So, I’ve recently passed my 150th episode of the Modern Evil Podcast, having posted 2 episodes a week almost entirely without fail (there was a week or two where the episodes were a few days late, but no actual gaps in content) since I started it. I’ve just put up the penultimate chapter of Dragons’ Truth, and the final chapter will go up on Friday. ((Yes, Dragons’ Truth was the first of my books I made available, through Podiobooks, almost two years ago – but since I didn’t start the Modern Evil Podcast until  several months later, it hadn’t yet been in the Modern Evil Podcast feed.)) Then, starting a week from today, I’ll be podcasting the short story ‘Second Thoughts’.  It comes from a short story collection I haven’t yet released (I feel I need at least one more story before I can put it out, possibly several more.  They’re long-ish stories, but right now I only have 4 of them, and it comes together as about 150 pages so far.) but this story is one I’ve made available as a limited edition chapbook.  I should put those online for sale…

Anyway, ‘Second Thoughts’ will run for 3 episodes. I’ve got it recorded but not yet edited. Then I had planned on alternating between episodes of the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut (on Fridays) and new poetry (on Tuesdays)… and when I drew up that schedule a couple of months ago, I’d expected to have been able to write the 5 new poems such a schedule calls for… but I haven’t written any new poetry.  I could grab 5+ more poems from my 3 existing collections. I could cut the podcast back to once a week. I could *quick* write some poetry in the next 2 weeks. I haven’t yet decided.

Regardless of what I do, after I finish podcasting ‘Second Thoughts’ and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, I’m out. If I only do 1 episode of LaNF-DC per week, I’ll run out of content April 9th. Including the presumed mid-week poetry episodes, that’ll be episode 167. I don’t have anything ready for episode 168. Yet.

Theoretically I could podcast the remaining stories from More Lost Memories… though I have been reluctant to do so. I could podcast all the remaining poetry from both volumes of Worth 1k… I could edit and polish the other stories from my unfinished collection and podcast them. I could … write a new book. I could let my podcast go on ‘hiatus’ pending new content. I don’t know.

I should be able to write a new book between now and then, but I have a lot of other things going on. A major factor of which is that the book I’m currently researching for … I expect not to be one of the quick ones. I expect to spend at least the next month researching for it, actually (though I suppose if I cut back on crochet work, I could get through my reading faster), before I write word one. I expect it to come out to be one of my longest novels yet, if I want to do a good and thorough job with it. I suppose I could do what some other authors have done before, which is to podcast the unfinished, unedited work as-I-write-it. Or I could write some other book in between researching for it, and podcast that.  I don’t know.

What I don’t want to do is podfade. To stop podcasting. I really would prefer not to go on hiatus. I don’t want to lose my momentum. I also don’t want the quality to drop, or the nature of the feed to change – it’s a podcast of my writing. It isn’t some guy jabbering, it isn’t an interview show, it isn’t topical or political or humorous or informative – it’s a podcast of all the literature I write. Twice a week, every week. I’d like that to continue.

So, I put together that long post about numbers the other day, but I left out some of the numbers. Because I consider them to be less valid. But gosh, do they look more impressive! So, here are the TOTAL downloads for my various podcast novels. So for a book like Lost and Not Found, broken into 18 parts, the number is probably over 18x the number of actual listeners. And for books like Forget What You Can’t Remember and Cheating, Death where I intentionally made the episodes half as long (15min average, instead of 30), the numbers look even more impressive than that! And yet, still so much less impressive than the numbers for the actually popular podiobook authors, whose downloads are hundreds of thousands per book.

