Rick Wayne's Blog, page 104

I Want You SO Bad Right Now (plus, What I Do When I Do It Good)

I want you. I need you. I burn for that special something only you can give, the drug that dribbles in words from your fingertips... Feedback!

Episode Two of The Minus Faction is nearly to beta-draft, which means I am looking for beta-readers.

What are the requirements for beta-reading, you ask? I'm glad you asked. They're pretty simple. Be literate. Be interested. Be willing to read 25-26,000 words (roughly 100 standard pages) in the next couple weeks. Give feedback.

That last one always gets people, but it really shouldn't. Just tell me what stood out to you, what worked and what didn't. That's it. Obviously the more thought you can give, the better. But I have no grand expectations, and I am always so desperate for feedback that I am tickled breathless and purple to get anything you're able to share.

(Feedback is the only way I get better, so do me a favor and don't spare my feelings. That does me no favors.)

If interested, you can send me an email here. It is open to all, and there are no obligations for signing up, but if you do, you're welcome to an e-book copy of the finished product.

I had a request a loooooooong time ago to write about how I write. At the time it seemed pointlessly self-reflective, like a mirror looking into a mirror. But after a conversation this past week, I remembered how much I appreciated seeing how others do it -- the morbid fascination of someone else's open heart surgery.

So we'll keep this short and not very deep, because that's how I do it. Cue '70s porn guitar. 

I don't have a set process, which is good because it would be mind-blowingly boring to read a play-by-play of the making of a book. I'm going to tell you what I don't do in the hopes of bounding the space of all possible things I DO do.

Do-do do do-do.

I don't write a complete draft and then sit on it before going back and doing rewrites. I think that's an excellent way to develop an argument but a less-than-elegant way to develop a character. I also don't write in order. I often work backwards.

I don't use plot points or character interviews or any of that kind of stuff (although I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that). I don't use big words when small ones will do. I don't use expository passages to explain what my plot failed to show. I don't leave any sentence that doesn't advance the plot or develop a character -- preferably both at the same time -- or if not, that doesn't directly support another sentence that does.

I don't write every day. I don't write without knowing what's going to happen. Those two go together for me. I tried forcing myself to write every day. I spent the early months of FANTASMAGORIA with a daily word count goal. I learned two things: daily word goals only amplify guilt and frustration, and what comes out when I force it is generally crap. These days I don't write until I'm ready, until the story is baked. I don't have a schedule. It happens when it happens. (I still get frustrated with lack of progress, just less than before.)

I don't take notes, even though I often say I do. I have notes, pages and pages worth. They're just all in my head. I've learned as I've gotten older that I have a pretty good memory. (It's going to suck when it starts to go.) Not a Sherlockian mind palace, but pretty good all the same. I will occasionally leave a short prompt, just a phrase, if what I have to remember for that chapter is particularly nuanced, but that's usually the extent of it.

I don't live cleanly while in the throes of heavy composition. I smoke a lot of cigars (but never indoors). I drink a lot of coffee. I watch a lot of porn. I eat a lot of pie. I'm eating blueberry pie as I write this, my second piece, having already smoked before 9 a.m. Sherlock was right that nicotine does wonders for brain work. So does caffeine, sugar, and frequent masturbation.

Your mileage may vary because your goals may vary. I don't want to do anything but tell an entertaining story, something people are excited to read and, hopefully, have trouble putting down.

Episode Two of The Minus Faction has challenged me there, but then every project I've worked on has challenged me in different ways. I can't look back on a single one where I said, "I GOT this!" Never happens. And if it did, I'd suspect I was doing something wrong.

Finally, I don't like writing about writing, so I'm going to stop here and leave you with a fantastic piece by Trevor Brown that sums it all up. Werd to your mutha.

And for those who haven't seen, the cover to Episode Two:

The Technicolor Night Sweats of Joe Vaux

Discover more at www.joevaux.com.

