Michael C. Bailey's Blog, page 104

Social Butterfly

The bad part of staying home to watch the pets while my wife works the Storied Threads tent at the Connecticut Renaissance Faire is that I spend the weekend alone (except for, of course, the pets). Boo. My bulldog Beatrix tries to fill in as my bedtime cuddle-buddy, but it’s not the same.

The closest I’ll come to having a child (thank God).

On the good side, I have plenty of time to work on novel stuff — on draft one of book two of Action Figures (11 pages today!), and on promoting book one so I have a better reason to keep plugging away at book two.

My mailers (previewed here) have been ordered, I received a mention in my hometown paper (I’ll post that here as soon as get my hands on a copy), and — big project for the day — I splattered my name all over the Internet.

Social networking sites are a boon for small businesses — which I am, for all intents and purposes — since they provide potentially limitless free advertising that reaches a literally global audience. There are a lot to choose from, maybe too many, and it’s a daunting task to maintain multiple presences. Fortunately, thanks to networking and synergy and the general over-sharing nature of the Internet, this here blog post can be auto-shared to my many new social media outlets. Hooray for enabled laziness!

So, now people can keep up with me on Facebook, Google +, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and LiveJournal (yes, that’s still a thing!), as well as on my Amazon Author Central page and my Goodreads Author page.

Egads, that’s a lot of pandering…but casting loaves, coming back a hundredfold, etc., etc.

And Now The Real Work Begins

Action Figures has been out for a little less than a week now, and I certainly can’t complain about the response. More than a dozen copies sold in the first few days, and a lot of friends shared the launch announcement, which I hope will generate future sales.

Ah, but this is where the real work begins for me. Writing and prepping the book was the easy part, comparatively; now I need to push it so people outside of my circle of friends buy the thing.

In doing my research on self-publishing, I learned that the publicity phase is where a lot of self-pub authors fall down. Their business plan amounts to: Step One: publish book; Step Two: (mumble mumble); Step Three: profit. Maybe they’ll set up a Facebook page, send some e-mails to their friends and family, but too often indie authors’ attitude is, “If I write it, they will come.”

Fortunately, I have an edge: my experiences in the newspaper industry and in publicity for the renaissance faires at which I’ve worked have prepared me well for the task of publicizing my book, and that effort is now underway.

The first things I did were to create author pages on Amazon.com and Goodreads, which are a bit more passive publicity tools; aside from blog posts that auto-share on those pages, these will sit on the Internet, largely untouched, and show up on searches.

The next step: write up and send out a press release. My former place of employment, the Falmouth Enterprise, got the first one, and as soon as something runs there, I’ll be sending the release out to other news outlets covering my home town.

The more ambitious phase of the publicity campaign is coming up. I took advantage of CreateSpace’s expanded distribution service, which makes my book available to book stores, but how can they order it unless they know about it? That’s where this comes into play:

Buy me!

I plan to print up copies of this mailer in small batches, as finances allow, and send it out to indie bookstores to let them know this book exists and hey, maybe they want to carry it.

All these things have one end result in common, besides selling copies: generating word-of-mouth buzz, which can be as effective, if not more so, than any sort of formal advertising/publicity campaign. Thankfully, my friends are both very literate and very talkative.

Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins – NOW ON SALE!

Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins is now available for sale!

Action Figures is available via Amazon.com as a softcover trade paperback for $14.99 (although, as of this writing, Amazon is offering it up for a slightly lower intro price, so buy now)! An e-book edition is coming soon.

If you’re new to this site and would like to know more about this, my debut self-published YA novel, check out this post or go read the first two chapters for free.

Hopefully, book one will get you all hooked and clamoring for more, so I have incentive to keep plugging away on book two. Yep, I’ve already started work on the next story in the series, and I want to get the “Write faster, George R.R. Martin!” treatment to keep me motivated.

Action Figures: Covering The Cover

When I made the decision to self-publish Action Figures, it was a foregone conclusion that my buddy Tricia Lupien would be my cover artist.

Aside from being a good friend for (yow, feelin’ old here) 18 years, Tricia is a talented artist, a geek girl before geek girls were cool, and someone who deserves a co-creator credit for this project. The majority of the characters in the story are my creation, but two basic concepts popped out of her head many years ago while we were, for pointless fun, creating goofy superheroes. Out of that session, two names stuck with me: Psyche and, no kidding, Captain Trenchcoat.

(An aside: this same fit of insanity also produced such oddball characters as Disaster-Man and William Wail-Ass, the World’s Mightiest Scotsman — who, FYI, gets a mention in the novel).

