Zachary Ricks's Blog, page 11

Goals

I have a hard time with goals. I get stuck in a trap of “well, what SHOULD my goal be?” instead of “what do I want to accomplish?”

But not today.

Today, I’m announcing a base goal of writing at least 1000 words per day, six days a week. And I’m holding myself accountable. If you’ll look at the top of the website, there’s a new page. A writing tracker. Which ties into a Google spreadsheet where I’m putting in my daily word count. So far, I’m averaging 998 words per day, so I do need to step it up.

Battlehymn continues. Episode 12 just went live. We’re getting closer to the end. I may do a bit of expansion, but right now, we’re 8000 words from the end. That’s two regular episodes, or one really long one. So, Battlehymn’s COMPLETE audio will be posted within the next seven days. And then, off to podiobooks.com with it. And the various eb0ok stores.

 

Building it.

I couldn’t sleep at all last night. Well, okay, I eventually did get to sleep at about 3:30 (and then three and a half hours later was dragging my daughter out of bed, but whatever). But I kept going back and forth over something that I’d seen.

People don’t seem to understand the problem conservatives like myself have with recent comments by the President of the United States that have been boiled down to four words: You Didn’t Build That. Don’t conservatives recognize the debt of gratitude they owe to the people who’ve gone before? Don’t they know that without those people, they wouldn’t be able to accomplish whatever it is they think they’re doing? How ungrateful, they tell themselves, shaking their heads.

What those people don’t recognize… what they have to concede if they really think about it… is the contribution of the man in the middle. What do I mean by that? Well, that’s what kept me up past three AM last night. Let me paint you a picture.

An… acquaintance of mine… is an author. He’s getting a good start, things are looking good. And he posted a picture of himself standing with two of his heroes. On his right, a NY Times bestselling author. Someone whose work I’ve read and enjoyed. Someone that if you’ve read fantasy over the last… thirty years…? you’d recognize the name. On his left, his English teacher. It’s a great picture. And he does owe those two people a debt of gratitude. Just like I owe one to the guy in the middle.

He’s one of my heroes, though I wonder sometimes if he’d be glad to hear it.

Whatever debt of gratitude he feels he owes the people around him, he has to realize (as does everyone else) that the NY Times bestseller didn’t write his books for him. He did that.

The English teacher didn’t take hours and days and months recording and editing and mastering audio files to promote and release his work. He did that.

Without the guy in the middle, books on my shelf and on my e-reader simply don’t exist. They’re figments of my imagination without that guy in the middle.

He’s paid the price for his success. I’ve seen him deal with personal tragedy that I am grateful to God that I haven’t had to go through personally. Things that made me get down on my knees and pray for him and his family. You can’t tell me that anyone could have done that, because I’ve watched this guy for years, and I know better. He’s inspired me to write my own stuff and release it via podcast as I am doing now.

If I had a picture like that, this guy would be one of the people in my picture. But he’s not putting his butt in my chair and his hands on my keyboard to write Battlehymn, or the Untitled Ghost Bear Project I Have Yet To Name. I have debts of my own. Battlehymn comes from all kinds of places – Macross Frontier, Spellsinger, the Book of Mormon…Untitled Ghost Bear Project owes debts to Shaman King, Pokémon, the Campbellian monomyth, deTocqueville’s Democracy in America…  but at the end of the day, for better or worse, it’s me that’s got to attain a state of BICHOK (Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard) and make words happen. Because if I don’t build it… it don’t get built.

New Story – Perdition’s Posse

A new Sinner’s Tale is done, and is now up at the Free Story page.

If you’re not familiar with Seth McAllen, also known as “The Sinner”, you might want to track down a couple of the older stories that have appeared here at Mad Poet Files – specifically, “High Moon” and “The Devil’s Due”.

With this story, I started taking some of the things I’ve been learning about actual US History and weaving them into the Sinner’s old west. There were a ton of changes, of developments that happened in the Old West in and around the end of the Civil War and the years immediately following.

In particular, Fort Pillow, which is mentioned in the story rather significantly. Fort Pillow was not a great episode in American history, when Confederate soldiers captured a number of Union soldiers – a high number of the captured soldiers were black. They weren’t allowed to surrender, and apparently a number of them were tortured and killed. Their commanding officer “died while attempting to escape”. Incidentally, the commanding Confederate Officer at Fort Pillow – a certain Nathan Bedford Forrest, survived the Civil War, and eventually became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

And with a title like Grand Wizard, you KNOW that’s going to come back up eventually.

But it’s been really interesting to do just a little research into the old west. The Fort Pillow massacre happened in April 1864, the War ended in May 1865. The Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869 – four years later (mentioned by The Sinner in “High Moon”, and featured in “The Devil’s Due.”)

