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What It Took To Write My Novelette “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay”

Check out the entire Scribtotum article archive! What It Took To Write My Novelette “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” Published on April 08, 2021 Index under creative franchise, creative life, creative process, creative writing life, goals, mental health, the big plan, the perfumed air at kwaanantag bay, writing fiction Join the conversation! There are 0 comments so far. Published on April 08, 2021 Index under creative franchise | creative life | creative process | creative writing life | goals | mental health | the big plan | the perfumed air at kwaanantag bay | writing fiction Join the conversation! There are 0 comments so far.

My latest creative work, “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay,” is now available as an e-book via Amazon, worldwide.

It comes out ten months after my previous release, the novel Light of the Outsider, and while I’m not sure if that’s some kind of record for me, it feels like an improved rate of creative productivity, that’s for sure.

All the same, the April 6th, 2021 release of “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” was four months later than my declared target of December 4th, 2020.

I won’t say I don’t have a little anxiety about that. At the same time, “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” is something I’m proud of; a creative work that feels like an artifact of my intention and my expression, and if that’s not the definition of hitting the target creatively, I really don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

What’s “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” about? What did it take to write it and get it to the world? How did the process contribute to my progress as a creator? What lessons have I learned?

About “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay”

“The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” is a tale of the Shaper’s World Cycle. It takes place about a year after the events in Light of the Outsider, and features three characters from that novel.

For those of you not keeping every little thing about me and my creative works front-of-mind: The Shaper’s World is, speaking simplistically, a fantasy setting like Westeros or Middle Earth… but… no. It’s not like those at all. There are no elves, no hobbits, no talking lions, no dire wolves (no wolves!), no dwarves or dragons. No portal to our world. It’s a planet around a star… somewhere… and, apart from a few fantastical elements, is readily in the “realistic fantasy” camp. Another name for this genre (if I gotta… man, I really hate genre labels) would be “grimdark” (hate that phrase) or “dark fantasy” (too limiting..! Arggghh!)

Digression: putting a genre label on an entire fantasy setting is like saying every story told set on planet Earth is “post industrial noir.” The Shaper’s World is… a world! So all manner of stories can… and are being… and will be told there.

Light of the Outsider, the debut novel and first work in the storyworld, is a caper / crime thriller with undercurrents of cosmic horror.

“The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” is a character-driven, emotionally charged interpersonal tale of love, obligation, and consequences. It’s much more “literary” in tone, and the fantasy elements are, while integral, not center stage.

It’s one of those stories of mine for which I feel I have to say, “Even if (fill-in-the-genre) isn’t your thing, this will resonate with you.” More about why in a bit.

What Did It Take To Write “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay?”

I started writing “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” on October 1st, 2020… barely. Given that I hoped to release the finished product just two months later… yeah. See “What Have I Learned…” below.

The story was on my mind before then, of course. A whole lot of writing involves staring into space, writing free-form journal / brainstorming entries, and allowing everything to just kind of… stew.

My lodestone was that this would be a gentle, almost quiet, story. No evil cultists or scheming agents; no taciturn assassins or cosmic threats. Not that there wouldn’t be conflict, and very, very high stakes.

If Light of the Outsider was a summer blockbuster, “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” is a heartfelt indie film.

I had another guiding light: Mike Resnick’s stunningly moving collection of interconnected stories, Kirinyaga.

Not that “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” has anything at all to do with the subject matter of Resnick’s multi-award winning work. I didn’t even want to necessarily emulate the tone of those stories.

Rather, I wanted to create something that clung to the memory the way Kirinyaga has clung to mine for decades.

I am not the writer Resnick was. Not yet. I am not claiming I succeeded. You’ll have to decide that.

Stated simply, Kirinyaga was the lamp that lit my pen, and “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” was written, gratefully, in its shadow.

Other Lights and Shadows

In “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay,” Dennick, travels with Agane, his spouse (“heartfast” in parlance of the Magn people of the Shaper’s World) and their friend Kug on a mission to find the healer who can cure the Agane of a progressively debilitating disease. It’s got a lot to do with illness, and mortality, and the special, unique burdens carried both by people who are sick and the people who love them.

I didn’t set out to make this a parable of the Coronavirus / COVID-19 global pandemic. But a few days before I started writing, the global dead passed one million. Two days after I started writing, I lost a potential client to the disease.

Then, as now, it was impossible not the think of those who had been lost, their surviving loved ones, and the toll extracted on COVID-19 victims who had survived not unscathed.

Agane suffers from “the Wasting,” a fictional disease that is nothing like COVID-19. It more resembles a horrible combination of Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and fibromyalgia.

I came up with the general symptoms long before the pandemic. Rather, I was… inspired is hardly the appropriate word… by a long-ago co-worker who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and my own mother’s long struggle living with fibromyalgia. Basically, I thought of some of the most horrible ailments I’d personally seen people endure, and made them one awful thing.

Write what you know, they say.

Wish I didn’t.

Another experience exerting undeniable influence on “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” was being the sole caretaker for my mother as complications and cumulative damage from her diabetes, her fibromyalgia, and her chronic anxiety and depression brought her increasingly frequent and severe health crises in the last four years of her life until her death in late August, 2019.

A year and a half later, I miss her, of course, but also, I am still adjusting to the fundamental fact that I am no longer responsible for her well-being; her safety; her very life. I’m very aware that there are deeply ingrained issues at the ready for me to work out.

So, while I didn’t set out to write a story about the collateral effects of the pandemic, I was fully aware that “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” would be, like it or not, compulsory therapy for me, one way or another.

Every Day: Feel the Burn, or Avoid the Workout by Rearranging the Gym?

I started out envisioning “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” to be a novella — that is, depending on which yardstick you use, between 17,500 and 40,000 words. I knew the story didn’t require the complexity (and so, word count) of a full-length novel, but I also wanted to let it breathe and stretch when appropriate.

It ended up being around 16,400 words, which puts it in the “novelette” class. Now that the thing is up on Amazon, their algorithm puts it at 65 pages, short enough for the various “short reads” categories.

You might think it would take correspondingly less time to write than a larger work. I sure did. That’s why I allocated just two months for the thing, from start to publication.

Why’d it turn into six?

While I can point to the holiday season, house guests, my day job, and other assorted cans of time gas leaking everywhere, there were plenty of days I could have been adding words to the manuscript and was instead working on adjacent activities, like sussing out details of the Shaper’s World itself.

Granted, I needed to know lots of specific things about the continent of Kaebrith, especially the region in which “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” takes place, distances from there to there, travel times, and the like. This logistical stuff matters in the story, and because the story is one piece in a larger mosaic of fiction set in the Shaper’s World, it matters for internal consistency not just in this work, but across multiple works.

But… yeah. Some days, I only had enough mental energy to muck around creating maps and working out the locations of things, and not enough emotional energy.

Looking at the reporting in yWriter, it seems between when I started on October 1, 2020 and when I finished the first draft on February 27, 2021, I actually only added words to the manuscript on 33 out of 150 days. Less than a quarter of the duration.

Seriously, why?

Because it was painful.

Because it was challenging.

Because it was exhausting.

I’m With Frank Norris, Mostly

As the late novelist once wrote in a letter, “Don’t like to write, but like having written.”

Writing fiction, at least for me, means juggling assorted structural and situational elements while also hopscotching between the heads of imaginary people I have to, for the duration, functionally become, all while attempting to ignore external distractions and stressors.

With this story and its close-to-home subject matter, I was dredging up some largely unexamined and, until then, unasked for stuff, too, pretty much every time I’d put my hands on the keyboard.

Some days, I just couldn’t do it. It was easier to find related and, sure, necessary, but secondary, tasks to tackle… apparently around 75% of the time..!

Ol’ Frank Norris, and many like-minded scribes since (and undoubtedly before), knew about the drudgery and the toll, and I agree with him, to a point.

There were moments in the writing — specific scenes that I can’t share without spoiling the novelette for you — that were cathartic. Moments that created, for me, the feelings I hope to inspire in you when you read the thing. Healing moments… although it’s going to be a while before the scabs flake away.

Now, not every writing project is an emotional marathon. Light of the Outsider certainly was, for reasons very different from those to do with “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay.” My literary shorts-and-essays collection Four Stories had some no-pain-no-gain stretches. On the other hand, my most recent Sovereign Era (another of my storyworlds, this one focused loosely on “super powers”) short story, “The News from Bewilder Pond,” left me feeling like I’d had a really invigorating walk — an accomplishment, but more of an exhibition than a title bout, to mix sporty metaphors.

I might grouse through the process, and do everything I can to avoid it… but I know enough to recognize that when it’s rough going, it’s worth it, and that value will be passed on to you, dear reader.

At least, I hope so! Find out!

What Have I Learned Creating and Releasing “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay?”

In the ten months from first words to release day, I did gather some new skills and proficiency across the 117 days I should have been writing, and I came to some realizations that merit further investigation and experimentation.

Worldbuilding Level-Up

I mentioned doing a bunch of worldbuilding over the last ten months. Thanks to excellent and generous resources, especially on YouTube, and especially-especially Edgar Grunewald‘s Artifexian channel, I was able to refresh my knowledge of things like atmospheric and oceanic currents, Köppen climate zones, and the like, and to engage in some just-in-time learning on cartographic techniques.

Part of the map of Kaebrith made for my personal reference, featuring the Gulf of Kwaanantag and the regions mentioned in “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay.” This image represents an area about 600 miles across.

