Aleksandr Voinov's Blog: Letters from the Front, page 13

Massage and tables

Last weekend, I've had my first massage lessons, and I love giving massages. I over-worked a few muscles in my forearms, but a couple days later, I was pretty much back to normal, so all's good. I now have to get 80 hrs of practice, several case studies and homework, and I'll be ready for my exam in late September. Then a month off and I'll start the sports massage course at the same place.

LA Witt is currently at my house and we're both so slammed with deadlines that we're right now working on our solo books rather than continue on the next book in her Wilde's series (basically a follow-up of No Distance Left To Run); I'm currently battling through Suckerpunch and have reached the "boring piece of shit" stage, but I think part of my problem with the book is that it's currently single-POV and might need a double POV (both Nathaniel and Brooklyn). Which means retro-fitting everything I've done so far, which is a bloody pain in the neck.

Normally, it's the other way around - I tend to eliminate additional POVs and stick to one. For example, I went 25k in Scorpion with a double-POV, alternating between Steel and Kendras before I realised Steel is just not that interesting. I frankly think it increases tension and stakes if I stick to one POV - and it's more difficult to tell a whole story that way even though the POV character is biased or might not "get" what's going on, while the reader should. I do think I'm best when I go deep into a single character and limit his ability to get the whole picture. Of course, he should be smart and perceptive--I've yet to write a really dumb/unperceptive character. Some of my favourite books are single-POV: all of Scorpion, Skybound, If It Drives, and Capture & Surrender, and of course Hostile Ground, which is currently tearing up the Amazon charts. (Thanks, guys!)

I've now been "freelance" for five months, and my stress levels are way down. I could be more productive, but overall, I think I'm in a pretty good headspace now. The massage course definitely helps with that--learning new interesting skills you can actually use really helps with the sense of being stuck in place. The big thing now is the UK Meet, and after that, I'll focus on finishing up some books and becoming a damn good masseur.

To that end, my partner sponsored a nice massage table which I have to assemble and then I'll unleash what I know about back massage. That's the issue with learning it a certain way--you do need the right tools to not ruin your back and assorted joints. But it's fun, and I have lots of volunteers to get my 80hrs of practice.

Life's good.

Book Cover Reveal: Return on Investment

I'm tempted to just put this up here without comment, mostly because so many things still need doing - the final editing, proofing, layout, file conversion and uploading. But generally, once I see the cover, a book is starting to feel "real" for me.

Garrett Leigh was the cover artist on this one, and the brief was basically me flailing about trying to cram in a little bit of understated sexiness (very understated), and show it's really about character growth, and, oh, it's a financial thriller, too. (Covers should always at least hint at what the genre is, I'm led to believe.) Garrett came up with this version pretty much right away, and all the work was focused on fine-tuning strap-lines and what words should look how and go where. From the very first draft, I couldn't imagine Martin (my main character) looking any other way. What do you guys think?

Release Day: No Distance Left to Run (The Distance Between Us, #4)

I know, I know. Launching two novels within a day of each other is . . . yeah. I didn't make that call. Also, things will be a LOT slower in June, July and August. (Though I'm planning to self-publish Return on Investment in June/July - depends really when the cover/layout issue is solved.)


Back from the dead...and back to square one.

The Distance Between Us, Book 4
The night before Chris and his best friend Joshua were sent thousands of miles apart on their respective Mormon missions, they finally gave in to their mutual desire. Left trying to make sense of what happened, Chris’s already shaky faith crumbled altogether a year later, when Joshua suddenly died.
Inconsolable, ostracized by his family and the only community he’d ever known, Chris found his way on his own. Now he’s going to school and loves his job as a bartender at Wilde’s. Years after Joshua’s death, he’s finally moving on.
Then a familiar face rocks his world. Joshua isn’t dead. He’s back in Seattle to make peace with his dying father, with a new name, a new accent…and old feelings for Chris that are alive and well.Forgiveness doesn’t come easy for anyone, but just as Chris is accepting that the man he loves isn’t going to run away this time, their families threaten to pull them apart all over again...
Buy it at Samhain.

