David Barron's Blog, page 6
November 5, 2011
Short Medium Long Term
My considerable writing productivity has been lagging a bit in the last month or so, and you may find yourself wondering "Why? WHY?!?"
I know I have...
But besides that: Why?
I'm still doing the Short Stories Challenge Practical, even though it needs a better name. I'm just doing that thing where you write a story and set it aside and read it after having written the next story. Also, whenever a story seems like a good fit for Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I send it to them. That messes up the flow of the challenge until I build up a backlog for a weekly release. This doesn't count as an excuse, that's just Sustainable Planning.
Overall, though, my mighty word output powers are at an ebb, and that's because I'm having to spend my short term stabilizing my medium term to ensure my long term. Understand? Probably. It's not that hard a concept, but I'll expand anyways.
I mean, who eats just one grape?
Short Term
is where writers write short stories.
My short term, that is: my day to day, has recently been spent in meetings with people and introspection of myself to obtain a stable medium term. My crazy jungle lifestyle needs to be extended somehow, but expanded so that it can fit all the stuff I need to accomplish. With that much on my plate, as it were, there's only enough time for a quick snack of grapes. Which is my metaphor for writing short stories. Books are more valuable, but, fortunately, writing short stories is easy, once you've practiced.
TM
Medium Term
is where writers write books.
A book is a banana. Yes, that is a f*cking amazing metaphor, which I hereby copyright for all time. The medium term is what you get when you've spent enough short term time setting up a stable future. I'm looking for one or two years here, and to get one or two years of stability, I've found that I need to spend one or two months on prep. Once I've got those years, though, I can output like a BEAST. A banana-beast. Some sort of orangutan or typing monkey. Which is another metaphor, although it is in the public domain. Still, at the constant rate of three-four books a year, we're rolling through dynamite.
Pictured: Stupid Metaphor
Long Term
is where writers have written a lot of books
Long-term is what you get when you've got a big bunch of bananas. In this metaphor, bananas don't spoil. Maybe they're plastic bananas. In any case, a big pile of books is like a bunch of bananas that never spoil. They can hang out on that banana hook in the kitchen while you get on with the cooking. In this metaphor, cooking is writing. This is the five year plan: After five years I'll be a full-time writer, only writing, producing at least four books a year, plus short stories like unto the stars in the sky. Which, of course, means stars are grapes? Wait, that can't be right...
The point is, your long term is where you have achieved stability on your own, not based on other people. The kind of stability that rich folk were born with, but without being a jackass. I shall be a jackass for entirely different reasons, because it is the duty of every successful author to develop a couple oddball opinions so he gets in the newspaper every once in a while. I'm looking forward to it.
So, to review...you use your short term to find your medium term, and, if you play your cards right, your long term finds you.
-daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
I know I have...
But besides that: Why?
I'm still doing the Short Stories Challenge Practical, even though it needs a better name. I'm just doing that thing where you write a story and set it aside and read it after having written the next story. Also, whenever a story seems like a good fit for Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I send it to them. That messes up the flow of the challenge until I build up a backlog for a weekly release. This doesn't count as an excuse, that's just Sustainable Planning.
Overall, though, my mighty word output powers are at an ebb, and that's because I'm having to spend my short term stabilizing my medium term to ensure my long term. Understand? Probably. It's not that hard a concept, but I'll expand anyways.
I mean, who eats just one grape?
Short Term
is where writers write short stories.
My short term, that is: my day to day, has recently been spent in meetings with people and introspection of myself to obtain a stable medium term. My crazy jungle lifestyle needs to be extended somehow, but expanded so that it can fit all the stuff I need to accomplish. With that much on my plate, as it were, there's only enough time for a quick snack of grapes. Which is my metaphor for writing short stories. Books are more valuable, but, fortunately, writing short stories is easy, once you've practiced.
TM
Medium Term
is where writers write books.
A book is a banana. Yes, that is a f*cking amazing metaphor, which I hereby copyright for all time. The medium term is what you get when you've spent enough short term time setting up a stable future. I'm looking for one or two years here, and to get one or two years of stability, I've found that I need to spend one or two months on prep. Once I've got those years, though, I can output like a BEAST. A banana-beast. Some sort of orangutan or typing monkey. Which is another metaphor, although it is in the public domain. Still, at the constant rate of three-four books a year, we're rolling through dynamite.
Pictured: Stupid Metaphor
Long Term
is where writers have written a lot of books
Long-term is what you get when you've got a big bunch of bananas. In this metaphor, bananas don't spoil. Maybe they're plastic bananas. In any case, a big pile of books is like a bunch of bananas that never spoil. They can hang out on that banana hook in the kitchen while you get on with the cooking. In this metaphor, cooking is writing. This is the five year plan: After five years I'll be a full-time writer, only writing, producing at least four books a year, plus short stories like unto the stars in the sky. Which, of course, means stars are grapes? Wait, that can't be right...
The point is, your long term is where you have achieved stability on your own, not based on other people. The kind of stability that rich folk were born with, but without being a jackass. I shall be a jackass for entirely different reasons, because it is the duty of every successful author to develop a couple oddball opinions so he gets in the newspaper every once in a while. I'm looking forward to it.
So, to review...you use your short term to find your medium term, and, if you play your cards right, your long term finds you.
-daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
November 1, 2011
Small Publishing: Computer
As H2NH Publishing expands, it needs a publishing platform. I do all my writing on an Asus EeePC netbook with Ubuntu using FocusWriter. I have Windows XP on the other partition, and it is from there that I do all the publishing, using Microsoft Office 2007 and GIMP, etc. I can theoretically do it all in Ubuntu, but I like Word better than LibreOffice. You can see the (mostly) current H2NH publishing workflow here.
But, as I move up the publishing ladder and contemplate going into POD, that's just getting ridiculous. It's a 10" screen, and you can't layout a book on a 10" screen. Not to mention that InDesign cannot actually run on my netbook without waiting a minute between each click. Horrifying. I need my eyes to read with, people. So, H2NH is currently in the medium-term planning for a Business computer. I'm OS agnostic, with some reservations, and I need the lifecycle to be at least five years. (I buy a netbook every two years and give the old one to a deserving case.) So, let's get into the nitty-gritty with a number:
Budget: $4500-$5000 (read: ~$1000/year)
Makes for three options. I'll put them in rough order of convenience:
[image error]
Option 1: iMac
Software - ~$1,500
Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 - $120
Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard - $1,300
Hardware - ~$3,000
iMac 27" with a solid state hard drive, and upgraded RAM.
Thoughts -
This has the advantage of being incredibly easy to lug around a jungle, and it doesn't take up a lot of space. The disadvantage is that there's no Apple Store or anything, and I'd prefer to support my own damn self anyways. STILL, it's pretty, well-designed, and runs cool in my tropical existence. Software-wise, I'd have InDesign and Word and everything would just work. If it didn't, I could just reinstall from a base image. The main disadvantage is that I'd have to use Mac OS. If you can't dick around with your computer, what's the point of even having one?
Option 2: Built PC running Windows
Software - ~$1,800
Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 - $200
Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard - $1,300
Windows 7 Ultimate - $320
Hardware - ~$3,000
A veritable beast of a machine, acquired of Newegg and assembled by myself - $2,000-$2,500
Display (touch-screen) - $500-$1000
Thoughts -
First off, yes: $320. Are you f*ckin' kidding me? I have a philosophical objection to paying that much for a mere operating system. Esp. one that isn't all that great. But, the advantage of a massive touch-screen makes this a viable option. Also, my hardware budget will go much farther than with Apple, so I could load this thing down with RAM and a sexy video card, and still have cash left over for a great display. The added benefit of knowing exactly where every component came from can't hurt for purposes of providing my own support, not to mention a robust cooling system for use in my tropical paradise. Put it all together and I'd have a beast. A sexy, sexy beast. Still...Windows...urgh.