I codified the general shape, topography, major rivers, and major biomes for Kaebrith, the continent on Gundi-Fai (the Shaper’s World) where Light of the Outsider, “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay,” and the next five-plus novels and other works take place, and I made great progress on a master map I can repurpose and supplement going forward.

In the process, I acquired working knowledge and basic skills working with Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer, two vector art applications, and that will carry over into the day job, adding to my worth as a creative services provider.

My next Shaper’s World novel, Shadow of the Outsider, will bring readers to previously unseen corners of Kaebrith, so I’ll continue to dedicate time to fleshing out the foundational details of the setting over the coming months. The long-term plan is to publish a Shaper’s World gazetteer that will serve not just as a companion to the fiction, it will be a resource for tabletop role playing gamers who might want to use the storyworld for their own personal games. So this will all be time spent with an eventual return.

I just have to make sure I’m not falling into the worldbuilding-as-procrastination trap. For Shadow of the Outsider, I’d like to see myself flipping that “writing time:not writing time” ratio.

3D Landscape Rendering

Book covers are important. While it’s true that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, it’s a fact of marketing that if the book cover doesn’t satisfy certain criteria, your potential reader will never get past the cover to judge the content of the book on its own merits.

Thing is, original cover art, especially original digital or tangible painted art, is relatively expensive. Worth it! But expensive.

Until I’m making much, much more from my creative endeavors and it makes financial sense, I’ve made the decision to only pay for original art for the covers of my novels.

For shorter works (short stories, novelettes, novellas, and non-fiction works under 50,000 words), for now, I’m creating and designing my own covers.

Note that if you don’t have expertise with graphic design software and experience with book marketing, I do not recommend this! Indeed, even though I do have professional expertise and experience creating market-appropriate book covers, I’m going to turn that over to others as soon as it makes economic sense to do so.

Until then…

I have a general strategy for works released in the Shaper’s World Cycle:

Novels will feature original cover art from artists like Tim Shepherd, whose work graces the cover of Light of the Outsider. The subject matter will be dynamic, including characters and a loose, market-appropriate interpretation of a scene from the book.Shorter works will feature landscape art I create myself, representing a market-appropriate interpretation of a location and the theme / tone of the work.The typography on all Shaper’s World Cycle books, major and minor, will have a similar look and feel to maintain brand consistency.

Since Kwaanantag Bay is right there in the title of the novelette, the subject matter is a no-brainer. For the tone and feel of the cover, I wanted to emulate the painted covers from the pulp fantasy paperbacks I remember from the 1970s… evocative images that often didn’t feature any characters or action, but sure gave your imagination plenty to do.

I looked around for public domain and open-license photographs of real world locations, and a few came close… but always included people, metal fences, buildings, and other real-world elements I knew I wouldn’t be able to easily remove without stumbling into that uncanny valley of “Oh, that’s been photoshopped” disconnect.

I tried… VERY briefly… to digitally paint what I saw in my mind’s eye myself.

Nope. I do not have those skills.

What I do have is a height map of Kaebrith, which includes, down to a very high resolution, the region of Kwaanantag Bay.

A height map is a top-down graphic representation of relative altitude in gradient shades from dark to light. The darker the pixel, the lower it is compared to the lightest pixel. True black equals the lowest point; true white, the highest.

What’s neat is this: You can take a height map and import it into any number of terrain generation software programs and have it re-interpreted in three virtual dimensions.

I chose World Creator 2 for this task. Yes, I spent money on a professional license — about half what I might have spent on an actual artist — but since I’m going to be using this tool for future covers and other purposes, it’s a sensible investment.

After a learning curve I’m, frankly, still navigating, I was able to create a reasonable interpretation of Kwaanantag Bay as it might look from the points of view of the protagonists of the novelette. By using digital tools in World Creator that emulate real-world lighting, fog, and other environmental elements, plus some “post production” in a graphics editor, I managed to come very, very close to the image in my head: a realistic, but “painterly,” landscape.

Bonus: it’s the actual topography of a portion of Kwaanantag Bay!

Bonus bonus! I have new skills that I can use to help my clients as a creative services provider working with authors and other creators.

Marketing Lessons

As with Light of the Outsider, I offered my mailing list community of friends and fans the opportunity to purchase a Pre-Order Bundle shortly after the first draft of “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” was complete.

For $10.00, they reserved the e-book and the audiobook, and received an invitation to participate in a “koffee klatch” group video chat to talk about the novelette once they had some time to read it. I also included high-resolution wallpaper of the full cover art image (only a fraction is shown on the e-book cover) for their computers, tablets, phones, etc.

Unlike my direct pre-order effort with Light of the Outsider, which you can read about, this offer was only adopted by a small percentage of my mailing list community. When it came time to actually download the e-book, only half of those who purchased actually did so within the first two weeks. And the “koffee klatch?” No one RSVP’ed to indicate their interest, so I cancelled it.

I’m a little surprised!

However!

I shouldn’t be!

Here’s the thing: it’s always better to find out what your community of friends and fans actually wants and to, if you can, give them that… over thinking they’ll want whatever you think would be fun to offer.

I’m grateful folks put down their money even though they apparently didn’t really care about the perks their pre-order provided! It tells me what really drove them was a desire to support me as a creator.

That’s wonderful. It really is — indeed, it kind of keeps me going — but I’d rather deliver above and beyond for them.

So next time, I’ll find out what they’d most love to receive for their early-adopter direct pre-order commitment.

My Community Is Changing… Or Is It Me?

I have a small mailing list. Heck, by some standards, it’s minuscule!

It’s loyal, though. Many of those folks have been around for fifteen years.

It’s engaged, too. 44% of the emails I send, they open. Click-through (how often people who open emails click on links I want them to click) is 4%. Both of those are considered well above average.

That said…

I know most of those people came to me out of their love for my first novel, Brave Men Run, and its pioneering podcast edition. That book, and it’s superior but less popular sequel, Pilgrimage, is in a different storyworld and a different (here’s that dirty word again) genre than my Shaper’s World works.

I’ve seen, over the years, that folks who liked Brave Men Run‘s mash-up of teen coming-of-age with superpowers just aren’t that into anything else I’ve done. Even if they buy (thank you!) and read (I assume?) the stuff, they’re not writing reviews (one of the kindest things you can do for an author after you’ve read their work), spreading the word, and so on.

Also, the list is essentially stagnant, acquiring just one or two new community members each month.

It’s time to reassess what I’m doing over there, and get much more proactive about growing the community.

Why?

There’s no more valuable or profitable marketing asset for a writer than their mailing list. I’ve been letting mine ride, and that means I’ve been missing opportunities.

It’s very possible most of my existing friends and fans aren’t all that interested in The Big Plan to write and release six novels, plus minor and supplemental works, in the Shaper’s World storyworld between 2020 and 2026. It may be that most of the folks in my community are waiting until my focus returns to the Sovereign Era storyworld to bring out their fully activated enthusiasm and support.

If that’s the case… that’s okay!

To find out for sure, though, I need to ask.

So in the coming weeks, I’ll put together a community survey and take the pulse of my mailing list. This will help me make sure I’m delivering the right information and offers to the right people. I know they’ll appreciate that, and I’ll appreciate the opportunity to be more effective.

One thing I already know: I must find, and attract, new people: readers into the kind of stuff I’m going to be writing for the next several years.

“But Matt,” you might be thinking, “if you really want to give your community what they seem to want, why not write and release the next four or five Sovereign Era novels?”

Yeah, that’s a valid question. The honest answer is: right now? I have more love for the Shaper’s World.

I love the giant story I’m telling across those six-plus books.

I love the characters: those I’ve introduced to the world, and those I know, but you, gentle reader, so far do not.

Most of all… I love the world! I think about Kaebrith’s savannas and jungles and forests and deserts and sprawling highlands and imposing mountains… the animals, the people… and it feels like home. I want to spend time there. I want to tell as many stories there as I can, while I can… and when I am  no able or alive to do it myself, I want to have left enough material behind that others can continue to explore and discover everything there is to experience there.

I believe in it. I’m inspired by it.

It’s up to me to find other people who share that excitement. So that’s what I will do.

Next

Before I move “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” over to the “done” column, I have to record, produce, and release the audiobook. It’ll go to the direct pre-order customers first, and then I’ll submit it to the various audiobook marketplaces. They all have different processing times, so it’ll be weeks (in some cases, months) before the audiobook is widely available… but once it’s submitted… the novelette is done.

Shadow of the Outsider

Concurrently, and in-progress right now, is work on the next novel of the Shaper’s World Cycle: The Outsider Trilogy volume two, Shadow of the Outsider.

Originally slotted for public release on July 14, 2021, pushing the release date for “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” from December of last year to April of 2021 means Shadow of the Outsider is now scheduled for October or November, 2021.

Shadow of the Outsider is a bigger story than its predecessor, Light of the Outsider. It’s got to work as a meaningful extension of the tale begun in Light of the Outsider, as an entertaining bridge to the novel that follows, War of the Outsider, and as a satisfying work of fiction in its own right.

As I write these words in early April, 2021, I’m in the middle of all of the “pre-production” work: mapping out the overall story (including two overlapping primary plotlines), creating detailed character background documents, and crafting a detailed scene-by-scene outline.

That’s my process; when it’s time to create the first manuscript draft, I know exactly what I should be writing each time I come to the keyboard.

