That albatross is slain, at least

by john | Feb 5, 2011 | Writing

Before I get to dead birds, I just found out that my book, The Chosen, is featured on Spalding’s Racket today! If you don’t know Nick, you should check out his blog. He highlights indie authors, is an indie author, and has a fantastic snarky sense of humor! Check out his book, Life…with no Breaks, when you need a good laugh!

Now, about my albatross. The one that’s been hanging around my neck all week, I mean. I’ve finished my short story for the Twelve Worlds anthology that the inimitable Derek J. Canyon is putting together. The anthology will be out sometime in late spring and will feature a dozen short stories from self-published authors, as well as a few extra stories from previously unpublished writers. It’s also for a good cause, as all proceeds from the sale of the book will go to charity. I’ll post up more info as it develops, but I think it will be a cool thing. I wrote a Black Knight Chronicles story, a short adventure set before the events in Hard Day’s Knight, so I hope that people who enjoyed that book will pick up the anthology and get some stand-alone back story for our boys. There’s certainly nothing in there that is required reading for anyone’s understanding of the universe, it’ll just add a little color for the folks that read it.

I’ve been reading Side Jobs, which is a collection of stories from the world of The Dresden Files, and it’s really good. Of course, by reading in this case I mean listening to while I drive, but that’s how I’ve “read” the last four or five Dresden books, so that’s just my M.O. for those novels. I signed up with Audible forever ago, and for $15/month I get one free audiobook. And as much as I drive, I love it. All of these stories are similar to what I tried to do for the anthology, a separate story that doesn’t impact the continuity of the universe, but allows for a little depth into something that I haven’t yet explored in the main storyline. Of course, since I’ve written two books as opposed to Butcher’s dozen or so Dresden novels, it was a little easier for me. But I turned it in at around 5,000 words, which is a nice length for a short story.

Now on to the next thing – I think I’m going to work on Return to Eden Volume 1. I posted the first chapter here a week or so ago, and I think I want to spend some time with those kids and see what I can make of their story. I need to pump a little more immediacy into it, or at least get ready for a big conflict soon. I’ll keep you posted. I have no idea how long this one is going to be, but if it runs like most of my stuff, in that 60K range, I’ll be ready with a first draft of it some time in late March or early April. Depends on how the prep work for Back in Black (and Blue) goes.

I fly to Wisconsin tomorrow for work, because the baby Jesus hates me and wants me to be cold. I just hope all my flights are ok from the weather they got earlier this week, and I can get there on time. Wish me luck!

Long week

by john | Feb 4, 2011 | Writing

It’s 10:30 on a Friday night and I’m just beginning to catch my breath. This was a long week, and it looks to be followed by another one of the same. I’ve been to Atlanta, Durham, Raleigh and Winston-Salem this week, and next week sees me in Madison, WI, Atlanta and Columbus, GA and then eventually back to Charlotte. Then I think I’m home for most of a week before RoundCon in Columbia, SC, which will be a nice little semi-vacation. More to the point, I’ll be working, but I’ll be working for me and not for The Man.

Although, I guess since I’m middle management, I’m the epitome of The Man most days. Oh well, it is what it is. I’m getting through the first round of edits on Back in Black (and Blue) and March is still looking good for a release date. Gotta get to work on a cover, though. Might try something radically different with this cover. I love the covers Lindsay has made for me, but they might not be the best covers as far as marketability, and the whole point is to sell books, after all. So I’m gonna look at some things. I can always change the cover later.

The Win a Kindle/Nook/Gift Card contest is getting a lot of entrants, but not a lot of people are emailing me book receipts or trivia question answers, so I’m not sure how effective it is as a sales tool. But it’s getting my name out there, and anything that increases my name recognition doesn’t hurt at this point. Joe Konrath had a really interesting post on his blog a while back about book tours and signings and things like that. Basically he said that now that he’s self-pubbing, his writing is making him enough money to stay home and write. And since he’s doing most of his business through e-books, it’s better for him financially to not do as many cons and appearances, and stay home and get the next book out. This makes sense, especially if you’re as prolific as Joe (and I hope to one day be), but I’m likely to continue doing as many cons and book fairs as I can for a while, simply because I really enjoy them. I like meeting people and talking to them about my book. I’m sure eventually the gild will come off that lily and I’ll want to stay home and write, but for now I’ll be behind a table every chance I get signing books.

Speaking of books, we’re at 8 books sold 4 days into the month, so why don’t you go to Amazon and put me into double digits already?

So now I’m officially behind

by john | Feb 1, 2011 | Writing

I missed a deadline this morning. Well, I probably haven’t really missed it until tonight, and there is a slightly less than zero percent chance that I can create a short story out of whole cloth between now and the time I go to sleep. Except for the fact that I’m at work, which interferes with my writing. It’s considered somewhat untoward for the manager to be working on his fiction writing while at work. We’re not going to talk about my blogging while working, because it doesn’t take as long. And because we’re not going to talk about it.