Option 3, AKA the 'free option': Built PC running GNU/Linux
Software - $0
LibreOffice - Free
GIMP - Free
Scribus - Free
Ubuntu, some flavor thereof, or some other build entirely.
Hardware $2,500
A veritable beast of a machine, acquired of Newegg and assembled by myself - $2,000
Display - $500
Thoughts -
If I were daring enough to go free software for this publishing adventure, this is what I'd do. It'd be the same machine as above, but without the fancy touch-screen. It'd run fast, smooth, and delicious. Like a penguin-flavored ice cream. The problem is that Scribus isn't InDesign, and LibreOffice isn't Word. Yet? I'm sure I could make it work, but do I want to?
So...yeah. At some point I'll just flip a coin. What do you use, small publishers?
-daB
feel free to comment
Available Stories
But, as I move up the publishing ladder and contemplate going into POD, that's just getting ridiculous. It's a 10" screen, and you can't layout a book on a 10" screen. Not to mention that InDesign cannot actually run on my netbook without waiting a minute between each click. Horrifying. I need my eyes to read with, people. So, H2NH is currently in the medium-term planning for a Business computer. I'm OS agnostic, with some reservations, and I need the lifecycle to be at least five years. (I buy a netbook every two years and give the old one to a deserving case.) So, let's get into the nitty-gritty with a number:
Budget: $4500-$5000 (read: ~$1000/year)
Makes for three options. I'll put them in rough order of convenience:
[image error]
Option 1: iMac
Software - ~$1,500
Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 - $120
Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard - $1,300
Hardware - ~$3,000
iMac 27" with a solid state hard drive, and upgraded RAM.
Thoughts -
This has the advantage of being incredibly easy to lug around a jungle, and it doesn't take up a lot of space. The disadvantage is that there's no Apple Store or anything, and I'd prefer to support my own damn self anyways. STILL, it's pretty, well-designed, and runs cool in my tropical existence. Software-wise, I'd have InDesign and Word and everything would just work. If it didn't, I could just reinstall from a base image. The main disadvantage is that I'd have to use Mac OS. If you can't dick around with your computer, what's the point of even having one?
Option 2: Built PC running Windows
Software - ~$1,800
Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 - $200
Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard - $1,300
Windows 7 Ultimate - $320
Hardware - ~$3,000
A veritable beast of a machine, acquired of Newegg and assembled by myself - $2,000-$2,500
Display (touch-screen) - $500-$1000
Thoughts -
First off, yes: $320. Are you f*ckin' kidding me? I have a philosophical objection to paying that much for a mere operating system. Esp. one that isn't all that great. But, the advantage of a massive touch-screen makes this a viable option. Also, my hardware budget will go much farther than with Apple, so I could load this thing down with RAM and a sexy video card, and still have cash left over for a great display. The added benefit of knowing exactly where every component came from can't hurt for purposes of providing my own support, not to mention a robust cooling system for use in my tropical paradise. Put it all together and I'd have a beast. A sexy, sexy beast. Still...Windows...urgh.
Option 3, AKA the 'free option': Built PC running GNU/Linux
Software - $0
LibreOffice - Free
GIMP - Free
Scribus - Free
Ubuntu, some flavor thereof, or some other build entirely.
Hardware $2,500
A veritable beast of a machine, acquired of Newegg and assembled by myself - $2,000
Display - $500
Thoughts -
If I were daring enough to go free software for this publishing adventure, this is what I'd do. It'd be the same machine as above, but without the fancy touch-screen. It'd run fast, smooth, and delicious. Like a penguin-flavored ice cream. The problem is that Scribus isn't InDesign, and LibreOffice isn't Word. Yet? I'm sure I could make it work, but do I want to?
So...yeah. At some point I'll just flip a coin. What do you use, small publishers?
-daB
feel free to comment
Available Stories
October 31, 2011
Lazy Writer Eats: Delicious Salad
What am I up to today? Eating Delicious Salad! As everybody knows, vegetables are brain food. And the working writer needs all the help he can get. (Isn't fish brain food?) Shut up.
What you'll get.
Delicious!
What you'll need. Fresh
Egg, ver' expensive due to flooding. (Chickens can't swim, I guess.) Hardboiled.
Cabbage. Remember, if there are worms on it, you know it's organic.
Onion. Lots of onion.
Corn, steamed, shucked.
Red beans, for protein.
Some weird meat substitute thing you found in the market. It's taro!
Red onion, for color.
Tomato, which is actually a berry. Supreme Court said so.
Exploded rice. I don't know the real term, but it's for texture.
Cucumber. Because why not?
A bowl, preferably one of the cool ceramic ones.
Salad dressing (not pictured), not too sweet.
A fork.
A girlfriend, for steps three and six.
Step 1. Assemble the ingredients
Step 2. Cut them up as per custom. Steam the corn, hard boil the egg.
Step 3. SEX, possibly some booze
Step 4. Place all ingredients in bowl.
Step 5. Salad dressing, to taste.
Step 6. Eat, talk about your feelings.
Total cost per bowl: ~฿25. That is, less than a can of beer.
Lazy Writer Eats series...
Lazy Writer Cooks: Boiled Chicken
Lazy Writer Cooks: Cup Mama
Lazy Writer Drinks: Thaiball
The First 200 Days, i.e the exciting saga of two-hundred straight days of blogging and learning about writing, is available at Amazon.com. It should, by now, be free. If not, find it free for all formats on Smashwords, and do me a favor and click the 'Tell us about a lower price' link on Amazon to speed up the process. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll read a blog. Also, there is business drama. It's like Moneyball without the editing. Also, no baseball.
More exciting blurb: The First 200 Days (200th post)
What food do you make?
daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
What you'll get.
Delicious!
What you'll need. Fresh
Egg, ver' expensive due to flooding. (Chickens can't swim, I guess.) Hardboiled.
Cabbage. Remember, if there are worms on it, you know it's organic.
Onion. Lots of onion.
Corn, steamed, shucked.
Red beans, for protein.
Some weird meat substitute thing you found in the market. It's taro!
Red onion, for color.
Tomato, which is actually a berry. Supreme Court said so.
Exploded rice. I don't know the real term, but it's for texture.
Cucumber. Because why not?
A bowl, preferably one of the cool ceramic ones.
Salad dressing (not pictured), not too sweet.
A fork.
A girlfriend, for steps three and six.
Step 1. Assemble the ingredients
Step 2. Cut them up as per custom. Steam the corn, hard boil the egg.
Step 3. SEX, possibly some booze
Step 4. Place all ingredients in bowl.
Step 5. Salad dressing, to taste.
Step 6. Eat, talk about your feelings.
Total cost per bowl: ~฿25. That is, less than a can of beer.
Lazy Writer Eats series...
Lazy Writer Cooks: Boiled Chicken
Lazy Writer Cooks: Cup Mama
Lazy Writer Drinks: Thaiball
The First 200 Days, i.e the exciting saga of two-hundred straight days of blogging and learning about writing, is available at Amazon.com. It should, by now, be free. If not, find it free for all formats on Smashwords, and do me a favor and click the 'Tell us about a lower price' link on Amazon to speed up the process. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll read a blog. Also, there is business drama. It's like Moneyball without the editing. Also, no baseball.
More exciting blurb: The First 200 Days (200th post)
What food do you make?
daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
October 26, 2011
Short Stories Challenge Practical
This was going to be a quick addendum to my Business: Short Stories article, but it snowballed. Think of that article as the 'Theory' and this one as the 'Practical'. Apply it to your life, if you dare.
Will this happen? Probably.
To summarize the previous article, I laid out why I wasn't going to sell individual short stories anymore, based on the Amazon 35% Royalty on $0.99 vs. the 70% Royalty on $2.99. That point still stands so far as I'm concerned, but I left out a few nuances, craft and business.
