John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 22

THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER Cover Reveal

I’m very excited and pleased to unveil the cover to my new book, The Sword and the Sorcerer. For a variety of reasons, this novel has taken a lot longer to publish than others I’ve worked on, but I am entering the last stages now! (And given that I wrote the first draft of this book 30 years ago, I suppose it’s okay it took a couple extra months to get it out.)

The Sword and the Sorcerer tells the story of Calibot, a poet who just happens to be the son of the most powerful magician in the Known World. When his father is murdered and bequeaths him the legendary sword Wyrmblade, Calibot finds himself unwillingly thrust into a deadly power play that will change the face of the Known World forever.

Here’s the cover, the latest awesome piece by Jill Jess.

The Sword and the Sorcerer releases Christmas Day 2013. You can find more information on the “Fantasy & Fairy Tales” page of my website.

Using Insomnia for NaNoWriMo

Lately, I’ve been suffering from insomnia. I wake in the middle of the night and can’t back to sleep. The truth is I haven’t been sleeping well to begin with, so it’s hardly a surprise that I can’t return to sleep if I’m interrupted.

It’s not all my fault. Last week, some idiot’s car alarm went off at 3.30am. Four times. A few days ago, the cat came to bed at midnight. Before settling in, he had to walk up and down my legs, collapse on my feet, and proceed to have a bath.

So it’s not like I’m trying to miss my nightly z’s. People are messing with me.

What’s this got to do with NaNoWriMo? Well, I’m a big believer in not wasting opportunities. Lying in bed wide awake accomplishes nothing. The way I figure it, I’m going to have to make up the sleep the next day with either a nap or an early bedtime. That’ll cut into my productivity. Moreover, exhaustion is one of creativity’s enemies. I can’t write for beans when I’m a zombie.

So, if I’m well into a bout of insomnia, I get up and work. I see no reason to waste time.

And during NaNoWriMo, work means writing.

The thing about this challenge is that it is a constant battle not to fall behind. In a lot of ways, NaNoWriMo is a race. Time is your enemy, and any day you don’t hit your writing goals gives that enemy a chance to take the upper hand. Anything you can do to stay on pace — or better yet, get ahead — is helpful.

So, if I can’t sleep, I get up and write. It doesn’t have to be that much. When the cat roused me this week, I only knocked out 800 words before I was too tired to write anymore. I went back to bed and passed out.

But I was 800 words ahead on the chapter I needed to write the next day, and I needed that jump since I was tired from my alleged familiar stealing over an hour of dream time from me.

I also figure this is partly NaNoWriMo’s fault. The pressure to stay on pace has me constantly thinking about the book. Yesterday, raking leaves, I was thinking about how a chase was going to go down. I mapped out a conversation between two characters while I was in the shower the other day. I plotted two chapters in my notebook while I was waiting during my daughter’s physical therapy session. Whenever I can steal a moment, I bend my mind towards Roses Are White to reduce any chance I won’t make it to the end by the 30th.

And that is likely having a detrimental effect on my sleep cycle. Exhaustion may be the enemy of creativity, but creativity is also the enemy of sleep. If I can’t shut down my brain, I won’t be losing consciousness any time soon.

But, hey, it’s only for a month, right? I can sleep during December. There won’t be anything going on then. . . .

Hopefully, NaNoWriMo isn’t costing you any sleep. If it is, well, maybe you can make it work for you too.

Fighting through Writer’s Block during NaNoWriMo

Sometimes you run out of steam unexpectedly. You’re cruising along, writing well and everything’s fine, and then bam! The ideas stop flowing. It’s like someone turned off a faucet. You’re stuck.

This is the most sinister form of writer’s block. Being stuck without an idea is bad. But being stuck when you know what you want to do next but you don’t know how can be worse. The frustration is doubled, and frustration is the enemy creativity.

I had this exact problem start on Friday night. I had a very productive week of writing Roses Are White. I’d made it through Chapter 22, and the plot was accelerating nicely towards the big climax.