One Hundredth of a Star

This post is for those who care about book marketing and indie publishing. It is an abnormal topic for me. I can count on one hand the number of times I have written on it this year. That frequency won't change.

But I know for a fact some people are interested because they've told me as much. And last week I took my second step into "real" marketing -- the first being a pair of Goodreads giveaways earlier this year -- and I promised a recap. This is it.

First, a word about what I was trying to accomplish. I was not trying to make a big dent in anything. I was trying (1) to gather some intel to use in the crafting a fully fledged marketing plan later, and (2) to see how responsive the needle is.

Marketing is pushing boulders down a mountain. The myth is that pushing a boulder always creates a landslide, but that's not true anymore than that the market is an efficient sorter and the cream rises to the top. "Quality" is only loosely correlated with economic success, and most of the boulders you launch will crash down and come to a dead stop. 

Big companies have the resources to launch many boulders at once, and giant boulders at that, and even then they don't always cause a ruckus. Little guys like me have to settle for small boulders -- big rocks, really -- and fire them off one at a time. If one is lucky, one gets a little landslide. But most of the time one will not be lucky.

Last week I ran a single promotion -- FANTASMAGORIA was discounted to 99 cents -- which was announced in an email from Booksends to their subscribers on Monday, and which was also featured on the Kindle Books & Tips blog Wednesday morning. KBT also sent an email to their subscribers that afternoon. (I also announced the promo via my email list and on social media.)

Booksends cost $30, while KBT cost $25, for a total spend of $55. Quite modest.

I like the 99-cent sale versus the free giveaway for the same reason insurers like co-pays -- it reduces the moral hazard. I've done a few free giveaways this year -- on Smashwords, on my website, on Google Play, and I took part in Free eBook Day -- and I never noticed any rebound. I got lots of downloads, but no return sales.

I expect that's because a free book requires no engagement. In fact, I expect there is a bit of a hoarding effect with free promos. LOTS of people will download because it costs nothing and because they might want to read the book later. I doubt many did.

Please note, I'm not saying you shouldn't give your stuff away for free. Not at all. I am saying that, just like with piracy, people who download for free have low engagement and so aren't/weren't likely to buy. (Personally, I don't believe piracy represents many, if any, lost sales.) I am just much more judicious about giving stuff away now than I was before.

For example, I will give a book away face-to-face, meaning to someone I run into or chat with online, in a heartbeat. Some minimum threshold of engagement has already been passed at that point. I also think there's value to keeping the first one or two books in a series free -- not because the engagement is necessarily any higher but because you want to keep an open door.

But outside of those two purposes, I now want to see some real value before I list my books for free. If someone is unwilling to engage at 99 cents, then they're unlikely ever to be a customer of mine.

So running the promotion at 99 cents was intentional. It set a small bar. People had to be engaged enough with the cover and blurb that they'd pay a dollar. At that rate, I sold a VERY modest 110 books. However, that includes some books besides FANTASMAGORIA (which were not discounted), meaning at least a few people engaged enough to buy some other stuff at full price.

KBT (at $25) outperformed Booksends (at $30) such that I actually came out ahead on the one and lost money on the other. I was roughly neutral for the week, meaning I spent $55 and earned roughly that back, partially because some folks bought non-sale items. (My royalty on a 99-cent book is 35 cents, meaning I have to sell three books for every dollar spent to break even.)

The overall verdict is mixed. There was unquestionable value in going through the process. I learned what to expect. I learned that Booksends is probably not good for reinvestment for me. (Other authors/books may have different results there.) I learned KBT probably is. I got three reviews on Amazon over the weekend, only one of which I can otherwise account for. (Incidentally, that review was the result of a "face-to-face" free giveaway from several months ago.)

On the downside, all of these numbers are piddly. I did expect that. As I mentioned, the goal was not to make money. That will come, if at all, after I craft a fully-fledged plan and start launching boulders down the mountain on a regular basis. Here I was just gathering intel and getting a little practice.