I won’t go into the convoluted mental process that led to those early concepts becoming actual characters nearly two decades later, I just wanted to provide a little background. As Bill Cosby once said, I told you that story so I can tell you this one.

The point is, Tricia absolutely deserved the opportunity to create the cover. I’d be King Jackass if I did not ask her. Fortunately for me, she agreed and set to work.

The logo, previously unveiled here, was the first thing to become reality. Seems like a minor thing to get jazzed over, but it was one of those “Holy crap, this is really happening” moments.

The first cover rough showed up a week later. I’d pitched to Tricia the idea of the main character, Carrie, standing in front of her high school locker, in which hanged her superhero outfit. I thought it would hit two of the story’s main elements nicely.

Here is the first rough, based on that concept:

Action Figures front cover – first draft

Pretty good for a first shot! We chatted a bit about how to punch it up a little, to more clearly illustrate the superhero element, and decided to add a glow effect around Carrie’s hands (hinting at her super-power), adjust the image to expose more of the locker, change how the costume was hanging so it was more visible, and add some newspaper clippings with convenient and obvious headlines — fairly simple changes.

Before those were implemented, Tricia produced a line drawing of Carrie herself, giving me my first look at her as something other than an image in my head:

Carrie, solidified.

Yes, she is a foosball player in this rendition, but that’s why it’s called a “work in progress.”

The important part is it captured how I wanted Carrie to look: like your basic all-American girl.

The first color draft came next, and wow, amazing what color adds to the overall product!

Action Figures – in color! (A Quinn-Martin Production)

You can also see that Carrie has been made more prominent to fill up more of the space, which was an excellent call on Tricia’s part, that the costume is definitely more noticeable, and that a placeholder glow effect has been added to Carrie’s left hand (which, you’ll notice in the first rough, was down). Improvements all around!

The penultimate version added some details to the locker (newspaper clippings), filled in the background color, finished off the super-suit hanging against the door, and punched up the hand glow.

More is more!

At this point, there was nothing left to do but some fine-tuning. Tricia punched up the newspaper clippings a bit to make them more visible, added an impressionist version of Bruce Springsteen’s WHAT album cover (Carrie is a big fan of The Boss), and added the last of the text.

And so, without more ado, here it is: the full and finished cover for Action Figures – Issues One: Secret Origins!

The final cover, along with the spine text!

But wait, there’s more! I also received the back cover, and here is a section featuring Carrie’s friends/teammates. What’s really cool about the character designs is how perfectly Tricia portrayed them based on my rather general descriptions. This is, verbatim, what I sent her for descriptions:

Carrie herself I imagine as an all-American girl, blonde and blue-eyed, pretty but not glam. She’s 15 years old, and I’d like her to look real-world 15 and not Hollywood 15 (meaning early 20s). [The others are] Matt Steiger (Captain Trenchcoat), a boy with messy black hair and a perpetual smirk; Sara Danvers (Psyche), a pale girl with long, unruly dark hair…she doesn’t look goth so much as she looks badly anemic and sorely in need of some conditioner; Stuart Lumley (Superbeast), a throwback metalhead with long brown hair and an “I’m kind of awesome” attitude; and Missy Hamill (Kunoichi), an unstoppably spunky and energetic half-Japanese girl. All of them are 15.

So here’s the whole team:

Artwork from the back cover.

The best part of this entire process reaching its conclusion?

The book will be ready for sale next week!

That’s right, all I have to do is upload the PDF of the full, finished cover art once I get it from Tricia, and Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins will be available for sale as a paperback novel and as an e-book from Amazon,com! Believe me, you’ll know when it’s officially on sale.

Ending One Story, Starting Another

The title of this blog post is a semi-poetic way of announcing that I am leaving my job as a reporter for the Enterprise Newspapers. My last day is one week from today.

This is a huge deal on several levels. I’ve held this job for more than 15 years, my longest stretch with a single employer, so to leave behind what has been a significant part of my life is a little jarring, even though it’s both desirable and necessary.

It’s desirable because, honestly, I’ve been rather unhappy here for a while. I hate to say that, because I loved my job for most of the time I was here, but in recent years my sense of discontent has grown. I realized I was spending so much more time writing the stuff I had to (news) instead of the stuff I wanted to (stories), and that became a considerable source of frustration.

I guess that also covers some of the necessary part, since it’s tough to pursue my passion when the need for a paycheck is eating up so much of my potential writing time.

The other necessity is not my own, but my wife’s. Veronica’s business, Storied Threads, has grown considerably over the past year, and she’s hit the point where she cannot grow the business working almost completely by herself. Hiring her friend Kate would be the ideal solution, but that’s impractical due to distance, so the next most logical choice was me.