Craft: I Like Finishing Things
Short stories get the creative juices flowing. Using scientific tracking methods, I've found that my word count per day on books increases if I've written and completed a short story in the near past. And I've also got a new short story to sell for everybody to admire, which is nothing to be sneezed at. I suspect I just like finishing things, and so when I do it gets the adrenaline up, but there's also the Middle of books to be considered. That's the most dangerous part, creatively (that is, where I tend to get bored and try to start a new book unless I chain myself to the text document)...and taking a little break to write and finish a short story reenergizes the mind.
Business: Smashwords
My standard complaint about Smashwords is it makes my books look ugly, but it's still a good place to sell short stories. There's not that much formatting in a short story to mess up or for Meatgrinder to mangle, and Smashwords sends them all over the place and pays somewhere around 50% royalty. I've had especially good success selling short stories on Kobo via Smashwords, so I think it's a good idea to use it as my 'short story distributer'. This meshes well with the Theory article, because Smashwords makes it incredibly easy to make a story Free, whether via price control or via coupon. As we speak, Smashwords' sales tracking is improving, and I suspect at some point soon they'll work out the deal with Amazon. If I can just upload a short story DOC made from a template and watch the cash flow in from five to ten markets every quarter...well, I'd say Smashwords has earned its 10%.
Short Stories Challenge
For business and craft reasons it's desirable that I write and finish a short story on a regular basis. Well and good. Dean Wesley Smith declared a fancy challenge with a One Year time limit and everything, but it's already October, and I'm too lazy to wait until January to officially challenge myself. I'll just ask how often is the optimal regular basis? Science Says: every weekend.
So, every weekend I'll write a short story. Start on Saturday, finish by Sunday. Stick it up on Smashwords for free until the next story goes live, after which it'll be a buck everywhere fine eBooks are sold (once it's gone through the Meatgrinder). I'll even do a little blog post about it, whynot? I'll do this for five years, give or take. Probably.
I'll write books on weekdays.
Story Covers
I'd rather make my own cover than buy some 'generic art', but because this is a short story challenge, not a crappy-slappy cover art challenge, I made a template for my short story cover art. Remember, I'm lazy.
So lazy...
That should do it. Big author name, big title, an inconspicuous number, a logo, and clearly labelled "Short Story" so nobody can possibly be confused. As noted in the previous article, I'll spend the big bucks on the collection covers, but whatsay for a popular short story? If it comes down to it, I've one idea that may or may not be reasonable.
Sketch Covers
I provide a two-sentence cover description, give an artist $50 to sketch it, add the title and author name and save it as a 600x800 jpg. I'd expect the total working time to be about an hour, so I wouldn't expect it to be fine art or done to a deadline. Just a quick art project between big jobs, wham-bam-done: fifty bucks later, I've got a short story cover. Fair? Sounds fair.
Heck if I know, I'm making this up as I go.
-daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
Will this happen? Probably.
To summarize the previous article, I laid out why I wasn't going to sell individual short stories anymore, based on the Amazon 35% Royalty on $0.99 vs. the 70% Royalty on $2.99. That point still stands so far as I'm concerned, but I left out a few nuances, craft and business.
Craft: I Like Finishing Things
Short stories get the creative juices flowing. Using scientific tracking methods, I've found that my word count per day on books increases if I've written and completed a short story in the near past. And I've also got a new short story to sell for everybody to admire, which is nothing to be sneezed at. I suspect I just like finishing things, and so when I do it gets the adrenaline up, but there's also the Middle of books to be considered. That's the most dangerous part, creatively (that is, where I tend to get bored and try to start a new book unless I chain myself to the text document)...and taking a little break to write and finish a short story reenergizes the mind.
Business: Smashwords
My standard complaint about Smashwords is it makes my books look ugly, but it's still a good place to sell short stories. There's not that much formatting in a short story to mess up or for Meatgrinder to mangle, and Smashwords sends them all over the place and pays somewhere around 50% royalty. I've had especially good success selling short stories on Kobo via Smashwords, so I think it's a good idea to use it as my 'short story distributer'. This meshes well with the Theory article, because Smashwords makes it incredibly easy to make a story Free, whether via price control or via coupon. As we speak, Smashwords' sales tracking is improving, and I suspect at some point soon they'll work out the deal with Amazon. If I can just upload a short story DOC made from a template and watch the cash flow in from five to ten markets every quarter...well, I'd say Smashwords has earned its 10%.
Short Stories Challenge
For business and craft reasons it's desirable that I write and finish a short story on a regular basis. Well and good. Dean Wesley Smith declared a fancy challenge with a One Year time limit and everything, but it's already October, and I'm too lazy to wait until January to officially challenge myself. I'll just ask how often is the optimal regular basis? Science Says: every weekend.
So, every weekend I'll write a short story. Start on Saturday, finish by Sunday. Stick it up on Smashwords for free until the next story goes live, after which it'll be a buck everywhere fine eBooks are sold (once it's gone through the Meatgrinder). I'll even do a little blog post about it, whynot? I'll do this for five years, give or take. Probably.
I'll write books on weekdays.
Story Covers
I'd rather make my own cover than buy some 'generic art', but because this is a short story challenge, not a crappy-slappy cover art challenge, I made a template for my short story cover art. Remember, I'm lazy.
So lazy...
That should do it. Big author name, big title, an inconspicuous number, a logo, and clearly labelled "Short Story" so nobody can possibly be confused. As noted in the previous article, I'll spend the big bucks on the collection covers, but whatsay for a popular short story? If it comes down to it, I've one idea that may or may not be reasonable.
Sketch Covers
I provide a two-sentence cover description, give an artist $50 to sketch it, add the title and author name and save it as a 600x800 jpg. I'd expect the total working time to be about an hour, so I wouldn't expect it to be fine art or done to a deadline. Just a quick art project between big jobs, wham-bam-done: fifty bucks later, I've got a short story cover. Fair? Sounds fair.
Heck if I know, I'm making this up as I go.
-daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
October 23, 2011
Writing: Stability
You can't spell 'stability' without 'ability'. You can't spell 'stability' without 'stab'. I have now linked political science and linguistics. Nobel Prize, please.
Thank you for your contribution, Mr. Barron. Here is a pile of rocks.
In this article, I intend to make a lot of sweeping statements based solely on personal experience. Since I've been doing that for almost three hundred posts, regular readers won't notice any difference and new readers will be amazed at my sexy confidence. And possibly aroused.
Eh, that'll happen.
In my professional quest to write great fiction as fast as possible using SCIENCE!, I've come to a few conclusions: avoid booze, set a timer, read a lot, have goals, don't write horny, drink plenty of water, exercise indoors, write stories not words, books are long stories...
Just Write.
Put that all together, and you should get at least two thousand words a day. "Duh," someone asks, while picking their nose: "How can I, a known moron, put that all together?" Well, my aggressively dim questioner, the key is stability. "How stability?" you ask, to which I reply: "Shut up and let me answer."
My considerable research into the lives of men and Creatives has yielded four 'types':
Unstable Unhappy
Creative: Not Very Prolific
Everybody is born this way, but most people grow out of it. Often leads to brilliant one novel careers (or a small collection of disturbing short stories), followed by despair and/or death. If you find yourself here, get angry and get help. I've never been here longer than a couple weeks because I'm too impatient with misery and have friends who notice shit. Good work, friends!
Stable Unhappy
Creative: Very Prolific
This is the most common state for the working professional. He's bundled all his neuroses into a ball of creative energy. Possibly self-medicating with booze, etc. Not very healthy, but, then again, neither is working in an office...so it balances out and pays the bills. Since he doesn't have a girlfriend or money in the bank, he has plenty of time to engage in a free, fun activity: Writing. Can spiral down to Unstable Unhappy if there's a lack of friends due to isolation. Keep those friends!
Unstable Happy
Creative: Less Prolific
This is often what happens when the Creative suddenly gets a lot of money or a girlfriend. Or, I suppose, both. It throws off his routine, and thus his writing output. He still has a billion ideas, though. Which, annoyingly, doesn't help. It just makes him feel like he's falling behind in the great game of life. ...but at the same time, he's not. He's actually rather happy. See? Unstable. This is where I am.
