As you can see, I got a lot of writing done on Tuesday. Before I started, I had been on a pretty-fully-reversed sleep schedule, going to bed around 8AM and sleeping 8 hours. I wrote that long blog post between 2AM and 4AM, basically “mid-afternoon” for me, and then got started writing. I took my last two modafinil that day, to stay awake until 8/9PM, with the intention of then sleeping all night and continuing the week on a proper daytime schedule. The first day went well, as you can see. My average words/hour rate was consistently above 800 words/hour (which is what I’ve been averaging across my last several books) and frequently at 1k words/hour. In part, I’m confident this is because in addition to being a drug for narcolepsy (let me stay awake), modafinil is a sort of “smart pill” which can enhance one’s mental focus. I ended up writing 4 of the 20 chapters I needed to finish the vampire duology.

When the 2nd pill wore off and I got tired right on schedule, I tried going to bed, but I couldn’t get to sleep. After about an hour of that, I tried some mild exercise for about an hour, then tried again to go to sleep. I ended up getting a little over 3 hours of sleep, and was wide awake but feeling odd/off before 2AM. I put myself back to work, but my writing speed was maxing out at 800 words/hour, and I kept distracting myself with other tasks, sometimes for hours at a time. Then at around 8:3oAM, I was overcome with sleepiness. I went to bed. Slept 4-5 hours. My pace (and distractibility) were the same after sleeping, though I tried to keep myself working most of the afternoon and evening. By the end of the day I’d only finished writing 2 more chapters.

By Wednesday night it was clear to me that rather than shifting myself back to a diurnal schedule, I’d merely broken my sleep cycle in two – I slept another 4-5 hours at night, and woke in the early morning. As distractible as I’d been with all the other things I could do on my home computer, I decided to try heading to Starbucks where I (sometimes? often?) have better luck keeping focused. My writing pace, even with the good caffeine & sugar & eye candy and without much to distract me from the task at hand, was under 500 words/hour. I nearly failed to finish a single chapter before giving up and going home – where I almost immediately went to bed. And slept 4-5 more hours, waking up without enough time to get any writing done before I had to make dinner and go with Mandy to a Phoenix Comicon meeting. When we got home, I logged in to Star Trek Online for their 2-year anniversary event (free new ship for everyone!), and didn’t get any more writing done before heading to bed around 1AM. I only got 1 chapter written, yesterday.

So, that’s where I’m at. I slept from 1AM to 5AM and expect to sleep from 10AM or 11AM to 3PM or 4PM – at which time I’ll need to go get started making dinner, followed by having a Friday night with my wife. Worst case for this (barring no writing) is that I go write for the next 3 hours, it goes as slow or slower than yesterday, and my word count for the day goes down by half yet again. On this trajectory I’m facing Zeno’s paradox and will never reach the end of these books.

What I really need is 3 more of those 10k+word days. Quick, someone get me more smart pills! At the very least, this sleep thing is screwing up my ability to write for any sustained period, and is eating some of the best writing hours from the middle of the day.

There’s so much work yet to be done on these books. Beyond the 60+ good hours of writing it will take to finish the first drafts, there’s initial editing so I can send to my Beta Readers, then days or weeks waiting for them to get back to me with their feedback, then re-writes and edits based on that feedback and possibly (if I can convince anyone to re-read the books so quickly) a second round of the same. Once I’ve got the basic text in good shape I’ve got to do another close read (copyediting) before I begin recording the audio version – a step which always finds new errors and awkward sentences/dialogue in the text, and which I prefer to do before publishing, when possible. I’ve got to do the interior layout, which shouldn’t be too difficult at this point and with all the experience I have, but I’ve also got to design the cover in three ways, for each individual eBook as well as for the paper/limited-edition/flipbook, hopefully all as a single image. I’ve got to do fundraising (possibly via Kickstarter) to pay for the paper edition, which almost certainly takes weeks or more. Actually podcasting the audio version may take up to a year, though it’s the hundreds of hours of recording, editing, and assembling them which I’ll want to have done before publication. After all that, getting the eBooks ready will be a snap.

Why am I thinking about all this? I just noticed January has slipped away, almost without my notice, and February is at hand. Tomorrow I’ll process the data on January eBook sales and (possibly) update the prices on some of my books/eBooks, according to the formula I rolled out at the start of the year. This has reminded me that Phoenix Comicon is coming up at the end of May; hopefully the significantly lower prices this model affords my paperbacks will result in increased sales at Comicon. This has led me inexorably to the idea that, if possible, I’d like to have my vampire duology flipbook on hand and for sale at the Phoenix Comicon. Which led to thinking about everything in that last paragraph, and more.