I spend my weekends plotting the chapters I’m going to write during the week. That way, there is nothing to slow me down or trip me up (from a creative perspective), which is critical during NaNoWriMo, where I have zero margin for error. So I sat down Friday night, wrote, “Chapter 23″ in my notebook, and . . . couldn’t think of a damned thing.

Now here’s the catch. I knew what I wanted to happen. May’s brother Gavric is becoming radicalized, and his terrorist friends want access to his sister’s apartment. They have plans for the Captain of the Elite Guard. So they convince Gavric to steal her keys, so they can make a copy of her apartment key and be able to sneak in.

Chapter 23 is supposed to be about Gavric pulling off the theft. So I sat down to plot it all out and discovered I had no idea how he was going to do it. His relationship with May is fraying. How would he get close enough to her to do it?  She’s the head of the chief security force in the country. How would a young elf with little training steal keys from someone like her without her noticing? Even if he could do it, how would she not notice they were missing the next time she tried to leave the apartment?

I thought and I thought and I thought. And not one freaking idea would come to me. I spent most of the weekend trying to puzzle this out, and, given that this was the first of the five chapters I’m supposed to write this week, that put me behind on getting everything mapped out.

In the end, I took the advice I always give in this situation — just write. I sat down yesterday and just started writing Chapter 23. I decided Gavric would visit her at the apartment and look for an opportunity to steal the keys. With that in mind, I started typing.

A thousand words into the chapter, he’d pulled off the first part of the plan. But he also had to get them back without her noticing. He needed to stall while his friend made the copy. I glossed over the conversation he had with May while he was buying time. It wasn’t relevant to the story, and my creativity wasn’t too very sharp. I figured this would be one of the shorter chapters, coming in at between 1500 and 1700 words.

But I let the flow take me. I let May and Gavric tell me what to do. And when I was done, I had a 2733-word chapter that accomplished the plot device of getting a key to May’s apartment into the hands of the bad guys while revealing a lot about Gavric. The chapter is from his perspective, and through it we really come to understand who he is — what he thinks of his sister and why he is doing what he is doing. He’s a three-dimensional, complicated person as a result of the chapter wherein I couldn’t figure out how to get him to steal his sister’s keys.

If you’re stuck in your current project, I encourage you to just keep writing, especially if you’re participating in NaNoWriMo. You just don’t have the time to ponder what to do for very long. To stay on pace and hit your goal, you have to keep writing.

It sounds strange and counter-intuitive, but if you don’t know what to write, writing is the way to figure it out. Getting into a flow solves the problems.

Hopefully, you haven’t hit any snags on your NaNoWriMo project. If you have, leave a comment below and tell us how you battled out of it.

Hitting my NaNoWriMo Goals this Week

I hit my NaNoWriMo goals this week! Well, the truth is I’ve hit them every week so far in November (which is a Good Thing TM), but this week I hit them on time.

Last week, you may recall, I had to adjust my schedule. By accepting a teaching gig, I interfered with my ability to write on Thursday and Friday. I wrote into the weekend to make it up, so I would still be on time for another five chapters by Monday.

This week did not start out promisingly. Monday went off-plan early on, and I didn’t even get to start my NaNoWriMo writing until after the kids went to bed. I’m not very fresh then to begin with, and, after a long day, I found myself tiring quickly. By 10pm, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and I’d only written 800 words. Defeated, I went to bed.

However, a neighbor’s car alarm went off repeatedly at 3.30am, waking me and refusing to let me go back to sleep. I got up and resumed working on Roses Are White. That turned out to be a good thing, because the chapter I was working on ran over 3000 words. I finished it just as my stepson was getting up to shower.

Later that day (after a nap), I penned the next chapter, which was over 2500 words. I went to bed exhausted Tuesday night, but I was back on schedule.

And that’s where I stayed for the rest of the week — despite my wife buying a new car and my stepson having a birthday. I found the time to write. So I was pretty pleased when I typed the last words into today’s work at about 9.30 this morning.

