Chris Fox's Blog, page 34

The First Ark is nearly here!

The manuscript has been completed and is just awaiting one final edit before being ready! The preorder will be up on Amazon this weekend, and the most important part? The beautiful new cover! I’d like to offer a big thank you to Nikolai for the amazing rendition of The Mother, and to Stu for his stellar typography.

For those curious the novella explains what happens when the Mother entered the First Ark, a scene that raised a lot of questions in the first novel. For those who haven’t read book one you can still enjoy The First Ark, though you’re likely to end up with some very interesting questions about what happens next.

Anyway, just wanted to share the progress! I’ll be emailing the mailing list for the first time this weekend to offer a free copy of the eBook. If you haven’t signed up yet now is a great time!

Dungeons & Dragons: The Rise of the Indie Author

I discovered D&D when I was six. Several older kids were hunched around books and dice at a corner table in the library. I was fascinated and asked to join, but they told me I was too young. It was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

See, I don’t deal well with being told I can’t do something. It brings out that competitive streak, and I’ll move heaven and earth to prove someone wrong. In this case it took me four more years. I saved up my allowance, then got a paper route without asking my parents. They were furious when they found out, but allowed me to keep it.

Every dime went to one of two places. Fantasy novels, or D&D books. I started with the red basic set and cajoled three of my friends into playing. We were instantly hooked. Years passed and faces changed, but the games remained the same.

We’d gather every afternoon in my backyard to play D&D, Shadowrun, Rifts, or the World of Darkness games. These games allowed the unconstrained use of our imaginations in a way video games and even novels couldn’t match. We could do anything, be anyone.

I’ve seen similar stories repeated all over the internet. Hundreds of thousands of gamers spanning four decades, all loving and exploring our own unique worlds. Unsurprisingly nearly every game master also wanted to be a writer.

We spent hundreds of hours fleshing out worlds, characters, histories and stories for our players to enjoy. In short, we became storytellers and most of us didn’t just love it. It became part of us. Something we needed to express.

Fast forward to today. Those gamers all grew up. We went on to be IT guys and programmers, but part of us never forgot our roots. The urge to create and share amazing stories was still there. This has led to a curious phenomenon.

2010 saw the first explosion of eBooks. Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and now Kobo allow anyone to publish a book. All of a sudden tens of thousands of authors could bring their fantasy worlds to market.

Many are terrible. Some are amazing. There is now an entire generation of authors who got their start in the same fantasy worlds. You’ve probably heard of at least a few. Patrick Rothfuss and Jim Butcher still play D&D.

For some reason this makes me unbelievably happy. The hobby I most loved when growing up has given rise to a sea of wonderful worlds I get to enjoy. I love knowing that many of us are living our dreams, and I smile when I think of all the GMs cum authors who will soon be joining our ranks.

Searching For My Tribe

Once I was part of a vast tribe. An endless nation of geeks and nerds, each armed with their fandom. Star Wars,  Harry Potter or Rifts. We’d gather every weekend to play the latest RPG, or draft the newest box of Magic the Gathering. Every few months we’d congregate at Dundracon or ComicCon.

It was part of my identity and it represented everything I had grown up to appreciate. Yet as the years passed, as careers changed and bills accumulated it somehow slipped away. I woke up one day and my tribe was gone.

I searched everywhere for them. Except where they were. Where they’d always been. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t my tribe that had disappeared. I’d just gotten lost. Separated from the herd.

I’d somehow wandered into the mainstream, hiking Half Dome and learning to write. I started missing the opening days of tribal movies like The Avengers. I shed fandoms, winnowing it down to the greats. Then the unthinkable happened. I stopped gaming. My last pen and paper RPG was over three years ago. Jesus that hurts to say.

My excuses were excellent. The iPad had come out and I spent every waking minute learning to code. Then I took up a career doing exactly that, working six to seven days a week at aggressive startups.

I moved forty miles closer to San Francisco, putting the few tribal members I was in contact with juuust out of reach. Sure, I always meant to make it back to Santa Rosa but I’d blink and six more months had blown by.

My tribe’s absence was difficult. I coped by writing. I wrote every day, turning out hundreds of thousands of words. I wrote about things my tribe would love. About things any Werewolf the Apocalypse fan would resonate with, that people who loved Buffy the Vampire slayer would get into.

One day I looked up and realized I’d written a decent book. My girlfriend liked it. So did all the beta readers. So I took the plunge and published it. Much to my continued surprised the book has started to sell, which is great.

But after publishing and selling my first couple hundred copies I didn’t feel much like celebrating. It took a few weeks of chewing on the problem to finally figure out why. I didn’t want to celebrate, because celebrating was all about sharing what I’d created with my tribe. I couldn’t do that, not beyond immediate friends and family.

I wanted to geek out with people on forums, just like I had about WoW or Anime. I knew some of them would love it, and just like any good geek it was my responsibility to share the fandom. Not to  stand on a marketing rooftop alongside every other new artist yelling, read my book, it’s awesome. To share it like a fan. Tell them why they’d enjoy my take on werewolves in the same way I nagged my best friend to check out Dragon Age: Origins (He loves it- you will too. Go check it out).

Fortunately we live in the age of the internet. My tribe isn’t just easy to find, they’re everywhere. A vocal pageant of proud geeks who love lightsabers and wish a blue police box would appear in their backyard. Who talk about H.P. Lovecraft and love BSG.

I just need to sit down at their campfire and introduce myself. It’s time to rejoin my tribe.

Writing: One Hour a Day

Most of my friends and family know I’m a writer, but whenever I’d say ‘I’m going to publish a novel‘ they’d look at me the same way you look at the fat guy who says he’s going to lose weight (I know, because at one point I was the fat guy). They give polite smiles and enthusiastic nods, but no one really expects too much.

Who can blame them? Anyone can call themselves a writer and very few ever finish anything. I fell into that category for a lot of years.

After the book came out the biggest question I received was where do I find the time? Don’t I have a day job? I do as a matter of fact. I write software for the best startup in the world, which is by far the most demanding career I’ve ever had (and I’ve had several).

I work ten to twelve hours on weekdays and an hour or two on Saturday and Sundays. Last year at crunch time I worked on Christmas and had a three month block where I worked at least eight hours every single day. It was a brutal marathon, and it was absolutely worth it the first time I saw someone using the app I’d written.

During this same stretch I wrote the bulk of the sequel to No Such Thing As Werewolves. I cranked out 90,000 words in that three months. People gawk at me when they hear that. How did I work as hard as I did on software and still find time to write?

The answer isn’t sexy, but it is something anyone can do. I get up at the ass crack of dawn every day. From 5am to 6am I work out and while doing so I think about what I’m going to write. Then I go home and write it.

I belt out two thousand words of fiction, which typically takes about forty-five minutes. The last fifteen minutes is spent marketing, or writing blog posts like this one. That’s it. There’s my secret.

It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s 700,000 words a year and I’m done writing it each day right around the time most people are waking up. There is a cost of course. I don’t go out to parties, because I’m in bed by 10pm every night. 9:30 on a lot of nights.

This paradigm has worked for many novelists and it will work for you too. The trick is to create a habit, a sacred space where you do nothing but write. By setting it early you can do it before the husband or kids get up. You can do it before you have to start thinking about email, or errands.

Grant yourself that hour every day. Do it diligently. In a year you’ll be looking back at your first novel.