Throughout, there will be, again, necessary worldbuilding work to be done to serve the story. But not at the expense of finishing the thing!

Come hell or high water, I will begin writing that first draft on May 1st, and it will be completed before July 14, 2021.

Well before I complete the draft, I’ll commission the cover art and get the direct pre-order going. The goal is to have the e-book in the hands of my direct pre-order customers on or before October 11, 2021.

That’s a tough pace. I know it. It’s important that I get more and more efficient creating these novels. Light of the Outsider was written in 125 days spread, often thinly, across 19(!) months.  Can I do Shadow of the Outsider in 75 days?

I’m going to do my best. What truly matters is that I continue to work, and build, and keep my eye on the long game.

Reflecting

I used to be a baby rock star. The bands I was in were middling-to-big fish in very small ponds. The opening act for the opening act of the band you came to see, with a few exceptions.

Didn’t matter. There’s something remarkable, something precious and pure, about creating live music with two or three of your creative brothers and sisters. The exchange of energy between band and audience in the 45 minutes you’re on stage is a singular experience.

Fueling those forty five minutes are hours and weeks where it’s just you and the band in a hot, sweaty practice space, looking inward, honing your craft and growing together into a cohesive engine. It’s a lot of work, over a long time, between those firecracker minutes in front of an audience.

When it’s over and done; when everyone’s packed up and gone home and you’re sitting on the edge of your bed, exhausted but unable to sleep for the residual vibration in your veins and buzzing in your ears… coming down from that high can be jarring indeed. Post-Concert Depression is a thing.

I can’t speak for all creative acts, or for all creators, but for me, at least, something similar happens after I’ve released a new book.

The momentum, the blind confidence, required to get a book completed and to market… after launch, it can feel like coming to a sudden, jarring stop.

There’s no more running on faith. The book is in the world, to stand or fail or, worst of all, do nothing at all, and promotion and advertising be damned, what happens next is all in the hands of the reader.

If there are readers.

As I bring this article toward its 5,000 word finish line, having revisited and relived the road to this point, I can’t deny feeling a bit maudlin and fatalistic. It’s valid; post-publishing depression is a thing, too, right? It’s also just kind of how I’m put together.

I made another thing.

Even though I know what comes next; even though I’ve been making things and releasing them into the world for over two decades, I still hear the voice from somewhere in my chest: “Now what?”

Yeah, I know as well as you do, having just read this far. I know what comes next. Hell, I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Doesn’t mean it’s not terrifying.

I’m going to do it anyway. One day after another, one word after another, in patches of time I sometimes have to fight (myself as much as anything or anyone) to claim.

Because this is The Big Plan!

This is what matters to me, more than anything.

Legacy. Expression. Creation. Life and death.

Truth: one reason I’ve taken to writing these lengthy de-briefings after I publish something is to honor the accomplishment. To draw a line between when it wasn’t done and when it was. To mark who I was, and who I am, and to clean the plate and clear the air.

It’s a stick of burning sage.

I’m running a long game. The Big Plan: years of steady, cumulative work aimed at bringing a world to life in a time-and-space-shifted collaboration between our imaginations, mine and yours, if you’re into it.

I made another thing.

I love it. You will, too.

Next!

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The Big Plan

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Published on October 24, 2020







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Published on October 24, 2020



Index under commitment | creative legacy | creative life | mental health | the big plan



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(This Scribtotum article is cross-posted with Sonitotum with Matthew Wayne Selznick episode 25. Listen to it, and / or read it here.)

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

That’s a question usually posed to would-be employees by recruiters and hiring managers. It’s lazy interviewing, don’t do it.

For an independent creator and self-employed “knowledge worker” like myself, however, asking yourself that question is useful.

Which is why it’s almost unforgivable that, other than in the vaguest sense, I didn’t have a long term plan until a few days ago.

Scribtotum is for teaching by example from the perspective of an experienced beginner, so I’m going to tell you why I finally figured out The Big Plan.

Since Scribtotum is also a node of my offboard brain… the place, as I once wrote, for “getting to know my own head…” I’m going to share the plan with you. That’s for accountability, too, so be a dear and read on…

“There Is Only So Much Time To Be Alive”

I sang that lyric, from my song “Brian Wilson,” in the band PIGBAT in the early nineties, when I was in my mid-twenties. Here’s the only recording I have of it, from a 1994 rehearsal. Enjoy, or, be amused, or something.

Brian Wilson

by PIGBAT feat. Matthew Wayne Selznick | Triple Bind Knot

https://www.mattselznick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/08_brian_wilson_triple_bind_knot_pigbat.mp3

Can you hear the youth? I knew the concept of mortality. Knew it. Didn’t understand it.

Now, I’m in my early fifties. My parents lived into their mid-eighties. I’m in comparatively better health than either of them were at my current age, so I can reasonably expect that I’ve got another thirty-ish years on the planet.

Except… I can’t reasonably expect that, or anything, when it comes to how much time I have left. I might as well have sung, “There is only x time to be alive.”

I’ve mentioned my late colleague P. G. Holyfield at least two times in the last few episodes of Sonitotum with Matthew Wayne Selznick, the companion podcast to Scribtotum. He died in 2014 at the age of 46 with many creative works left unfinished and unrealized, including things we were going to do together.

In episode twenty four of Sonitotum, I talked about Grant Bulltail. He and I were going to work together to bring his one and only novel to fruition and to publication.

We were to begin this month.

On October 1st, 2020, Grant died of coronavirus.

Grant was eighty years old. While his contributions as an honored storyteller and ethnographer of the Crow people were invaluable and extensive, he died before seeing his own novel experienced by the world. That’s affected me deeply.

In my twenties, I was still too young to really grok what I was singing. I hadn’t lost anyone other than grandparents.

In my forties, when Patrick (P.G.) died, I had lost a few friends — some of them creators, including Kris Shine, whose guitar playing you can hear on “Brian Wilson” — and my niece. I was starting to get the message, but still, it was abstract.

It’s 2020 as I write this, I’m fifty three years old, and I’ve survived over a dozen friends, colleagues, clients, and relatives. Artists, writers, musicians, many of them. Count among them my mother, who left behind scores of poems, vignettes, fragments, paintings, and other writing, not least of which was her extensive genealogical research.

Okay. I get it.

If a Tree Fell On Me Right Now

I’m sitting in a park, writing this. A strip of bark the size of my torso just fell off a tree and onto the path about thirty feet from where I sit. Nobody was jogging by at that particular moment, and if it had hit anyone, it probably wouldn’t have done more than give them a good scare and a scratch or two.

Still, it was a reminder of the very randomness and uncertainty driving me more and more the last few years.

If a tree fell and took me out right now, I would leave unfinished and unpublished (in addition to this very blog post)…

Five novels, four novellas, two serials, and an undetermined number of short stories in my Shaper’s World storyworld, plus secondary material like role-playing game setting guides.
Four novels, five serials, at least two short stories, and secondary material in my Sovereign Era storyworld.
Three novels and at least two short stories, plus secondary material in my Daikaiju Universe storyworld.
An unknown number of novels in my as-yet-unrealized pulp / thriller series The Dent Method.
Three novels, an anthology, a screenplay, and at least three short stories that are not canonically part of any of my storyworlds… “literary” projects, if you will.

That’s at least thirty five projects… not counting any music I might want to make. And I do want to make more music.

The Math Speaks

Thirty five projects. Less than thirty years… how much less, no one knows.

So we have a variable (the time I have left to do productive work) and a real number (the work left to do).

We do have one other number… my rate of production to date.

First novel: 2005. Second novel: 2013. Third novel: 2020.

Seven years between major works.

Clearly, that’s unacceptable. At that rate, I would need to live to be 158 to finish all the planned novels, never mind all the other stuff.

Happily, my rate of production is a variable I have some measure of control over.

There is much to do, and only so much time to be alive.

So.

The Big Plan

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

I’ve got a different goalpost: my sixtieth birthday on July 14, 2027.

By that time, I will be making at least $75,000.00 a year on my creative endeavors alone. I will have phased out my services business and will be a full time creator.

How will I get there?

The Work

Here’s the minimal production schedule:

December 4, 2020: LAUNCH: “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay” (Shaper’s World novella)
July 13, 2021: LAUNCH: Shadow of the Outsider (Shaper’s World novel)
December 3, 2021: LAUNCH: Untitled Shaper’s World novella)
July 13, 2022: LAUNCH: War of the Outsider (Shaper’s World novel)
December 2, 2022: LAUNCH: Walk Like a Stranger: “Passing Through Home” (Shaper’s World serial)
July 13, 2023: LAUNCH: Thraal (Shaper’s World novel)
December 1, 2023: LAUNCH: Untitled Shaper’s World novella
July 13, 2024: LAUNCH: Invasion (Shaper’s World novel)
December 2, 2024: LAUNCH: Untitled Shaper’s World novella
July 13, 2025: LAUNCH: The Shaper of the World (Shaper’s World novel)

There’s a lot of padding there. If I can move faster, I will. Remember, my current reality is that I spend 80% of my productive time working for other people. That needs to flip, gradually.

By my 58th birthday, I will have at least ten more titles in the Shaper’s World cycle on the market, plus a freebie serial in the same series, and possibly a few other minor works.

The Projected Result

What does that mean in terms of projected revenue? How will I get from where I am now to $75,000 in less than six years and eight months (as I write this)?

Where Am I Now, and What Do I Need To Get Where I Want To Be?

First of all, where I am now ain’t pretty.