Just got some interesting news, though. The 2012 Democratic National Convention will be coming to Charlotte, which is good news for the day job. You see, I sell theatrical lighting equipment. And news crews use a lot of lighting. And so do event companies. And two things that flood into a town during a big political convention are event companies and news crews, so that looks like next summer will provide a nice little bump in sales for us.Nothing huge, but a decent bump is better than nothing, which is what we would have gotten if the convention had gone to St. Louis.

On the writing front, I’m getting the first proofreading bits of Back in Black (and Blue) back, so I think we’ll be all systems go to have that ready in March. I just stocked up on Hard Day’s Knight and The Chosen to have copies at RoundCon in a couple of weeks, so if you’re gonna be around Columbia, SC come by and say hello. I’ve also been featured on a couple of cool websites lately, including Fang-Tastic Books and No Trees Harmed. Please go visit these folks and thank them for supporting your favorite independent author!

Real life dreary Monday post

by john | Jan 31, 2011 | Writing

It’s a good thing Amazon had a bunch of good albums on the $5 rack this month, or I’d be downright homicidal by now. Work sucks right now, but it’s just standard beginning of year evaluation/budget crap that everybody goes through. And I’m down a person because he and the company parted ways last week, so now I begin the hiring process all over again. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been interviewing people constantly for the past two years. But these are the perils of middle management, and since I take the check, I have to take the crap.

On the “take the check” front, January will wrap up as the best sales month to date for my books. As of this morning, I’ve sold the following –

Amazon –

Hard Day’s Knight – 27

Red Dirt Boy – 1

The Chosen – 17

Barnes & Noble (I don’t really believe these figures since they show zero sales since the 15th, but I suppose it’s possible. There have been issues with the BN reporting software).

Hard Day’s Knight – 6

The Chosen – 3

Smashwords- (a couple of these are freebies that I gave to reviewers)

Hard Day’s Knight – 3

The Chosen – 2

I’m not going to get rich on those kind of sales by any stretch, but this shows a 50% increase in sales on Amazon, my primary sales channel, since last month. So let’s extrapolate that a few months and see what it looks like.

January – 45 books – $90

February – 65 books – $130

March – 95 books – $190

April – 190 books – $380

So if I continue on this growth pattern, I might actually be making some significant money by late spring/early summer. Add to that the release of my next book in March, and I’m pretty optimistic about being able to pay for a couple of Vegas trips this year off of selling books, and that would be nice.

A lot of successful indie authors are reporting a point where the switch just flipped and they went from selling a couple dozen books a month to hundreds of books a month seemingly overnight. I’d love to see that happen, but if it doesn’t, it’s no big deal. I’ve written the books, and I’ll keep writing the books. I have faith that if I write to the best of my ability, that the market will find me eventually and my books will sell.

It’s kinda like when I started blogging – create good content and people will eventually find you. So I’m going to write good books, and trust in the marketplace to find me. Of course I’ll still do whatever promotion I can afford, but most of what I’m going to do is write.

Which reminds me, I have to crank out a short story tonight to replace the one I tore into electrons in a fit of frustration last night. I knew where it was going, it was clever, witty and going in exactly the direction I had planned for it. And it was boring as hell. I couldn’t come up with a way to show more than I was telling, so I trashed it. I might go back to it later, but now that I’m on deadline I need to shift gears and knock this bad boy out tonight or tomorrow. I came up with a new plan while I was driving to Atlanta yesterday, so I should be able to jam out 5K words in a night or two.

Alright, enough ramble – go buy a book, my cat needs fed!

Return to Eden, Part 1

by john | Jan 27, 2011 | Writing

This is the first chapter of something new I’m working on. It’s a young adult novel about the end of civilization as we know it. Lemme know what you think.

The day the world ended started off just like every other Thursday. Christin Kinsey got up after the alarm went off for the third time, staggered to the bathroom in her t-shirt and pajama bottoms, went about her morning business, took a shower, brushed her teeth, yelled at her brother Matt to drag his sorry butt out of bed because she wasn’t going to be late on account of him again this week, went back into her room, got dressed in a pair of jean shorts and a Kings of Leon T-shirt she’d borrowed from her boyfriend Kent a week or two ago, and beat on Matt’s door a couple more times before heading downstairs for breakfast.

While Christin was settling in behind a bowl of Lucky Charms and a Coke, her mom was in the kitchen in dress slacks and a bra, ironing a shirt that had obviously spent the night in the dryer and mainlining coffee with CNN on in the background. There was some other big fuss going on somewhere in the world with people that hated Americans shooting Americans, and Americans going in to stop them from shooting too many other people, and some talking heads with French accents whining about the overbearing American policies.

“Mom,” Christin asked between mouthfuls of cereal and marshmallows, “why don’t French people like us?”

“Because all frogs are douchebags” answered Matt, clumping down the stairs in baggy cargo shorts and Doc Marten boots, the uniform of his whole bunch of loser friends.