However, I had hoped to see a little bump in my daily sales, which normally hover around zero. Turns out the needle is heavy, so I will have to wait until I schedule enough of these promos -- staggered days over multiple weeks -- to keep my Amazon ranking high, which gets me de facto secondary advertising. It didn't take much to book me into the top 50 in my category.

The next step is to schedule promos on other sites to test out their viability, and after that to look at the effectiveness of different days of the week. Once I know those things, I can begin to craft a "real" plan, which is to say I am still a loooooong way from a "real" plan, let alone any kind of success, and what I have now is only a fraction of what I need.

Contrast all of this with the Goodreads giveaways I did earlier this year. The site requires you to send a paperback. In two runs, I gave a total of 15 books away at a cost (with printing and shipping) of $180. This $180 got my book into the hands of a mere 15 people -- chosen by Goodreads, not by me -- and netted no rebound sales. Three of those 15 people left 3-star ratings on Goodreads without any accompanying text (versus the two five-star reviews with text that showed up on Amazon over the weekend resulting from a net-zero spend.)

[Side note: reviews are SUPREMELY IMPORTANT. They are CRITICAL to establishing trust in new potential readers. Critical. Absofuckinglutely. If you want to support an indie writer, leave an honest review. Talking them up is great, but everyone understands that talk is cheap. Taking the time to write a review is putting one's money where one's mouth is! Write a review, then talk THAT up by telling everyone you liked it so much that you were motivated to leave a review. That is genuine A1 support.]

To me, nothing sums up the culture of the Goodreads community more than their rating system, which proudly displays hundredths of stars. A book is not 4 stars, it is 3.99 stars. It is not 4.5 stars, it is 4.46.

The only possible value of a hundredth of a star is to assign status, to know who wins. Like a beauty pageant. Thanks to Goodreads, now we can know which of the two books rated 3.8 stars on Amazon is better. One is 3.82 while the other a mere 3.78.

The scientist in me wonders how that last digit is possibly significant, while the reader in me balks at the puerile need to RANK AND ARGUE ALL THE THINGS.

Don't get me wrong. There are lots of fine folks on Goodreads. I am merely pointing out that just because it's dense in readers doesn't mean it's dense in my readers, who are best defined as "anyone without a stick up their butt. About anything." And on the numbers, Goodreads will not get any further investment from me.

End boring marketing crap.

One a fun note, I created a new gallery of comic art on my website. If you are a Serum subscriber, you have access to Cosmic Jungle, which is what I call the giant waste of time that is my curated image collection.

Cosmic Jungle

True Story

When I was little, my parents took us all to the circus. I was visibly enraptured by the knife thrower.

After his performance, my mom asked me what I thought.

"It was okay," I said, "but he kept missing her."

Painting by Glenn Arthur

The Action Figure Art of The Sucklord

Check out more at http://suckadelic.com/

The Audio Production of "Agony in Violet" is now available!

The Audio Production of Agony in Violet is now availableClick the links for a sample

Agony in Violet is the first in my series of short occult mysteries. It is a Sherlockian-type character study that introduces the reader to Etude Etranger, heretic chef and master of the occult.

The audio production was produced by Matt Thurston, a fantastically talented voice actor who also produced the audio of FANTASMAGORIA. As I told him recently, what makes Matt so awesome is not just how he acts all of the character voices differently, but also how he maintains a perfect pitch. He never sends you to the rewind button because you can always hear him perfectly. I have a face for radio and voice for books, so I can't say I've ever tried it, but that's gotta be damned hard!

Check it out. At just over an hour, it's perfect for filling a daily commute.

Amazon                   iTunes

The Last Thing Anyone Wants to Hear

A list.

"We need to talk."

"There's a slight possibility we're standing in a mine field."

"Umm. That wasn't a tampon..."