I’m not literally starting from zero. I have one Shaper’s World book published, and I have six Sovereign Era titles out there, and a handful of other things. Thirteen titles (counting novels, short stories, non-fiction… everything) on the market.

My revenue from Amazon in 2019 was… $170.56. I had eleven titles on the market most of that year, so I earned, on average, $15.51 per title.

In 2020, of course, I released a book (and a short story, but it’s Light of the Outsider that’s really made a difference). I also started investing in advertising., and finally, after two months of figuring it out, I’m making a little more than I spend.

I’m projected to earn $514.46 from Amazon royalties this year from thirteen titles. Or, about $39.57 per title, on average.

The reality is, releasing Light of the Outsider and investing in advertising beginning in August (for Brave Men Run, for reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere) had the biggest impact on revenue this year. But let’s keep it really simple: bottom line, adding another book resulted in 2.56 times the revenue.

The objective is to release at least two titles each year — a novel and a novella. If you run some spreadsheet calculations to see what happens if you add two books a year and assume x2.56 revenue per title each year…

Well, you might get pretty excited.

I just did it. It shows me blowing past my $75,000 / year goal in 2025 and bringing in

Introducing Your Story Buddy

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Introducing Your Story Buddy













Published on July 28, 2020







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Published on July 28, 2020



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Most of my life, I’ve been an explainer; a teacher; a mentor and trainer. I love to share topics that capture my attention and passion, to learn from others as we exchange ideas and experiential knowledge.

Nothing’s held that attention longer and kept passion more radiantly aflame than the topic of creation; specifically, storytelling… precisely: writing fiction.

Talking Shop and Talking Story

As a member of various groups and forums across the last twenty years and more, I’ve offered my educated opinion and advice on countless questions from thousands of writers.

Often, writers come to me with other needs, and I find myself helping them with their craft, both generally and with works-in–progress, on a casual and conversational level.

It brings me joy, and from what I’m told, it brings them closer to their goals as storytellers.

As a developmental editor, I’ve helped many unpublished and professional authors transform their completed manuscripts into the best work they can produce. I call it “a masterclass in story architecture with the author’s manuscript as the syllabus.”

That level of intense engagement takes weeks, and I charge accordingly. For many writers, however, no matter how valuable it may be for them, that service is beyond their means.

Many writers need something more like the direct, issue-focused interaction I’ve provided catch-as-catch-can in those groups and forums… but at a personal, intimate level difficult to achieve on social media, and at a price closer to what you might pay for a nice dinner, rather than a mortgage payment.

I’m now offering that service.

Matthew Wayne Selznick is Your Story Buddy

Click here for all the details about Your Story Buddy, my new one-on-one writing coaching service focused on fiction and creative non-fiction, and learn how you can get $25.00 off the regular price of $75.00 if you act before the end of July, 2020, to reserve a session.

I’ve done a few Your Story Buddy sessions already, via phone and Zoom video conference. At the end of each of those hours, I’ve come away exhilarated, and my clients left full of ideas and inspiration. It’s deeply fulfilling, and I’m grateful to be able to help in such a personal way.

For Writers at Any Level

It doesn’t matter where you are on your “writerly journey,” or how far along you are with your work-in-progress. The idea here is that you come into our session with a challenge, problem, or question you’d like to address, probably but not necessarily having to do with a particular story.

Over the course of an hour, I’ll offer suggestions and, most importantly, help guide you to your own conclusions through open-ended, deep-dive questions informed by my twenty-plus years as a published author, editor, and storyteller. When applicable, I’ll provide materials and references to sources that have helped me with similar issues.

When we say goodbye, you’ll have a head full of ideas and options to move forward with your fiction.

Service and Inspiration

I hope to make Your Story Buddy a big part of my “day job” as a creative services provider, as few things are more personally fulfilling for me than chatting on the phone or over a webcam with a fellow creative person and knowing I’m helping them bring new art into the world.

They say any pitch should be more about the problem solved or the “win” achieved for the client. Yeah, that’s all there on the landing page for Your Story Buddy.

This is Scribtotum, though, and vulnerability and transparency are always the order of the day on this blog, so right here I’m going to be honest about my selfish motivation to make Your Story Buddy a success:

It’s inspiring to me!

Helping creators makes me a better creator. Helping writers pushes me to write. Helping authors build their careers drives me to keep going in my own.

Of course it’s revenue, too. Frankly, it’s a bit less than I usually charge when I work by the hour… but I am more than willing to be Your Story Buddy at that reduced rate because it’s so damn fulfilling.

Service and inspiration… all while keeping the lights on, both in my skull and in my house.

Sounds perfect!

Let’s be story buddies!

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Indie Authors: How to Use Direct Pre-Orders to Fund Your Books Before You Try Amazon

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Indie Authors: How to Use Direct Pre-Orders to Fund Your Books Before You Try Amazon













Published on June 22, 2020







Index under creative franchise, creative life, independent creativity, indie, indie author marketing, marketing, writing fiction







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Published on June 22, 2020



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I raised over $700.00 to help finance my third self-published novel without using Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Amazon. Here’s how I did it.

The Foundation: Community

The size — and dedication — of your community of friends and fans is why your mileage may vary if you try to replicate what follows. Indeed, those of you with larger communities and a more established indie author career might do much better!

I have a long history in indie publishing. Back in the fall of 2005, I self-published the first novel in history with a simultaneous release in paperback, DRM-free e-book, and free podcast editions. Over the years, it was nominated for a Parsec Award, a small press picked up the paperback rights, it hit #53 on the overall (not just Kindle) Amazon charts, a minor RPG developer adapted the characters and settings for their rules system, and many indie authors cite the book as being influential on their own decision to self-publish. (Many of those folks have, like you wish for all your “kids,” done much better than I have!)

This isn’t humble (or not so humble) bragging. The point is, my first book, and the marketing of same, was objectively Something Different, and it got a lot of attention.

Thanks to that book and the advocacy and promotion I did for it and the platforms and “new media” associated with it, I developed a small but loyal community of friends and fans. Those folks powered a successful Kickstarter for my second novel, and even today, I look at my mailing list and see many people who’ve been there since 2006 or so.

If not for that small-but-mighty (just over 300 subscribers!) mailing list and a modest but loyal (see a trend there?) social media following (1700 Facebook (cumulative personal and creative page); 2400 Twitter; 500 Instagram (personal and creative accounts, cumulative), 8 Patreon patrons), I would not have attempted what I attempted.

Direct Reservation… With Incentives!

I ran a series of promotional offers well before the book was available to order anywhere… indeed, before the book was even finished!

Use Gumroad for Digital Delivery and Payment Processing

A note on one integral, essential service that made everything possible: With all of the offers mentioned below, I used Gumroad to process the orders and deliver the PDFs.

Gumroad integrates with my mailing list provider, ConvertKit, so anyone who purchases anything of mine via Gumroad is automatically added to my mailing list and tagged accordingly so I can communicate with them directly later.

I am on the free tier of Gumroad, which means they take 8.5% + $0.30 of each purchase. Gumroad pays out via direct deposit every two weeks — a heck of a lot better than waiting at least sixty days to be paid by Amazon, yes?

This part is very important: Unless you’re running a literal pre-order where nothing is provided at the time of purchase (and so no money is charged at the time of purchase), Gumroad requires a deliverable product for all sales, which is why my “pre-orders” were really paid reservations… and included an actual digital product the buyer received instantly.

Plus, it’s just nice to give folks something exclusive.

Okay, then. Here’s what I offered.

The Super-Fan Bundle

In late January, 2020, with the first manuscript draft about 60% complete, I created an offering I called the “Super-Fan Bundle.”

Unlike running a pre-order on Amazon, where you don’t get paid until sixty days after your book is actually released, this was a pre-paid reservation, and every two weeks Gumroad deposited what I earned into my bank account.

The “Super-Fan Bundle” guaranteed the buyer:

a signed, personalized, numbered (limited to 100) paperback
the audiobook read by the author
EPUB and MOBI e-book copies

In addition, purchasers immediately received a 13,000-word PDF of my original character notes for the book: a free-writing exercise in worldbuilding and character development that is part of the planning stage in my writing process.

Finally, their purchase gave them ongoing access to “behind the scenes” updates, other notes and material, and opportunities for direct access (video chats) with me.

The price: $75.00, including free shipping in the United States. The offer was good for 100 sales, or until the Kindle Book went on pre-order May 1st, 2020.

I sent the offer to the segment of my mailing list interested in my writing (at the time, 319 people) on January 28, 2020 (I also announced on social media about a week or so later, and repeatedly — no paid ads, though, just organic reach).

8 people clicked through; 6 people purchased, resulting in a net of $368.80 (I gave one person a discount because he was already a monthly Patreon patron).

The Autographed Paperback Offer

Now, of course, $75 was too pricey for some folks who, all the same, wanted to support me and the work.

I created another Gumroad product with the same extra goodies as the Super-Fan bundle, but this only reserved the autographed paperback. Price: $35.00.

That email went out on February 18, 2020 to 396 people. 19 people clicked through; 2 people purchased, resulting in a net of $68.45. (As before, I also did social media mentions, but unpaid and so, not trackable.)

Putting the Funding to Work

Meanwhile, I contracted a cover artist, Tim Shepherd, for a work of original digitally painted art with all commercial rights (not just a license for the cover — I can do anything with the art, including other products and merchandise).

