David R. Michael's Blog, page 7
January 27, 2013
Gunwitch: The Witch Hunts
Gunwitch: The Witch Hunts by David MichaelNovel (Rose Bainbridge, Gunwitch Book #2)
A Storm Threatens…
Once a beautiful settlement named for the fabled Fountain of Youth, Founsteeth has become the stronghold of the Three Captains and their pirate crews.
Rose Bainbridge and Janett Laxton arrive in Founsteeth as black stormclouds loom, and as pirates and colonial military officers meet to swap a noble prisoner for a hefty ransom. Rose, a convicted witch and former Gunwitch in the King’s Army, feels almost at home. Young Janett, though, turns heads and more than one of the Three Captains seems to be calculating her possible ransom.
When enemies worse than any pirate strike with the onset of the storm and capture Janett, Rose must head back into the Amerigon wilderness…
A Witch on the Hunt.
Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords and more!
January 23, 2013
Proof of Proof
More news soon.
-David
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January 18, 2013
First of all, I would like to make one thing quite clear…
I never explain anything.
–Mary Poppins
Hear, hear!
-David
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December 29, 2012
My 2012 Reading List
69 books this year (since I’m not counting the ones I didn’t finish). Books I really enjoyed are bolded. Books that irritated me for whatever reason (and I remember them irritating me) are
Fiction
Blood Tells True by Alan Ryker.
The Knowland Retribution by Richard Greener. [*]
Devil’s Lair by David Wisehart.
The Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham.
The Sacrifice of Mendleson Moony by Mark Fassett.
A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters.
Into the Wild by Erin Hunter.
Soul Music by Terry Pratchett.
Shotgun Opera by Victor Gischler.
Mort by Terry Pratchett.
Double Dead by Chuck Wendig.
Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer.
Dead is Forever by David Cray. [*]
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett.
Partners by David Cray.
No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay.
Mercy Killing by Stephen Solomita.
Dangerous Visions edited by Harlon Ellison.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
“Wool” by Hugh Howey.
“Dreams of Earth” by Mark Fassett.
Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham.
23 Hours by David Wellington. [*]
Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau.
Second Errata by Chris Braak.
Death of a Hollow Man by Caroline Graham.
Grave Peril by Jim Butcher.
Trigger City by Sean Chercover.
Grim Repo by Mark Fassett.
Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey. [*]
Thriller: Stories To Keep You Up All Night edited by James Patterson.
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.
The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan.
A Tower Without Doors by Mark Fassett.
She by H. Rider Haggard.
The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan.
The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan.
The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan.
Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art by Christopher Moore.
I can’t believe I never read To Kill a Mockingbird before this year. That book is amazing. Too bad forcing grade schoolers to read it has probably ruined their enjoyment of it.
Nonfiction
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen.
Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload by Mark Hurst.
Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen.
Business Around A Lifestyle (First Step: How To Dream Your Perfect Lifestyle, Then Go Get It!) by Jim F Kukral.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain.
The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success by Mark Coker.
Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson.
Attract and Feed a Hungry Crowd: How Thinking Like a Chef Can Help You Build a Solid Business by Tea Del Alma Silvestre.
Stop Acting Rich… and Start Living Like a Real Millionaire by Thomas J. Stanley.
The Shelfless Book: The Complete Digital Author by Bob Mayer and Jen Talty.
250 Things You Should Know About Writing by Chuck Wendig.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg.
Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. [**]
The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau.
Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception by Pamela Meyer.
The Comedy Bible: From Stand-up to Sitcom–The Comedy Writer’s Ultimate How-To Guide by Judy Carter.
The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You’re Not by John Vorhaus.
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t by Nate Silver.
Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud. [**]
The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson.
Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield.
On Writing by Stephen King. [**]
2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron.
No biographies this year, which is unusual. Didn’t realize that until now.
Didn’t Finish
11/22/63 by Stephen King.
The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling.
I think I no longer have the patience for staggeringly detailed doorstop novels.
[*] I don’t remember anything about this book. I must’ve read it, because I listed it, but it got lost…
[**] I’ve read this book at least once before.
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December 27, 2012
10 Years of (Getting Serious About) Writing
2003 is the year I decided to “get serious” about my writing. The first time.