Release Day: Hostile Ground

Yes, everybody who pre-ordered at Riptide got the book on Friday, but today is the universal roll-out of Hostile Ground.


Enemy territory is a dangerous place to fall in love.

After the deaths of three undercover cops investigating a drug ring in a seedy strip club in Seattle, Detective Mahir Hussain has been sent to finish the job. He joins the club’s security team in the hopes of finding enough evidence to bust the operation before the men in charge find a reason to put him in a shallow grave.

To protect the strippers, only gay men can work the club. Ridley, the cold and intimidating head of security, knows exactly how to test potential new hires—including Mahir. From the minute they meet, Mahir and Ridley engage in a dangerous dance of sex and mind games. Mahir needs to find his evidence before Ridley figures out he’s a cop—and before they both grow too close to betray one another.

As the game goes on, Mahir burrows deeper into the operation, where he learns there’s much more happening than meets the eye . . . and why every cop who made it this far has been silenced with a bullet.


Win stuff at the blog tour stops here: 

Post-Birthday Post

Right, it's 7 May, so I'm now officially 39 years old. (Note to self: update biography.)

I'm looking forward to starting my massage training in two weeks. I'll be able to give basic massages from September (which is the date of my first exam), and I've had a chat with my local hairdresser who thinks setting myself up as a masseur locally is a great idea, so that's my plan of action.

After being out of an office for four months now, I can't imagine going back, to be honest. I don't wanna. (I might still return to my previous line of work if I get an amazing offer that helps me pay off the mortgage in a few years, but it would have to be an amazing offer - and none of those seem to be happening on the market. People are hiring journalists with my specialisation, but not editors, and no job offer could be amazing enough to return to journalism.) So I have to make a business plan for the massage part of my portfolio to generate a supplementary income. In August or so, I'll be starting to look at local therapy rooms to hire on a day-to-day basis, or maybe join forces with other health-and-wellness people.

The behemoth novel (code name: ROI), which I spent two weeks editing hard, was turned down by Riptide because it's not romantic enough and essentially I'm not willing to turn it into a typical romance to increase expected sales numbers. It's a sound business decision, and only proves that Riptide doesn't give me an "owner's bonus". (I'm a silent partner, anyway, no longer involved with the day-to-day running in any capacity - our staff is much better qualified to do the work anyway.) No hard feelings, though it came as a surprise and puts me into an awkward position where I have to fend for myself. You only notice how much work the team does when that support is no longer there.

I was considering sending ROI to agents and mainstream publishers, but I have to admit that publishing via Riptide has made me quite demanding in terms of what I want from a publisher, and impatient. I no longer have the stomach to wait months for an agent to get back to me, and then months and months for the publisher to get back, and then two to three more years until somebody can fit me into their catalogue. Also, it's a genre-buster. It's far too gay and explicit for the mainstream financial thriller crowd, it's too much a financial thriller for the coming-of-age crowd, and not nearly romantic enough for the romance crowd, and it's far too business-y for the erotica crowd. Hey, even I don't know how to market it or who could possibly be interested in reading this. This makes it very unsuited for all m/m publishers I know, and I have no real contacts to traditional LGBTQ presses (who will then have to work out how to sell this genre-cluster to anybody, really).

So, after careful consideration, I'm going to self-publish ROI in June or July via Amazon, likely Amazon exclusive (this keeps my book-keeping to a minimum and my royalties to a maximum). What I now need to sort out is editing, proofing, layout and cover and how to do all this. There's also tax documents to fill out. Essentially, I'm throwing this book at the mercy of you, my readers, making it the best I can on my very limited budget, and hope somebody loves it. Letting it die is no alternative, and I trust that any book finds the readers it's meant for, eventually. I'm hoping I'll have all the ducks in a row for a release in June/July.

I've also done some financial modelling, and done a cashflow analysis, and it's pretty clear I need to eventually go back to a second job in some capacity. I've deleted a long whiny post about why that's the case with proof and numbers, but it comes down to either writing books that sell significant amounts or writing the books that keep me up at night, and those aren't the same.