His price was just over $600.00. Hmmm… I’d made $437.25 so far…

Three More Offers

So! A few days after I completed the manuscript draft of the book, I created three more Gumroad offers:

The paperback (unsigned) for $25.00
The audiobook for $25.00
The ebooks for $4.00

All the extra goodies / access from the other offers included.

I sent that offer to 369 people on my mailing list on April 22, 2020 with a hard deadline to purchase of no later than the end of April, 2020.

10 people clicked through, resulting in 3 paperback sales, 8 audiobook sales, and 10 e-book sales, for a net of $281.93.

Along the way, between February and the end of April, I sent these lovely direct reservation folks scans of hand-drawn maps and sketches I’d made to suss out locations and character movements, pretty much all of the in-process drafts my cover artist shared with me, and another exclusive e-book of about 10,000 words featuring the scenes from the book in which each principle character first appeared.

I also did a live-stream of the last two hours of my writing the manuscript draft so people could literally witness my finishing the book (about eight people showed up, we had a nice impromptu Q&A for about an hour after).

The Bottom Line

The monetary bottom line: I raised $719.18 (net) from twenty nine wonderful members of my community toward the production of the book for an up-front investment of nothing but time.

This doesn’t include the twenty bucks or so I’ve been getting from very patient Patreon patrons every month, in some cases for years. Patreon patrons automatically get a copy of any digital product I create, so e-books and audiobooks are theirs without them having to lift a finger.

The Amazon pre-order (for the Kindle and the paperback) ran from May 1st, 2020 through June 17th, 2020. It resulted in 26 pre-orders for the e-book and 23 paperback pre-orders, which will — when Amazon and IngramSpark get around to paying me in sixty to ninety days — net about $65.24 (Kindle) and $59.43 (paperback) for a total of $124.67.

Compare the per-person revenue:

Each of my lovely friends and fans participating in the direct pre-order brought an average of $24.80 in revenue.
Per-person revenue from Amazon pre-orders was $2.54

Think of it this way: nearly all of the direct pre-order reservations came as a result of my mailing list community of friends and fans, so in a very real way, those people are “worth” substantially more — almost by an order of magnitude — than the folks who learned about the Amazon pre-order via social media or word of mouth.

Of course, the actual worth of my mailing list community of friends and fans is, in all ways, priceless and invaluable. You should have a mailing list, dear writer-reader.

There’s been a really nice intangible bottom line to this effort: re-connecting with long-time steadfast fans who, unprompted, started re-tweeting and sharing my promotional posts about the book. Not to mention a “lean start-up”-style validation of the product (and, let’s be honest, validation of me, a guy who hadn’t released a novel-length work since 2013).

What Did It Cost to Raise Over $700 to Finance My Indie Book?

I spent exactly zero dollars — beyond my usual monthly expenses running my business — to earn over $700.00 toward the production of my book Light of the Outsider.

If you have even a small community of loyal, supportive friends and fans — and you’re willing to engage on a direct, personal level, and put in the time — you should give direct pre-orders a shot!

I Can Help You Get Set Up

Need help with your mailing list, website, Gumroad account, or other indie-author infrastructure?

I help indie authors bring their books to fruition, to market, and to an audience. It’s my full-time day job, and I’ve been doing it for over fifteen years.

Check out my Services page for some of the ways I can help you… or, so we can best see how I can help you.























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I offer thousands of words of free fiction and articles, as well as hours and hours of free podcast content. I hope it’s all entertaining, informative, and interesting!

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Become a PatronPledge your support of my creative endeavors through your monthly gift of $1.00 ~ $5.00. Click the “Pledge Now” button to learn all about becoming a patron!
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What It Took to Write My Third Novel, “Light of the Outsider”

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What It Took to Write My Third Novel, “Light of the Outsider”













Published on June 18, 2020







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Published on June 18, 2020



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My third novel, Light of the Outsider, is now in the world in e-book and paperback formats, with the audio book in production and on its way.

It’s the first novel in my Shaper’s World storyworld. The Shaper’s World is, speaking simplistically, a fantasy setting like Narnia or Middle Earth… but… no. It’s not like those at all. There are no elves, no hobbits, no talking lions (no tigers or bears or fawns, even), no dwarves or dragons. No portal to our world.

It didn’t start out that way.

The development of the Shaper’s World, and the origin of Light of the Outsider, stretches back more than three decades.

In the interest of revealing just how many twists and convolutions and changes the creative process can endure over time, what follows is a rough-as-memory history; a tale of a tale that would not let me go.

Thank You, Gary Gygax

In the summer of 1984, I was seventeen years old. Home life was a metaphorical floor of planks laid over quicksand. My girlfriend was in a non-metaphorical mental hospital. Although it was all I knew, my normal was… not.

Thank goodness I had comic books, science fiction, rock and roll… and, since 1980 or so, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games published by TSR, Game Designers Workshop, Chaosium, and others.

My world wasn’t so hot, but I could make a different one.

Which is what I’d done, many times.

The latest creation provided the day’s distraction as I played Dungeon Master (“referee” or “narrator,” for the three or four people in the audience who don’t know what I’m talking about) during a role playing game session with my pals around the picnic table on the back patio of my house.

My friends portrayed intrepid adventurers invading  the mountain lair of a recently revived dragon that had been terrorizing the countryside and amassing a small cadre of evil followers. We quite literally cheered when, to everyone’s glee and by sheer luck in the roll of the dice, one of my friends’ characters cracked the dragon’s skull with a single, perfect throw of his hammer (a “critical hit” in the parlance of the game, if I remember correctly).

It was one of the last times I played a tabletop role-playing game session. None of the few that followed were anywhere near as epic and fun. It stuck with me.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had kinda re-invented the plot of The Seven Samurai: a band of mercenaries save a bunch of peasants from a nasty, overwhelming threat.

Thanks to an afternoon of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, and the years of inspiration that had come before that summer day, from that germ the Shaper’s World began to take… well, shape.

Maps and Legends

I’ve always been fascinated by maps and atlases. As I write this, the Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World I’ve had since 1992 sits within arm’s reach.  It’s not even my oldest atlas.

Remember, as a teen-ager, escaping reality was a coping / survival skill for me, although I wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize it. Atlases — all kinds of maps, really — provided a visual gateway to other lands, other worlds, other environments… beautifully realized in faux relief and lovely, muted, literal earth-tones.

Role playing games depend heavily on maps to represent the places players might adventure, and what they might find there. The maps associated with AD&D and other role playing games didn’t just tell stories… they told me how to tell stories.

So it makes sense that I started to sketch out the continent that would eventually be called Kaebrith, on the world of Gundi-Fai, also known as the Shaper’s World.

It was a few years after that picnic table AD&D session, around 1989 or 1990 or so, when the guitar player in my band happened to see a hand-drawn map of Kaebrith and immediately recognized it as… Britain.

Oops.

That’s one of the pitfalls of drawing on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper in “portrait mode” — you’re gonna end up with a land mass that fills up more vertical space than horizontal. Subconscious influence does the rest, if one isn’t careful.

I kept at it; refining the lands and coming up with names of countries and mountains and forests and seas… letting my pencils guide my imagination, and my imagination guide my pencils.

Finally, somewhere around 2000, I discovered a remarkable application with an unusual name: WILBUR. This free software from Joe Slayton creates realistic planetary “maps” through complex fractal mathematics and random numbers. Of course I started playing around with different random seeds and other settings. How fun!

And then… there, before my eyes on the computer screen, was the Shaper’s World.

I was smitten. I was home.

Not Quite Right and Better For It

Now, geographically and geologically, there are things about this computer-generated Gundi-Fai that are simply just not right. Over the years, I’ve come to look at the precise representations of these landforms as inspirational rather than literal.

Except for that central continent, Kaebrith. It cannot change. I love it so much, from its wide inland sea to the great central gulf to the archipelagos of the south.

Iteration, Variation, Evolution

Now that I had a location so vividly represented, things really started to happen.

What started out as a rather generic fantasy setting gradually became… something else. Something that, like the seeking aerial roots of a vine or orchid, extended to make tenuous connections with my other fictional worlds, especially the Sovereign Era and the larger Humanity Continuum.

I was beginning to uncover a multiverse.

As the connections strengthened, I became dissatisfied with the idea of populating my world with the usual fantasy races, species, and tropes. No more elves and dwarves and orcs. No more dragons, no matter how inspiring and influential had been the doomed dragon that started it all.

So now I had the magn, the faien, and the gundynal — hominids, to be sure, but not humans, elves, and dwarves. These are people. Maybe they couldn’t pass for people in downtown Manhattan, except maybe for the magn, if you don’t look too closely… but they are people.

No traditional dragons, fine, but there are monsters. However, “monsters” — unnatural or magical creatures — are very uncommon in this setting. Animals can be interesting and dangerous enough, no?

But what kind of animals?

It’s My Party, So…

A long-lingering image informed the nascent ecology of the Shaper’s World: a smallish hadrosaur (a “duck-billed dinosaur” we called trachodon when I was a kid) that didn’t just get around on four legs… when it needed to put on the speed, it hopped.

Fieldhopper rendering by Matthew Wayne Selznick, colored pencil and ink, April, 1992

The fieldhopper was born… and if you’ve got one kinda-sorta-dinosaur, why not, reasoned this guy who never really grew out of his six year-old terrible lizard phase, have a whole terrestrial ecology based around dinosaur-ish animals?

