Marko Kloos's Blog, page 18

The outdoor office

There’s a pond about a half mile down the road, and when the weather is good, I grab my little Surface Go and head down there in the mornings to get a head start on the word count for the day. Right now it’s the start of the best month for using that outdoor office because the vacationers are thinning out and the weather is cooling down. I’ll be able to come down here until the first frost, when the mornings get cold enough to make typing difficult.

But for now, this is the golden month here in central New Hampshire, that beautiful span of time where the leaves start changing color and the evening air is crisp and cool. And for a writing spot, this one is hard to beat. There’s nothing around but loons and the occasional bald eagle.

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Dispatch from the desk

The most enjoyable words for a writer to read are “Pay To The Order Of…”, and the most enjoyable words for a writer to put down on the page are “THE END”.

I’ve been quiet on here because I’ve spent the last few weeks finishing BALLISTIC, the second book in the Palladium Wars series. But it’s turned in, and once the edits are done, it will make its way through the production line for its scheduled July 2020 release.

I took the holiday weekend off, but now I am back at my desk working on FRONTLINES #7. That’s right, friends and neighbors. It’s in the works, so you can stop emailing me to ask about it. (“Is there going to be a #7?” and “When is the next Frontlines coming out?” make up about 90% of the messages I receive from readers.)

For the release of AFTERSHOCKS, the PR team had me scheduled for a lot of radio interviews, and I find that I enjoy doing those a lot. They only take 15-30 minutes out of my day, and I can do them in my PJs if I want, so that’s easy to fit into the schedule.

Next up will be the Frontlines novella I’ve threatened to release for months now. It kept getting shunted to the back of the line by various other obligations, but now I’ll finally be able to finish it. It takes place concurrently with the events in Frontlines #6, “Points of Impact”, and centers on a character you haven’t met yet. As soon as that one is available for purchase, I’ll make an announcement here on the blog, probably in the next week or two.

Interview with the local newspaper

My local newspaper, the Valley News, interviewed me a few days ago, and you can read the whole thing here. It’s a very good piece that stays true to the facts, and I enjoyed sitting for the questions (with journalist Sarah Earle) and the pictures (with photographer Rick Russell) very much.

An interview and a weekend trip

Here’s an interview with me over on Paul Semel’s blog, in which I talk about the ideas and motivations behind AFTERSHOCKS and the general world-building and setup of the Palladium Wars universe.

I spent part of the weekend in New York City, to have lunch with my editor and take the German nephew along so he could see the Big City. NYC in August is….not my favorite time and place in the world, I have to say. It’s hot, full of tourists (especially Midtown, which is where the visitors I bring along invariably want to go too), and we got there on trash day, which means the olfactory experience was spectacular. But it still has its charms, and some things about NYC will never get old for me. Like the view from the observation deck of the Empire State Building:

And the building itself is beautiful, of course.

There’s an Amazon Bookstore right across the street from the lobby entrance of the Empire State Building, so naturally I had to go check it out and get the rare pleasure of seeing one of my books on the shelf of a bookstore. (B&N and BAM won’t stock my books because 47North is an Amazon imprint, so I don’t usually see my name in a dead-tree store.)

Another cool thing about browsing the SF/F section was seeing the names of lots of friends on the book covers. I get a kick out of that every time I go into a bookstore, even if it’s one where my stuff is not on the shelf. It’s fun to be able to put so many faces to names and be happy for their successes.

Wiktory

Inbox Zero on all three of my email accounts–a small triumph, but I feel a sense of accomplishment nonetheless.

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WordPress will remain my only form of public social communication from here on out because it’s non-intrusive, and I can check it on my own schedule without getting bombarded with comment notifications. I’ve enabled blog comments again–some of you have left comments on my About page, and that’s not a spot I usually check for messages, so feel free to comment on the individual posts. But don’t get upset if I don’t reply right away because I only check WordPress a few times a week at best.

And nobody send me any email to screw up my Inbox Zero zen right now, or I’ll subscribe you to all kinds of interesting email lists.

When characters take the wheel

I have a blog post up on the Wild Cards blog, in which I talk about the relationship between character and plot, and attempt an answer to the question of which is more important to a good narrative. 

I’ve been a member of the consortium since late 2015, and since then, I’ve turned out two novelettes at Tor.com (How To Move Spheres and Influence People, released on March 27, and a new Khan story that will be out next year). I’ve also written two novellas—Stripes, for the LOW CHICAGO mosaic novel, and PROBATIONARY, for Knaves over Queens, our first UK-centered Wild Cards book. It’s great fun to be part of that world, and I feel like I am stretching my writing wings in ways they wouldn’t necessarily flex in my day-to-day genre writing. It’s making me a better writer, letting me be part of a group of insanely talented colleagues, and turning out stories that are among the better stuff I’ve written. It’s kept me busy in between the day job novels, and I am very glad to be a part of it. Sometimes you are presented with an opportunity that feels like you’ll be in over your head if you accept. But then you find that you can not only rise to the challenge, but that your professional skills improve greatly as a result. It can be scary to hop off the deep end, but there’s treasure at the bottom of the pool.