I've also done some soul-searching (I found one, I'm happy to report), and I remain unsuited to writing the type of books that sells vast amounts of copies. In marketing terms, I'm a solid midlist performer with an enthusiastic but small readerbase. I'm the type of author publishers won't lose money on, but they won't make them rich or hit bestseller lists. I do win some awards every now and then, but I'm also too proud to take money from my partner to "fund my dream". It's a life lesson from my mother who ended destitute and broken when she had to rely on a husband who was a functional sociopath and dropped her when she got ill.

I write the books I must, and that's the price for it. Not that I'd be any good writing any other type of book. The luxury of writing what I want means I need to find a way to pay my remaining bills with a second job (ideally massage, though we'll see how that goes). I'm hardly the first author who faces that decision, so no need for anybody to cry a river, least of all myself.

Generally, I don't expect this situation to get any better. I've had a look at my spreadsheet and I'm clearly drifting away from writing romance. Just this morning, I realised I have a series of at least four novels that won't have any romance in them. For me, that's 12 months of work. There's no way I can afford to write them if I want to live off writing.

But I'll still write them, sales be damned.

And a slight re-schedule...

In the attempt to spend more time with my partner, we're currently watching Game of Thrones in the evenings. My feelings for the show are pretty mixed; I think there's loads of stuff that's extremely problematic, and quite a few things I like. However, I've also been spoilered by the internet, so the whole Robb plotline kind of doesn't have the same impact. I think we're pretty much united on how much we're enjoying Cersei, though, and Lady Olenna has certainly made an impact. Otherwise, as a historian, I'm finding all the bits and bobs "loaned" from history amusing.

In writing/editing terms, I've got a novel edit back and am currently making my way through. And after much planning and hand-wringing and re-planning, I decided to place the historical novel on the backburner again, mostly because we have big plans that involve getting Counterpunch edited and Suckerpunch written, and time's ticking on both, so I have to write Suckerpunch in the next 3-4 weeks at the latest. Ideally, I want it wrapped by 4 May (my birthday), and then return to the historical. After pushing that book around for about three years, three more weeks won't make that much of a difference.

There's also going to be more about Silvio and Franco in 2015, which means writing all that by September. So, yeah, four novels to write by September, and that's just solo stuff. I expect we'll do at least 1-2 more Market Garden books and a co-written historical in the same period.

And, of course, it's exactly four weeks until Hostile Ground and No Distance Left To Run come out. (The former with Riptide, the latter with Samhain). Time flies - just a while ago, that seemed like ages away. I better get back to finishing a couple more.

And it's a wrap

I've finished my editing pass on what I've lovingly called my #BehemothNovel on Twitter. It was originally 127k words, and I've cut 22k without any great losses to the story. I've become a much tighter writer in those 5-6 years since that draft. Now much depends on whether Riptide thinks it can sell that. (I don't have a say in acquisitions.)

There's also a blog tour going for our most recent release, If It Drives, here. There's prizes to win.

I wrenched my back a few days ago, but went immediately to an acupuncturist and he did the needle thing (my first--never been), something with electricity, cupping and finally a massage. He did manage to keep me mobile rather than allow the back to freeze up, like it normally does. Five days later, I'm good--though my shoulder hurts from, I assume, compensating/tension. But I can walk and lift and put my socks on, so it's all good.

Now, I've been teasing people with my WWII novel for more than a year. It's the novel I hint at in Skybound, and the project is already about 30k, though I kept getting sidetracked with other books and real life issues. Now, with the Behemoth Novel in the can, and in between getting edits back on a different project, I'm returning to the WWII novel I've dubbed the Birds Book. Today I'll clean up my desk and arrange my research books all around me, then put the most recent version on my Kindle and re-read what I've written. I expect to go in deep and hard--that's not a book that's easy to write, or even light and funny, so I'm expecting to work on this for the next 6-7 weeks (end-May is about my estimate) and do pretty much nothing else but come up for air. (And those edits.)