"Relax. Just be yourself!"

"Unfortunately the tumor is inoperable."

"Your child has been sending videos of their bowel movements to the other students."

"This account has insufficient funds."

"The alien virus you contracted is going to wipe out the rest of humanity."

"This probably isn't a good time to tell you this, but..."

"Hey, your mother is on the phone. She wants to know if you cleaned the dildo."

"You missed Rick Wayne's latest."

Don't be a victim. Episode One of The Minus Faction is available now.

It's OfficialEpisode One of my super-powered sci-fi thriller The Minus Faction
is birthed into a harsh, harsh world.

Former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan said, "This is a very important work. This announcement affects the entire world."**

So there you go. Pretty cool, huh?

Both Amazon and my website have had the e-book on super secret pre-sale since the first of the month, and some folks got a super SOOPER secret reading before that even, but the paperback is now available and we're at near-full distribution, so I'm donning a flight suit and calling it MISSION: ACCOMPLISHED.

Paperback:

RickWayne.com
Amazon
Barnes & Noble (any day now)

e-Book:

RickWayne.com
Amazon
Barnes & Noble (any day now)
Google Play
Apple iBooks (any day now)
Kobo
Smashwords
Inktera
Scribd

You can order signed copies exclusively from my website. There is also a listing on Goodreads for those who are active in that community. Click any of the links to purchase.

Here's what some folks had to say:
 

"I was engrossed from the first page and now I'm invested." -goodreads reviewer

"I could not put it down until I had devoured the whole book in one sitting." -amazon reviewer

"Terrific dialogue ... tightly-paced high-speed chase down the darker alleys of our modern world." -amazon reviewer

"Wayne's take on normal people getting super human abilities is both refreshing and closer to realistic than just about anything else." -amazon reviewer

"Ridiculously fun read." -amazon reviewer

"LOVE IT. Love. Excellent, start to finish. Tight writing, excellent character development. Mr. Wayne keeps you guessing, keeps you surprised." -amazon reviewer

I'd say there'll be a release party, except I'm too busy sitting here in my boxers eating cheese puffs and working on Episode Two.

Mmmmmm.... cheesy goodness.

**Okay, not really. But I maintain he would if he read it.

The Grotesquery of Fabio Magalhaes

My kind of painter.

 














 














 














 

Follow this blog

Story Time With Uncle Ricky (NSFW)

I was a late bloomer. Wait. Backup.

I was at a Breeders concert my freshman year of college. I was not old enough to drink, which the state of Oklahoma takes very seriously. (The entire state was dry until 1957, meaning soldiers returning from WWII were not allowed to have a beer.) So having a drink was out of the question. A young woman with a drink -- this means she was old enough you see, and here I was just 18 -- asked me if I wanted one. A woman asked me if I wanted a drink, and an upperclasswoman at that.

It did not occur to me that might have meant anything other than that she was being nice, because it did not occur to me that she would ever actually be interested in me, mostly because no one in high school ever had been.

Late bloomer.

When I broke free, towards the end of my junior year, I spend the next few years, including my first year in medical school, making up for lost time. I worked at a local tobacco shop/coffee shop hybrid (it was fucking awesome -- free merch all day) which is also where I picked up most of the bad habits I live with today. It's also where I tried LSD for the first time.

The assistant manager at the shop threw many parties. He was engaged at the time, and his fiancee (and future ex-wife) lived with him, along with one of their friends, call her Jane, who they were helping get back on her feet after an awful break-up involving, as I understand it, some violence.

Jane was fucking hawt. I will skip over her physical details, but suffice it to say she was a well-endowed woman. At one party, I apparently became a pet project, and soon we were dating, only I had an asshole roommate at the time and for reasons blah blah blah we always hung out at my friend's house.

One day my friend pulled me aside and asked, very politely, if we could "keep it down."  I am certain his wife put him up to it 'cuz frankly she was a bitch. But I was mortified. Truly. I felt terrible. Here I was a guest in someone's home, and I wasn't being respectful. So that night things were not animated.

