R.W. Krpoun's Blog, page 30

I love my readers!

Sales for Dream 3 are chugging along quite nicely, and I’m seeing an uptick in my other books as well.

I’ve gotten two great reviews so far, which is a real motivator. It’s tough to get reviews, especially when you won’t pay for them or play the ‘turn about’ games with other writers.

Thanks to everyone reading my work!

Dream 3 is published!

101, 464 words at final print.

Both files are uploaded. The e-Book on Amazon will likely be available within twelve hours of this post, the paperback through Createspace around the 5th of July.

I decided to dedicate this book to my readers (and my wife) because without you my books woulds be nothing more than dusty binders from Wal Mart sitting on a shelf in my office.

Have a happy Independence Day! I’m off to make some shrimp gumbo.

Did not make the July 1 deadline

This is why I avoid making promises. I had a tough week at work, and life kept getting in the way, such as a dead air conditioning compressor in 100+ degree weather.

But the cover is made, all that remains is to plug the changes into the master document and then upload them to Amazon and Createspace, and I do not go back to work until the 5th.

I’m hammering away.

Dream 3 second edit is complete

Had some setbacks last week that slowed the process; Texas heat does not leave me in the best frame of mind when I get home from work.

But the second edit is done, I have the cover photo, and all that remains is to log the changes made onto hard copy during the edits into the computer doc, add the dedication, About the Author blurb, and plea for good reviews, and use GIMP to make the cover.

Thereafter I must plug the pieces into Amazon and Createspace, and within a dozen or less hours the book will be up for sale, and a piece of my life will be over. It is t once a relief and a tad depressing.

A June release seems very optimistic given the week I just had, but the first week of July seems a safe bet. Again, I hate promising a fixed date because life and work tends to undo those predictions. Still, we are on the last leg of the journey.

Dream 3 first edit completed, second edit begins

The first edit, the longest stage in the finalization process, is complete. The second edit is much quicker, and is followed by final adjustments, and then the assembly into a Amazon-ready novel and a Createspace novel.

I plan to take the cover photo and build the cover using GIMP in the next day or two. Creating the cover is one of the harder aspects of the process for me as I have very poor visual artistic ability.

Again, I do not want to set deadlines because each book is different and my job frequently and unexpectedly intrudes into my free time, but the first of July is firming up as the ‘long date’, and a release within June is a real possibility.

Blast from the past II

So I rented an M-3A1 ‘grease gun’, a submachinegun that came out late in WW2 and saw action in Korea and a little in Vietnam, being phased out of the US inventory in the late 1980s.

I was stuck by the weapon’s crude appearance and ‘no frill’s’ design: the only safety was the ejection port cover; the weapon could not fire unless the cover was open. To cock the weapon you opened the cover and inserted a finger into a depression in the bolt and slid it back. It gave the feel of well-machined parts as you did so. With the bolt locked back and the port open you are ready to fire.

The sights are a simple circle and post familiar to the users of the M-16, only non-adjustable at either end. The stock is simply a steel rod outline, but the recoil is minimal and at 25 yards I was able to tear up a target quite easily. It was full-auto-only, but a two or three round burst was easy to obtain.

The magazine was of a conventional style and could easily be loaded and unloaded via a button release.

The weapon is interesting because the steel rod that makes up the stock can be used as both a cleaning rod and a wrench to remove the barrel, and the pistol grip is an oil reservoir, so the essential cleaning tools are built into the weapon.

The M-3 was intended as a replacement for the Thompson, and while I found it to be a bit less accurate, it was also much lighter, compact, and well-balanced. It did not have the Thompson’s selective fire, but it was not burdened by the Thompson’s odd placement of selector and safety switches, and unlike the Thompson it was free of sharp edges and projections which would be very important when living with the weapon. It’s more modern reloading system made it vastly superior to the Thompson in the sort of close-quarter for which both weapons were intended.

Firing these two weapons threw my notions of them on my head. I had always thought of the Thompson as a grand old dame while the M-3 was a poor-crafted upstart, but after handling them I realize that the Thompson, while finely crafted, was poorly designed for a new style of war, whereas the M-3A1 is clearly the first generation of modern submachineguns.

Dream 3 enters first edit

eeded So I finished the review of the rough draft, which was a combination of editing, adjustment of plot holes, and a general check of the ‘flow’ of the story.

The latter is always in stories that took as much work as D3 did, because lead-in information on plot arcs and twists that did not made the grade have to be edited back to fit the main story.

I also use this time to throw in a few extra adjectives (at no extra charge) to add color and clarify descriptions.

The end result was that a rough draft of 99,207 words became a more polished product of 101,771. I don’t get too obsessive about word count, but you really need at least 75-80k words to qualify as a novel.

So now a hard copy will receive my wife’s editorial review, following which I will review the work and her notes, and make the needed adjustments.

I will have to take the cover photo and use GIMP to make it into a cover. Despite the simplicity of the covers I struggle mightily with cover design, as I am very poor at visual art. While I have hired artists for three books (The Zone, Chains of Honor, and the Phantom Badgers) it was a long drawn-out process, and they have since priced themselves out of my range. Other than finding artists who will donate existing work (Dark Path, Dark Practices, and Dark Tide), I am forced to make my own.

Luckily the Dream series runs to a type, and  I have already purchased a few small props for this book, so I will get this done while my wife edits.

I will not set a concrete date for when Dream 3 will be available for sale, but I hope to put it up for Kindle by the first week of July (Createspace tends to have a longer lag time).

I will continue to post developments.

The Rough Draft of Dream 3 is done

15 months to crank out 99,207 words. This one took a lot more work and two major plot shifts to bring to a conclusion, but now it is done.

The rough draft, anyway. Next I will re-read it in electronic format, looking for typos and mis-used words, bits of text from discarded story arcs, plot holes, and for things that could be worded better.

Then my wife will edit a hard copy.

Finally I will do one more review of the work, and then put it up for sale on Amazon.

I will also be hammering away at other projects, as reviewing is tough, and can only be done for short periods of time (by me, anyway).

 

I saw it on Facebook

I don’t Facebook; as anyone who reads this can see, I have trouble keeping a blog even somewhat afloat.

However I was directed to a Facebook group where I found a poster who had checked for Dream 3 and thought I had moved on to other projects.

I have multiple projects in play at all times because, well, I’m not a very good writer. The muse ebbs and flows within me, and it ebbs a lot more than it flows.

However, Dream 3 is at 96k words of rough draft, and I am hammering out the final chapters as we speak. It is still my prime project, and will remain so until it publishes.

To be frank, my reach nearly exceeded my grasp with this one, and it has taken a lot longer than I anticipated. D1 and D2 flowed freely, but D3 fought me every step of the way.

So if you are waiting on D3, fear not: the end is in sight.

Scene blockage

Every writer hits plot issues; you are at A in a project and you want to get to Y, but you draw a blank on step B, or G, I, M, whatever.

I also get hung up on physical scenes. I’m cooking along, hammering out words, got my plot arc worked out, got plenty of forward planning, zip through the build-up, come to the action part…and BLAM. A blank.

I know the heroes are going to fight Group A to accomplish Thing B.

But under what conditions? What is the layout? It can’t just be anywhere, the reason the fight is taking place is that Group A went to ground in a safe spot to do X, allowing the PCs time to catch up.

But what is the safe spot in context with the larger, already described environment? The physical layout will dictate the flow of the fight, after all.

This seems so simple, yet it can be a very tough nut to break, at least for me. It is better than writer’s block because it is less hard to break, but it still is an impediment.

The curse of the action genre writer.