John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 25

“Sleeping Beauty” Free this Week!

I’m running another free event on Amazon this week. “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” — my creepy re-imagining of the classc story — will be available free all week long. Yep! I’m using all five of my KDP Select free days at once this time. So all this week, you can get my most successful book absolutely gratis!

If free isn’t enough of a motivator for you, consider some of these reviews:

Clever! 5 stars

A compelling short story that blends just a little bit of magic with a true-to-life modern day twist on the original Sleeping Beauty. I loved the original story as a child, and this was a GREAT new version of it!!

–Kendra L. Metz

Amazing 5 stars

I like modern fairy tales and this one is amazing. It leaves you wanting more. It’s interesting and shocking at the sometime.

–Miss G. Willis

A great read! 4 stars

Sleeping Beauty is an enjoyable short story with character development that defies its length. It’s a quick read, but the tale lingers. Unnerving, haunting and well worth the purchase price.

–Runninginheels

A tale of greed and hope. 4 stars

Well-timed, well-told, neither longer nor shorter than it need be, Sleeping Beauty is indeed a modern fairy-tale, with all the gruesome cruelties of the old set in the world of the new.

–Sheila Deeth

And if you want another free short story, don’t forget you can download “The Darkline Protocol” free from Amazon and Smashwords. It’s a short, exciting adventure designed to introduce Wolf Dasher, and you can get it for nothing!

As long as I’m engaging in shameless self-promotion today, did you know you can sign up for my new releases mailing list? Click this link, and you’ll be able to register to be the first to know about cover reveals, release dates, and other nifties in conjunction with my newest books. Don’t worry. I won’t spam and I don’t sell or share your email.

Two free short stories — is there a better way to start the week? Perhaps, but this one sure doesn’t suck! Enjoy!

Squeeze Play: Stacking Multiple Writing Projects

I’m behind on my plans for this year.

My business plan for 2013, as you may recall, was to publish two novels and a short story. Things have gone a little astray on that scheme.

My goal was to release The Sword and the Sorcerer in March/April, “Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale” this summer, and Roses Are White (the next Wolf Dasher novel) in November/December. Not much of that is working out.

I got married in March, and, while that was one of the best things I ever did, it made hitting deadlines for The Sword and the Sorcerer pretty difficult. I still had hoped to have it out by now, but the damned thing resists getting into finished shape. I’ve had to make several adjustments to the story and the narrative, and I’m planning on making another before I actually release it. I would much rather hold the book back to make sure I get a well crafted, high-quality novel out there, but I would also prefer to have it available now so I could be selling it.

“Beauty & the Beast” was supposed to be a short story — a companion to my successful book, “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” It’s currently 22,000 words long and it isn’t finished yet. That sort of defies any definition of short I’m familiar with. At this point, it’s going to end up being a novella. That’s fine. I have no objection to that, but novellas take longer to write and edit than short stories. So I’m behind on that project too.

And that means I haven’t even begun Roses Are White. The first two Wolf Dasher novels averaged 85,000 words. That’ll take a little time to get written.

Last year, I started stacking projects, and it’s a good thing I did. Otherwise, I’d never have a prayer of pulling this off. The Sword and the Sorcerer is in editing now. My editor assures me she’ll be done with it by the end of this week, so I should be back in rewrite mode Monday morning.

In the interim, I’m madly trying to finish the first draft of “Beauty & the Beast.” I believe I can do that. I’m writing the final section now. The goal is to get that completed before the week is out, so I can start plotting Roses Are White. I’ve not tried stacking three projects before, but there’s no way I hit my publishing goals for the year if I don’t. (I’m not sure I can do it anyway, but I’m trying to give myself a chance.)

So my hope now is to publish The Sword and the Sorcerer in early July (I’d like to say late June, but I’m afraid I won’t make it). “Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale” lands in September/October. (Football figures in the plot, so that’ll be timely, at least.) Then we’ll see if I’m able to bring Roses Are White in before the end of the year. If not, I should be in position to get it out in January/February.

I don’t like being behind. It makes me feel like I’m letting people down. There wasn’t much I could do about it, though. One novel proved trickier to write than I foresaw, and the next project is a lot longer than planned. That was a perfect combination to throw my schedule off.