Now, it was an old house, and, being a pipe smoker, my friend never cared if I lit a cigar. So I did, a fat Hoyo de Monterrey Excalibur No.1 maduro. As I was smoking, Julie called me out -- loudly as I recall -- saying we needed a do-over. I explained to her the conversation I'd had earlier, and she said tough.

For the record, Julie was generally very accommodating, but she was a pretty girl and accustomed to being taken care sexually. She grew loud, mostly in jest as I recall. An argument ensued.

The important thing to know is that arguing is like kryptonite to my penis, by which I mean green kryptonite. (Crying, on the other hand, is like red kryptonite.) As Julie got more frustrated, so did I, which meant I wanted Round Two even less, which meant I resisted more, which meant she argued more, and so on in an ever-downward spiral.

Meanwhile, I'm still smoking.

At some point, I don't remember how, Julie joked that I got to suck on the fat cigar, and what did she get? Also important for background: all of this was taking place around the time of the Monica Lewinski scandal. So I joked that she could "have" the cigar too. She said I wouldn't dare. She had basically been questioning my manhood indirectly for the last twenty minutes, and I'd had enough.

I told her to lay back and spread 'em, which she did, and in went the cigar, lit and still smoking. We started having fun with it, and she started to fake moan and everything.

Now, my friend's fiancee had of course had mounting frustration with our noise for the past week or so, and I'm sure after the earlier conversation, she thought we would keep it down. Now she'd no doubt heard us arguing. It was late at night. I was a grad student and Julie was unemployed, but everyone else in the house had to get up and go to work, so you can see where they might be frustrated.

So all of a sudden, with Julie moaning at full volume, my friend's fiancee bursts into the room, sees the smoking cigar sticking out of her friend's vagina, turns around, mouth agape, and walks back to her bedroom.

I finished that cigar.

Art by Tina Lugo

I am the villain of this story

A Cover Reveal, A Release Date, and the Origin of 'The Minus Faction'

From the standpoint of the universe, The Minus Faction is my first book. It is not my first published novel -- that's Fantasmagoria -- nor is it my first attempt at a novel. That was Darksign, a science fiction foible, written circa 2001-2, about life, death, and the origin of everything. After 150 rambling pages, I abandoned it.

I did so for the same reason I stepped back from the first version of The Minus Faction, which had the working title Love and the Zombie-Cyborg Apocalypse. In 2012, as my marriage was failing, I wrote 105,000 words -- for those in the cheap seats, that's 420 standard pages -- and it still wasn't done. Entirely too long. The story got away from me. 

However much one might have a bend for it, no one is born knowing how to swim, or ride a bike, or write a novel. You have to learn.

Those close to me know that, after I abandoned the story, I stood on a mountaintop and shook my fist and vowed to earn my way back. (Or at least that's how the Sioux shamans sing of it.)

I wrote Agony in Violet, the first in my series of short occult mysteries, in December 2012 and published it in February of 2013. It popped my publishing cherry and it is, like everyone's first time, over too quickly. I erred in the other direction.

I then set off to write Fantasmagoria, which took the better part of a year and which was SUPPOSED to be the next step to earning my way back to novel-length work. It was SUPPOSED to be around 50,000 words, give or take. But in another magical mondo miscalculation, it ended up 76,000 words, which is roughly standard novel length. D'oh!

To be clear, I am proud of both Agony in Violet and Fantasmagoria. They aren't for everyone -- given that they feature, among other things, shit-eating and a giant vat of semen (respectively), it's safe to say neither were intended for general consumption. But they're fun, entertaining stories, even if they do have their flaws. It's just like with one's spouse: eventually you live with them for so long that even their shortcomings become endearing.

YMMV.