Stable Happy
Creative: More Prolific
The elusive ideal. Once the Creative gets used to being happy, he starts exercising and eating right, gets off the self-medication, and grabs the tiger of life by the tail and hangs on. And once you've got a tiger, you need not fear the darkness.
My conclusion, then, is that, for busy Creatives (such as myself), stability is more to be preferred than happiness. Although if you can get them both, good on you.
So how to get them both? Well, you're in luck, because I have created the David Barron Stability Scheme(tm) just for me! And you can use it too! What time is it?
It's Money Love Time!(tm)
Please consult this handy 3-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system (Fig.1)!
Fig. 1: Money Love Time
x is Time, y is Money, and z is Love, and I've programmed in the types for your convenience. Find your type on it, and then see what you need to get in order to improve. Got no money? Get a damn job! Got no love? Get a girl! Haven't had either long enough to get used to it? WAIT!
...and write.
-daB
feel free to comment
Available Stories
[image error]
Thank you for your contribution, Mr. Barron. Here is a pile of rocks.
In this article, I intend to make a lot of sweeping statements based solely on personal experience. Since I've been doing that for almost three hundred posts, regular readers won't notice any difference and new readers will be amazed at my sexy confidence. And possibly aroused.
Eh, that'll happen.
In my professional quest to write great fiction as fast as possible using SCIENCE!, I've come to a few conclusions: avoid booze, set a timer, read a lot, have goals, don't write horny, drink plenty of water, exercise indoors, write stories not words, books are long stories...
Just Write.
Put that all together, and you should get at least two thousand words a day. "Duh," someone asks, while picking their nose: "How can I, a known moron, put that all together?" Well, my aggressively dim questioner, the key is stability. "How stability?" you ask, to which I reply: "Shut up and let me answer."
My considerable research into the lives of men and Creatives has yielded four 'types':
Unstable Unhappy
Creative: Not Very Prolific
Everybody is born this way, but most people grow out of it. Often leads to brilliant one novel careers (or a small collection of disturbing short stories), followed by despair and/or death. If you find yourself here, get angry and get help. I've never been here longer than a couple weeks because I'm too impatient with misery and have friends who notice shit. Good work, friends!
Stable Unhappy
Creative: Very Prolific
This is the most common state for the working professional. He's bundled all his neuroses into a ball of creative energy. Possibly self-medicating with booze, etc. Not very healthy, but, then again, neither is working in an office...so it balances out and pays the bills. Since he doesn't have a girlfriend or money in the bank, he has plenty of time to engage in a free, fun activity: Writing. Can spiral down to Unstable Unhappy if there's a lack of friends due to isolation. Keep those friends!
Unstable Happy
Creative: Less Prolific
This is often what happens when the Creative suddenly gets a lot of money or a girlfriend. Or, I suppose, both. It throws off his routine, and thus his writing output. He still has a billion ideas, though. Which, annoyingly, doesn't help. It just makes him feel like he's falling behind in the great game of life. ...but at the same time, he's not. He's actually rather happy. See? Unstable. This is where I am.
Stable Happy
Creative: More Prolific
The elusive ideal. Once the Creative gets used to being happy, he starts exercising and eating right, gets off the self-medication, and grabs the tiger of life by the tail and hangs on. And once you've got a tiger, you need not fear the darkness.
My conclusion, then, is that, for busy Creatives (such as myself), stability is more to be preferred than happiness. Although if you can get them both, good on you.
So how to get them both? Well, you're in luck, because I have created the David Barron Stability Scheme(tm) just for me! And you can use it too! What time is it?
It's Money Love Time!(tm)
Please consult this handy 3-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system (Fig.1)!
Fig. 1: Money Love Time
x is Time, y is Money, and z is Love, and I've programmed in the types for your convenience. Find your type on it, and then see what you need to get in order to improve. Got no money? Get a damn job! Got no love? Get a girl! Haven't had either long enough to get used to it? WAIT!
...and write.
-daB
feel free to comment
Available Stories
[image error]
October 16, 2011
Business: Short Stories
Executive Summary: I'm not selling short story singles as
eBooks anymore. To avoid 'juggling too many sea-shells', all my eBooks will be
priced between $2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion.
1500 words. (Yeah, I just HBR'd your collective asses. feel free to comment,
bitches.).
Since this is a reversal of my previous sexy business plan, "The Short Story Octopus", I'll deploy some arguments to support my new, sexier
conclusion. Since this is a business article, most of them will be made with my
publishing hat on, but there're a few more drawn from other hats. There may be
pictures. Also, I wish I could come up with an equally awesome nautical name,
but I've already rejected "Big Mussel Barnacles" for sounding too ocean-porny,
and my morale is low.
Publishing
Background: Amazon pays a 35% royalty on eBooks priced
between $0.99 and $200 sold throughout the world, but pays a 70% royalty on
eBooks priced between $2.99 to $9.99 sold via Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon
DE, Amazon FR (and more coming).
The best price for an individual short story is $0.99 (yaknow, like music).
Short stories do, indeed, sell. Great! But...
$0.99 @ 35% Royalty = Lame
Everything else in this article is going to build on a
"juggling too many sea-shells" metaphor (and not just because it fits the
ocean-porny theme.) Every story is a sea-shell, because every sea-shell is
different...but most people would rather have one great sea-shell on their
mantle than a big pile of good sea-shells. It's more organized! Likewise, a
savvy sea-shell seller's shelves (say it out loud!) should be filled with those
sea-shells that can be sold for the most. Selling ten one dollar sea-shells to
get a quarter is not as good as selling a three dollar seashell to get two
bucks, because you have to spend about the same amount of time fiddling with
the one dollar sea-shells as you do with the three dollar (or the five dollar
or the seven dollar or the ten dollar) sea-shells.
I'd rather sell a collection of ten short stories at 70% than
10 single short stories at 35%. Thirty-five cents is lame, esp. when I have to
track it (and promote it, and manage it, and, even more basic, remember it.) It's
just better business: The official H2NH price point is "one dollar per ten
thousand words plus a buck". The $1 per 10k is to get the $100/hour I, the
publisher, pay myself, the writer, while the extra buck is to pay for the
formatting and cover art, whether it's me doing it or somebody else. I can
calculate how many books I'd have to sell to cover those expenses, after which
it's all profit. 'Getting to Profit'--to bust out the HBR lingo again--takes
significantly less time when I, the publisher, am getting 70% of every sale. Under
the current Amazon-style royalty system, I'll not price any eBook below $2.99
or above $9.99 again.
A few extra publishing arguments, to let me expand on the
'plus a buck' a bit:
Sexy eBook Formatting
Good formatting takes time, but, if you follow the H2NH
workflow (and/or Paul Salvette's excellent guide) it doesn't really take all
that much more time to do a full book or collection than it does a single short
story. You have to make a more robust table of contents, and scroll through
longer checking that nothing mysteriously broke in the converted files, but
that's about it. I would say two hours, maximum, if you're comfortable with your
workflow. Average it as an hour, because any less and you probably didn't do
enough checking. (No need to rush, it'll be on the Internet forever.) Since I'm
almost certainly doing it myself, I bill myself, publisher, for two hours and
pay myself about a dime per sale from the 'plus a buck'.
I Like Cover Art
It's not professional cover art unless it has characters
from the book on it, and H2NH is still seeking professionals, but, as usual, I
assume 'professional rate' is $100/hour. Later on, especially for print books,
I'll need a professional to do my cover art. Something around fifty cents of
that 'plus a buck' will go to that end, and it's obvious that a collection of
short stories is a more cost-effective use of a professional cover artist than
a single story.
For the moment, though, I make my own cover art, and I like
it, I enjoy it, and it gets the job done. Some of it is even artsy, and it only
takes me about an hour, even counting taking the pictures. So, until I fire
myself as cover artist, prepare for such masterpieces as
*almost definitely not by David Barron
Writing
So much for business. Let's talk about me!