“Matthew!” Shrieked their mother, putting on her shirt and zipping up her slacks while simultaneously trying to butter a bagel and put away the iron. “We do not use terms like ‘douchebags’ or ‘frogs’ in this house! There are some French people who would rather eat Brie and smoke stinky cigarettes than do what needs to be done in the world, but that’s no reason to condemn the whole country. The French contributed some wonderful things to society,”

“Yeah,” Matt interrupted, “like eating snails and the guillotine.”

“I can think of some times when the guillotine would be useful, muttered Christin.

“Alright you two comedians, get your butts out of here or you’re going to be late. Again.” Their mother hustled them out of the kitchen and thrust some cash into Christin’s hand. “This should get you some gas and cover lunch for both of you. There’s frozen pizza in the fridge for tonight, I’ve got to go to Charlotte for a meeting with the B of A people about the loan.” She had been negotiating with the mortgage demons at Bank of America for months about refinancing their home, and it was, in her words, time for someone to “shit or get off the pot.” Sandra Kinsey didn’t swear often, but more and more often lately when she did, it involved someone with the mortgage company.

Things had been okay when Christin and Matt’s dad had been around, but Jacob Kinsey had died of lung cancer three years ago, and things had gotten tight with all his medical bills. Sandra had mortgaged the house to the hilt to pay off all the doctors and hospitals, but when the housing market in Asheville, NC went into the toilet like it did all over the country, they owed a lot more on the house than it was worth. President Obama’s plans to help American homeowners sounded good on TV, but didn’t always work out so well when reality hit the fan, as Sandra had become increasingly fond of saying. So today she was headed down to Charlotte, and she was determined to come home with some answers, or at least with a pound of flesh from some useless paper-pusher to make her feel better.

Sandra followed her kids out the front door and watched as they piled in Jacob’s old F-100 pickup truck and headed off to school. She’d kept the truck around until Christin had been old enough to drive, then given it to the girl for her sixteenth birthday. Big, blocky and decidedly un-sexy, the truck was nevertheless dependable and certainly better built than anything that had come out of Detroit in the past 30 years. It was a 1965 model, the year Jacob was born, and he had restored it to working order, if not much more than that. So it was a big rolling hunk of steel that Sandra didn’t mind sending her kids off to school in while she headed down the mountains in her Nissan Murano to do battle with the evildoers at the great corporate headquarters.

Christin drove into the parking lot at West Asheville High School, and parked the truck at the far end of the lot, as usual. It didn’t take too many mornings of being mocked by Cindy Monihan and her gaggle of bleached-blonde cheerleaders and wannabes for the Kinseys to decide it was easier to walk a few more steps up to the school each morning than deal with the popular kids. Of course, it didn’t matter where they parked, they still had to run the gauntlet of the beautiful people to get into the school, and that was as fun as your average dentist’s visit.

“Oh look, everyone, the Kinsey twins have decided to grace us with their pollution once again,” announced Cindy, who wielded her new Prius like a weapon against Christin’s gas-guzzling truck.

“Not twins, bimbo, but if you weren’t too vain to wear your glasses you’d see that,” muttered Matt as they walked into the school, heads lowered against the disapproving glances of Cindy’s psuedo-environmentalist friends. They cared about the planet because it was the latest flavor, not because they had any great connection to Mother Earth.

Since Matt had his head down, he never saw the chest he ran into, but it didn’t take anyone nearly as bright as the younger Kinsey to realize that Brian Regan, Cindy’s boyfriend, had heard his mumbled insult.

“What did you say, asswipe?” The much larger boy said to Matt, who had bounced off his chest like a superball.

“I said we’re not twins.”

“What else did you say, butt-munch?” Brian gave Matt a shove, spinning him into another of his friends. By now most of the starting offensive line for the football team had formed a circle around Matt, grinning and handing their letter jackets to their girlfriends just in case there was bleeding.

Matt’s temper flared white-hot, and he lost control of his mouth, as he was wont to do in these, or really any, situations. “I said, if your bimbo girlfriend would put on her glasses once in a while, she could see past the end of her makeup mirror.” Christin groaned quietly, hoping her mother had paid for the health insurance this month, because it looked like Matt was going to be needing another trip to urgent care.

“Hold the little chump,” Brian said to his buddies. They instantly grabbed Matt’s arms, but left his legs alone, which cost Brian dearly when he stepped in to deliver Matt’s punishment. The smaller boy was no football bruiser, but two years of varsity cross country had given him plenty of lower-body muscle, and the kick he landed on Brian’s groin was as good as any field goal the team had made all season. Regan dropped like a sack of well-manicured potatoes, and his buddies relaxed their grip on Matt’s arms just enough for him to wrestle his way free and bolt into the school building, his sister hot on his heels. The first bell was just ringing as they made their way inside, laughing hysterically.

“That was great, little bro. Meet you for lunch?” Christin asked.

“Yeah, if I can avoid the goon squad.” Matt gave his sister a high five and they headed off to their morning classes, for the last time.