I wrote The Red Dagger -- the second short in the occult mystery series -- earlier this year, although to be fair, a great deal of the characters and plot were excavated during my trip to Asia last Fall. Unlike the two earlier works, The Red Dagger is the length it needs to be. However, as with Agony in Violet, Dagger is merely one star of a rising constellation. I believe the 4-5 mysteries of The Heretic Arcanum hang like the Pleiades and will only find an audience, if they ever do, once collected into a single volume. (The third mystery, tentatively called Bonewhite, is yet a blastula of notes in my mind-womb.)

That brings us to The Minus Faction, which I intend to be my new flagship work. It rises from the ashes of that earlier discarded epic. Out of 105,000 words, I recycled not a one. Characters, plot points, ideas . . . These I plucked like flowers. The rest burned like a repressed pyromaniac's childhood home.

The core idea for the series dates back to 2011 when the buzz for 2012's "Avengers" movie was building. It occurred to me that all of the Avengers, with the possible exception of the Hulk, were antiquated heroes dating from a bygone century. There is nothing wrong with them. Certainly I enjoy them all and own all of the movies and quite a few comics. (I highly recommend Mark Millar's Ultimates books, which first proposed Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury and on which some parts of the first movie are based.)

But nevertheless, here we have a white male wealthy genius arms dealer (a prime mover of the military-industrial complex) and a white male super-soldier (a result of the military-industrial complex) and a white male super-scientist (the military-industrial complex eating itself) and a white male god-prince, first in line for a cosmic throne.

Again, I don't think there is anything intrinsically wrong with these characters. The common man has been looking up to gods and princes and those possessed of secret arts for as long as there have been humans: Gilgamesh and Odysseus and Beowulf and the rest. I enjoy those stories. People are not crazy for wanting their heroes to be heroic!

Also, to be as clear as sunlight in space, I did NOT set out to redress any gender slights or slay any sociopolitical dragons. I was not trying to compensate for anything. I WAS trying to remove all barriers, to entertain no taboo.

I asked myself, if the wealthy entitled European male -- starting with The Shadow and moving through Superman and Batman and down to the Avengers -- is the paradigmatic hero of the 20th Century, who is it in the 21st?

It wouldn't be an idealized, whitewashed version of the Kennedys and Rockefellers fighting aristocratic oppression on behalf of the less privileged. We no longer need cower behind top hats.

I think it would be the less privileged rising up to fight for themselves. The underdog. The outcast. The disenfranchised. The misunderstood.

But that raised another question: Who would be the villains? After all, the traditional antagonists of those Gold and Silver Age superheroes, if not the old aristocratic order (think Doctor Doom), ARE the outcast, the misunderstood, the Other.

It was important to me that the villains NOT simply be a parody of the old ruling class or the military-industrial complex. The point is not that, in a dramatic reversal, the villains have risen up and taken the city. We're not destroying an older order. We're embracing a new one. That means facing new challenges. Complexity. Diversity. Excess. Interconnectedness.

So from which class come the villains of today? I can't answer that without giving part of the story away. You'll just have to wait.

In the first three episodes, you'll be introduced, in order, to John Regent, Xana Jace, Ian Katsuhiro Tendo, and "Wink". In the final three episodes, the four of them will discover why things are so much easier if you have Tony Stark's fortune and Cap's overdeveloped ethos.

Plus, there'll be zombie-cyborgs, at least one giant monster, a blackout with quite a bit of collateral damage, and a (hopefully) shocking twist. You'll learn about the minus faction and the mysterious Prophet. You'll discover the Consortium of collaborators and learn the meaning of this symbol.

(And at the end, you'll see what the Consortium has frozen in the basement.)

But mostly you'll get to know the characters. As the tagline says, it's a story about extraordinary abilities and how not to use them. Not heroes as you've known them. Heroes redefined.

Episode One: Breakout goes on sale August 15th. Don't worry. I'll send out a reminder.

And last but not least, the print cover is revealed!