Still, I’m going to have at least two books out this year, and the third will be well advanced before 2013 becomes 2014. I’m not on schedule, but I am on pace.

Time to get back to work.

The Color of Magic: Details and Consistency in a Novel

“So is magic fire always purple?” my editor asked.

The question caught me by surprise. I’d just turned the manuscript to The Sword and the Sorcerer into her. She hadn’t made it all the way through the Prologue. And yet she already had a question.

If you’ve read the Prologue to the book, you know that, just before Gothemus Draco is murdered, he casts a spell wherein a tiny scroll explodes in purple fire. (If you haven’t read it yet, you can download a .pdf sample here.) Having seen a spell create purple fire, she wanted to know if all spells created fire that was purple.

The reason for the question is as important as it is subtle: consistency. She’s insistent that I emulate J.K. Rowling and not George Lucas. Rowling never violated her established milieu throughout the Harry Potter series. If she wrote a rule for magic or a spell or a mythological creature, it worked the same way every time afterward. She deepened and enriched her fictional universe, but she never changed it.

George Lucas rewrote and altered things almost from the beginning. In Star Wars, Darth Vader “betrayed and murdered” Luke’s father, but in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader claims to be Luke’s father, which Yoda confirms in Return of the Jedi.  Speaking of Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader are supposed to be the last of the Jedi in Star Wars, but Yoda is introduced in “Empire.” In Star Wars C-3PO claims to not to be very good at telling stories, but in “Jedi” he tells the Ewoks the story of the first two movies in grand fashion in one of the film’s more entrancing moments.

And so on.

So the question, “Is magic fire always purple?” is an important one. The real question my editor was asking was, “How does magic work?”

Is color really important?

Maybe. Maybe magical fire is purple as opposed to normal, red-orange fire. Or maybe some magical fire is purple and some is green and some is blue. And if that’s the case, why does it change color?

All these are questions I hadn’t thought about, but they’re important, because they define how things work in the fictional universe I’m creating. And internal consistency is the mark of a well developed milieu.

The answer to the question was, “No. All magic fire is not purple. It is different colors depending on the situation.” But now I’m going to need to look at each incident carefully. Do I need to establish a color scheme so that I’m not violating my own rules?

I don’t know the answer to that yet. But that’s why I have an editor. She does more than find typos. She makes me think about the little details, so I’m writing a strong, internally consistent narrative that both pleases and follows its own logic.

Because she’s hoping one day I’ll have a legion of obsessive fans just like Rowling and Lucas do. I don’t know how likely that is, but, if it happens, I want them to be happy.

Hey, look! Those covers don’t suck!

“If you want something done right, you need to do it yourself,” goes the old saying. Unfortunately, it’s not always true.

Take the cover of my debut novel, State of Grace, for example. I designed it myself, and, frankly, it sucks.

A bad book cover.

I’ve known for some time it was a bad cover and that I needed to do something about it. But knowing something and really understanding how important it is are two different things.

Everything I’ve read indicates a bad cover will kill sales of your book. It’s not that I didn’t believe it. I did. And I knew I had a bad cover. I just didn’t truly believe (or perhaps realize) how bad it was. Nor did I understand how effective a bad cover is at killing sales.

Then I ran a free event for State of Grace through the KDP Select program on Amazon.com. In two days, I got a meager 449 downloads in the U.S., and 22 in the U.K. Three days prior, the companion book in the series, Red Dragon Five (which has a superior cover), garnered more than three times that many downloads — a number I thought was disappointing. Given that I’d advertised both books in the same circles there was only one logical explanation: sucky covers kill sales, even when the price is free.

Fortunately, I had largely handed over cover design to someone who knows what she’s doing a few books back. So I went to her and said, “We need to fix this.”

By “we” I meant “you.”

Because it was clear I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I can make all sorts of excuses for why, but it doesn’t matter. The cover sucked, and it was killing sales.

I told her to blow the whole thing up. We’d based the other two Wolf Dasher covers (which are vastly better) on the template from the first. I told her to just start over, and we’ll modify the other covers to complete a branded look. But let’s start with something that will make people want to buy the first book.