In mid-2003, my first non-fiction book, The Indie Game Development Survival Guide, was completed and published. Conceiving that book, pitching it and landing the contract, then writing it from start to finish according to a very sane and sensible schedule of 1000 words per day, showed me that I was capable of writing long projects.
This was an important demonstration. Though I had started any number of novels in my teens and twenties, I had never finished one. I got close to finishing one only once. I still have the several hundred double-spaced manuscript pages of that effort (and probably most of the other efforts, as well, in various typed and longhand forms).
In Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield’s followup to his book The War of Art, he talks about “shadow careers” we create because we’re balking from embracing our true, artistic career. Nonfiction writing, especially about video game development, had become my “shadow career” as a writer. It was the writing I did because it was easy, and because it was at least some form of writing. I recognized it as such, though not with the words “shadow career”. Sometimes I even felt like I was dodging “real writing”, replacing it with … well, it wasn’t fake writing. Just not fiction.
Maybe, though, it all worked out in a useful manner. By coming at the scary monster that was fiction writing through the flanking maneuver of nonfiction writing, working my way up from short, hypertechnical articles to longer, more general articles, and finally to The Indie Game Development Survival Guide, instead of head on, I seem to have built up both my skills and my confidence as a writer.
When I finished the pitch document for the indie book, I looked at it and realized I had written the complete outline for a novel-length work. That was heady stuff. I realized I could envision a full, long work. And then actually writing the indie book showed me that I could take the outline I created and turn into a coherent, full-length manuscript.
So, once the contract for the indie book was completed, I launched into my first real attempt at a novel in the 21st century.
I wrote over 123,000 words on that novel in 2003, getting to about the 2/3 mark in the outline I had written. And lost heart. All of that work, and the damn thing wasn’t done, and I lost faith in the outline.
It was 2005 before I finished that novel. I had taken a run at it in 2004, with a bit (a lot) of tweaking (and reduction) of the outline, but lost heart again. In 2005, I “got serious” a second time and with another running start at it, finally got to “The End”. I then shopped the completed manuscript around to agents, because I was young and didn’t know any better, but nothing ever came of that. I lost heart again.
It wasn’t until early 2006, after finishing a somewhat unexpected short story, that I “got serious” a third time. As I describe it in my post-mortem of the A Short Story a Day project , I could look at that first completed novel manuscript and SEE that my writing had improved. The writing in the last 1/3 of the book was noticeably better than the writing at the beginning. And that was without me making any conscious attempt to improve. I was just putting words down, one after the other, trying to get to “The End”. What would happen if I actually tried to improve?
2006 was a great year for my writing, and for me as a writer. I wrote a little of just about everything that year, and I wrote a lot, about 230,000 words. So much of what I have available in novels, collections and short stories came out of the rush of words that was A Short Story a Day. 2006 is the year I came closest to calling myself a writer in response to the question, “So, what do you do?”
Despite the high of 2006, 2007 was another year I lost heart. Even before the chaos of buying a new house and moving the family, then launching a major new version of The Journal, but after writing 80% of The Girl Who Ran With Horses, I lost that feeling of being a writer. I was so close to “The End” of that book, that “lost heart” is the only way to describe it.
All I wrote in 2008 were a few stories for contests. I focused on getting The Journal 5 done–and on not thinking about the unfinished novel I was avoiding.
I didn’t finish Girl Who Ran With Horses until November 2009, which marked my fourth time of “getting serious”.
So far, that fourth “getting serious” has stuck, and has carried me through 2010, 2011, and, now, 2012, even if I don’t seem to have been as serious in any of those years as I was in 2006. Part of that reduced seriousness has come from new software efforts, including The Journal 6, some from having a baby, and some from learning how to navigate this new world of indie writing & publishing. In all of those years, I set big goals for my writing and fell way short. Still, I did achieve something in all of those years, and I would like to think I’m continuing to improve as a writer and storyteller.
I had hoped to hit 1 million total words since 2003 before the end of 2012, that being the end (ish) of 10 years since I first “got serious” about my writing, but I won’t make it. I expect to be somewhere around 876,000 words. Which doesn’t seem too bad, really, for 10 years as a part-time writer who sometimes loses heart but always manages to find it again and keep going.
