B.J. Baye's Blog, page 2

Desperate Upload in Print!

Desperate Upload is now available in trade paperback format at Amazon. Feel free to check it out! I’m not entirely sure how to tell Amazon that it’s another format of the ebook already on the site, but hopefully the different editions will be linked before too long.

Honourable Mention

Another of my stories received an Honourable Mention from Writers of the Future! I’m not going to reveal the title of this story yet, as I’m not sure what I plan on doing with it. I may revise and resubmit. It eventually will be released in some form, however.

Updates

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve made my weekly updates. That just shows how much I’ve been failing in my goals. I’m not going to focus on that failure, though, but look forward and try to get back to doing both my writing goals and weekly updates.

Desperate Upload up on Nook and iBookstore!

Awesome news! Desperate Upload is now available on both Nook and Apple’s iBookstore. Unfortunately, I can’t link to the latter as I do not know how to access iTunes Store on the web. Just search for it, though, and you should be able to find it.

Weekly Update

Sorry this is so late this week, I knew Desperate Upload would soon be up on Nook and I wanted to wait until it was. The fact that is up on iBookstore too is a welcome surprise.

Once again, I didn’t reach my goal of 1000 words written. This should, however, be the last week for a while I say that. I am just about ready to start writing the first draft of my novel. I have the characters, many of the conflicts, the dramatic beats, and even most of the first chapter outlined in my head.

It’s not, yet, a formal outline. I’m not sure my brain works in quite the right way to do a complete outline. At least, not at my current level of professional development. I plan to make one more try this week, but succeed or fail I plan to start writing the first chapter this week. At the very least, I’ll be taking a hybrid approach to this book, and I think it’ll be much better for the attempt.

In other news, I believe I’ve picked the theme I want for the new site design. Hopefully, I’ll have it live soon. If possible, I hope to have it up before next week’s update.

Million Dollar Outlines

Just finished David Farland‘s book ‘Million Dollar Outlines‘. I learned so much, I feel a little overwhelmed. I’ll likely have to go back and reread sections. (Some areas confuse me, for example at one point it seems he’s saying to start a story with a detailed setting, and then in the very next section said never to start with a setting. I know I must have misunderstood.)

While I don’t think I could go as all-out in an outline as described in the book, as I’m more of a discovery writer, or ‘pantser’, by nature, a hybrid approach may just be the ticket to improving my skill and the stories I tell. What I learned in this book about character and conflict development alone will, I think, vastly improve my writing.

I highly recommend this book to any writer looking to improve their storytelling.

 

Weekly Update

As I mentioned last week, for my next project I want to try an outline, and reading this book gave me a lot of ideas. Now, it’s just a matter of coming up with characters, conflicts, and individual arcs. In the future I hope to get to the point where I can work on planning one project while writing another, so I can keep up a more steady pace of writing new words. For now, though I once again didn’t hit my goal of 1000 words written this week, I’m making a lot of progress.

This time, when I sit down to write a novel, I may actually succeed.

Desperate Upload Reviewed

Desperate Upload has received its first review on Amazon.com!

I know, not the news I’m supposed to be’s posting about in the weekly update. I just had to share, however.

As for my writing progress this week, I only hit a little under 250 words. I don’t have an exact count, as I was also deleting stuff as I edited my last story, so the software word count is not accurate. I have started work on my next story, but as it promises to be my longest one yet I am taking a new approach and going to try outlining ahead of time. This means I may not get started on my actual writing this week. I’ve never outlined before, always writing by the seat of my pants, so it may take me a bit to wrap my head around it.

In other news, now that I have published my first e-book, I am looking to redesign my site. The current theme works well for a blog, but not an author site. I will hopefully make some progress on that this week. Thankfully, my subscription to Elegant Themes is still active.

That’s it for this week. I’ll post again next week, if not sooner!

I’m (self) Published!

My first ebook is now available! This is an updated and revised version of the story that received an Honourable Mention a little over a year ago from Writers of the Future.

A young boy is all that stands between a commando team from Mars and a deadly attack on Earth’s orbital station.

Jon Whyte is a kid born and raised on his family’s freighter Stardream as it carries cargo all over the solar system. On a yearly return to Earth Station, the Stardream is intercepted by a commando team of marines from Mars, who are ready to strike the first blow against Earth in a war of independence.

BONUS STORY: Four Minutes

A young single mother finds herself the target of the Men in Black.

This short story ebook is currently available at Amazon, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Kobo, and Smashwords. Sony, Nook, Apple, and print editions to come.

No Progress

Well, this week I did terribly. My word count is exactly 0. I don’t even have a good excuse. All I did this week was watch three seasons of Dexter on Netflix.

I did, however, get my story back from Penumbra. So, I was able to send the story to an alpha reader, and got an extremely useful critique back. I just need to implement it.

My goals for this week will not only include getting 1000 words written, but also finishing up the new draft of this story and trying to sell it at a couple more markets before I have to send it off to Writers of the Future.

Story Completed

Sorry, I’m a day late this week. Hopefully, this won’t happen too often.

This was another great week. Well, at least half the week was. I beat my daily writing records twice. First, on the 12th, I wrote 802 words. The next day, even better, I did 986. Unfortunately, except for a little bit the next day, that’s all I got done this week. My total was 1988 words.

I finished story I was working on, and sent it to Penumbra Magazine, just in time for the deadline on the 15th, for their space opera issue. If they turn it down, I should still get it back in plenty of time for another revision and sending it to Writers of the Future.

Also, this week, I made some progress on the book cover for my first e-book. It’s not ready yet, but when I finalize it I’ll post it here.

Now, I just need to get started on my next idea. I do have an novel that needs work, but I’m not quite ready to get started on that yet. It stumbled, the last time, because I didn’t have enough of a plan. It seems, while I am what they call a pantser (that is, I write without an outline, ‘by the seat of my pants’) with my short stories, for anything longer I need a plan.

See you next week.

Weekly Update

Good news!

I hit my goal! In total, I wrote 1396 words this week. I managed this even though I had trouble finding a consistent time to write, which cost me a couple of days.

I’ve also set myself up to be able to sell e-books through

Goals

Dragon NaturallySpeaking (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Despite my best intentions, last year didn’t go so well for my writing goals. I completed two stories, and part of a novel, and that’s it. Due to my disability, typing became painful, and there was less and less inclined to type. Until now, that is meant that I’ve gotten little in the way of writing done for the last few months.

Thanks to my parents, however, I now have a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It’ll take a lot of getting used to, and for now it is much slower than typing, but it’s something. No longer will my shoulders ache for days after spending some time writing.

Now that I can write again without pain, it’s time for me to set some new goals. First, I’m going to return to setting up time once a day where I can be alone and write. Since I’m still getting used to Dragon, I’m setting myself an easily obtainable goal of 1000 words per week.

Every Friday, I will post on here whether I’ve succeeded or failed in that week’s goal. I will also be keeping track of how many words I can write per hour, and how much time every day I can put towards writing. I’ll use this information at the end of January to come up with a new weekly goal that will follow from there on out.

If all goes well, I should have a much higher production rate than last year, and hopefully learn much more the process.

Never Again / The War Amps / Les Amputés de guerre – YouTube