Seth’s time with the Rangers doesn’t really work with the time frames involved, so that may take a little secret history, but if you’re going to allow for werewolves, vampires, zombies, dragons and deals with the Devil, perhaps a little mythological license with the Rangers can be forgiven if and when we ever see what happened to Seth McAllen after he and Bones escaped the hellish rituals of Fort Pillow… (and we may get more detail on just what General Forrest was trying to do there…)

Well, that’ll be a tale for another time. Seven dimes. Twenty-three to go. (And we’ve only seen the way he got two of them at this point.) Plenty of time to spin a yarn about the Old West…

Audio Recording Blues

Sitting down to record episode 2 of Battlehymn, I’m thinking about my audio recording fidelity. My main concern is that I want this to sound as good as possible, but the available locations for recording are severely limited.

Option 1: The Mac. My Mac Mini and the mixing board and microphone are all set up, unfortunately, about three feet from the intake for the house’s HVAC system. So it often sounds like I’m in the middle of a wind tunnel. The best vocal quality, I think, but unavoidable background noise.

Option 2: The PC. My Windows 7 PC is set up in a room with another PC. On the opposite side of the wall is the family TV. This TV is ALWAYS ON. And is often loud, as Reeta’s grandparents are getting on quite a bit. SO MUCH LIFETIME MOVIE CHANNEL. Also, there’s really no place to put the recording equipment. The desk is already occupied.

Option 3: The Shed. I can take my iPhone and headset out to the shed. No more worry about background noise out there, by gum, but the vocal quality is questionable at best. But then I can take the audio, import it to the Mac and play around with it in Garageband.

Sigh. First world problems, I know.

Crown of Exiles – Battlehymn

So, tonight I am recording the first episode of my “first” book – Battlehymn.

It’s a story about two young people trying to find their place in the world. Of course, one is a wanna-be rock star. And the other is a princess. And the world includes civil war, mecha, crazy psychic powers, space habitats, intrigue, betrayal, and cats. Well, one cat.

My main goal with this is to a) show that I can produce a longer novel, and b) have fun with it as I go. I’ll be releasing episodes in both text and audio at the website – exiles.madpoetfiles.com. Sign up there to join the mailing list and get notifications as new episodes and side-stories become available.

I truly hope you enjoy it.

 

Intimidation

Wow. Time flies when you're… uh…

If you've been watching Flying Island Press, you know that we're moving FlagShip from every other month and six stories to monthly and more like three stories. It's definitely taking up a lot of my available mind-space. I've also been fighting a bit of depression, lack of a regular day job, and struggling through a Body for Life challenge (I've lost about fifteen pounds over the last two and a half months or so. Three more weeks in the challenge, I think.)

Needless to say, it's been a busy few months. Plus, I am looking at a novel manuscript I wanted to have completely edited by the end of the month which probably isn't going to happen (dagnabit) because I don't know if I can actually pull off what I want to and there's been family health issues and -

And yes, I know. If you want to find an excuse not to write, you can definitely do that. And you eventually have to just decide that you're going to push forward and do something if you really want it. It's easy to turn away if you don't feel like you're seeing immediate results – and if you've got what looks like a massive project staring you in the face. (Hello, book manuscript. How are you today? Me? Oh, I'll be over here brainstorming. Which is another way of saying I'm going to try doing something that looks productive without necessarily putting new words down on a page. Cool with you? Cool.)

I've heard it said (and I'm wanting to attribute this to David Farland, but it could easily have been Tracy Hickman and I couldn't tell you where I saw it) that creativity is easy, but disciplined action was a rare and beautiful thing.

Here's to reaching for rare and beautiful. Which means that I'll be posting a new story here in the next couple days – just have to check where it is in the submissions process (I don't remember if I've submitted this to Asimov's, which has a six-week average response time or something like that – if I have, I'll have to write something new for the site.) And here's to getting a book draft DONE by Balticon.

Which, unfortunately, I will be unable to attend this year. See my lack of regular day job, cited above. And that means I won't be there for DS Breakfast (which I totally look forward to every year). DS Balticon Fans, Consider This Your Fair Warning.

MPF 2.07 – Norris Tilney and the Docks of Dover

New story time!

This one's been kicking around for some time. Last year, Scott Roche and I co-wrote a novellette we called "The Battle of Wildspitze". I've been trying to decide how to explain that world to people, and I think I have a concise way of summing it up.

Harry Potter.
But everyone knows about magic.
And it's 1910.

And that's basically it in a nutshell. One of us had come up with an idea for a short story regarding dragon-riding pirates raiding airships, and we started writing. I had originally thought that this would be a parallel world, no really recognizable people in it, until Scott introduced Baron Richtoffen as one of the pirates. That single character nailed the setting, the attitude, and the timeline for me.

I'm still working on a cover, and some people are sending me ideas for graphics, but the story itself is up and available for free right now on the current Free Story page. I hope you enjoy it. It'll be there until I get the next story written and posted, and then it'll be up at Amazon, BN.com, and anyplace else I can throw it.

Enjoy!

Back in the Saddle…

Back in the writing saddle, that is.