I’ve now got 22 chapters of Roses Are White finished. I’m enjoying where it’s going and how it’s developing. It’s really starting to feel like a Wolf Dasher novel and not just a concept. It’s becoming a lot of fun.

I hope you’re having as much success with your NaNoWriMo project as I am. Leave me a comment below to tell me about it!

***

It’s Friday (or Saturday, if you’re reading this on the weekend), and that means you may need something to occupy that free time you’ve got. Why not pick up a copy of Red Dragon Five to entertain yourself with on your days off. It’s a page-turner that’ll keep you up late, making it perfect for the days when you don’t have to get up early to work. Get it for your Kindle here. It’s only $4.99!

KDP Select Free is Dead

The Amazon KDP Select Free Event is officially dead.

This is perhaps not news. Amazon has been changing and adjusting its algorithms all year. As with many things Amazon-related, it’s difficult to know what their true motivation is. (Beyond profit, of course. Everything Amazon does is designed to sell merchandise, so you have to figure their changes to algorithms follow that model, but, given that free events used to sell lots of books, it’s hard to know how this benefits Amazon.)

Regardless, free downloads of books in KDP Select went from being counted as a full sale to one-tenth of a sale to . . . no one is sure what, but not even a tenth of a sale.

I ran a free event for “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” last month. My goals were twofold. All of my sales had fallen into torpor and needed some stimulation, and, I was launching Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale, so I was trying to raise its visibility.

In a five-day stretch, I got 1967 free downloads of “Sleeping Beauty” — not bad for a non-BookBub or ENT-featured event. After the book went back into the paid store, it sold eight copies. That’s four-tenths of one percent.

I also sold eight copies of Beauty & the Beast after the event. So much for the rising tide lifting all boats.

Back in March, when I ran my most successful free event, “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” had about 2500 downloads, which then resulted in 16 sales and 11 borrows. (The numbers were considerably better in the U.K., but this time I got almost no traction in Britain). That’s a little over one percent.

Other authors had reported better numbers from their free events, and it was pretty evident that there was a snowball effect — the more downloads you got, the higher the percentage of sales to free copies moved you had. My numbers were respectable but not outstanding.

Last week, I ran a second free event, this time for State of Grace. The Wolf Dasher books seem to have a different audience than the modern fairy tale ones, so I wasn’t too surprised that “Sleeping Beauty” didn’t do a lot to improve the Dasher novels.

In three days (as opposed to five), I saw 1769 free downloads. Again, pretty respectable for a book not featured by one of the big services. Since it went back into the paid store, I’ve sold three copies of it, and one of the sequel, Red Dragon Five. That’s two-tenths of one percent.

The one caveat to all this is that, while State of Grace was free, it fueled downloads of “The Darkline Protocol”, which is permafree. So, since the two books were in the same series and both free, they helped each other get more downloads.

State of Grace saw one other benefit — it picked up another review, a four-star one. But otherwise I didn’t see a whole lot of action from giving the book away for free.

Here’s why this matters. The key for every author’s success — whether they are traditionally published or an indie — is visibility. The free events in Select used to offer that. Your numbers shot up as a result of free downloads, and then you went back into paid with some momentum,which helped sell books for 30 days. That made money for authors, and it made money for Amazon.

But the new system doesn’t work that way. You gain visibility while you’re free, which increases downloads. But once you are back to charging, the vast majority, if not all, of that visibility is lost. Thus, free is not working anymore.

In one respect, Amazon should be lauded for making this adjustment. The old system had been conditioning readers not to pay for books. Why buy it when it will eventually go free? That would have been no good for Amazon or the authors who publish through it.

Moreover, Amazon has launched its Kindle Countdown Deals program, which allows authors to put their books on sale without sacrificing their royalties. So Amazon is definitely trying to find ways to sell books and cut authors in on a piece of the action.

These are both good things. But it leaves us indies trying to crack the code on how to maximize the program again. Because, whether we give our books away for free or put them on sale or charge full price, the key to success is still visibility, and Amazon is a very, very, very crowded market.