• Dragons’ Truth – 11,458 downloads in 2008, 15,985 downloads in 2009: 27,443 total downloads
• Lost and Not Found – 2,906 downloads in 2008, 18,251 downloads in 2009: 21,157 total downloads
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 43,218 downloads in 2009
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 35,704 downloads in 2009 (~9 months)
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 27,178 downloads in 2009 (~6 months)
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 13,502 downloads in 2009 (~4 months)
• Cheating, Death – 11,899 downloads in 2009 (~2 months)
• Total downloads in 2008: 14,364
• Total downloads in 2009: 165,737
• Total of all my Podiobooks’ downloads as of 12/31/09: 180,101
• Total downloads of MEPod as of 1/8/2010: 24,229
• Grand total of Podiobooks + MEPod: 204,330

So there’s some bigger numbers. Still long-tail sized numbers. Even within podcast audiobooks, I’m a small fish. But 204,330 looks a lot better than the 11,119 downloads of just the final episodes of my podiobooks. Puts the donations in perspective; for every ~6005 downloads of my Podiobooks, $1 is donated. Podiobooks.com’s $0.25 cut wouldn’t cover the bandwidth cost of those 150Gb+ of downloads, so I suppose it’s a good thing they aren’t being charged for bandwidth.

I’ve spent the last few days gathering numbers and putting them into a spreadsheet. Now I’m going to take a few of them and try to communicate them to you here. The numbers come from several places, representing podcast downloads, eBook downloads, and sales of books and of art. Since I didn’t make a post about it for 2008’s numbers, I’ll probably include some of them as well, for comparison. I’ll try not to turn this post into a spreadsheet, just numbers, but will try to make it more like my usual rambles.

To begin, a snapshot of right now. As of 1/1/2010, I have 13 titles in some form of publication or other. 5 standalone novels, 2 poetry journals, 2 short story collections, 3 books in the Untrue Tales… series and a single edition containing those 3 books. One of the novels (the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut) is currently only available as an eBook. One of the short story collections (Time, emiT, and Time Again) isn’t yet finished, but I’ve released one of the short stories that will be contained in it as a standalone chapbook.  The 3 individual Untrue Tales… books aren’t technically “in print”, though I have a few copies, printed by Cafepress & sans ISBN. I am not counting The Vintage Collection, though it is another book I’ve put together, had printed, and sold at one time. (I plan to edit and re-release it at a later date.) Seven of my books are available as podcast audiobooks, and all but the poetry is available as eBooks.

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I have a reasonably long attention span, I don’t suffer from anything like what gets diagnosed as ADD/ADHD, but I do find myself having trouble focusing on one thing for very long.  Not minutes, not hours, but … usually after a few days or weeks, I have trouble staying focused and interested on working on the same thing.

Right now it’s this book, Cheating, Death.  I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my next novel about four months ago, and had its initial outline done by mid-July. Then I spent two and a half months reading modern, popular, and recommended zombie novels until I was on the verge of being so sick of zombies I couldn’t have written Cheating, Death.  At which time, in the middle of reading one of the books, I just stopped reading and began writing.  And I’ve spent the last 5 weeks working on it.  In a conversation with my brother earlier tonight, I estimated that I’m on roughly the ninth or tenth pass through the full text of the book, between writing it, editing it, copyediting, hand-coding the kindle version, recording the audiobook, and now editing the audiobook.

It’s no wonder I’m having trouble maintaining interest in editing the audiobook.  (Have you tried reading the same book 9+ times in a month?)  If I’d been able to sit still and work through the edits, hour after hour, I should have been able to finish the first pass through the entire audiobook in (at most) two days, finishing today.  Alas, I’m not quite halfway through with the main edits, I’ve barely begun the work of marketing the book, and I’m nearly fed up with it.  I want to work on anything else.

I want to work on my next book.  I’ve been brainstorming & worldbuilding for the next book and have come up with at least one more (longer, more complex) novel in addition to that which will be set in the same universe.  I lost a couple of nights recently in looking toward what I’d like to accomplish in the next five years.  I spent several hours with my brother tonight developing (from scratch) the basics of a video game we want to develop.  I’m able to work on each of these other ideas & projects for hours at a time over multiple days; it’s not a moment-to-moment shifting from project to project, it’s an urge to work on anything other than Cheating, Death, right now.

I am aware that other authors work on a single book for months, often for years, before ever considering submitting it for publication – and that’s before professional editors start working with them on it, a process that typically stretches on for a year or two before the book reaches the market.  I am aware of it.  It’s just not something I do.  I’m undisciplined, unfocused.  I have trouble working on a single project (a book, an audiobook, learning a language) for more than a few weeks.  I have trouble working on a single image (a painting, a website design) for more than a few days.  I have trouble working on a single blog post for more than a few hours.

