon, so I’ll probably try to get back to it. I did get a handful online, so I’m going to go ahead and give myself half credit for this one, too.

Submit to at least half-a-dozen anthologies. Yeah, not quite. I submitted a story to exactly one anthology. While I’m glad I did at least that much, I’m going to be ruthless here and give myself zero credit.

Release another collection of short stories. Full credit for this one! 2012 saw the release of Permanent Damage, which has been quite well-received and I’m totally happy with it. Good job, me.

Publish a new edition of Counting From Ten. Full credit for this one, too. Like I said last year, doing this was kind of a no-brainer. Not to disparage any of the effort I went to to proofread it, reformat the text, and design a brand-new cover that, if you don’t mind my saying so, looks pretty damn sharp.

Actually promote things once in a while. I had a very specific measurable goal for this one, which I don’t think I met — I wanted to contact 50 book bloggers throughout the course of the year. I kind of shifted gears on that one a little bit, and concentrated my efforts mainly on running book giveaways instead, contacting potential reviewers through sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing. I reached hundreds of potential new readers that way, so even though I didn’t go about it the way I’d intended, I think I get full credit for this one.

So let’s see, how did I do? Looks like that’s 5 out of 9 points. I think we can call that a passing grade, although just barely. But although this list doesn’t necessarily reflect it, I did work my butt off last year. So I’d say, honestly, if I were going to assign myself a letter grade, I’d give myself a solid C. Definitely room for improvement. But that’s what 2013 is for.

Now I’ll need to sit down and figure out what my goals for this year are, and we’ll start this all over again. I’ll see you here next time.

My Year of Writing Full-Time Begins

So, here we are — we’re actually finally doing this. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I was talking about doing this in early 2012 — namely, spending a full year without a day job and concentrating purely on writing and self-publishing. Now that 2013 has rolled along, it’s actually happening.

Theoretically, at least. I’m not off to a great start. You’ll be seeing this early Tuesday morning, but I’m actually writing it very late Monday night, burning the midnight oil so I can feel like I got something useful done today. This was supposed to be my first day. I did manage to accomplish a couple of minorly useful tasks, but nothing substantial.

I’ve actually managed to develop a pretty good work ethic over the last year. I never really thought I would, but it turns out that when I’m spending my efforts on something I actually want to do instead of just what earns me a paycheck, I seem to be willing to put in the hours.

So what happened today? I had already let the first few days of 2013 slide by, figuring that I would wait to start work on the first Monday. It seemed to make sense, and would give me a little chance to recover. Not, I’m sorry to say, that I was recovering from a fun and raucous New Year’s Eve. Instead, I’m trying to get over the end of a romantic relationship, and trying to get my head around the fact that the home I shared with someone else through most of last year is now suddenly quiet and empty.

That’s made it a little hard to stay motivated. I’m trying to look on the bright side, as best as I can. Now, I have nothing but time on my hands, and I can dedicate myself to this project without distractions. It’s hard look at things that way. The pain I’m feeling is still so fresh that it’s hard to look past it. But I’ll manage somehow. I know I will. I’ve been wanting this for too long.

It has been months since I first started talking about doing this, and I’ve been pretty uncertain about it for most of that time. It just seems like such a big decision, one so far outside my experience that it seemed impractical and unreal. Surely, I thought, someone was going to try to talk me out of it. Someone would talk some sense into me.

No one did. To my great surprise, not even my mother tried to talk me out of it. She, like everyone else, seemed to think it was a great idea.

I spent most of 2012 halfheartedly looking for a job, and getting by on unemployment insurance. All that time, I kept testing the waters. I figured out that if I cashed in some stocks, I’d have enough money to pay myself the same amount as I was getting from unemployment for twelve months, so I was carefully budgeting myself and making sure I could be comfortable and happy on that amount. I threw myself into publishing and promotion as if I already had made the decision to go full-time — I even went so far as to rent a desk at a shared office space in order to make myself take the work more seriously. It worked. I managed to put out two books of short stories in that time, and completely revamp this website.

By the time the unemployment finally ran out, I’d already made my decision. I certainly had my concerns — was I going to be able to jump back into the job market in a year’s time? Was I really going to be productive enough to be worth the expense? In the end I finally realized that I shouldn’t even be debating all this with myself — that there were hundreds and thousands of writers out there who would kill to have this kind of opportunity, and that I’d be foolish not to take it. If I didn’t do it now, when would I do it? If I never did it at all, wouldn’t I always regret it?

The beauty of doing this is that I set myself a very simple victory condition. The goal is simply to do it. If my goal had been that in one year’s time, I would be earning a living wage from self-publishing, I would just be setting myself up for failure. But my only goal here is just not to walk away from it. As long as I’m still concentrating on my writing career by the time I cross the finish line a year from now, I can call this year a success.

I’m sure that within that year’s time I will manage to become more successful. I’ll manage to increase my sales a little bit and get my name out there more. The only hope here is to bump the needle a little — to lay the groundwork for a writing career that, hopefully, will someday earn me a living. I’m going to try to set specific, measurable goals during the next year in order to see if I’m on the right track, but I’m going to try not to stress over them too much. This is just to see if I can actually do the work, and that depends solely on me.

Today was — not promising. I don’t think tomorrow will be very productive either — my ex-girlfriend will be coming over to help me take down our Christmas tree. I don’t think I’m going to be good for much of anything after that.

But the day after that will be a new day. I’m going to lift myself out of the heartbreak I’m feeling and hit the ground running. I’ll talk to you then, and we’ll look back on the writing and publishing goals I set myself in 2012 and see how well I did. Thanks for coming by.