With the holiday shopping season almost here, it’s going to be very interesting to see what works and what doesn’t.

Extra Weekend Work Keeps NaNoWriMo Rolling on Schedule

Pardon me while I pat myself on the back a little bit.

I hit my writing goals for NaNoWriMo last week.I wanted to knock out five chapters of Roses Are White, the third book in the Wolf Dasher series. My chapters are averaging 2000-2500 words in that book, so I was hoping for a solid 11,000 or so words.

I was worried I wasn’t going to make it. As you may have read last Friday, I accepted a job teaching at a two-day theater camp, which was going to wipe out my writing time on Thursday and Friday. I doubled up Wednesday, writing two chapters, so Thursday’s work would get done, but there was still the matter of the chapter that needed to be written Friday.

Well, I managed to get it written this weekend. It took me several sessions to do it. That seems a little silly for a short 1846-word chapter, but weekends are notoriously busy around here. It’s one of the reasons I don’t usually bother to try to work weekends. There’s no time for it.

This past weekend was no exception, with a 13-year-old’s birthday party on Saturday, a lot of leaves to rake, and a Bengals game Sunday. I was really worried it wasn’t going to happen.

But I stole time where I could. I wrote during the birthday party, pausing only occasionally to check on the teenagers trashing my den. I got a portion written on Sunday morning before the game. I finished Sunday afternoon, following another ignominious Bengals defeat.

And it pleases me. It’s another sign I’m taking this really seriously. If I weren’t doing NaNoWriMo, I’d have just left Chapter 17 for Monday. Instead, I made sure to get it done, so I could stay on pace.

I’m beginning to wonder why I never participated in NaNoWriMo before. It seems to be imbuing in me a sense of dedication I haven’t quite felt in the past. It’s a contest, and I’m hell-bent on winning.

Anyway, I got the work done. I’m in position top write another five chapters this week. I don’t have to try to make up ground. If I can keep this up, I’ll be through Chapter 22 Friday.

If you’re participating in National Novel Writing Month, I hope you’re finding it just as “easy” and rewarding to keep with it. Leave a comment to let me know how you’re doing.

***

By the way, I mentioned above that Roses Are White is the third book in the Wolf Dasher series. The first book, State of Grace, is available through Amazon.com for the introductory price of just $2.99. I marry James Bond-style action to a traditional fantasy world with elves and magic. All its reviews are glowing. Pick up a copy for your Kindle by clicking here!

Doubling up for NaNoWriMo

Sometimes, you just have to pull double duty.

Among my various supplemental careers is teacher. Specifically, I teach youth theater. My local community theater offers camps on days elementary school kids are out of class but would normally be there — Spring Break, parent-teacher conferences, etc. With the local school district letting the kids out for Thursday and Friday, I got the opportunity to work drama with first- through fifth-graders.

But that messes with my actual work schedule, which, right now, involves penning at least a chapter a day for Roses Are White as part of NaNoWriMo.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal. I’d just find some time to write at night — like a lot NaNoWriMo participants.

But there was another catch. My stepson was performing as Bilbo Baggins in his middle school’s production of The Hobbit.

There goes my writing time.

So that meant there was only one option — double up my production on Wednesday. In the morning, I wrote 2448 words for Chapter 15. Then, after the kids went to bed that night, I stayed up late and knocked out another 2488 words to get Chapter 16 down.

Yeah, I wrote almost 5000 words Wednesday. I haven’t done that for a very long time. I went to bed really tired.

But what else was I going to do? There was no way I was going to find time to get my writing done Thursday. The only way to stay on pace was to sneak in an extra writing session the night before.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen Friday. I teach again all day, and The Boy has another performance that night. However, I don’t have to get up early Saturday, so, in theory, I could put a session in after the show. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll have to steal the time on Saturday. Possibly while he’s hosting his birthday party.

But, if nothing else, putting in that extra session Wednesday convinces me I’m committed to NaNoWriMo. I want to get it done. That fills me with a certain confidence. That excites me.