So yeah, I will be working for my wife, doing whatever I can to free her up to sew. It seems like I’m just trading one job that isn’t what I want to do for another, but I will be getting back some lost writing time, and the fact that I will not be blowing my creative energy all on work should help boost my output.

I don’t want any of this to come off as bitter, because I’m not. If anything, I’m grateful for the opportunity I got 15 years ago when my now-retired editor decided to hire a guy with no formal higher education or previous experience in journalism — or writing in general, except for a very recent freelance sale. I learned how to write faster without sacrificing accuracy. I learned how important choosing the right word can be and how it can significantly affect how the reader interprets a sentence. I learned when to expound and when to summarize.

I also learned a lot of interesting bits of knowledge that I’ve worked into my writing, most of that coming from covering local police departments — which was always the most fun I ever had at my job.

So in the end, it was to my benefit to have my soon-to-be-former job, but its time is at an end. I need to move on if I’m going to grow, creatively and professionally.

The Suspense Is Killing Me!

It’s been a while since I posted, but that is not for lack of reason to post. My cover artist, Tricia, has been plugging away at the front cover and it’s pretty close to done, but I’m holding onto the artwork for now so I can lay it all out, along with some background material, in a future post.

I will grant folks who don’t follow my official Facebook page a tease in the form of the current cover image:

That’s my main character, Carrie. You’ll be seeing more of here, literally and figuratively, very soon…before the end of the month, I’m hoping.

My original plan was to release the book in late August, but the demands of motherhood and the quirks of the creative soul have delayed things, which is fine. When the question is, “Do you want it now, or do you want it good?”, I always choose good.

So yeah, my fingers are crossed that the cover art will be done soon and I can put this project to bed. Well, sort of…the novel itself will be all done, but then comes the part where I have to promote the thing, and that will be an ongoing process.

So, in the interest of generating buzz, I’m going to remind folks that I have posted the first two chapters on this website, which everyone may read for free. Whether you’ve read it before or read it for the first time now, I’d appreciate it if you could pass this link along to friends who might also enjoy it.

Action Figures – An Introduction

Hello to what I hope is a readership of thousands (I’ll settle at this point for low hundreds, but hey, hope springs eternal).

Today is the day I officially start ramping up the publicity for my new soon-to-be-self-published young adult novel Action Figures. The manuscript has been fully edited and processed at Create Space, my chosen publishing platform, and is now awaiting its cover (my cover artist Tricia is plugging away at that now…unless her baby needs her, of course. She has her priorities straight).

She has already finished the novel’s logo, which looks a little something like this:

Cool, huh? Nice touch of old-school comic book logo going on there.

(That specific image, by the way, is the cover image on my new Facebook page. Expect a lot of cross-posting between that and this blog.)

To help build interest in the novel leading up to its official release, I am posting the first two chapters on this site, free to read at your leisure. You’ll meet Carrie, the main character, and get a sense of the story’s tone. It barely touches the plot proper, but hopefully this taste will encourage you to buy a copy of the full novel once it’s available — and I do plan to make it available as a trade paperback and as an e-book.

I’ve already posted once about what to expect out of the story, but I’m going to do so again in a question-and-answer format.

What is the novel about?

Smart-ass answer: about 400 pages.

Straight answer: it’s about a group of teenage superhero wannabes who find themselves in over their heads when an actual super-villain starts causing trouble. It’s also about the main character, Carrie, trying to put her life back together after her parents’ unexpected divorce and her subsequent relocation to a new home in a new town.

What can I expect from the novel?

A lot of humor (which I’m sure comes as a shock to no one who knows me), action and adventure, homages to some classic comic book tropes, and a reasonable dose of drama; I’m trying to avoid a teenage angst-ridden quasi-soap opera, so don’t expect “Teen Titans 90210.” Also, don’t expect to see what has become a cliche of the YA genre, the love triangle. I hate ‘em and I’m not interested in writing one. This is not to say the characters will not have romantic experiences, but don’t expect Carrie to spend the entire series twisted in knots over whether to love Male Character A or Male Character B. Boring!

Wait, did you say “series”?

I did. This is envisioned as a finite series, of as-yet indeterminate length, and whether the second book happens depends in good part on how well the first one does (not that I’m trying to pressure anybody to buy it. Heavens, no). I say “finite series” because I do have an end in mine, and no interest in writing a series that goes on forever and ever…you know, like superhero comics do.

Hey, why are you doing this as a prose novel? Why not a comic book?