Life after FaceTwitStagram

A little over a month ago, I pulled the plug on all my remaining social media accounts and went full-on cold turkey on everything. And by “cold turkey”, I mean that I didn’t leave myself the option of reactivating those accounts. Twitter and Facebook make it intentionally hard to leave the service altogether, for obvious reasons, and they instead suggest you just let your account sit dormant until you come to your senses. (Facebook also tries to put a guilt trip on you by letting you know how VERY MUCH your friends are going to miss you.)

So the accounts are gone. In the process, I lost a few hundred Facebook friends and about 6,000 Twitter followers. And you know what happened to my professional and personal relationships?

Not a damn thing.

The people who were in touch with me before are still in touch with me. They have my phone number and my private email address. I did not disappear like Marty McFly in the photograph just because I am no longer on social media. I have no doubt that I’ll miss out on a few things—Twitter in particular was useful for the occasional coordination of meet-ups and social events with colleagues—but I think that the negative impact of social media on my ability to focus vastly outweighed the networking benefits.

And I have to tell you that the absence of social media has had a major positive effect in my life. I didn’t even realize just how pervasive that low-level background din of constant information and compulsive cycling through feeds had become until it was no longer there. I’m more relaxed, more productive, and better able to concentrate for long periods of time. And I am unaware of the Outrage of the Day, which means my mood and anxiety levels have improved greatly. It’s to the point where I don’t even check news feeds anymore beyond a quick headline skimming. I’ll tune in to NPR on the way to the grocery store, and that does the trick of keeping me generally informed without subjecting myself to the information barrage of online news sites. Maybe sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

It’s strange how the first few days after social media feel like kicking an addiction. I found myself reaching for my phone more than once to snap pictures for my Instagram feed, and that urge only subsided after a week or two. But now, the idea of stopping my day for a minute to post something for likes or comments has no appeal anymore. There’s a reason why the social media engineers make their products intentionally addictive—they make money every time someone pulls down on their feed to refresh it. (Even the very motion used to refresh is a slot machine kinetic, and that’s exactly what Twitter and Facebook have become. They’re not information or quality social connection, they’re slot machines in our pockets, and the people who put them there are the ones who get the payout.)

I’m not saying that everyone needs to get off social media, but I think that more people should consider it, especially those of us in the creative field. Writing requires long periods of unbroken concentration, and Twitter and Facebook are explicitly designed to claim attention as much as possible. I’m pretty sure that if I had ditched social media two years ago, I’d have two or three more novels in my backlist, and the ones I did manage to write would have turned out better than they did with social media in the picture.

The Big Idea: Aftershocks

My friend John Scalzi was kind enough to let me borrow his blog today, where I talk a little about the central idea behind Aftershocks.

In related news, I have been informed by reliable sources that I can claim the first use of the term “giraffe-adjacent” on Whatever. May it stand to future historians as one of my greatest achievements.

Aftershocks release day!

AFTERSHOCKS, the first book in my new SF series called “The Palladium Wars”, is out today!

It’s available on Amazon in Kindle, Audible, trade paperback, and hardcover forms. And if you are a Prime member in the US, the Kindle version is available to you free to read for the month of July as part of the Prime Reading program.

(If you are a Prime member and you pre-ordered the Kindle version already, don’t get too upset about not getting to read it for free like those late-to-the-party Prime Reading bandwagon jumpers. I get royalties from the pre-sales, so I’ll be able to write more books, and you get to keep the Kindle book even if you maxed out your Prime Reading borrowing library because you own it for good.)

I am about to turn in the second novel, called BALLISTIC, which is scheduled to be released in June of next year. And for those of you who kept asking on Twitter and via email: there will be another Frontlines novel, I will be writing it between now and the end of the year, and it will be out next year as well. In the meantime, I am writing on a Frontlines novella to be released in a few weeks, and there will be at least one more Frontlines story out on the Kindle after that before the next novel comes out.

The novella I am currently writing has been a great way to get my head back into the Frontlines universe after spending a year and a half with the characters in the Palladium Wars system. I hope you’ll enjoy what’s coming in the next year.

 

Writing and the Internet

I have to come to realize that over the last few years, the Internet has had a profoundly corrosive effect on my professional output and occasionally even my emotional health.

This effect has been especially severe in two areas: social media and email, both of which basically constituted my consent to being easily and directly available to contact by anyone with an Internet connection. In Twitter’s case, that contact has also been fully public, which means that anyone with a Twitter account has been able to see and share any conversation I’ve had with people outside of direct messages.