In other news, I read Line and Orbit, which I enjoyed, especially for the evocative writing and the scale of the worldbuilding. It made me want to write some military sci-fi along the lines of Dark Edge of Honor again, but that will have to wait for a little. I'd definitely want to have a plot first.

Along a similar vein, I've also finished watching The Pacific. The Pacific Theatre is not something that Germans are usually very aware of, so quite a bit of that was news to me. I'd be interested to read a military history that focuses on that overall conflict (including Korea and Vietnam) with a strategic/sociological focus. Unlike with Band of Brothers, I won't be buying the book by Hugh Ambrose--as a military historian, Ambrose just rubs me the wrong way, which is quite possibly my fault more than his, but then, maybe I'm just not his target audience. Anyway. I do have a tiny bunny that's based on an event in the Pacific Theatre ever since I watched the still excellent World at War.

So, yeah, my headspace will be decidedly WWII/apocalyptic in the next six weeks. I'm hoping I'll make some serious progress by my birthday, that would be nice. :)

The joys of editing

I know. Me saying "the joy of editing" is a bit like starting off on the pleasure of unassisted ocular surgery. But in this case, it's actually true. Self-editing is usually my least favourite part of the process, though it's obviously necessary.

In this case, though, the book's been sitting untouched on my harddrive since 2009. I thought it was a write-off, but I re-read it to ascertain just how bad it would be re-vamping it. And the truth is - the story is good. The characters are even very good. And the writing doesn't sound like me very much, but it has moments of brilliance. It also has a million tangents and repetitions and loose plot threads that I never really cleaned up. It was a book I pantsed, so I didn't really know where it was going, but it has a really quite special energy and mood, so I've been at it for a bout two weeks now, chipping away and applying what I've learned from my editors in the meantime.

And it's fun. Five years later, I have zero emotional or ego attachment to any of the scenes or sentences. (Though I still love those characters, hard.) There's moments when I roll my eyes at my younger self - "Oh, author really thinks he's being clever here" - and that's okay. I was a different person when I wrote it, and I now have the skills to fix this book, and most of the fixing is on the pacing/language level. It's amazing to see the story emerge from this fairly rough draft. And it's a luxury to have that amount of distance--a luxury rarely afforded in this "fast turnaround" type of publishing. I mean, I'm impatient with the worst of them.

So, yeah. This one's fun. It's also beautifully responsive and trusting. It's a breathing thing, this book, and it's so rewarding to polish it up. If wish self-editing were like this every time, because then I could really get into it. Fingers crossed.

ETA: NOT an April Fool. Honest. (I should check the calendar before I post stuff like this...)

Core values and beliefs

A couple months ago, I've done some writing-related self-coaching. I was using a self-coaching book and a journal for my answers. NLP talks a lot about core beliefs and values. They drive what we do and what we don't do. I can't go into any meaningful detail about what my core values are--it's really personal stuff to reveal one's "buttons". It's a bit like showing the strings that can make you a puppet.

There's a reason why a lot of NLP is being used to sell people crap they don't want or need. Advertising is never about the product and all about the feeling or all about the underlying value (or insecurity). Romance sells the feeling of love, and can hack into our need to love and our willingness to love. It can also hack into our insecurities about deserving love and being lovable or finding somebody worthy of love.

As an example, I get angry every time I go to the local mall. The reason? There's a lot of advertisement about their pre-paid gift card. You buy the card, put money on, gift the card, and they can spend it in any shop inside the mall. So far, so common. The thing that gets me and sets my teeth on edge is the slogan they're using: "Load it with love!"

In other words money = love. Normally, I see such bald-faced crassness only around Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, and, oh, throughout the three months leading up to Christmas. But that shopping centre has made it an all-year fixture. Because love is such a strong value, it's near irresistible. Give them money to show your love. (Corollary: if you don't have money or don't give money, you don't love them enough.) This goes so fundamentally against everything I believe in, it's not even funny.