I hope your NaNoWriMo project is filling you with the same passion. Keeping finding those times to write. That’s how you make it to the end.

Sometimes Writing is Hard

Sometimes writing is hard.

I’m not talking about trying to figure out what to write next or how to choose the right words or even just finding the time to do it. Sometimes it’s just hard to do what you planned.

I killed a character yesterday.

That shouldn’t be a big deal. I write action-adventure stories and fairy tales. I kill characters often.

But yesterday I killed a recurring character. He was minor. He’s had very few scenes, and he hasn’t had a huge impact on the plot. But he’s been in all three Wolf Dasher novels (including Roses Are White, the one I’m writing now in which he dies).

And he doesn’t just die. When I say, “I killed him,” I mean I killed him. Roses Are White is about an assassin working to topple Alfar’s government. This guy falls victim. So, when I say “I killed a character,” I mean I murdered a character.

This isn’t the first murder that’s occurred in one of my books. There’s been at least one in each of the Wolf Dasher novels, and I’ve only penned one book (Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale) where a murder doesn’t occur (although there is a death).

But this one felt a little harsher. I mean, this character survived two other novels. It was a little hard to kill him now. It felt like a betrayal of sorts.

Sometimes, writing is hard. Doing what’s best for the story can be heartbreaking.

***

NaNoWriMo continues to go well. The chapter where my unfortunate character meets his end came in at 2177 words, and today I penned another 2448. Chapters 14 and 15 are in the books, er, the computer.

I am pleased with how it is forcing me to stay on pace for getting the first draft of Rose Are White done by the end of the month. Here’s hoping I can keep it up.

NaNoWriMo Causes Chapter Reorganization

I’m pretty pleased with my early progress on NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month kicked off on Friday, and I’ve been using my time reasonably well.

Snoopy is a NaNoWriMo enthusiast too.

As you may recall from last week’s blog, my goal is less to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days and more to finish Roses Are White, the third book in the Wolf Dasher series. When I began NaNoWriMo Friday, I had 12 chapters done. Writing for 21 days would bring me up to 32, which is a little short of what I usually get but would put me close. I should also note that, as the Dasher books approach their climaxes, the chapters get shorter, so it might be possible to write more than one a day.

Anyway, I wrote Chapter 12 (the book has a prologue) Friday, cranking out a solid 2380 words.(If you’re doing the standard NaNoWriMo pace of 50k words in 30 days, you need to write 1667 words per day.)

I used some of my time this weekend to plot. I wanted to make sure I had five chapters plotted out and ready to write, so I wouldn’t have to spend any time trying to figure out what happens next. I could just write it.

And that’s when something funny happened. One of the new characters I’m introducing in this book is May Honeyflower’s younger brother Hollygrove. (If you’ve read the other books in the series, you know May is Wolf’s love interest.)

One of the subplots of Roses Are White is Hollygrove becoming radicalized. I plotted a chapter where insurgents are talking to him and discover who his sister is. I then planned for another chapter wherein they introduce him to someone higher up in their organization, because they think there is good opportunity to exploit the brother of the captain of Alfar’s Elite Guard.

I realized two things. First, these chapters needed to be farther apart for pacing purposes, and, second, the first one needed to appear before the last chapter I’d finished writing.

So I wrote the chapter today wherein Hollygrove reveals to his friends who his sister is and they see opportunity. That came in at 1786 words, a little shorter than I’d have liked, but you can’t force things to be a certain length. You write as much as it takes to tell the story.

Then I went back and tried to find a place for it. As it happened, the right fit was for it to be Chapter 10. Thus, I had to relabel Chapters 10, 11 and 12 to 11, 12, and 13.

Writing is a funny process. We’d like to think it happens linearly, where we go from beginning to end, but that’s often not the case, at least not for me. Anyway, I’m looking forward to penning Chapter 14 tomorrow,  which promises to be exciting. There’s a murder, and I am writing from the killer’s perspective. I’m looking forward to the challenges there.

Hope your NaNoWriMo project is going well. Leave a comment below to tell me about it!

