August updates, so you know I didn’t die…

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’m still alive, although even there I’m not on as much. If you’re following me here on the blog or Facebook, you might be wondering if I’ve suffered some horrible tragedy and/or died. Well, obviously, I’m writing this, so the death option is out, and the only tragedy I’m suffering through is a muse who won’t leave me alone for a day off.

You may recall in my last post, I was writing book 3 for Alice’s series. The day after I finished it, the muse hit me up to start book 4. I asked her about a day off, and she laughed and said “You’re so funny. NOW GET BACK TO WORK.”

Sometimes writers on Twitter tell me they wish they had my muse. I don’t believe they know what they’re asking for. It’s a bit like saying “gee, I wish I had someone to torture me.” And this is turning into torture sometimes. I’ve been hitting an average of 8-10K per day, with occasional downshifts to rest my aching wrists or my fuzzy brain. Even on the downshifts that I considered my days off, I still got 3K added. This is why I’m almost 100K into Hungry Like the Wolf, and why I will finish the entire Alice the Wolf series before the end of summer.

Once I finish this, I’m going to have to send the muse packing to Tahiti so I can work on editing. In addition to needing to edit some released books to catch typos, I also have to start going through my queued books and get them ready for release. It’s rather a large stack at this point, and every time during the summer that I’ve tried to work on it, my taskmistress muse has sabotaged me with another new book to write. Which would be awesome if she was pitching some guaranteed bestseller. Alas, it’s just more weird shit. And okay, I like writing weird shit. I just won’t have much luck selling it.

I’m not even sure what to categorize Alice’s series as. It’s not horror or paranormal romance, and it’s only rarely worthy of the label dark fantasy. Someone suggested calling it urban fantasy, but Dallas Pennsylvania isn’t exactly a sprawling urban jungle. I’d jokingly call it suburban fantsy, but I need a category already listed on Amazon and Kobo, and I doubt they’ll add in a new genre for little me. Despite there being a lot of high school life, it’s no more YA than Peter’s series was. I can’t market it to the Twilight crowd, to the horror junkies, to the romance readers, or to the fantasy lovers. So yeah, even as I finish writing the series, I’m anxiously wondering “who exactly was I supposed to market this to?”

But returning to my muse and her new ideas, she’s pitched a sequel to The Life and Death of a Sex Doll, continuing the life of Ashley Braun in Sex Doll Divorce and Family Planning. I’m sure the muse would love to get me to work on this right after I wrap up Alice’s last book, but I’m serious about not writing anything else until I’ve done some edits and revisions to get the new books ready for sale, or at least closer to ready.

And now a reading update. I’ve completely lost my momentum on my reading goals thanks to Insurgent by Veronica Roth and Finale by Becca Fitzpatrick. It’s hard to believe these books were written by the same writers as the previous books in their respective series, because they’re both awful. I’m still trying to force myself to read them, but with every chapter, I just shake my head and ask “What happened to the good parts?” When I finish these books, I hope to regain some momentum with other books, because I’d still like to read at least 30 books this year.

The problem is, I had four books open, which is my way of pushing through one bad book. I get tired of it, so I read the others to make me forget why I’m hating the other book. Only now, I’m hating all four books. I dropped the two “horror” books (and I use the term real loosely because they’re not even remotely scary, or interesting) to focus on these two series books, and even reading one chapter from each is feeling like a homework assignment. These were sequels to books I had to stay up late to finish, so I’ve stuck with them in the hopes of them getting better, but ugh, right now, this reading thing is not working out nearly as much as the writing.

And I got so bored with reading, I decided to buy the Mechromancer character for Borderlands 2, just to have something to do. I still despise the writing and the “humor,” and the game is still glitchy as fuck. But I need a distraction, and one FPS is the same as the next once you look past the surface.

My first impression is, meh, the coding is still lousy. The Mechromancer’s robot is able to fly though wall or travel underground, but will hang on doorways, and sometimes stands right in front of you doing nothing but blocking you view even when you’re in a clusterfuck of enemies. Which is to say, it’s the same programming quality I’ve come to expect from Gearbox Software games.

Setting aside the glitches, the jokes, and the plot, the killing has been somewhat therapeutic this time around. I’m focusing on accuracy over quantity of ammo, with my primary weapon being a very slow loading sniper rifle. I have rarely used rocket launchers, even against bosses, because with my current critical hit bonuses, I can turn a 524 point bullet into a 3346 point one-shot kill. So even for bosses and mini-bosses, it’s often easier for me to sit back and snipe. Why bother going to the inventory to load a rocket launcher when I don’t really need the extra firepower?

I’m currently at level 25, and I’m about to complete the game without doing a lot of the side missions. Regardless of where I go in the story missions, I get little skull warnings next to the enemy health bar that the character is dangerous and higher in level than me. Which is a bit of a joke. Oh, that giant robot with shoulder-mounted missile launchers is dangerous? Three critical shots later, he’s just a scrap heap to me. So is the enemy AI that awful, or am I just that good? (Here’s a hint: I’m not that good.)

But so, that’s where I am at this point. I don’t know yet whether there will be a release for August or not. If there is, it’s going to be a coverless book, and I’m not going to put much effort into promoting it. I need to save money for a lot of covers for projects that have better chances of selling, and I need the time away from promotions to edit. But once I get around to the release after that, I should be able to devote more time to begging for readers.

Oh, wait, that’s the other thing. July ended with me getting 37 sales and 9 positive reviews ranging from 5-3 stars. It’s not quite my best sales month ever, but it was my best month for reviews. A caveat: most of those sales all came from the same person, and July was otherwise very slow across all my vendors. We can safely call Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life a flop, since it only sold three copies in the first month of release. Tobe White can’t seem to catch a break anymore than Sandy Morrison could. Of course 37 sales, whether from one customer or a group, is still a good amount to report when the previous month I’d only sold a third of that total. But I’m expecting the summer slump to affect August too, and that’s yet another reason why I’m a bit meh about promoting stuff lately.

And that’s my report. Hopefully after I finish writing this last book for Alice, I can find some time to blog between editing sessions.