And there's the thing. The values and beliefs we hold we tend to think of as universal. It took me ages to accept that some people have different beliefs and are okay with that. Quite a few people place their priorities differently and are happy that way. As I get older, I'm getting better at identifying what's important to other people (yep, that took me a good long while).

This is also true for writers. There are writers who do not want to make a living writing. There are writers who are happy just writing for themselves and not for publication. I used to not really understand that--for me, writing is a lot about communication, and putting work out there means that gets fulfilled. By now, I get it. I know writers who are happy labouring away in their studies and offices and at their kitchen tables, and communicate only with themselves. It's not a "damn pity", as I used to think, but absolutely a valid way to go about it. It fulfills different needs from mine and reflects different core beliefs or different ways to go about them.

I think spending a while thinking about what drives us (ambition, loyalty, independence, love, peace...) is tremendously useful for authors (and other humans). What needs are we fulfilling by writing? If a writer is oriented towards money, for example, is that a tangible, quantifiable measure of success ("I'm succeeding because I'm doubling my royalties every year") or a need for safety ("I can't sleep without solid financial in place. I can't think clearly if I'm dreading the sound of the letterbox announcing an unpaid/unpayable bill"). If it's safety, which other ways can that need be fulfilled? Sometimes, these can be at odds - you might want to make money but can't compromise on what you're writing (and what you're writing is uncommercial). Dig deep and see if there's a way to fulfill the conflicting needs. Some lateral thinking helps. In any case, core values and beliefs are usually ignored at our own peril - I think quite a few cases of writer's block might have their root causes here, but that bears further thinking/exploration.

Anyway, that's me thinking out loud in between editing chapters. I've trimmed >4k out of my 127k novel and still have about 25 chapters to work through. I think I'll end up at pretty much exactly 100k. And it'l be a stronger book for it.

(Not) business as usual

I'm just looking through a lot of paperwork. The whole process of leaving my current company took three months and was about as pleasant as a persistent itch in the unmentionables. But hopefully, after spending five hours or so in a group meeting with lawyers today, I'll be home free. In positive news, I'll get to see how City lawyers live. Yes, everything is research, and all of it is significant in some small way.

I've been reading. There's "Fanny and Stella", about a pair of Victorian crossdressers/transsexuals, which is nicely written and while I'm no fan of the Victorians, I did learn a few new things. I'm also re-reading the The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, which I read in German as a teen, 25+ years ago. I needed a break from "adult fiction" and wanted to see how it's held up against my memory. I'm only about 70 pages in, but it's interesting.

I've also wrapped "the damn book", and I'm currently cutting paragraphs and sentences and individual words from the financial thriller/coming-of-age/romance novel. I've cleaned up 5 chapters out of 34, and cut 3k words from 127k. At this level of redundancy, I'll very likely hit my target of cutting at least 17k, and I might even hit 100k wordcount overall, without losing too much. It just occurs to me how hard it is to write a book that's 70% set in an office. There's only so much lunch to get and coffee to drink to break things up. Much like corporate life, come to think of it.

With the 127k monster going strong, I'll have a decent track record for 1Q 2014; re-vamped a novel, edited another novel, reducing it by 30k (ideally) and co-wrote one book with LA Witt. April will very likely be Suckerpunch, though that depends on a few external factors. May/June is my "literary" WWII novel, and after that I'll write my historical paranormal.

Mentally, the fog is lifting. I'm less stressed, and more optimistic than I've been in a long time. Overall, "real life" is a lot more fun. I got to see friends I would have struggled to meet, and in April, I want to travel over to Germany and touch base with a few more (as well as some family). I have two leads for full-time jobs, one with the largest asset manager on the planet, and one with a small house. The latter came through my network, so I owe my contact drinks at the very least, as she was "thinking of me". Nothing beats personal recommendation.

In writing-related news, LA Witt and I have won an EPIC Award, category Short Fiction - Romance, with Quid Pro Quo. Not bad for a little story we wrote because I was bored witless and would have otherwise committed terrible crimes.



So, yeah, looks like the universe is telling me something with all these awards and awards finals and being generally productive and happy.