Tackling NaNoWriMo

For the first time, I am going to participate in National Novel Writing Month!

That’s probably a strange thing for an author to admit. You’d think a guy who has published two novels, a novella, and three short stories would have participated in NaNoWriMo before.

The last two Novembers, though, I was working not on writing a book but on publishing one. In 2011 and 2012, I released a Wolf Dasher novel — State of Grace in 2011 and Red Dragon Five last year — the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. So there wasn’t a lot of time to write with being involved in production.

And the previous years? Well, I’m sure I’ve got a good excuse lying around here somewhere.

But this year, my writing calendar is actually open (sort of) in November, so I’m going to give it a shot. I’m kind of excited.

The rules for NaNoWriMo are pretty simple — write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. That translates to 1667 words a day. For a professional novelist, that shouldn’t be too hard.

Thus, I am going to cheat.

Head down over my computer is how I’ll be spending a lot of November!

The book I plan to write is Roses Are White, the third book in the Wolf Dasher series. (Ironically, this novel was supposed to be published Thanksgiving week like its predecessors. Such is life.) That’s all fine and good, except that I’ve already written 10 chapters, and I’ll be penning an 11th today. So I won’t be starting my novel on the first of the month, like you’re supposed to.

However, the goal is to write a 50,000-word book. The Wolf Dasher novels run between 80,000 and 90,000 words, so, if I am to finish it by the end of the month, I’d need a head start. I haven’t run a word-count on what I have yet, but I’ve been averaging about 2500 words a chapter, so that’s 25,000. I’d need to write another 55,000 words to get to 80k, so that sounds about right.

Secondly, I can’t write every day for 30 days. Even though it’s my vocation, I just don’t have the time. The weekends are when I get a lot of my house-maintenance work done (just like people with regular 9-to-5′s), there are Bengals games to watch, children who want to go to special events, and other things. There just isn’t free time on Saturday and Sunday to write.

Moreover, I need to rest. Writing fiction is every bit as exhausting as other forms of mental labor. After 3000 words, I am drained. The weekend helps me recuperate my powers, so I can apply them again the next week.

So that takes eight days out of the schedule. Now I’ve only got 22 days to get this done. Not only does that put more pressure on, it increases the number of words I have to produce a day. It’s now 2272, which is a lot closer to my standard average output.

And Thanksgiving is in there. There is way too much football and feasting (and cooking!) to be done for me to have a prayer of writing anything on Turkey Day. Even if I could find some time at night after the festivities, the tryptophan and the wine will make certain I am too sleepy to do it.

So now I’m down to just 21 days. The word count goes up to  2380 a day. So I’m basically going to try to write a 50,000-word novel in three weeks.

Wait, I thought I was cheating. Cheating is supposed to make it easier. This sounds harder!

But I’m doing it for two reasons. First, it sounds like fun. I’ve never tried NaNoWriMo before, and the challenge of it intrigues me.

Second, and more importantly, I am trying to use it to pressure myself into getting the book done. My publishing plan for this year was to put out two novels and a short story, with Roses Are White being the third and final publication. I didn’t make it for a variety of reasons (one of which being the short story turned into a novella), and I’m trying to make as much hay out of the time I have left on this calendar year. I want to publish two novels and a novella next year, and I need to have at least a first draft of the first book done before year’s end to have a shot at that.

So my main goal for National Novel Writing Month is to finish the first draft of Roses Are White. If I can type, “The End”, by November 30, then I should be well into the second draft of the book by the time the year ends, even with Christmas and the release of The Sword and the Sorcerer happening in December.

I’ll be updating my progress on a (semi-)daily basis here and on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/johnrphythyonjr). Blog entries may be short, since I’ll be bearing down on getting the book finished, but I remain excited. It’ll be nice to set a challenge for myself and see if I can master it.

And, really, that’s what NaNoWriMo is all about. It’s a challenge. It’s a dare to yourself to see if you can do it. Along the way, you learn.

Here’s hoping I succeed.