Quick, name three YA series that tell a superhero story.

You can’t, can you?

And that is why I’m telling this story this way. A superhero story told via the expected medium is going to be white noise. As a novel, I’m hoping Action Figures will stand out and really grab prospective readers’ attention.

Why a female protagonist? Shouldn’t a superhero story be told through the eyes of a male superhero?

Again, name three comic book series starring a woman. While you’re doing that, I’ll name ten times as many starring a male character. I won’t even cheat and just list off the multiple titles starring Batman or Wolverine.

The idea that comics in general, and superhero comics in particular, are only for boys (and men) is laughable. I know LOTS of women who dig superhero comics (my wife, for starters) and want to see more titles with female protagonists. Moreover, they want to see female protagonists that are presented well: as fully fleshed-out, well-rounded, layered characters that do more than back up the men while gadding about in impractically skimpy, skintight outfits.

Granted, I am taking a bit of risk here as a 40-something male writer telling a story through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl, but I was fortunate to have some beta-readers who were quick to point out when I got Carrie wrong — and aside from a complaint from my editor/sister-in-law about the cliche of girls being bad at math (which I address here), I made it through the manuscript without anyone calling bullshit on me. Hooray!

Does that mean male readers won’t like it?

Not at all. There are prominent male characters in the book, but that shouldn’t make a difference; I’d like to think male readers would pick this up as quickly as they’d snatch up The Hunger Games series or any of Cherie Priest’s excellent novels, and for the same reasons: they want to read a fun, exciting story, regardless of whether the main character is a boy or a girl.

For that matter, just because it’s a young adult novel, that doesn’t mean adult adults won’t enjoy it. Honestly, the “young adult” tag has lot a lot of its meaning over the past several years, what with us old fogies snatching up YA titles as quickly as the alleged target audience. Young adult novels nowadays are as complex and mature as many a “book intended for adults,” and I think the only thing that makes a YA title a YA title nowadays is the lack of the lack of a gratuitous F-bomb or two. But I digress.

Let’s say I bought a copy. I’ve done my part, right?

And I thank you for it (or will, when you buy one), but please remember that I’m doing this on my own here. I don’t have a publishing giant behind me to promote and distribute the book to stores across America and the world. I don’t have an advertising budget. I have this blog, a Facebook page, and (soon) a presence on Amazon.com. I know how to write and send press releases. It’s a start, but what I will need to make this endeavor really pay off is support from those who took a chance on an unknown writer and shelled out for a debut (self-published) novel.

If you like the novel, please take a couple of minutes to go onto Amazon.com (and/or, if it shows up there, Goodreads.com) and post a review. It doesn’t have to be long or elaborate, just give it a rating and say a few words letting people know why you liked it. Tell your friends and family about it, maybe even give them a copy as a gift (or at least let them borrow your copy). Share my Facebook and blog posts so new readers can learn about it. If you’re feeling really ambitious, shoot your local bookstore and/or library an e-mail asking them to carry a copy.

Okay, I’ve rambled on long enough. Go check out the sample chapters, and they stay tuned for further announcements about the release.

Adding To A Character

This Boston Globe piece about a controversial T-shirt got me to thinking a bit about my YA manuscript and how it caused a somewhat similar controversy. Go read the story then come on back.

Twice while reviewing my manuscript for typos, my sister-in-law implored me to abandon a rather small and mostly insignificant character trait for Carrie, the main character in Action Figures: her weak math skills. It’s a stereotype, she said.

Well, perhaps. I did some quick research, and it looks like there is no crystal-clear final word on the common belief that girls do worse in math than boys. A lot of stories and studies I found maintain that is indeed the case, many dispute it, others say it’s conditional on any number of factors (including, no kidding, whether the society in which the girl is raised is “sexist”).

I decided to keep it for two reasons, even though it may raise some hackles.

Carrie is presented as attractive, funny, personable, and, most importantly, intelligent, but a perfect heroine is neither easy to relate to nor much fun to read about (or write, for that matter). She has to have recognizable flaws to be interesting, relatable, and realistic, and her lackluster aptitude at math is one of them — and I dare say that because she is highly skilled at English, is computer literate, and generally a nimble thinker, sucking at math in this context will be more palatable than implying girls suck at math but, as the T-shirt suggests, rock the house when it comes to shopping and dancing.

Reason number two I’ll explain in a more roundabout way.