On the other hand, I’m intense. I’ve written several novels in about two weeks each, and I wrote one of them in under 3 days.  I’ve won NaNoWriMo four times.  Cheating, Death is the second novel I’ve gone from first word to finished-paperback-book-for-sale with in under a month.  I usually take a website redesign from zero to done in less than two days.  When I’m working passionately, I dive in completely, forsaking sleep, the normal bounds of time, and press on diligently until I’ve exhausted either the idea or my interest in it – and then, like I’m certainly going to do with the Cheating, Death audiobook, I usually continue working on things in which my interest has waned, at least until that phase of my work is complete.  Even my sense of responsibility (& stubbornness) is intense; I remain dedicated to completing the work, and doing so to the best of my ability, in spite of even intense apathy.

I’ve just spent nearly four hours working on this post, and I’ve had a headache for almost half that.  I ought to be sleeping.  Not just because I’ve been awake so long, but also so I can wake in the morning and dedicate tomorrow to working (at least a few hours) on editing that audiobook.  To marketing it.  To getting it from being just a book I wrote to something people are actually reading and listening to.  Hopefully the acetaminophen I took a little while ago will take effect soon; I’m not sure how easily I’ll be able to sleep with this headache.

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Whew.  Done!  Now I just have a whole stack of things to do!  But at least the 1st draft is written!  One of the first things I have to do next is print it out and read it for the first time.  I’ll do this out loud and make notes as I go.  It’s a pretty good way to see if it all works, and whether any sentences need work.  I actually read quite a bit of it out loud as I was working on it; since beginning podcasting all my fiction, I pay a lot more attention to making a good read-aloud book.

Speaking of the podcast:  No voices, for this one, just narration and enough vocal variation to be able to tell any two lines of dialogue apart.  Also, based on a schedule I’d just laid out, I should be able to start this one on the Friday after Untrue Tales… Book Three is complete and then post two chapters a week (one chapter per episode, like FWYCR) from 11/13/09 to 12/25/09.  Because, yeah, I’m going to post the stunning conclusion to the novel on Christmas day. :p

Oh, in addition to writing chapter 13, I’ve also written Appendix Z, included here:

Appendix Z: About the Zombies

Some helpful information about the zombies in this book:

Zombies are slow.

Zombies are stupid.

Zombies do not use tools.

Zombies do not use language.

Zombies do not experience romance.

Zombies are not just old, hungry vampires.

Zombies do not want to exact revenge on the living.

Zombies do not have any magical abilities or super-powers.

Zombies can only be killed by damaging or destroying their brain.

Zombies eat the living, and are attracted to the motion and commotion they make.

Zombies like eating brains, but are not possessed of superhuman strength, so how are they supposed to bite through your skull?

Zombies who did manage to eat the brains of their victims wouldn’t be much of a threat, since they’d prevent the spread of zombie-ism by doing so.

Zombies are created when a human has had fluid contact with a zombie; primarily via saliva transmitted into a bite wound.

Note: Hell is not full, zombies are not a sudden and global phenomenon bringing all unburied dead to life, the dead are not clawing their way out of graves, and this book’s cover is intentionally misleading.

Zombies spread quickly because the living are stupid, too.

I’m posting it here because it’s at the end of the book, which means it isn’t in the free preview.  Which still contains (roughly) the first four chapters of the book.  Have you checked it out, yet?  You should.  The full book’s price is, as promised, at the full eBook price of $4.99 (subject to change) over at Smashwords.  It is currently in its first-draft, unedited state.  Please let me know if you find any problems or errors in it, so I correct them before I send it to press (probably next week).  When it’s corrected, I’ll update the Smashwords copy again, and release it to “Premium Distribution” as well.

Time to go throw it into InDesign, so I have a page count to submit for the PCN request.  I hope you enjoy it.

Go read Cheating, Death now.