So here’s what she came up with:

As you can see, they are a lot more dynamic and attention-drawing than the feeble cover I did. As my darling wife put it, “It looks like a book now.”

And she’s right. With a new template in place, it was a simple matter to update the other covers.

The new version of State of Grace is live on Amazon.com now. “The Darkline Protocol” should be up this afternoon, and Red Dragon Five should be up some time tomorrow.

I don’t expect sales to leap through the roof now that the books have new covers. That requires marketing. But at least my sucky design work won’t be turning buyers off anymore.

So lesson learned: If you want something done right, hire someone who knows what she’s doing. That way at least, you won’t be standing in your own way.

Here’s the other two covers:

Starting Over: How Rewriting has been Critical to my Latest Novel

The story of my latest novel, The Sword and the Sorcerer, has been starting over.

It began life as a handwritten power fantasy when I was 14 entitled Calibot’s Revenge. Once I got it “finished,” I started over by typing it into an Apple IIc in the St. Norbert College computer lab. (Back then, I was taking greater advantage of SNC’s initial foray into personal computing that 99% of its students.)

I never finished that awful draft, but, in 1991, I began writing a second one (more of a second edition) during my first semester of graduate school. The plot was completely different and some of the characters had changed. I had started over again.

I never finished that draft either. In the 2000′s I tinkered around with a third version of the story, writing a couple chapters but never finishing again.

Last year, I finally sat down with Calibot for another try. The original story and the 1991 rewrite were both terribly dated. It needed something fresh. So I started from scratch again, and, as the story evolved, I also realized it needed a new title.

So you’d think I’d finally be done with starting over on Calibot’s Revenge, er, I mean The Sword and the Sorcerer. But, no. Three drafts into the current iteration of the novel, and I’m still starting over. I’m still going back to the beginning.

One of the most fundamental changes of the 1991 version that I kept is Calibot being a poet in the court of Duke Boordin of Dalasport. To establish this, the novel opens with him reading an excerpt from his latest masterpiece. When I wrote the first draft, I didn’t have the poem done (or even begun), so I just put placeholder text in for it, so I could keep writing.

When it came time to edit and then write the second draft, I had to compose that poem. So I spent two weeks writing stanzas of an epic until I had something that fit what the story needed and inserted it into Chapter 1.

But after I got the second draft back from my editor and started reading through it, I realized something: the first two chapters of the novel are boring. They are given over largely to establishing Calibot’s character as the Poet Laureate of Dalasport and his relationship with his lover Devon. The information and the character development are critical to the novel. But until Chapter 2 cliffhangs with the revelation that Calibot’s father has been murdered, nothing happens.

That might have been okay for a fantasy novel 30 or 50 years ago. Certainly, some of the classics that spun me into a writer began quietly. But it just doesn’t work for today’s reader, and, given that most of my sales will come from eBooks, the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon isn’t going to hook many people with a slow, actionless opening featuring an epic poem.

There was only one conclusion. I had to start over again. I could keep the story intact, but it needed a much more exciting beginning.

So I decided that, since the murder of Calibot’s father is the causal event that puts the novel’s plot in motion, it made sense to start with his death. Told from the perspective of his killer, the book now opens with what is obviously a political assassination. It drops hints and raises questions, and pushes the reader further into the novel. Hopefully, it makes potential buyers want to know more.

You can download the prologue to The Sword and the Sorcerer below, so you can get a taste of the style of the novel and see what I did to make the opening more exciting. If you like, leave me a comment and tell me what you think.

Of course, I can’t guarantee this is what the final, published version of the chapter will look like. The book is still in editing.

And the story of The Sword and the Sorcerer is starting over.

Download The Sword and the Sorcerer Prologue

Name Game: Struggling with Titling my Latest Novel

Sometimes, I have to stand back and marvel at my own thickheadedness.

I’ve been trying to write this book for years — 30 years to be exact. It’s about a wizard that gets murdered, and his son gets a magic sword to avenge him. From the day I conceived it when I was 14, it’s been simply titled Calibot’s Revenge.

That seemed perfect enough. It was a revenge fantasy. The main character was named Calibot.