Sure, Anne McCafferty had done it before. Didn’t care. Don’t care. It’s my world, and if I want dinosaurs, I’m gonna have dinosaurs. So there are, for all intents and purposes, dinosaurs.

How do mammalian hominids exist on a planet where mammals aren’t really a thing? I had to answer that question to my satisfaction, and following that trail helped me refine not just the Shaper’s World storyworld, but all my fictional worlds.

By the way — the Shaper’s World is a world. It’s a planet — not Earth — around a star, in a galaxy. I know which star, even if it’s not…

Hey, y’know what? Never mind. You get me talking like this, I gotta be careful not to give certain things away..!

Making Stories

Thirteen years after that afternoon game of AD&D, the second Shaper’s World short story I wrote became my first commercial short story sale. “Trouble Day” appeared the 15th issue of Bardic Runes, “Canada’s Magazine of Traditional and High Fantasy,” in April, 1997. Bardic Runes would only publish one more issue, so I got in under the wire there! I was paid ten bucks. While I have sold essays and articles to an anthology or two, that remains my one and only magazine sale.

I was searching for information about Bardic Runes and its publisher, Michael McKenny, for this article, when I discovered you can actually read the issue of Bardic Runes in which “Trouble Day” appears, right now, thanks to the Pulp Magazine Archive at the Internet Archive.

I had no idea. I teared up a little!

The very first proto-Shaper’s World short story also featured Scor, the hero of “Trouble Day” (and you’ll meet him again in the fourth novel in the Shaper’s World cycle!). I wrote a kind of origin story for the merchant Daen Caul (featured in “Trouble Day”) as well, and another Scor story.

Trying to See the Light…

In May of 1997, over the course of three weeks or so, I wrote a 6,672-word short story called “The Light of Amang’huru.”

I submitted it all over the place. I have a “keep writing; this one’s not for us” rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder over at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among “no thanks” notes from other esteemed publications.

No one bought it. No one should have bought it, frankly.

I shifted my attention to discovering my answer to the “what would realistic superhero fiction look like” question and started the webzine Sovereign Serials. My literary focus was on my Sovereign Era storyworld for… some time… after that. Brave Men Run, as Garrett Morris might have said, “been veddy veddy good to me.”

My life in that first decade of the twenty first century was… fraught. A divorce. A new marriage. Another divorce. Moving three times. Lots of uncertainty.

I still tinkered with Shaper’s World stuff, but nothing solidified. To say it was hard for me to focus would be a kindness. It’s a wonder I was able to do so much around my first novel and the converging worlds of indie publishing and podcasting in those years… and no wonder I didn’t accomplish more.

It’s easy for me to be hard on myself about that, and future periods of instability and diminished productivity.

By the beginning of 2011, things had, at least temporarily, settled down enough for me to start thinking about starting another novel.

“The Light of Amang’huru” called to me.

So in February of that year, I wrote an outline expanding the core elements of that short story (informed by what I’d discovered about the Shaper’s World across thirteen years) into the bones of a novel.

Then, I started writing that novel.

In true “new media” style, I started a YouTube series, Writing “Light,” in which I checked in with viewers on the progress being made on the book and shared lessons learned. Boldly and optimistically, I declared the book would be done by summer of that year.

By the end of 2011, I abandoned my attempt to release a weekly video series, and I abandoned my attempt to write Light of the Outsider.

I wrote close to forty thousand words before I realized the structure of the story was deeply, deeply flawed… and I didn’t have the skill to fix it.

Lots of self-examination followed, and self-education.

It paid off… just not for the Shaper’s World.

My second novel, the Sovereign Era tale Pilgrimage, came out in January of 2014. It’s a huge leap beyond my first book, both in complexity and in craft, and doing that hard work helped me level up, as the kids say.

All along, Light of the Outsider lingered. Indeed, the entire Shaper’s World storyworld continued to expand and develop, mature and grow. I played with a short-lived serial set in the storyworld, but something about it wasn’t working for me.

I knew I’d come back to Light of the Outsider before long.

Took a little while. Life, as it usually does, had other plans for me.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel is an Oncoming Train…

How many clever “light” references do you think I can make before I come to the end of this article?

Anyway.

Let’s move up to September, 2018. I was in the middle of a good streak of creative work, regularly producing episodes of my podcast Sonitotum, creating new installments of my free serial Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights, and I’d written about 25,000 words in articles across five months.  I felt warmed-up. I felt ready to step back up to the plate, get back in the ring, get back on the horse… y’know.

So I declared the start of something I called The Autumn Project 2018 — I gave it a year because I believed I’d have a new Project every Autumn! Yes!

In the event that you’d rather not take the time to read the blog post / listen to the podcast linked above: the Autumn Project 2018 involved planning and completing the first draft of a new novel by the end of 2018.

That novel would be Light of the Outsider.

Man Plans, God Laughs

I did pretty darn well with the Autumn Project 2018 in September and October, and even well into November.

Then…

A death — not of someone I knew, but the close friend of someone close. I was called out of town and away from my regular routines to lend support over the course of about a week or so.

And then…

Another death, this time much closer to my immediate circle of friends. There was drama, betrayal, disappointment. My social landscape shifted and it took quite a while to find my footing.

That was all December and January.

February, I moved.

March and April, there was a lot of disruption involving roommates.

In April, my mother’s health took a downward turn. By May,  I was spending three days out of seven with her. By June, she was in a nursing home and in hospice care.

By the end of August, she was dead.

I wrote about my mother’s influence on my creative life, and, by extension, the creative lives of many others.

I didn’t write, then, about the night, not long after her death, when I lay in bed with my girlfriend and told her I would do everything I could to not die as my mother had, alone in a nursing home because no one in the family had the resources to do better for her.

I vowed, in so many words, to build a creative life that would support me.To create a lasting, sustainign legacy and, as much as possible, a safety net.

“Nothing,” I told my girlfriend, “is more important.”

Nothing is. This is life and death for me.

It took September to attend to all the things one has to deal with following the death of one’s mother.

In the middle of October, I reserved a little cabin in Idyllwild, California for four nights and literally and figuratively got the hell away from my still-nothing-like-normal (which, the older you get, makes it more like normal) life.

Back to the Light

In Idyllwild, alone, I hiked and I cried and I wrote.

That’s all I did.

By the time I came back, I had thousands of words added to Light of the Outsider… the first since November of the previous year. I kept up a fairly regular writing practice back home: a scene per day most days. It still took until April 19, 2020, to finish the first draft.

Seven years since my last novel.

Twenty three years, ‘pert near, since writing “The Light of Amang’huru.”

Thirty six years since that session of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

A lifetime.

Next

I started this post days ago. As I finish it, there’re only three hours or so before Light of the Outsider is commercially available.

There are thing to do. Finish the audio book. Rustle up some promotion and marketing. Spread the word and boost the signal so all the people who would enjoy the book get to know about the book.

Regardless of all that…

The thing I made is done.

No Perfect Time

It’s a strange time to release what is — my own claims of literary quality aside — essentially a work of popular entertainment.

This week, one of my dearest friends lost two people to the pandemic. A creator for whom I have great respect has been revealed to be, at best, a manipulative womanizer. Black lives are being lost to police violence and lynching. There’s a lot of pain and uncertainty and sadness and anger in my country and in the world.

Which is why it’s an ideal time to release a work of popular entertainment. In fact, it’s my duty.

Light of the Outsider is all about taking desperate, difficult action in order to make a better life, no matter what the immediate consequences may be. It’s about believing in possibility, and letting potential guide you.

Self publishing a fantasy / thriller hybrid when all of your existing fans only know you for a very different kind of book, in the middle of a crippling pandemic work slowdown… damn if that’s not a desperate, difficult action committed regardless of immediate consequences in order to make a better life.

Writing and publishing a book is the definition of believing in possibility and letting potential guide you.

Also? I feel zero shame in writing my work of popular entertainment. Art is medicine. This is what I do: I make things for people who like the kinds of things I make.

I’ve quite literally bet that you’re one of those people.

Find out.

Thursday

On Thursday, June 18, 2020, as Light of the Outsider drops onto the Kindle apps and devices of a couple dozen people and another dozen find paperbacks in their mailboxes, I’m going to…

Take a walk in some nature somewhere.
Take stock of some shorter works — a novella, a couple short stories — I put aside across the last twenty months or so. One of them will likely be a little palette cleanser; something to write and release before I dive into planning the next Shaper’s World Cycle book, Shadow of the Outsider.
Permit myself an unstructured day spent, more than anything, breathing in gratitude.

(Heavy Sigh)

I wrote another book.

Thanks, very much, for letting me share how it happened.

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My New Sovereign Era Short Story: The Story Behind the… Story!

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My New Sovereign Era Short Story: The Story Behind the… Story!













Published on December 10, 2019







Index under creative life, influence, the sovereign era, writing fiction







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Published on December 10, 2019



Index under creative life | influence | the sovereign era | writing fiction



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“The News From Bewilder Pond” is an epistolary short story largely told through the (fictional) partial transcript of an episode of a public radio show. It’s part of my Sovereign Era storyworld, a soft science fiction alternate history in which the sudden appearance of individuals with remarkable powers and abilities — Sovereigns — upsets the delicate balance of international power in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Pre-Order Right Now!