Hearing Matt Forbeck's goal of writing 12 books in 12 months is both scary and inspiring. Basically, Matt is shooting to do a NaNoWriMo-length novel of 50,000 words every month in 2012. It's made me sit down and start calculating what it would take to hit a million words in 2012. The number is surprisingly small – 1000000 – four NaNoWriMo projects (200,000), minus the shorts I've already written for MPF (just north of another 52,000) = about 750,000. Divide by the number of writing days I'll have in 2012 (313) and I come up with 2,400 words a day. Wolfram Alpha puts it at 2396.16. But what's 3.84 words among friends?

It's not that much. I can hit that in two hours or less a day. The real concern isn't whether I CAN. It's whether or not I WILL. And it's that way for everyone. Of course that's 313 days of writing. No time off. No breaks. No vacations. Every day, when I get up, I need to put about 2400 new words down someplace.

I'm working on a second draft of the next MPF story, tentatively named Norris Tilney and the Docks of Dover. It's set in the same "Spells and Sparks" universe that Scott Roche and I came up with for The Battle of Wildspitze and that I explored a little more in Finding the Fire.

I've got to give most of the credit for this universe to Scott. I came up with mages and airships as an opening, but it was his placing of Baron von Richtoffen in the initial story that really cemented it in time and space for me. A pre-WWI fantasy world, with various factions maneuvering to potentially start or stave off the Great War. It's a really fantastic idea, and I hope I'm up to delivering a fantastic story in that world.

I'm posting a short excerpt from the story here – it should be done within the next couple of days.

"… No, no. They'll try to lay this squarely on your broad shoulders, my good man. Or on Dorothy's – we are not without our own enemies. Of course, they'll have to come up with some explanation as to how you came to be alive after the disaster. They'll probably charge you with desertion, and the official story will claim that you were never aboard the Columbia in the first place. Possibly you'll be hung, just to be sure that no nasty rumors start circulating."

Tilney's heart sunk, and he stared at his hands. "So… that's it?"

"Is it? The tribunal hasn't ruled yet, have they? I suppose that we have approximately three days before they'll have all their pieces in order. In the meantime, you'll most likely remain in confinement. That is, if you're still here."

Tilney looked up to see Lucius Bennett's wolfish grin. "So I'll ask you again, Mr. Tilney. How would you like to accompany me to Dover? There's no guarantee of any clemency, and you may be running into a worse fate than a hangman's noose. You know I claim to be a member of the Croix du Sangre, but other than a stickpin and my presence here in the Tower of London, there's little corroborating evidence of that. I could be merely speculating about your chances, but…" Mr. Bennett's eyes crinkled, and Norris was again aware of the feeling that he was being seen straight through. "… you were at the tribunal. You saw those men. What do you think your chances here? What are you willing to risk for your freedom?"

Norris Tilney stood again, returning the little man's piercing gaze. "I lost good mates on the Columbia, Mr. Bennett. And there were women, and children aboard. If what you say is true? If there's anything I can do to see that what happened to them doesn't happen to someone else? Then it's my duty to do so." He looked around the cell. "And it's a duty I can't fulfill from inside here."

Mr. Bennett smiled. "Very good, cadet. Very good indeed." He reached back and rapped at the door twice. "Now to effect a daring escape."

Keeping the Worlds Straight

This morning, I started counting up the universes that I've got planned out and am currently writing in, or that I have stories that I plan on coming back to – recurring universes, as it were. So far, here they are:

The Sinner – my two weird west stories- High Moon and The Devil's Due.
Sparks and Spells (that's a tentative name) – the alt history fantasy/manapunk pre-WWI universe – Battle of Wildspitze and Finding the Fire. (This is the universe that Scott Roche and I are sharing / writing in.) New stories coming from both of us soon.
Prodigals – The Assignment, Blood Red Sand and the NaNoWriMo project I did in 2009. My first Space Opera universe.
Exiles – You haven't seen this one yet, but it's this year's NaNo project, and you'll be getting stories as well as the longer work soon – Space Opera. Heavy anime influences.
Scions – You haven't seen this one yet either. Last year's Nano project. This started out being a story of people who formed telepathic bonds with wolves, sort of like the Gandalara cycle did with giant cats. Then the wolves became ghosts – spirits. Then one of them became a bear. And things sort of went crazy / off the rails at that point. This was a fun one to come up with, but it needs some work before it's ready for anyone to see it.

And there are others that I have up in my head.
For my readers (and listeners), do you have a preference? Is there a particular story / setting / genre that grabs you? Sound off in the comments.

GSG NaNo Gaiden Ep #31

So, it's December 1st, and another 30 days of crazy writing is behind us.

What now?

That's a fantastic question. I have a couple of suggestions, and a couple of announcements. The short answer is this: keep your eyes on this web site. Because GSG is coming back. And because by the end of December, you'll start seeing longer fiction here. And because there will also be regular short stories now that the craziness of NaNoWriMo is behind us.

If you need help getting your text to Amazon / BN / Smashwords / etc: Flying Island Press

And if you wanted to donate to GSG:

Enjoy!

Download GSGNaNoGaiden Ep #31