And no, this is not a Valentine’s Day dirty joke post. 🙂
I was sitting here looking at a blank screen thinking Shit. I have nothing new to say. So what else is new? I haven’t had anything new to say on this blog forever. I’m busy. I’m writing. I’m rehearsing. I’m writing. I’m rehearsing. Ad Nauseum.
Then it hit me – sometimes it’s not easy to write. Last night and this past weekend was a fine example of that. I wrote nothing on Friday or Saturday despite having both days off from the day job (5 weeks and counting!), but I decided that between the day job and rehearsal, I was going to give myself permission not to write if I didn’t feel like it. But Sunday that shit had to be over. I went to my parents’ to celebrate their birthdays (their birthdays are three days apart, so we celebrate them together), and got in a little writing before we left. I only got a little over a thousand words down, but it felt like I’d written 5,000 by the time I was done.
Then last night was more of the same. I wrote a little over 2,300 words, but it felt like 10,000. My writing muscles are rusty after writing practically nothing for a couple of weeks due to other commitments. But that’s kinda the deal – if you’re going to pursue this in any professional capacity, there will be days that you don’t feel like writing. Tough shit. It’s hard to sit there staring at an accusing blank screen, but that’s the job. People pay me to write things – books, stories, articles. And I love writing. But some days I just want to play Skyrim all day. And pretty soon, I won’t have anyone to answer to but myself (and my editor for some project, but usually just me and my bank account). So I’m learning to put my butt in the chair even when I don’t want to, and knock the rust off that’s built up in a month of playing theatre again. I think it will be easier to do shows when writing is my day job, and I’m not juggling three different things all at one time, but we’ll see.
Tonight is Valentine’s, so I’ll probably lose most of my writing time again, but Suzy and I have spent precious little time together this year, so it’ll be worth it. It just means I have to work that much harder Wednesday night to catch up, and to keep the rust from getting too thick on my typing fingers.
Not really. Found out this morning via Facebook that an acquaintance of mine died this weekend after an illness. He was too young, and he’ll be missed. I have a real blog post rolling around in my head about the brotherhood all of us who have worn stage blacks are a part of, and how we’re all connected, but it’s not ready to go just yet.
Instead we’ll recap some of January. It’s been a very good month for sales, surpassing December’s numbers and putting an end to the slight downward slide overall sales will likely be higher than any point since October, and several of the new titles are performing well. There hasn’t been any kind of bump from KDP Select yet, but I don’t start with any of those freebies until mid-week. I’ll be reporting back on how that all goes.
The new stuff is going well so far. Monsters Beware, the Bubba collection, has sold over 100 copies in the first month, while not really eating into the individual story sales too much. Cat Scratch Fever is having a good debut week, with 24 copies sold so far, and Gone Daddy Gone and Knight (Un)Life are coming out of the gate pretty strong as well. I now have somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty titles available, most of them short works. But as I colelct more of them into full-length volumes, I think I’ll continue to see increased sales.
Everybody says “write the next book” as if it’s the Holy Grail of book marketing, and I’m here to tell you something – they’re right. You’re only as good as your last project, so you’ve got to keep the wheels turning and the ideas churning if you’re going to make it in this business. But it’s been a great January, better than January 2011 by a factor of several thousand dollars! So thanks for all your support, I couldn’t do any of this without you!
Narrative stuff, I fins this stuff is good for most of what I write, but crap for fight scenes.
But when it comes time for some killin’, I need to amp it up a little. And really, what better for a horror writer to work with than a little Rob Zombie?
I like to keep a lot of irons in the fire. A lot. So it should surprise no one that I’ve got more than one thing that I’m working on right now. Let’s first take a look at my newest release – Cat Scratch Fever – a Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story.
I’ve wanted to write a story about a rakshasa for a long time, and January’s bowl games between Clemson and West Virginia (sorry, Clemson fans) and LSU/Alabama gave me plenty of tiger jokes to work into the story. I even went with the orange cover for my poor suffering Clemson fans. In short, there’s a love story, a murder mystery, a bar fight, a magical sword and a bunch of giant cat-people kicking ass all over West Virginia. I think it’s an absolutely ridiculous premise, which makes it pretty much perfect for a Bubba story. It’s currently available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
That’s currently the only Bubba story that is available on Barnes & Noble, because I’m trying a 90-day experiment with KDP Select. This is a way in which self-published authors can make their books exclusive to Amazon for three months, and in exchange they get to be available for borrowing by Amazon Prime members, and they can make their books free for five days out of the 90-day period. I’m trying this with the Bubba stories because I don’t want my main property (Black Knight Chronicles) to vanish from Noon or iTunes for thee months, but I’m interested in seeing what happens with these properties. But as part of KDP select, various Bubba properties will be going free at various times for the next 90 days. Keep up with me on Facebook or Twitter to make sure you know when that happens!
Speaking of The Black Knight Chronicles, I’ve gotten more good feedback from my editor and have now written most of the outline for Book 4, plus most of the first chapter. I expect to get a lot of work done on that one this weekend, because I get to be in my house for most of the weekend and not drunk wandering around conventions with amazing best-sellingurban fantasyauthorsand publishers. Full disclosure – I didn’t get drunk with Gail Z. Martin or Allan from Kerlak, but we did have a lovely time talking writing, promotions and business at Chattacon. And I make no claims of anyone else’s intoxication on Saturday night, but I was hammered by the time I waved the white flag at 2AM. And I honestly believe that Laura Anne’s phone dove into a glass of bourbon of its own accord. Really, I do.