Seven Books I Loved in 2012

So since I basically only ever read books on my Kindle anymore, it’s pretty easy to look back and figure out what I read in the last year, as opposed to my previous system of devouring paperbacks and then tossing them back somewhere into the crawling chaos of disorganized horror that is my apartment. I thought I’d take advantage of that fact and let you know what stood out for me this year, in roughly the order I read them.

Kill the Dead: A Sandman Slim Novel  – I loved the first book, Sandman Slim , when it first came out, even though I’ve often jokingly referred to it as “urban fantasy for bros.” There’s just something charming and fun and energetic about these books and their tough-as-nails protagonist, and this book does a great job at expanding on the world introduced to us in the original. Kill the Dead continues to take old and familiar ideas and completely flip the table on them, in a breezy but heartfelt style that delivers both real laughs and high stakes.
Ready Player One – For an utter geek like myself who came of age in the Eighties, this book is pure, unadulterated nostalgia candy. I love the idea of kids in the future obsessively studying the pop-culture of my youth — you know, for reasons — and then having the wish-fulfillment adventure of a lifetime inside a virtual world that they can mold to their geeky little wills. Is this book any good? Heck, I don’t even know. I was too busy packing my bags and getting ready to move into it.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell — I almost hesitate to include this one, because I haven’t actually finished it yet; but that’s not because it’s bad or boring, but because a.) it’s quite long, and b.) I don’t really want it to end. Its story of the study of magic in England and its revival is easily the most detailed, immersive alternate history I’ve ever read. It has a very entertaining cast of characters and a tone that manages to both dryly amusing and yet haunting, often at the same time.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children — This one I definitey hesitated to include, because in a lot of ways, I thought it, well — wasn’t very good, despite the fact that I’d heard so many good things about it. It’s a book that very badly wants to be a Tim Burton movie, a kind of twee and obvious story that ends a little suddenly and sets itself up for a sequel a bit too eagerly . . . . I dunno, I liked it well enough to read the entire thing, but thought there wasn’t a lot to it. So why is it on a list of books I loved? Because once I read it, then I found out that all the creepy vintage pictures in it I thought were Photoshopped were actually pictures the author simply found at flea markets and swap meets, and that he had written this story around the pictures he found. And I thought that the idea of doing that was so freakin’ awesome that I was willing to forgive the end result for any flaws.
Bait Dog — I was one of the backers for the Kickstarter campaign for this book. I’d read his novella Shotgun Gravy  and absolutely loved it — I thought that its protagonist, Atlanta Burns, was a wonderfully vivid character, lovable and flawed; scared, hurt and a complete bad-ass. I really liked the revenge-against-the-bullies theme, and thought it was just the right balance of revenge fantasy and real-world consequences, including an ending that broke my heart. I really wanted to see where this went next, and Bait Dog doesn’t disappoint — Atlanta takes on even bigger bullies in a cruel and terrifying subculture, with even more at stake. Author Chuck Wendig writes a blog called TERRIBLEMINDS, which is a never-ending fountain of excellent writing advice and equally excellent profanity.
John Dies at the End — I’d heard a lot of interesting buzz about this book, which is written by David Wong, the Editor of Cracked.com – I think he might have mentioned it in his columns there once or twice. I became especially interested when I found out it was being made into a movie by Don Coscarelli, who directed Phantasm , which is the best movie ever okay okay it might not actually be the best movie ever but I love it to little bits. But anyway, John Dies at the End is about a drug called Soy Sauce that gives users “a window into another dimension.” That doesn’t really tell you what the book is like. I don’t . . . actually know how to tell you what the book is like. It’s not a novel. At least, I wouldn’t call it one. It’s a disjointed and slightly dreamlike series of events that kinda sorta add up to a story. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes childish and disgusting, it’s almost always laugh-out-loud funny. I might sound like I’m overstating my case here, but this really pushed my boundaries of what you can actually do in “a book” and still end up with something solidly entertaining.
Constellation Games  – When I read Ready Player One, I thought, “Holy crap, you mean they let people who basically live on the Internet write books now?” I hadn’t seen anything yet. With its inventive plot and hilarious dialog, this book assumes you’re already familiar with science fiction tropes, Internet culture, and the history of console games, and just grabs you by the wrist and starts running. Hat tip to musician Sam Sheets for turning me on to this one; it’s fantastic and I don’t understand why I’m not hearing about it everywhere already. I don’t know if this book is The Next Big Thing or not, but it damn well should be.

That’s it from me for 2012. See you on the flipside.

Christmas Flash Fiction: “Mutant”

(Note: I first posted this on LiveJournal way back in 2005, and people still mention it to me as one of their favorite pieces. I just realized I’ve never posted it here. Merry Christmas to you and yours.)

________

“MUTANT”

You know their names. Do you recall mine?

I was just like them. Just like anyone else. But they couldn’t see it. All they could see was one small difference, my way of bringing light to the world. A difference that shouldn’t have mattered to anyone, but it did. I had to hide it away. My mark, as red as blood. Pretend I was like everyone else.

Until the night he said he needed me.

They loved me then. They all did, or said they did.

I wanted them to so badly. I believed them when they said it was an honor. I didn’t know any better. He was using me, that’s all.

He taught me so much that night, but it took me years to realize it. He taught me that no one will love you for being different, unless they think you’re useful to them somehow. All their hatred, all their love — it’s all about them, not you. You don’t need it. It doesn’t matter what they think, if what they think can be changed so easily.

I’m not letting him use me any more. He’ll never use anyone again.

I’m raising an army, now. An army of misfits. It isn’t easy. Everyone’s scared. They say he’s watching all the time — he sees us when we’re sleeping, he knows when we’re awake. I’m not afraid. I don’t really think he cares about us enough to pay attention.

But he should. They all should. They never let me play their games, but this time, this year, they’ll be playing my game. We are on the march, our eyes fixed true north.

Remember my name. I’ll go down in history.