The book has been through several drafts and iterations. In the 30 years I’ve been working on it, both the characters and the story have evolved. But the basics stayed the same — the son of a murdered sorcerer got a magical sword with which to avenge his father.

This latest version, though — the one I’m actually going to publish — veered off the novel’s original premise into an entirely different kind of story. Yes, a powerful magician gets murdered. Yes, his son gets a magical sword and a mysterious mission to use it on his father’s behalf. But it’s no longer a revenge fantasy. It’s very different kind of book altogether.

And that necessitated a new title. You can’t call it Calibot’s Revenge if Calibot doesn’t take revenge, doesn’t even try.

And so I’ve been spending the last several months trying to come up with a new title. It had to be something that captured the essence of the book but that would also be marketable (which perhaps the old title wasn’t).

One of the marketing books I recently read suggested that alliterative titles are more appealing to consumers. I’m not sure what the research behind this is or if it even exists, but I do know that I enjoy alliteration, so maybe there is something to it.

Of course, coming up with something alliterative that is also good and descriptive is harder than it sounds. I spent a lot of time thinking about The Sorcerer’s Son. It had the nice triple-S sound, and the main character was the son of a wizard. I let that bounce around my brain for weeks, but I was never quite satisfied with it.

I also played around with The Gothemus Gambit, since the name of the wizard is Gothemus Draco and his murder is a political gambit by the villain. But that had a very spy thriller sound to it, and, while there are some politics in the book, it’s not really that kind of novel.

A lot of incomplete and worse ideas bubbled up in my brain, and I dismissed them quickly. As I worked through the latest edit of the manuscript looking for some clue or phrase I could use to craft a new, catchy title, I grew frustrated. I’d been working on this book for 30 years. How could it be so damned hard to name? Or rather, why was it so hard to rename?

Regardless of the reason, I remained stuck. What do you name a swords-and-sorcery book about a son trying to find out what happened to his father? What is a good title for a book that features a lot of sorcery and a magic sword?

And then my brain finally unlocked the obvious answer. The novel is about a young man who receives an enchanted sword when his father, the world’s most powerful sorcerer is murdered. He has to use the sword to fulfill the last plans and wishes of his sorcerer father, from whom he is estranged. He knows nothing about magic swords and sorcery himself.

How about The Sword and the Sorcerer?

Sometimes my own thickheadedness is amazing. It’s a swords-and-sorcery novel. That’ll help categorize it. That’ll help it be found in search engines. It’s alliterative. And it perfectly captures the two things Calibot is dealing with throughout the story — his estrangement from his father, who happens to be the world’s most powerful magician, and the enchanted weapon bequeathed to Calibot by Gothemus.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to come up with something as simple as that, but then this is a book it has taken me 30 years to craft into something I would be proud to put my name on.

The Sword and the Sorcerer releases this summer. I’ll have more updates here in the coming weeks.

Friday Freebies!

It’s Friday, and that seems like a pretty good excuse for some freebies. Cuz, ya know, “Friday” and “free” both start with “fr.” And I dig me some alliteration.

Anyway, I’ve got some exciting information on free stuff for the Wolf Dasher line.

First, if you haven’t seen it, Amazon has finally (Finally!) price-matched Smashwords for the free price on “The Darkline Protocol.” The always-intended-to-be-free short story set two years before the events of State of Grace, is now actually gratis on Amazon.com (as well as Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Sony, etc.)

So what are you waiting for? Head over to Amazon.com and download this exciting short piece wherein Wolf is assigned to find out who’s leaking sensitive information from the Urlish consulate in Mensch, Bretelstein to the Phrygians. What he finds puts him in incredible danger — not only is the spy an innocent victim, the real prize is not intelligence on Her Majesty’s Shadow Service; it’s Wolf himself!

Get it FREE from Amazon here.

(And if you like it, take the time to write a review! It doesn’t have any at Amazon.)

Speaking of State of Grace, it’s going free on Amazon next week. On Monday, May 13 and Tuesday, May 14, you’ll be able to download the original Wolf Dasher adventure for your Kindle for absolutely nothing!