I hope you’ll pre-order the Amazon Kindle e-book edition of “The News From Bewilder Pond” for just $0.99 USD before its release on December 17, 2019. Your pre-order means the book will automatically appear in your Kindle app or device on December 17… and you’ll help the book (and me!) because all pre-order sales count toward the book’s ranking on Amazon. The higher the ranking on release day, the more visible the title, and that could mean more sales of “The News From Bewilder Pond” and all other Sovereign Era titles. Click right here to pre-order “The News From Bewilder Pond,” and thank you, in advance, for your pre-order!

I launched the storyworld way back in 2005 with the initial release of my first novel, Brave Men Run (volume one of The Charters Duology, which also includes Pilgrimage). Along the way, I’ve released an anthology of Sovereign Era short stories from a variety of authors, a stand-alone short story, an ongoing serial you can read for free, a novelette from the late P. G. Holyfield, and now… this!

About “The News From Bewilder Pond”

I love verisimilitude in fiction — the illusion that what you’re reading is a fully immersive world. This goes back to childhood for me; easily traced to the convoluted continuity found in 1970’s and 1980’s Marvel Comics, the subtly and not-so-subtly connected works of Stephen King, and the deeply influential shared world anthology spearheaded by George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, Wild Cards. The idea of a popular (if niche) public radio variety show addressing the Sovereign phenomenon tickles me, and adds a few tchotchkes to the house I’m building.

Speaking of public radio variety shows… “The News From Bewilder Pond” is a pastiche of “The News From Lake Wobegon,” a regular segment of A Prairie Home Companion, which ran for decades on many United States public radio stations. This is probably obvious to some of my friends and fans, and utterly outside of the experience of the rest..!

The host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor, was removed, and the show re-branded, in 2017 following dozens of allegations of his sexual misconduct.

Keillor’s alleged behavior is inexcusable and deeply disappointing.

It makes my appreciation of his art — perhaps thousands of hours of storytelling and worldbuilding — complicated.  Though I didn’t intend it when I wrote “The News From Bewilder Pond” many years before we all learned of Keillor’s actions, let’s just say Harrison Wheeler is an exercise in wish fulfillment; an instance where something in the complicated and often unpleasant Sovereign Era storyworld is preferably to reality.

Very astute, dedicated, and long-time friends and fans might be thinking to themselves, “Why does this story seems familiar?”

Fans of the author and podcaster Mur Lafferty might be thinking the same thing. That’s because I contributed an audio version of this story to help promote the publication of Mur’s superhero novel Playing For Keeps back in 2008.  The little piece was customized to fit Mur’s “Seventh City” storyworld, with references to the characters and locations in her novel. That audio, near as I can tell from a cursory search, is no longer publically available.

Now, “The News From Bewilder Pond” has been updated, adapted, and is part of Sovereign Era canon. Chronologically, it takes place in October, 1987.

It’s a folksy, homespun take on super-powered fiction, and unlike any other Sovereign Era story you’ve read.

Sound like fun? Pre-order “The News From Bewilder Pond” right now, with my thanks!

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My Champion

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Published on August 29, 2019







Index under creative legacy, creative life, gratitude, influence, parents







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Published on August 29, 2019



Index under creative legacy | creative life | gratitude | influence | parents



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When I was in the sixth grade at Barcelona Hills Elementary School, our teacher had us embark on what today might have been called a multi-disciplinary creative project.

I can’t recall if everyone had the same project, or if I had decided, among several choices, to make a book.

I gave it the title Fan-Fac-Sci because it would have elements of fantasy, fact, and science fiction. It included a character — a wizard named Yim-Yam-Yamo — who spoke entirely in rhyme. I wrote it in pencil, with colored pencil illustrations. And, undoubtedly with the teacher’s help, but if memory serves, not too much help, I also created a cardboard cover, sewed the pages, and bound the whole thing well enough that it’s still in one piece four decades later.

I got an A+. That semester, I was among the students who received a “Principal’s Award” on the strength of Fan-Fac-Sci.

Then, my limited-edition-of-one book… disappeared.

I’d brought it home for a while, I’m sure, but I had to bring it back to school to be on display for the Principal’s Award ceremony, or some such. Memory fails.

Point is, it was stored in my classroom, and then… no one could find it.

For weeks. Maybe months. Again, memory fails. I was a kid.

I was disappointed.

My mother, on the other hand, was furious.

My teacher had raved about it. She had told my mother she bragged to other teachers about the book, what her student had made.

Something about that zeal, and the mysterious absence of my little alliterative masterpiece, raised my mother’s suspicions.

She didn’t believe Fan-Fac-Sci has simply vanished.

Again, I was a kid, however old one is in sixth grade.

Eleven? Probably eleven.

So my persistent mother kept digging, and I don’t know exactly how, but eventually… Fan-Fac-Sci re-materialized.

Years later, my mother told me that teacher had taken it with her on a retreat, and that after that, it had just been misplaced.

My mother was certain my teacher intended to keep it.

Instead, thanks to my mother, I’m still in possession of the first “book” I wrote, laid out, and bound.

In other words, it was my very first DIY creative endeavor. My first indie publishing project, if you want to stretch things.

~

My mother’s name is Priscilla Suzanne Brieck. She died on August 28th, 2019, aged 83 and eight months.

She was my champion.

~

When I decided I wanted to play bass guitar (age 15ish), she took me to Sears and bought me my first instrument, a red Korean-made Hondo with a white pickguard. She helped me learn how to tune it with a pitch pipe, which, our lacking any real reference as to how it was supposed to sound, led to my over-tuning and snapping strings more than once.

Once I figured out, more or less, how to tune that thing, I taught myself how to play by sitting in front of the combo stereo in my bedroom, turning the radio dial and trying to play along with any music I’d find, even classical pieces. I played until my fingers were bloody; until the blisters turned to callouses.

Always learn on the crappiest instrument possible. You’ll be that much better when you finally upgrade.

My first gig at a real venue, playing bass and sharing the vocal chores in psychopathway (we didn’t capitalize the first “p” ’cause we were cool like dat)… my mother was there.

As she was for many, many gigs across the next decade and then some, taking photographs, collecting set lists and flyers, and often recording the cacophony on a little portable cassette deck.

When I added solo gigs, playing acoustic guitar and singing across Orange County in the pre-Starbucks coffeehouse boom of the nineties… my mother was there.

Not every time.

More often than not.

Sometimes, as a baby rockstar in his twenties, I’d be mildly embarrassed she was out there in the often single-digit audience, conspicuously related to the kid on stage.

Mostly, though, I was fine with it.

She earned the right to enjoy the fruits of her persistence, after all.

~

I wrote Fan-Fac-Sci longhand, in pencil.

That’s only because I didn’t have access to my typewriter, there in the classroom.

The Royal Quiet DeLuxe manual typewriter in the sturdy tweed case, to be exact.

The typewriter that had belonged to Charles Joseph Brieck, my mother’s father, my grandfather, who died eight years before I was born, at the age I am now, as I write these words.

I can’t remember how old I was when my mother first let me use it. I can’t remember a time that it wasn’t part of my life.

I put reams of onionskin through the platen of that Royal, churning out what would these days be called “fan fiction” featuring my own adventures of Marvel Comics characters, as well as embryonic, serialized versions of my Sovereign Era and Shaper’s World storyworlds I passed around among my friends, who all had thinly disguised starring roles.  A few years later, I’d use that typer to peck out Carver- and Bukowski-flavored short stories in the studio apartment I shared with my first live-in girlfriend.

It needs some loving care, and it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on it, but that typewriter has occupied a place in my creative space everywhere I’ve lived, my entire life, and it always will.

My mother must have had fond memories of her cherished father using that Royal, and she trusted it with me.

Entrusted it to me.

When I released my first novel in 2005, my mother was seventy years old and suffering from cataracts. She’d eventually get them removed, but right then, reading the small print of a paperback book was difficult for her.

So, we sat in her apartment together and, over the course of an afternoon, I read it to her.

She’d earned that, too.

~

In the last years of her life, my mother often wondered aloud:  why was she still around?

Her son was grown, independent, and we’d long since swapped caretaker roles in every obvious way.

Her daughter lived on the other side of the country and rarely reached out.

Her grandsons had grown into excellent men with their own active, engaged lives.

She’d never met her youngest granddaughter.

The middle grandchild, a young woman she’d mentored and loved more like a daughter, had been taken, tragically and suddenly, years before.

“What’s the point of my still being here? What am I supposed to be doing?”

Invariably, my answer was to remind her we don’t always get to know our purpose. That often, we don’t even get to know the influence we extend, or the impact we have on the lives of others.

I’d tell her of the woman I met at a podcasting conference who told me she’d been moved to tears by my first novel.

(I didn’t tell her of the other woman who offered me a very… personal… gift (which I declined with as much grace and resolve as I could muster) as a thank you for that book… but if I had shared that story, I know my mother would have said something like, “Well, you deserved it.” And we would have laughed.)

I told her about the writers who credited my example as inspiration to self-publish their own books and / or start their own podcasts..

Entire careers are due to my mother’s advocacy and encouragement of my own creativity. And those careers have brought entertainment and meaning to thousands.

That’s what she did, through me.

It’s what we all do when we encourage the people we love to do the things they love. To be the people they most want to be.

Of course, I understood her “but what have I done lately” lament.

I know I fell short when it came to relieving her sense of uselessness.

But that just proves my point, I guess. We don’t get to know; not always.

Maybe my mother’s final reason for living was to bring me these last experiences, the transformation that comes from moving into the complete adulthood one can only reach once you’re no longer anyone’s child.

She did her work. Her persistence; her dedication; the dogged and steadfast ferocity of her love… her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren live and extend their own ripples of influence and inspiration, knowingly or not, as a result.