-David
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November 27, 2012
Another Reason I Like How I Outline My Novels
If, for whatever reason (or weak excuse), I end up having to put the writing aside for a while, the story is waiting for me when I get back. I don’t have to remember where I was at in the story, or where it was all heading, or why character A is cranky with character B, or anything. It’s all right there, in the outline.
This aspect of outlining has proven to be very useful over the years.
My first (and still unpublished) novel, Threads, I wrote in spits and gushes from 2003 through 2005 (while I worked on The Journal 4, wrote my co-authored nonfiction book, Serious Games, and struggled with the whole “writer thing”).
I wrote the first 54,000 words of The Girl Who Ran With Horses in 2007, then the novel had to wait over 2 years for its ending (we moved, I launched the project that became The Journal 5, and was still struggling with that whole “writer thing”).
A similar fate befell Gunwith: A Tale of the King’s Coven. I wrote the first 60,000 words or so in a rush in late 2007, then put the book aside for 3 years before finishing it in another rush in early 2011 (The Journal 5 project, which stretched from 2007 through 2009, was a big culprit here, as well).
Gunwitch2, due out soon, suffered a 4-month gap in the middle of writing it (The Journal 6; are you spotting a theme?).
In fact, so far, the only novels I wrote in single, continuous blocks of writing (though with weekends off) were The Door to the Sky and The Summoning Fire. Both of those were written in 2006, one in September, the other in November. New Fairy Moon was written across three months in 2011, but with only a week lost to “stuff”, so it makes this list.
I don’t always drop the ball, but when I do, I can remember where I left it. Because of my outline.
-David
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November 16, 2012
Some Weeks I'm Productive In Spite of Myself
Not always *very* productive, but stuff gets written.
As I say far too often: Some progress beats none.
Work on GoSH2 continues, if a bit more slowly than I expected. I’m into chapter 5, and having fun with some aspects of the story. It’s only the second novel sequel I’ve ever written, and this one is more episodic than Gunwitch2 (the first novel sequel I ever wrote), so I’m still learning as I go.
I’ve started receiving feedback from first readers of Gunwitch2, and conceptual work on the cover has begun. My plan is still to have that book released before Xmas. Before New Years at the latest (which is, you know, a whole week later
).In totally unrelated news, I decided to pick up a pencil again and see if I can improve my drawing skills. Right now, I’m just practicing, working my way from faces to heads to bodies to action. Here’s a taste from this week’s practice sessions:
I think of it as “room to grow”.
My plan is to eventually tackle either a Web comic or maybe the graphic novelization of a story or two. Or both. Or neither. Maybe I’ll end up somewhere completely different. That often happens with me when I wander into “art”. Where I end up sometimes has only a passing resemblance to where I expect to go. I guess we’ll see when we get there.
-David
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"Baptism" – The Mayan Apocalypse 2012
On the Winter Solstice in 2012, the world will end. This is how…Drunk on mojitos, high on love, and smelling of sex just consummated on the beach, Myra Acevedo went swimming for the last time. When she came out of the clear water of the Yucatan peninsula, she was no longer just Myra. She had become the end of the world. (6000-word short story)
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November 5, 2012
"Baptism" – The Mayan Apocalypse 2012
On the Winter Solstice in 2012, the world will end. This is how…Drunk on mojitos, high on love, and smelling of sex just consummated on the beach, Myra Acevedo went swimming for the last time. When she came out of the clear water of the Yucatan peninsula, she was no longer just Myra. She had become the end of the world. (6000-word short story)
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Four Crows Landing Store
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been adding a simple bookstore to the Four Crows Landing Web page.Four Crows Landing Store
Eventually, all of my printed books and ebooks will be available there. Right now, though, it’s just a handful. I’ve been adding a few per week, as I get time, and I will continue to do that.
The For Crows Landing Store allows me to do a couple things I’ve been wanting to do. First, I can offer bookstores and other retailers a way to purchase printed books with a discount for quantity (40% discount on orders of 10 or more books).
And, secondly, I can offer a special deal to regular readers: If you purchase the printed version of a book from the Four Crows Landing Store, you will receive the ebook version for free.
-David
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