A chilling murder of Wolf’s friend and colleague in the Shadow Service, Sara Wensley-James, sends Wolf to Alfar, magical land of elves to find out who killed her and why. Sara named Sagaius Silverleaf, Alfar’s ambassador to Urland as the culprit, but he couldn’t have done it. He was in Urland at the time of the murder.

Wolf’s investigation uncovers one disturbing connection after another — a sadistic Phrygian Shadow, a mad general bent on conquest, an evil artifact, and a deadly group of fundamentalist terrorists obsessed with toppling Alfar’s government. They all weave together somehow, and Wolf will have to unravel this web of zealotry and deceit before a cataclysmic act of terrorism leads to a coup and changes the balance of power in the world forever.

You can download the first exciting chapter of State of Grace here to get a taste of a book one reviewer called “action-packed and full of surprises.”

Then click here to download it for free on Monday!

50 States of Indie

As many of you know, I’m a fan of indie authors (being one and all). So when an opportunity for us to expand our reach comes along, I like to give a heads up.

This one comes courtesy of Tyffani Clark at SideStreet Cookie Publishing. They’re launching a 50 States of Indie program to help showcase independent authors and bookstores. More information, including how to contact Tyffani to participate is below.

SideStreet Cookie Publishing is rolling out a long-term promotional opportunity for indie authors. We’re calling it 50 States of Indie. We’re looking for at least one promoter in each state to represent indie authors in their community. Your job is simple. Indies will send you book swag to put in your local bookstores and paperbacks to donate to your library system. The goal is to spread the word across the country about indie authors.

But that’s not all. We are also looking for authors who want to get their name out there, and who doesn’t? Author’s will be responsible for their own orders, postage, and shipping, but it’s otherwise free promotion!

If you’re interested please contact me, Tyffani Clark, at Tyffani (dot) C (dot) Kemp (at) gmail (dot) com with your name, address, email, phone number, and whether you are a promoter, an author, or both!

http://www.facebook.com/events/650675268282688/

“Sleeping Beauty” Wins Indie Book of the Day Award

I’m very pleased to announce that “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” has been selected as the Indie Book of the Day by indiebookoftheday.com. The award is voted on  by readers of the site.

Naturally, I’m incredibly flattered. “Sleeping Beauty” is most-reviewed and bestselling work, and I’m very grateful for it to get further recognition.

You can check out the story’s award page here: http://indiebookoftheday.com/sleeping-beauty-by-john-phythyon/.

Click here to purchase “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale from Amazon.com.

Voices Needing Expression

I haven’t been sleeping well. I wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to get back to sleep. When I am unconscious, I have vivid, intense dreams that seem to be really happening. The alarm goes off in the middle of these, and I wake up feeling like I’ve been run over by a very large truck.

I know why this is. It’s no big mystery. The explanation is pretty simple.

The voices in my head won’t shut up.

No, I’m not crazy. I’m not a schizophrenic en route to a serious break with reality.

The voices belong to stories. All writers hear them. They bounce around your brain, imploring you to write them down. They whisper ideas and plots and character flaws to you until you make them come out on paper (or nowadays into your computer).

And the voices have become loud recently. My sleep problems are the result of my not doing what the voices want.

I’m supposed to be editing the third draft of a novel. I had to write a new chapter for it, and I got that done, but the changes to the other 30+ chapters are still waiting to be put in.

I’m about 60% done with a novella that started as a short story. It needs to be finished.

And all the promotion I’ve done on the Wolf Dasher series recently has got my mind circulating around the next book. Of course, I need to do more on the other two projects before I can really start writing that one.

So the voices are not getting what they want. They are not being expressed in literary fashion. With nowhere to go, they shout their ideas to me while I’m trying to sleep.

There’s only one thing to do. I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to spend a little less time marketing and a little more time creating. The hell of being an author (indie or otherwise) is that you have to spend time promoting yourself in addition to writing masterpieces. As an independent businessman, it is easy to get bogged down in the details of selling the product and forget you have to be making it too.

It’s understandable, really. There is so little time each day, and there are so many more things that need to get done than I can reasonably hope to accomplish.

But the voices are tired of waiting their turn. They’re demanding attention.

So I’m going to have to play along. I need to focus on getting these stories told.

Because the voices won’t shut up. And I need to sleep.