WWdaB...er...D?
It doesn't really flow as an acronym, but what would I do? I've
only bought two individual short stories ever, The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke by Lawrence Block
and Ur by Stephen King (which, I suppose, is technically a novella...). On the other hand, I've brought a whole bunch of anthologies,
fiction magazines, and collections. I prefer to have a whole bunch of short
stories all in one place, so that I can skip around. In my reading experience,
there're always a couple lame (by which I mean, of course, 'not to my taste at
that time', not 'sucky') stories in any grouping, and buying only one story is
an annoying risk of that experience. Anyways, it's more organized, I don't want
to deal with lots of files on my eBook reading device, and it's easier to
recommend a collection than to recommend a single short story. So...daB would
buy a daB collection.
I'm Prolific
I write a fair amount of stories, as you may know. I've
somewhere around fifty stories for 2011, and I'll probably get about ten more
out in between all these books I should be writing. Some of them are wandering
around the pro markets, and the rest are selling on Amazon. Because I don't
remember most of them (for the simple reason that I'm always writing the next
one), I've completely lost track of them. Just picture what it'll be like if I
had eight-hundred short stories, like certain long-time writers. And I use
'will', because it's just a matter of time. (I write a lot now, and I'm not a
full-time writer yet.) So, you know what? For my sanity, I'm only doing
collections:
Science Fiction A Future Darkly
Fantasy To Another Shore
The Language of Ice Cubes (i.e. 'the Alan stories')
Undoubtedly, I'll do various 'themed' collections (yaknow,
like music albums) and, soon enough, I'll put together a big 'super-collection':
Science Fantasy Romance
which will be fifty or so stories (including some of the
ones in A Future Darkly and To Another Shore, but obviously not the Alan
stories). It'll be fun? It's my super-genre, it's awesome, it'll be a nice
thick print book, and, bonus, I'll never have to think of another super-collection
name again: My next fifty stories will go into "Science Fantasy Romance II".
Just consult the Wikipedia Roman numerals page for each fifty stories after
that.
Synergy
Let's stick both sides together and see what it looks like!
We could call this part "Promotion", I guess, but we're doing it Harvard
Business Review-style this time. It's a theme, and you have to respect themes
or what, really, is the point?
Pro Sales!
Let's face it, it's just a lot more fun to submit stuff to
fiction magazines than to put it up on Amazon.. I love rejection letters (not
that I bother to read them), because it means I can send the story
somewhere else, and when a story is accepted, they give you money and you get
to write an About the Author blurb and everybody visits your website and buys
one or all of your many books. Then, after that run's done, you can put the
story in a collection. Really, there's no downside.
I regularly read, often submit to, and have been rejected repeatedly
by pretty much every fiction magazine that pays pro rates (according to
Duotropes), but the only magazine I'm absolutely obsessed with being in is Beneath
Ceaseless Skies. Sorry, all others: it's focused!
Free is Fun
All that said, I think short stories make great promotions.
They're craft pieces, showing off my awesome writing in a convenient, no-hassle
package. Leaving aside the argument against free (hypothesis: many download,
few read), I think it's a good strategy, as well as just being fun. I recently
made my steampunk short story "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher" free on Amazon,
and, last I checked, more than two-thousand people have picked it up. Since it
doesn't suck, I like to think that'll lead to sales in the long run. I figure
if I make one short story free for each collection, and put links to every
other H2NH book and collection in the back of the free eBook, it's as good a
promotion as any. Or, at least, incredibly low-maintenance.
Which is just as good for the busy publisher.
Sexy Conclusion
I'm not selling short story singles as eBooks anymore. To
avoid 'juggling too many sea-shells', all my eBooks will be priced between
$2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion.
-daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
eBooks anymore. To avoid 'juggling too many sea-shells', all my eBooks will be
priced between $2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion.
1500 words. (Yeah, I just HBR'd your collective asses. feel free to comment,
bitches.).
Since this is a reversal of my previous sexy business plan, "The Short Story Octopus", I'll deploy some arguments to support my new, sexier
conclusion. Since this is a business article, most of them will be made with my
publishing hat on, but there're a few more drawn from other hats. There may be
pictures. Also, I wish I could come up with an equally awesome nautical name,
but I've already rejected "Big Mussel Barnacles" for sounding too ocean-porny,
and my morale is low.
Publishing
Background: Amazon pays a 35% royalty on eBooks priced
between $0.99 and $200 sold throughout the world, but pays a 70% royalty on
eBooks priced between $2.99 to $9.99 sold via Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon
DE, Amazon FR (and more coming).
The best price for an individual short story is $0.99 (yaknow, like music).
Short stories do, indeed, sell. Great! But...
$0.99 @ 35% Royalty = Lame
Everything else in this article is going to build on a
"juggling too many sea-shells" metaphor (and not just because it fits the
ocean-porny theme.) Every story is a sea-shell, because every sea-shell is
different...but most people would rather have one great sea-shell on their
mantle than a big pile of good sea-shells. It's more organized! Likewise, a
savvy sea-shell seller's shelves (say it out loud!) should be filled with those
sea-shells that can be sold for the most. Selling ten one dollar sea-shells to
get a quarter is not as good as selling a three dollar seashell to get two
bucks, because you have to spend about the same amount of time fiddling with
the one dollar sea-shells as you do with the three dollar (or the five dollar
or the seven dollar or the ten dollar) sea-shells.
I'd rather sell a collection of ten short stories at 70% than
10 single short stories at 35%. Thirty-five cents is lame, esp. when I have to
track it (and promote it, and manage it, and, even more basic, remember it.) It's
just better business: The official H2NH price point is "one dollar per ten
thousand words plus a buck". The $1 per 10k is to get the $100/hour I, the
publisher, pay myself, the writer, while the extra buck is to pay for the
formatting and cover art, whether it's me doing it or somebody else. I can
calculate how many books I'd have to sell to cover those expenses, after which
it's all profit. 'Getting to Profit'--to bust out the HBR lingo again--takes
significantly less time when I, the publisher, am getting 70% of every sale. Under
the current Amazon-style royalty system, I'll not price any eBook below $2.99
or above $9.99 again.
A few extra publishing arguments, to let me expand on the
'plus a buck' a bit:
Sexy eBook Formatting
Good formatting takes time, but, if you follow the H2NH
workflow (and/or Paul Salvette's excellent guide) it doesn't really take all
that much more time to do a full book or collection than it does a single short
story. You have to make a more robust table of contents, and scroll through
longer checking that nothing mysteriously broke in the converted files, but
that's about it. I would say two hours, maximum, if you're comfortable with your
workflow. Average it as an hour, because any less and you probably didn't do
enough checking. (No need to rush, it'll be on the Internet forever.) Since I'm
almost certainly doing it myself, I bill myself, publisher, for two hours and
pay myself about a dime per sale from the 'plus a buck'.
I Like Cover Art
It's not professional cover art unless it has characters
from the book on it, and H2NH is still seeking professionals, but, as usual, I
assume 'professional rate' is $100/hour. Later on, especially for print books,
I'll need a professional to do my cover art. Something around fifty cents of
that 'plus a buck' will go to that end, and it's obvious that a collection of
short stories is a more cost-effective use of a professional cover artist than
a single story.
For the moment, though, I make my own cover art, and I like
it, I enjoy it, and it gets the job done. Some of it is even artsy, and it only
takes me about an hour, even counting taking the pictures. So, until I fire
myself as cover artist, prepare for such masterpieces as
*almost definitely not by David Barron
Writing
So much for business. Let's talk about me!
WWdaB...er...D?