And speaking even further of my writing, and completely ignoring the fact that Chattacon had free beer in the con suite all weekend, there’s a short story coming! It’s actually already been out for a while as part of Twelve Worlds, a charity anthology I participated in last year, but the exclusivity is almost over and I’ll be publishing it in a variety of formats this spring. It will come out as a stand-alone short story for $.99, then I’ll collect it with Movie Knight, Black Magic Woman and Turkey Day Debacle (only available here on my site currently) and put those out as a small collection for $2.99.
I also have several shot stories that aren’t Bubba stories or Black Knight stories that I’m probably going to put out there in the next couple of months as a collection. They’re mostly sci-fi, a little fantasy, and some other randomness. So that’s coming this spring as well.
The Cindy Slaughter story that I posted the beginning of here a little while ago is moving along. I think it might end up as a novella by the time I’m done. Right now I’m at about 8,000 words and I haven’t gotten into the main plot yet. So it’s going to either be a long novella or a short novel. Either way, that’s coming, too. And someday there will be a sequel to Genesis, I promise.
And I’m in a play. I’m playing Dave in Almost, Maine for Ballantyne Community Theatre next month, so if you’re in the Charlotte area on a February weekend and want to see me make a fool of myself and strip down to my longjohns on stage, come on out. And I still have seven weeks left at the day job. I think a lot of these projects are going to wrap up in March/April, as my writing time increases dramatically. I’m looking forward to that, because I’m feeling pretty motivated right now, and I want to harness that as much as possible.
Isn’t there an old Bon Jovi song about sleeping when I’m dead?
I’m going to postulate for a few minutes, because that’s what I’m good at (and because I don’t feel like outlining Paint it Black right now). I came to a realization this morning when I read round two of my notes from my editor blowing up pieces of my book and adding in better chunks – editors don’t buy a book from a new author. They buy a voice they like and think has potential, then they spend a year or so teaching that person how to write a novel.
At least that’s what it feels like from here. The more I figure out, the more I realize that I know friggin’ nothing about putting a book together, and I can see how it could get overwhelming if you let it. And if you didn’t have an ego the size of Cleveland, which I do. I’m excited about all these notes, because it really does feel like school again, and I enjoy learning new stuff when I can see the value of it. In this case, the point is to make me a better writer, to make me more marketable, and to sell more books. That was the whole point behind signing with a traditional publisher in the first place – to elevate my craft and make us both money. Then I can take what I learn and move it across to my self-pubbed products and be more profitable everywhere.
So do I think everyone needs to sign with a traditional publisher to learn how to craft a novel? No. Do I think I found a good place for me to hone my craft while making money? Yes. I’m not a flag-waver. I don’t care how you choose to manage your career. For me, the hybrid career seems to be the best plan. I’ll sell some stuff to small press, some stuff self-pubbed, and if I get a NY deal, that’s cool, too. For me, right now, the point is to hone my craft and keep putting food on the table. And the best place for me to be to do that is with Bell Bridge Books. So my advice to new writers is this – check out the small press world. They aren’t going to give you buy a Ferrari advances, but they will give you personal attention and work with you to help develop your career.
So I’m pretty sure that my editor and I just blew up Paint it Black, Book IV of The Black Knight Chronicles. I sent in my synopsis, and she did exactly what I want her to do – she poked holes in the book and called me on my BS. That, kids, is why I signed with a traditional publisher instead of continuing to do everything by myself. Having someone who’s worked on a ton of books to look at a sketch of a book and say “nothing is happening, where’s the excitement?” Is worth the chunk of royalty percentage I’m giving up. Especially at this point in my career. I’ve got five novels out, and I think I’m just learning to tell a story.
I’m not going to pitch everything I’ve written in Paint it Black, but I am going to blow up a fair bit of it. As I read my editor’s notes on the synopsis, I realized that there were a couple of things that made this book very different from the others in the series, and not necessarily in a good way. There was practically no supernatural stuff going, I was almost 20,000 words in and we hadn’t had a fight scene yet, and there was no Father Mike. These are problems. I love the character of Father Mike, and he needs to be in every book. The characters are vampires, and they fight supernatural bad guys, so there needs to be a supernatural element. And really, I went nearly a third of a book without a fight scene? God, I was doing some serious navel-gazing.
So I now have a totally new direction for the book, and I’m pretty excited about it. There will be supernatural stuff going on – fairies, trolls, vampires, and new monsters. There will be Father Mike. And there will be fighting. Oh yes, there will be fighting.
So that’s my lesson for the week for self-pubbed authors. If you don’t have someone you trust to bounce ideas off of, then go find that person. I chose a traditional publisher to fill that role, but it can be a critique partner, a friend, whatever. It’s usually not a great idea of it’s a spouse but your mileage may vary.
I’ll leave you with a scene from Chattacon, where I spent the weekend chatting with some awesome authors and publisher types, got to watch one urban fantasy bestseller’s phone leap unprovoked to its death in a vat of bourbon, and realized that writers drink even more than theatre folk. I gotta step up my game! And I got hammered on chocolate wine by mute writer with an iPad and an evil, evil soul! Lando says “Playa, please!”
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