As of today, I am withdrawing that consent by getting off social media and curtailing my availability via email.

Late last year, I got so tired of the constant necessity to curate my Facebook feed and the drama resulting from pruning my Friends list that I pulled the plug for good and deleted my account. In the seven months since then, I have not missed it, and beyond a few concerned messages from long-time Facebook acquaintances, my absence has been inconsequential to the world and a lot less aggravation and anxiety in my life. Last night, I deleted my Twitter account as well, for slightly different reasons that boil down to the strong feeling that it will have a similar life-improving consequence.

My Twitter account shows that I’ve posted over 20,000 Tweets over the last 11 years. Even allowing for the old 180-character limit, that’s three or four novels’ worth of words I’ve put out there for free, much of it to entertain people who don’t know me personally, and who mostly won’t notice my departure. Twitter, like Facebook before it, has been a useful tool to stay in touch with colleagues in an easy way, a digital watercooler I was visiting during the day to take breaks. But I can’t count the number of times something in my feed made me angry, upset, or anxious. We all have different ways to deal with these emotions. My wife, for example, will get mad at something and then forget all about it within five minutes and move on with her day. I’m the type whose anger or anxiety will simmer for a good while, affecting the rest of my day. To put it bluntly: I can no longer allow anyone with a smartphone and a data plan the potential ability to darken my day or interrupt my work by trying to pick an argument or fill my Twitter feed with aggravating stuff. Most emails and Twitter interactions with fans have been fun and positive, but there have been exceptions. And even the well-meaning emails from happy readers take a slice out of my writing time.

In addition to the emotional effects, social media and its constant attention-seeking stream of pop-ups and notifications are constantly threatening my productivity. Social media has been a great tool for me to have fun and make new contacts, but on the whole, I have accepted that it is also a distraction and a major impediment to my ability to focus.

There is research out there that shows the deep focus necessary to produce creative work is easily interruptible, and once broken, it takes on average ten to twenty minutes for the brain to re-engage with the work fully and get back into that deep focus. That means every time I looked at an incoming email notification or checked Twitter or Instagram, I basically put the brakes on the work in front of me. Half a dozen interruptions during my productive work time will fragment it to the point where I struggle to get anything down onto the page. When I don’t get my word count in for the day, I get anxious, and the sort of anxiety that results from feeling unproductive has a cumulative effect for me. One ruined work day can easily snowball into a ruined work week, and a few months down the road, a blown deadline (and let’s not even mention the sort of anxiety caused by that, because there’s actual household-sustaining money attached to that deadline.)

I know that this will upset people who have enjoyed the ability to get in touch with me easily. But if I engage in Twitter banter and email exchanges all day long, my productive output will slow down to a trickle. A very smart friend of mine once taught me an important lesson about finances and time, and that is that your only finite resource is your time. You can always make more money, but you cannot create more time. I’ve already been in the habit of exchanging my money for more time–paying someone else to mow my lawn or plow and shovel snow instead of having to do it myself, for example–and this is just further safeguarding of my remaining time. I am less than three years away from 50, and if I don’t watch out, I’ll be pushing 60 and realizing that I spent three quarters of my creative time doing little creative work.

Going forward, I will only check my email in the afternoons and evenings, when my productive time is over, and I will only reply to emails that absolutely require a response. That means messages from my agent and editors, close friends and colleagues, and people that have an ongoing business or collaboration relationship with me. People who need to reach me directly and immediately are few and far between, and all of them have the number to my personal phone and the ability to send me a text message. If you have a professional request and need to contact me, please direct your inquiry to my agent Evan Gregory at agent@ethanellenberg.com. But be advised that going forward, I will have to be highly selective about doing book blurbs or attending conventions (which tend to take a full week out of my productive time because I can’t work at conventions or while traveling.)

I really appreciate all the fan mail and social media messages I have received over the years, but I simply cannot take the time to keep reading them all, much less replying, or I will be doing that all day instead of writing novels. (And much of the fan mail I have received can be summed up as “Love your work, when is the next book coming out?” I’m sure everyone involved will be much happier if I get the books out faster instead of responding to emails more quickly. Even a form “thank you” response takes a minute out of my day and fifteen minutes out of my focus.)

Some of you may have read Neal Stephenson’s policy on this subject, and if this reads a lot like what he had to say far more eloquently a few years ago, I can only say that he’s a smarter man than I am, and that he has come to the same conclusion much earlier than I did. But I am–thankfully–still able to learn, and willing to adjust my habits.

I will still update this blog, but only when I have something of value to say, and I will no longer enable comments. Please do not feel slighted. It will hopefully result in a better and more productive writing output, which will make me–and hopefully my readers–happier in the long run than the dopamine ping of a “liked” Tweet or a comment reply. And I hope you will understand why I have to take these measures to safeguard my creative time and ensure I can keep writing novels for your enjoyment.