It doesn't really flow as an acronym, but what would I do? I've
only bought two individual short stories ever, The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke by Lawrence Block
and Ur by Stephen King (which, I suppose, is technically a novella...). On the other hand, I've brought a whole bunch of anthologies,
fiction magazines, and collections. I prefer to have a whole bunch of short
stories all in one place, so that I can skip around. In my reading experience,
there're always a couple lame (by which I mean, of course, 'not to my taste at
that time', not 'sucky') stories in any grouping, and buying only one story is
an annoying risk of that experience. Anyways, it's more organized, I don't want
to deal with lots of files on my eBook reading device, and it's easier to
recommend a collection than to recommend a single short story. So...daB would
buy a daB collection.
I'm Prolific
I write a fair amount of stories, as you may know. I've
somewhere around fifty stories for 2011, and I'll probably get about ten more
out in between all these books I should be writing. Some of them are wandering
around the pro markets, and the rest are selling on Amazon. Because I don't
remember most of them (for the simple reason that I'm always writing the next
one), I've completely lost track of them. Just picture what it'll be like if I
had eight-hundred short stories, like certain long-time writers. And I use
'will', because it's just a matter of time. (I write a lot now, and I'm not a
full-time writer yet.) So, you know what? For my sanity, I'm only doing
collections:
Science Fiction A Future Darkly
Fantasy To Another Shore
The Language of Ice Cubes (i.e. 'the Alan stories')
Undoubtedly, I'll do various 'themed' collections (yaknow,
like music albums) and, soon enough, I'll put together a big 'super-collection':
Science Fantasy Romance
which will be fifty or so stories (including some of the
ones in A Future Darkly and To Another Shore, but obviously not the Alan
stories). It'll be fun? It's my super-genre, it's awesome, it'll be a nice
thick print book, and, bonus, I'll never have to think of another super-collection
name again: My next fifty stories will go into "Science Fantasy Romance II".
Just consult the Wikipedia Roman numerals page for each fifty stories after
that.
Synergy
Let's stick both sides together and see what it looks like!
We could call this part "Promotion", I guess, but we're doing it Harvard
Business Review-style this time. It's a theme, and you have to respect themes
or what, really, is the point?
Pro Sales!
Let's face it, it's just a lot more fun to submit stuff to
fiction magazines than to put it up on Amazon.. I love rejection letters (not
that I bother to read them), because it means I can send the story
somewhere else, and when a story is accepted, they give you money and you get
to write an About the Author blurb and everybody visits your website and buys
one or all of your many books. Then, after that run's done, you can put the
story in a collection. Really, there's no downside.
I regularly read, often submit to, and have been rejected repeatedly
by pretty much every fiction magazine that pays pro rates (according to
Duotropes), but the only magazine I'm absolutely obsessed with being in is Beneath
Ceaseless Skies. Sorry, all others: it's focused!
Free is Fun
All that said, I think short stories make great promotions.
They're craft pieces, showing off my awesome writing in a convenient, no-hassle
package. Leaving aside the argument against free (hypothesis: many download,
few read), I think it's a good strategy, as well as just being fun. I recently
made my steampunk short story "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher" free on Amazon,
and, last I checked, more than two-thousand people have picked it up. Since it
doesn't suck, I like to think that'll lead to sales in the long run. I figure
if I make one short story free for each collection, and put links to every
other H2NH book and collection in the back of the free eBook, it's as good a
promotion as any. Or, at least, incredibly low-maintenance.
Which is just as good for the busy publisher.
Sexy Conclusion
I'm not selling short story singles as eBooks anymore. To
avoid 'juggling too many sea-shells', all my eBooks will be priced between
$2.99 and $9.99, except for some free short stories for promotion.
-daB
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
October 7, 2011
Anniversary!
Today's my one-year anniversary with my sexy secretary!
pictured?
(she's not actually my secretary, guys, but she is sexy and...)
The first movie we saw as a couple was Secretary, which may or may not be indicative of our relationship. I'm not telling. (Probably not.) (I kinda talk like James Spader though?) It's still a good romantic comedy, so you should go see it. After that we saw Music and Lyrics. Let's call some mixture of those two our official couple movie, OK? (They talked too fast in The Thin Man and His Girl Friday.)
Our Song is "Wonderful Tonight" (Eric Clapton) ... the good version.
Our anniversary meal will be "Bla Lui Suan" (literal translation: Fish Invades a Garden), which is delicious fish covered in a spicy nut mixture and surrounded by vegetables. I'm always too hungry to take a picture of it when it's ordered, but it looks kinda like this:
Ours will be bigger (because we provide the fish), spicier, with more vegetables.
As an anniversary gift to me, I'm declaring myself "Offline-lite". This is also my gift to her, because I'm too focused and annoying without the Internet to distract me. I'm like a junkie, but with Flash. Also, where else am I going to get relationship advice from completely untrustworthy sources?
Thanks to all this stability, my health, my confidence, my writing (you know, that thing what this blog is about?), my finances...oh, c'mon! My entire life has improved for the better. Possibly there was some nagging involved, but that's OK.
I look forward to five or six more years of stable relationship bliss, at which point we will have a big fight about something or other and then get back together with a furious passion, our differences becoming our strengths and a best-selling novel of a writer's romance entitled "Make-Up". Followed by a romantic comedy on the big screen and successful television situation comedy. It will be more awesome than Mr. and Mrs. Smith and not a complete rip-off at all, nosir. (Add that to the Couple Movie mélange...)
Then happiness forever, et cetera, and the checks never stop coming in. What more stable a relationship could two ask?
I love you, lady.
feel free to comment
Available Stories
pictured?
(she's not actually my secretary, guys, but she is sexy and...)
The first movie we saw as a couple was Secretary, which may or may not be indicative of our relationship. I'm not telling. (Probably not.) (I kinda talk like James Spader though?) It's still a good romantic comedy, so you should go see it. After that we saw Music and Lyrics. Let's call some mixture of those two our official couple movie, OK? (They talked too fast in The Thin Man and His Girl Friday.)Our Song is "Wonderful Tonight" (Eric Clapton) ... the good version.
Our anniversary meal will be "Bla Lui Suan" (literal translation: Fish Invades a Garden), which is delicious fish covered in a spicy nut mixture and surrounded by vegetables. I'm always too hungry to take a picture of it when it's ordered, but it looks kinda like this:
Ours will be bigger (because we provide the fish), spicier, with more vegetables.
As an anniversary gift to me, I'm declaring myself "Offline-lite". This is also my gift to her, because I'm too focused and annoying without the Internet to distract me. I'm like a junkie, but with Flash. Also, where else am I going to get relationship advice from completely untrustworthy sources?
Thanks to all this stability, my health, my confidence, my writing (you know, that thing what this blog is about?), my finances...oh, c'mon! My entire life has improved for the better. Possibly there was some nagging involved, but that's OK.
I look forward to five or six more years of stable relationship bliss, at which point we will have a big fight about something or other and then get back together with a furious passion, our differences becoming our strengths and a best-selling novel of a writer's romance entitled "Make-Up". Followed by a romantic comedy on the big screen and successful television situation comedy. It will be more awesome than Mr. and Mrs. Smith and not a complete rip-off at all, nosir. (Add that to the Couple Movie mélange...)
Then happiness forever, et cetera, and the checks never stop coming in. What more stable a relationship could two ask?
I love you, lady.
feel free to comment
Available Stories
October 2, 2011
Offline Update
Shhh, I'm not really here... I'm searching for treasures on the OCEAN DEEP...
Amongst which are the mysterious Carolyn: my lost love...alas...
Since I'm 'orribly sick and can't write today, I thought I'd surface for a moment and note a few things, surprising and unsurprising. Then I'll disappear again, to reappear at a time that no man can ken. Or Halloween. I guess.
The Dark Tower
One of my goals over this offline time was to read Stephen King's The Dark Tower series from start-to-finish like the epic single book it was meant to be. (Also, I realized that I hadn't read any but the first two.) So, I've done that.. Being sick and flooded helped that process. Good stuff, it only took a week of constant reading. In case you care, I liked The Wolves of Calla best. I suggest you read them all, for a neat story and a true example of pure 'discovery writing'.