When was working on The Avengers, he had the Hulk redesigned. In The Incredible Hulk, the Hulk himself was ripped like a serious bodybuilder, but in The Avengers, he was softer, less defined. Joss explained that by setting the Hulk’s physique at a perpetual 10 as in The Incredible Hulk, he had nowhere to go when he got angry; his physicality was static, whereas in The Avengers, when the Hulk got pissed, his massive muscles became suddenly more sharply defined, a visual cue that his anger (and, if you know the comics at all, his strength) was rising to dangerous levels.

It’s conventional narrative wisdom that a character in a story must undergo a transformation, end the experience different than how he or she began it, or what’s the point of telling the story? If Carrie was good at everything in school, she has one available direction: down. That would have been a legitimate option, but it’s also a legitimate option that she could be less than adept at something and improve, and I just happened to choose math as the subject (but — not to spoil anything — she does in fact boost her grades a little by the end of the book thanks to some knuckling down and studying hard. Stay in school, kids!).

And, really, there are other things going on with Carrie that are more significant, important, and interesting to read (and write) about than how she’s doing in her classes. It’s one small part of a larger whole, and I’m hoping readers don’t get so hung up on Carrie’s math skills that they miss the rest of the story.

Monday Musings

Some quick bits of no major significance…

First, made a little more headway on final Action Figures edits. I have maybe a quarter of the book left to go through, and then I can begin the process of turning the manuscript into a file suitable for publishing. I’d love to have this wrapped up within the next week or so, but that’ll depend on how quickly others get their work done, and I’m the sort who prefers having things done right over having things done now.

***

The Neil Gaiman talk at the Museum of Fine Arts was great. He spoke about the role of mythology in modern fantasy fiction and how it informed his own work, then treated the audience to a sneak-peek reading of a new story, based in Norse mythology, that will be part of a project he’ll be working on throughout 2014. Can’t wait for the finished product!

PS: Got front-row seats. Score!

***

Finally, this collection of two-sentence horror stories got posted by a few of my friends, and I got a kick out of reading them. Some of them were very effective. For fun, here’s one I came up with:

Stan decided that, of all his children, little Timmy was his favorite. He took another bite.

Neil-ing At The Feet Of The Master

Not much to report on the Action Figures front right now. I received a new batch of editing notes earlier this week and plan to go through them tomorrow or Sunday, and that’s about it there.

Saturday I get to spend part of the afternoon with none other than Neil Gaiman, who will be holding a talk at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts entitled “Myth, Magic, and Making Stuff Up.” I am beyond excited to be attending this. I’ve been to one of his book signings before, in Cambridge, during his Anansi Boys tour, and he was funny and charming, and after he signed my copy of American Gods with what he deemed the worst signing of the name “Michael” ever, he apologized profusely and made sure my name was very tidy when he signed my wife’s copy of Anansi Boys.

The man himself. Image gakked from the MFA website.

I am oddly proud to own a book signed with one of his less graceful inscriptions.

Anyway, book signings are one thing, but to attend a dedicated lecture on the craft led by Neil is thrilling beyond words. I don’t care if he doesn’t answer questions, mine or anyone’s, or if he doesn’t stick around to say hello to people personally, I just want to sit there and soak up whatever he has to say. I want to learn from someone whose work I love and, in a way, has served as a long-distance (and unknowing) mentor.

Through his blog I’ve picked up on some interesting and valuable lessons about the process of writing that have helped me immeasurably.  Best example off the top of my head: back when he was working on The Graveyard Book, he wrote one day how he was stuck somewhere in the middle of the story, and how middles tend to confound him. The beginnings of a story were easy, he said, because that’s when you’re laying down your ideas and introducing characters, and endings, while intimidating, were about bringing all the pieces together and reaching the climax of the creative process.

Middles, however? That’s when a lot of stuff has to happen to connect the Point A of the beginning and Point B of the ending, and drawing that line isn’t as fun or easy.

As it happened, I was in the middle, literally, of my Bostonia manuscript, and having a mother of a time getting through it. I knew important stuff was happening, but writing the middle third felt way too much like work. The words didn’t flow. The ideas didn’t flow. I worried something was seriously wrong, that my creative mojo was suddenly gone, or that the story was revealing itself to be a dead end and I would never finish it. I didn’t know struggling with the second act was not unusual…not until Neil said so.

It took a long while — several months, in fact — to get through that rough patch, but after reading Neil’s blog post, I stopped freaking out about it. I’d work on it as much as I could, until I felt I hit a roadblock, then I’d walk away, let the manuscript sit and let the story percolate in my head for a while, and hit it again when I was ready.

If I get even ten seconds to speak to Neil directly, I plan to use the time to thank him for his advice. I know he’ll have no idea what I’m thanking him for, but I’ll know. Good enough.