I know.

I’m grateful.

And while I’m still really processing, and while I haven’t completely embraced my grief just yet… I do have this sense… this excitement… for what comes next.

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I offer thousands of words of free fiction and articles, as well as hours and hours of free podcast content. I hope it’s all entertaining, informative, and interesting!

If you’d like to support my creative endeavors and help offset the costs — both material, and in terms of resources and energy — to maintain this site, I’ll be grateful for your generosity.

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The Investors

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Published on August 14, 2019









Index under community, creative life, gratitude, patreon









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Published on August 14, 2019





Index under community | creative life | gratitude | patreon





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Like fifty thousand other creators, I maintain a Patreon account.

Since I haven’t been actively creating for myself very much in the last year or so… and that means I haven’t been creating for patrons… I don’t really actively market my Patreon account. But it’s there, quietly available to those people with the means and inclination to support the pursuit of my creative endeavors.

I’ve been in… well, to say dire need isn’t too much of a stretch some days, so, heck… dire need of a check-mark in the “win” column in the last few months, especially when it comes to my identity as a creative person.

As an adult in my (very early, thank you very much) fifties, I’ve got all the usual burdens on my time, resources, and energy… including the recent addition of “sole relative and advocate for an elderly parent in palliative care.” Every third day is spent visiting my mother and keeping on top of all the sundry issues that come along with her circumstance. This third job (usually over a hundred and twenty hours a month) puts heavy constraints and pressure on my first job and my obligations to a patient stable of clients, and on my relationships, and on my self-care.

Being creative, long-time readers will recall, is one of the ways I stave off anxiety and depression. Making things — and the solitude, the space to think, the silence, the unstructured time I need to make things — is self-care for me.

I’m working on getting better about that. I really am. I’m re-committing to getting enough sleep (it all starts with getting enough sleep) and chipping out the time and resolve to exercise more often.  Or at all.

For starters.

Meanwhile, though…

The other day, I was driving down the freeway to see my mother, thoughts wandering down their own self-recriminatory, self-victimizing road, when I realized something.

There’s a handful of people who have, month in and month out, invested in my creativity with, it must be said, very little or nothing received in return.

They’re my Patreon patrons. Their silent confidence in me is… well, it’s worth far more than the one-to-five dollars they contribute each month.

As of this writing, they are:

Rachel Steele, an investor since January, 2015
Amelia Bowen, an investor since February, 2015
Phil Zannini, an investor since February, 2015
Priscilla Brieck, a Patreon patron since May, 2016; a patron in every other way since July, 1967
Pearl Zare (aka Zoë Kohen Ley), an investor since April, 2018
Emma Wallace, an investor since July, 2018
Kimberly Puri, an investor since September, 2018
J.C. Hutchins, an investor since October, 2018

Check out their links, those that have them, and show your love for them, if you don’t mind. They deserve it!

I just wanted to publicly say thank you to these remarkable people.

Thank you for being the kind of people who like the kind of stuff I make.

Thank you for reminding me, in a material way, that I am a creator.

Thank you for your faith, and your trust.
























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Help Support Creative Endeavors

I offer thousands of words of free fiction and articles, as well as hours and hours of free podcast content. I hope it’s all entertaining, informative, and interesting!

If you’d like to support my creative endeavors and help offset the costs — both material, and in terms of resources and energy — to maintain this site, I’ll be grateful for your generosity.

Here are a few ways you can help.













Become a Patron

Pledge your support of my creative endeavors through your monthly gift of $1.00 ~ $5.00. Click the “Pledge Now” button to learn all about becoming a patron!

Pledge Now








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This stuff won’t pay the bills, but they will help me out! Try my Practical List of things I always need, or my Couldn’t Hurt To Ask List if you have the means…

Surprise Me

All In On Amazon

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Published on July 27, 2019









Index under e-books, marketing, self-publishing









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Published on July 27, 2019





Index under e-books | marketing | self-publishing





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You can now read nearly all of my novels, non-fiction, and short stories as part of your Kindle Unlimited subscription and through the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

This is a big change for me.

For years, my written electronic works were available in pretty much every online marketplace: Kobo, Nook, Apple Books, Google Play, Scribd, and so on.

I used to advocate “going wide” — broad distribution of an author’s e-books in every possible market, especially if you’ve been around for a while as an author or you hadn’t had anything new on the market for some time (both describe me).

The thought was that it just made sense to go where the readers were, and not penalize a reader simply because they opted to not shop at Amazon.

And believe me, I understand why folks might choose not to give Amazon their business. I’ve got mixed feelings about the company, too, especially when it comes to the labor practices in their distribution warehouses.

When it comes to selling e-books, though… through Amazon alone, I earn in a month what it takes a year or longer to earn at every other online marketplace. Amazon, and its Kindle devices and app, is where people are buying my books.

You could argue that it doesn’t hurt me to keep my books in those other stores, even if I’m not earning much there. After all, it doesn’t cost anything to be included in their catalogs.

However, by not selling my e-books exclusively at Amazon, I miss out on something called KDP Select, which is their suite of promotional services and distribution / revenue opportunities. Understandably, Amazon requires exclusivity in exchange for the right to enjoy those advantages.

It doesn’t cost me anything to be listed in those other e-book marketplaces.  Staying with wide distribution, though, could very well be taking money off the table for me.

I sure don’t want to do that.

So, when it comes to my e-books, with the exception of one title that sells well through a marketplace that specializes in role-playing game books,  I’m all in with Amazon.

Let’s see how it goes!
























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Stranger In A Strange Land

Check out the entire Scribtotum article archive!

Published on May 19, 2019









Index under creativity, isles of blogging, living poetically, mental health, personal









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Published on May 19, 2019





Index under creativity | isles of blogging | living poetically | mental health | personal





Join the conversation! There are 0 comments so far.

I’m so far removed from the practice of creating, my own brain feels like a foreign country.

I stumble around, gawking and stupefied, because while there are lots of interesting things to see and do, I no longer understand the language spoken there.

Nothing makes any sense.

Clocks, though — clocks are the same.

Those, I understand.

They keep ticking.

So I spend a lot of energy walking in circles trying to find familiar, stable ground; a place to roost and to nest, perhaps… while the sky turns and countdowns continue their counts down.

I can’t seem to just sit down at a proverbial outdoor cafe with a proverbial (or, heck, actual) pen and paper.

I can’t seem to sit down at all.

Loudmouthed Foreigner

I returned to this website, and to blogging, in the hopes that I would have a place to simply and quickly communicate what’s in my head when it comes to creativity and my life and all the ways those things intersect or don’t.

Twenty days ago, I wrote, “Break’s over.” I declared that I would “address, and incrementally add to, something creative every day of the week.”

I’ve been working on stuff. It hasn’t been a daily thing, though, and my inclination is to beat myself up for that. I shouldn’t.

The main creative thing I’ve done for myself in the last three weeks has been working on a post on blogging. As in: why I’ve returned to blogging, and why anyone attempting to be a working creator with an online proxy should also be blogging.

I got over a thousand words in on that damn thing. Most of is rambling personal history and exposition; me trying to find me.

The tourist, wandering around, attempting to obfuscate shameful ignorance by pouring a lot of words all over everything… like the stereotypical Yank in Europe who thinks using louder English will magically result in being understood.

Quiet Time

This post you’re reading now… let’s call this my retreat back to the hotel room.

My things are here; it’s the tiny oasis in a strange and thus far unknowable land. While I’m here, I’ll do a little research; maybe I can learn a few words of the local tongue before I venture out again.

After all, I don’t want to seem stupid.

More importantly, I don’t want to waste any time.

I understand clocks.

Why I’m Here

I spent three weeks, off and on, and over a thousand words, trying to explain why I blog, and why you should, too.

Here’s the answer in less than a hundred words. Unobfuscated. With an inside voice.

This blog, Scribtotum, is for getting to know my own head.

It’s notes in the margins of my synaptic commonplace book.

It’s morning pages, and it’s always morning.

It’s a recursive gratitude journal.

It’s a tiny undersea rift beneath the archipelago of isles of blogging, gradually displacing the embryonic darkness all around; aspiring to break the surface; dreaming of being colonized by airborne seeds and birds and things that pulse in tidepools.

If my creative mind has become a foreign country, Scribtotum is where I study for citizenship.

It’s where I’ll plant my flag.

Visit me. Tell me about where you live.

← Previous Article























Help Support Creative Endeavors

I offer thousands of words of free fiction and articles, as well as hours and hours of free podcast content. I hope it’s all entertaining, informative, and interesting!

If you’d like to support my creative endeavors and help offset the costs — both material, and in terms of resources and energy — to maintain this site, I’ll be grateful for your generosity.

Here are a few ways you can help.













Become a Patron

Pledge your support of my creative endeavors through your monthly gift of $1.00 ~ $5.00. Click the “Pledge Now” button to learn all about becoming a patron!

Pledge Now








Give A One-Time Donation

Moved to contribute? Make a one-time donation in any amount according to your means and your desire. Click the “Donate Now” button and give right now!










Go Shopping at Amazon

Need something from Amazon.com? Use the “Shop Now” button and I’ll earn a small commission from your purchases at no extra charge to you.

Shop Now








send me a present

This stuff won’t pay the bills, but they will help me out! Try my Practical List of things I always need, or my Couldn’t Hurt To Ask List if you have the means…

Surprise Me