I take two writing lessons from it: (1) Don't be scared to write whatever pops into your head, and don't worry about it until it's finished. (2) These books are too long for the working professional. My "I don't write longer" pledge remains in force. I have a few epics in me, though, once I roll through my backlist. DON'T WORRY. (They'll be so freakin' awesome.)
Timpani the Ostrich Rancher
This is one of the surprising ones. Right as I was about to pull the plug on my Internet, I got the Amazon notification that my short story "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher" had finally been made Free!, as I'd requested a month ago. So, I--here I apologize in advance--set up a few 'scheduled tweets' and left it alone. Here it's the first and now I've checked my Amazon numbers, and a kerbillion people have downloaded it. So, that's neat. It's always good to see four digits where the first one isn't a lonely one.
It's one of my favorite stories, considering it's my only proper steampunk at the moment. There are a few more stories waiting to be set in that world ("flat Earth"), but they'll arrive when they do. Until then, if one of you could leave a review, I'd be most grateful. Oh, and I'd like to say that Patty Jansen's "Out of Here" collection (which seems to have went free at about the same time), is also quite good. Check out the rest of the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought for more gems!
Mr. Booze
One of the other goals of this offline time is laying off the booze. In this case beer. I don't have a drinking problem--please don't read denial into that--but it is the main source (by a wide margin) of utterly worthless calories. I love my liver and svelte figure more than I do periods of cheerful drunkenness (esp. when I should be working). Also, I don't want to get gout. That'd just be embarrassing.
Anyways, that's going fine, and there's a neat passage in one of The Dark Tower books that reinforces it. (you'll know it if you've read it) Good on you, Mr. King. And good on me.
Jillian Nice
wrote this: "Minute Macabre One (1)", or at least the three Horror shorts within it. It's a dollar on Amazon and worth every dollar (1).
ed
Jillian Nice is about halfway through this horrific fish story, and it will soon be released upon the world like a barracuda in a small tank of ... whatever barracuda eat. You'll have to ask her, she did all the cetacean research. I just write the ad copy.
Next up will probably be (of all things), the exciting conclusion of Lived Too Long To Die.
eBook Formatting!
As you know, H2NH built up an eBook Formatting Workflow via the patented David Barron muddle-through System, which boils down to failing a lot, consulting many sources, and then working it out. I didn't keep notes, because I'm a bad person, but a certain Paul Salvette of my e-cquaintance has come out with a rather fine eBook Formatting Guide. I'll write a proper review later, but I've read it, it's amazing, I've added it up top of my workflow. You can find all the details via the link, and I suggest you pick up the eBook itself (for convenience, if nothing else) over at Amazon.
Thus concludes my surface message. Have fun!
Air tanks full, hatch secured...
DIVE DIVE DIVE
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
Amongst which are the mysterious Carolyn: my lost love...alas...
Since I'm 'orribly sick and can't write today, I thought I'd surface for a moment and note a few things, surprising and unsurprising. Then I'll disappear again, to reappear at a time that no man can ken. Or Halloween. I guess.
The Dark Tower
One of my goals over this offline time was to read Stephen King's The Dark Tower series from start-to-finish like the epic single book it was meant to be. (Also, I realized that I hadn't read any but the first two.) So, I've done that.. Being sick and flooded helped that process. Good stuff, it only took a week of constant reading. In case you care, I liked The Wolves of Calla best. I suggest you read them all, for a neat story and a true example of pure 'discovery writing'.
I take two writing lessons from it: (1) Don't be scared to write whatever pops into your head, and don't worry about it until it's finished. (2) These books are too long for the working professional. My "I don't write longer" pledge remains in force. I have a few epics in me, though, once I roll through my backlist. DON'T WORRY. (They'll be so freakin' awesome.)
Timpani the Ostrich Rancher
This is one of the surprising ones. Right as I was about to pull the plug on my Internet, I got the Amazon notification that my short story "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher" had finally been made Free!, as I'd requested a month ago. So, I--here I apologize in advance--set up a few 'scheduled tweets' and left it alone. Here it's the first and now I've checked my Amazon numbers, and a kerbillion people have downloaded it. So, that's neat. It's always good to see four digits where the first one isn't a lonely one.
It's one of my favorite stories, considering it's my only proper steampunk at the moment. There are a few more stories waiting to be set in that world ("flat Earth"), but they'll arrive when they do. Until then, if one of you could leave a review, I'd be most grateful. Oh, and I'd like to say that Patty Jansen's "Out of Here" collection (which seems to have went free at about the same time), is also quite good. Check out the rest of the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought for more gems!
Mr. Booze
One of the other goals of this offline time is laying off the booze. In this case beer. I don't have a drinking problem--please don't read denial into that--but it is the main source (by a wide margin) of utterly worthless calories. I love my liver and svelte figure more than I do periods of cheerful drunkenness (esp. when I should be working). Also, I don't want to get gout. That'd just be embarrassing.
Anyways, that's going fine, and there's a neat passage in one of The Dark Tower books that reinforces it. (you'll know it if you've read it) Good on you, Mr. King. And good on me.
Jillian Nice
wrote this: "Minute Macabre One (1)", or at least the three Horror shorts within it. It's a dollar on Amazon and worth every dollar (1).
ed
Jillian Nice is about halfway through this horrific fish story, and it will soon be released upon the world like a barracuda in a small tank of ... whatever barracuda eat. You'll have to ask her, she did all the cetacean research. I just write the ad copy.
Next up will probably be (of all things), the exciting conclusion of Lived Too Long To Die.
eBook Formatting!
As you know, H2NH built up an eBook Formatting Workflow via the patented David Barron muddle-through System, which boils down to failing a lot, consulting many sources, and then working it out. I didn't keep notes, because I'm a bad person, but a certain Paul Salvette of my e-cquaintance has come out with a rather fine eBook Formatting Guide. I'll write a proper review later, but I've read it, it's amazing, I've added it up top of my workflow. You can find all the details via the link, and I suggest you pick up the eBook itself (for convenience, if nothing else) over at Amazon.
Thus concludes my surface message. Have fun!
Air tanks full, hatch secured...
DIVE DIVE DIVE
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
September 21, 2011
Offline Until October 31st
Introducing an exciting new chapter in the David Barron writer experience: the part where I practice being a recluse while writing for hours and hours. I'll be offline until October 31st which, in case you didn't know, is Halloween.
Hence, that goblet won't be empty long.
This, like most of the awesome things I do, is mostly to prove I can. I intend want to write all these books before they start to pile up. I've been wasting too much time reading 'publishing business' articles that don't apply to me because I haven't yet written 100 books. I'm gwan' do that and see you back here soon.
We'll see how that goes.
While you're waiting, check out my 236-post blog archive (about half of them are good). Alternatively, buy one or all of my many books. Not that I'll be checking for five years.
If you want to try before you buy, check out "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher", free on Amazon!
I'll be checking my e-mail by proxy, so if you have something dramatic to say, send it to DavidalBarron [at] gmail [dot] com.
Have fun.
feel free to comment
Available Stories
Hence, that goblet won't be empty long.
This, like most of the awesome things I do, is mostly to prove I can. I intend want to write all these books before they start to pile up. I've been wasting too much time reading 'publishing business' articles that don't apply to me because I haven't yet written 100 books. I'm gwan' do that and see you back here soon.
We'll see how that goes.
While you're waiting, check out my 236-post blog archive (about half of them are good). Alternatively, buy one or all of my many books. Not that I'll be checking for five years.
If you want to try before you buy, check out "Timpani the Ostrich Rancher", free on Amazon!
I'll be checking my e-mail by proxy, so if you have something dramatic to say, send it to DavidalBarron [at] gmail [dot] com.
Have fun.
feel free to comment
Available Stories
September 18, 2011
The Consolation of Hard Science Fiction
My spectacular output has been a little low recently, but there's a good reason for it: I've been teaching myself math. The unfortunate thing is that it has been useless.
I wanted to write a Hard SF Epic of interplanetary war. But it turns out that that's impossible, because interplanetary war is stupid.
Let me explain, but those of you who knew what delta-v was before they started reading already know what I'm about to say: Spaceships are expensive without magic. In Hard SF, magic is 'anything that hasn't been discovered yet', or, put another way: 'assuming the advances of science are conveniently flexible in the direction the story requires'. And I wanted to write a Hard SF epic with no magic.
I now know why all the Hard SF I've read that involves space also contains magic.
I won't bore you with the math, but the massive costs makes the main problem political. Using reasonable projections of current technology, it costs more to create an effective space invasion force than any possible advantage from said invasion. Even caught in the most unlikely extremes of xenophobia, it would be cheaper to just blow up the enemy planet than to invade it. And when you've wandered into blowing-up-planets territory, you're beyond magic. Besides, even xenophobes have accountants.
But David, you retort: people are stupid. They'll do stupid things in the name of war. Awesome story! NOPE. Because interplanetary war is 'Hard Stupid'.
Stupid Stupid
"I'm going to blow myself up on a crowded bus!"
There's always a few people who'll do anything, because, as I mentioned: They're stupid. But interplanetary war is so expensive that it requires more than a few morons egged on by a few assholes to get going.
Easy Stupid
"Let's use a cheap resource to fuel our money-making consumption, but the resource makes parts of the Earth less habitable for humans at some later date when I am probably either (a) dead or (b) rich enough from money-making consumption to live somewhere habitable."
I don't want to make the point too hard, but most people believe this or it wouldn't be happening. (With appropriate modification, it applies equally well to 'causes of global climate change and species loss' as it does to 'economic super-bubbles'.)
Most Hard SF epics introduce enough magic to make interplanetary war Easy Stupid. Most egregious would be 'Unobtainium', where the infinite cost of the magic rock pays for the war (You know it's magic because that has never worked in the real world either...). There's also 'easy FTL' (The Mote in God's Eye style with those intersteller teleporty lines) or 'cryogenics' (sleep your way to victory centuries later). Lastly, there's the 'You got your economics in my science!', where economics and other soft sciences just aren't worried about This is the literary equivalent of High Fantasy bringing in three kerbillion knights'a'horse in an otherwise sparsely populated low-feudal society (although there, I suppose, it would be called 'you got your demographics in my Rule of Cool!')
Hard Stupid
"Let's spend one billion dollars to buy five hundred million dollars!"
It's hard because not many people have a billion dollars while also being stupid. I was going to make a better example of Hard Stupid, but the only one I could think of was, oddly, interplanetary warfare. The rest are much harder, and more stupid. Also, I kept thinking of things that traded short-term profits for long-term stability, and realized that that is, in fact, 'hard smart', and beyond the scope of this article. Or Humanity? (Lagrangian Point Infinite Solar Power. Prove me wrong, make it happen.)
Clever Stupid
Start an interplanetary war, but wait for your opponent to bankrupt himself trying to invade you. Then surrender and purchase his planet.
Hence the SF Epic I'm going to actually write:
The Gamblers of Earth
Who (i) Started a Solar War and Bet Heavily on Themselves
And (ii) Reaped the Whirlwind
Thus (iii) Becoming Landed Gentry Amongst the Stars:
And not just because it is my dream to become an astral gentleman. Wait for it, sometime in 2012. And if you like it, you'll want to read the companion novella (to be included as an epilogue to the deluxe edition), told from the perspective of the 'winning' side:
The Venereal Gentlemen
A Love Story
(Worst title? Or the Worstest Title? Screw you, hypothetical critic! I like it.)
I would be remiss in my discussion of interplanetary war if I didn't mention the Smart option: Interplanetary Trade, which can actually be made profitable under certain scenarios. And trade is just warfare by other, cheaper means. I can imagine writing about the Tai-Pan of the Sol System...
But then I remembered that there are no space pirates amongst these interplanetary shipping lanes, so who wants to read about THAT?
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
I wanted to write a Hard SF Epic of interplanetary war. But it turns out that that's impossible, because interplanetary war is stupid.
Let me explain, but those of you who knew what delta-v was before they started reading already know what I'm about to say: Spaceships are expensive without magic. In Hard SF, magic is 'anything that hasn't been discovered yet', or, put another way: 'assuming the advances of science are conveniently flexible in the direction the story requires'. And I wanted to write a Hard SF epic with no magic.
I now know why all the Hard SF I've read that involves space also contains magic.
I won't bore you with the math, but the massive costs makes the main problem political. Using reasonable projections of current technology, it costs more to create an effective space invasion force than any possible advantage from said invasion. Even caught in the most unlikely extremes of xenophobia, it would be cheaper to just blow up the enemy planet than to invade it. And when you've wandered into blowing-up-planets territory, you're beyond magic. Besides, even xenophobes have accountants.
But David, you retort: people are stupid. They'll do stupid things in the name of war. Awesome story! NOPE. Because interplanetary war is 'Hard Stupid'.
Stupid Stupid
"I'm going to blow myself up on a crowded bus!"
There's always a few people who'll do anything, because, as I mentioned: They're stupid. But interplanetary war is so expensive that it requires more than a few morons egged on by a few assholes to get going.
Easy Stupid
"Let's use a cheap resource to fuel our money-making consumption, but the resource makes parts of the Earth less habitable for humans at some later date when I am probably either (a) dead or (b) rich enough from money-making consumption to live somewhere habitable."
I don't want to make the point too hard, but most people believe this or it wouldn't be happening. (With appropriate modification, it applies equally well to 'causes of global climate change and species loss' as it does to 'economic super-bubbles'.)
Most Hard SF epics introduce enough magic to make interplanetary war Easy Stupid. Most egregious would be 'Unobtainium', where the infinite cost of the magic rock pays for the war (You know it's magic because that has never worked in the real world either...). There's also 'easy FTL' (The Mote in God's Eye style with those intersteller teleporty lines) or 'cryogenics' (sleep your way to victory centuries later). Lastly, there's the 'You got your economics in my science!', where economics and other soft sciences just aren't worried about This is the literary equivalent of High Fantasy bringing in three kerbillion knights'a'horse in an otherwise sparsely populated low-feudal society (although there, I suppose, it would be called 'you got your demographics in my Rule of Cool!')
Hard Stupid
"Let's spend one billion dollars to buy five hundred million dollars!"
It's hard because not many people have a billion dollars while also being stupid. I was going to make a better example of Hard Stupid, but the only one I could think of was, oddly, interplanetary warfare. The rest are much harder, and more stupid. Also, I kept thinking of things that traded short-term profits for long-term stability, and realized that that is, in fact, 'hard smart', and beyond the scope of this article. Or Humanity? (Lagrangian Point Infinite Solar Power. Prove me wrong, make it happen.)
Clever Stupid
Start an interplanetary war, but wait for your opponent to bankrupt himself trying to invade you. Then surrender and purchase his planet.
Hence the SF Epic I'm going to actually write:
The Gamblers of Earth
Who (i) Started a Solar War and Bet Heavily on Themselves
And (ii) Reaped the Whirlwind
Thus (iii) Becoming Landed Gentry Amongst the Stars:
And not just because it is my dream to become an astral gentleman. Wait for it, sometime in 2012. And if you like it, you'll want to read the companion novella (to be included as an epilogue to the deluxe edition), told from the perspective of the 'winning' side:
The Venereal Gentlemen
A Love Story
(Worst title? Or the Worstest Title? Screw you, hypothetical critic! I like it.)
I would be remiss in my discussion of interplanetary war if I didn't mention the Smart option: Interplanetary Trade, which can actually be made profitable under certain scenarios. And trade is just warfare by other, cheaper means. I can imagine writing about the Tai-Pan of the Sol System...
But then I remembered that there are no space pirates amongst these interplanetary shipping lanes, so who wants to read about THAT?
feel free to commentAvailable Stories
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