Part of the ‘more’ is all the other projects I’ve been working on lately, in my lack of focus, especially the interactive book on writing and publishing. I mentioned on Google+ last night that, in addition to beginning to write that book, I spent some time mapping out its (quite complex) hypertext structure; it’s intended to be read in a non-linear way, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as well as a cross between a memoir and a how-to guide for independent writing and publishing, and it’s been percolating up through my mind for years. At the current stage of mapping and note-making, I’ve already got forty-plus chapters/chunks started; if no more occur to me, and they’re each the 1500+word chunks they’ve been becoming so far, it’s already shaping up to be book-length, complex, and interesting. I’ve got at least another 60 hours of work just writing the thing, and possibly over 100 hours, the way it’s been going.

(I won’t even mention each of the other projects I’ve had queueing up and being worked on by my scattered thoughts and efforts, except to say that if I continue on as I am, none of them -certainly not the vampire books- will be finished by Comicon.)

According to my calculations, if I seriously applied myself, I could finish the first draft of the vampire duology in six or eight solid days of work, since I’ve already got it all well-planned and developed. The same is roughly true of the book on publishing; six to ten long, hard days of dedicated work and I could have a first draft complete, from where I’ve already got it. The work would be intense, draining work, and would require me to (somehow) overcome the worst elements of my own insanity; what I have been trying to figure out is whether, if I actually applied myself and accomplished those things, would I have the time needed to get either (or preferably both) projects ready for sale in time for Phoenix Comicon. All that extra work I listed off in the second paragraph – can it be completed and the finished books delivered to my hands before the end of May? And if so, is it worth it to me to try to do so?

If I set myself to these tasks/goals, to this deadline, the aspect most at risk for being potentially short-changed is the editing/rewrites. Getting people, even family and close friends, to read a single book and give feedback (even just basic spelling & grammar, to say nothing of content) in as little as a week or two tends to be a huge fight and to carry a significant attrition rate. I dread sending out two (or worse, three) books with the intention of getting meaningful feedback on any limited timeline, for free. I don’t know how long professional editors would take to do the work, but I know I can’t afford such a thing right now. There are some other parts of the work I can accomplish while waiting for feedback, such as cover design, or working on the other title, but if I expect to incorporate any meaningful changes to the text, the bigger time-sink of recording the audiobook has to wait. I can probably start fundraising before completing the final edits of the text, which helps even out the timeline, some.

Let’s see what the hard deadline would be… Phoenix Comicon runs May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend, except without the Memorial Day), which means I’d want to have any items for sale there on hand no later than Tuesday the 22nd, for booth setup Wednesday. LSI typically takes about a week from when I send them the files before they approve a title for printing, then another 3-5 days to print, then I have them shipped via UPS Ground (because shipping heavy things like cases of books any faster is prohibitively expensive), so to be conservative I need to submit the files three weeks before I need the books on hand, at the latest. That means I have to have the book ready for print on or before May 1st.

Yow. 90 days.

If I go mad (in a good, hard-working way) for the next couple/few weeks, I can finish at least the vampire books by the end of next week, and possibly all three books the week after that, and get them to my Beta Readers before mid-February. I’ll need not less than a week after I think I’m done editing the book to work through the audio version, probably at least two weeks, plus time to make final changes to the layouts & text after that, so I should say I need to be done polishing the text by mid-April. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, if I continue to have trouble focusing, trouble writing for long periods, or writing at reasonable rates, even with significant daily work it could take me until mid-March to finish the first drafts. Ugh.

What if I need significant re-writes? These books are important to me. Important that they express what I want them to express, even to casual readers. Not so important that they read like mainstream fiction… they’re not even in the same realm as that. But important to me that they’re good, that they do what they set out to do. Tell the stories they were meant to tell. I don’t know. I don’t really even know how to do re-writes. (Ooh; I’ve just added another chapter/chunk’s beginning to the book on writing/publishing, about my editing/rewriting process, or lack thereof.) If my Beta Readers all come back to me saying something like “we don’t really believe Emily is in love with Nicholas; you have to show it, make us feel it, it isn’t there”, or “we couldn’t buy in to anything Nicholas and his group were doing; it was obvious you disagreed with everything he had to say or tried to do”, I may just have a total breakdown, as that would mean most everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish (in one of the books) I had failed at, compromising the work straight to the core. I might have to take another year on the re-writes, or I might just publish as-is, with the admission that I’m a shitty writer… I don’t know where my emotional collapse would leave me, after excellent feedback like that. (Although, really, I’m just kidding myself with ideas like that; I have never in my life received feedback of that caliber. I don’t know whether it’s because the people reading my books understand my intent and I’m actually doing what I meant to do, or whether my goals were so far beyond the beyond that no one even know what was wrong, and that I’ve secretly, quietly, been a dismal failure all these years. (On the other hand, based on the comments in the worst of my reviews, the one and two star reviews, the single-sentence reviews, the reviews from people who admit they quit reading in under 50 pages… the things those people hate about them are generally all the things that were so important to me to accomplish, or were at least intentional. Not failures of writing, but failure of readers to appreciate what the author was setting out to do. The polarizing effect of my work has become quite encouraging, lately.)) I feel like time is my enemy, at times.

Still, even with worst-case responses, if I can get any meaningful feedback out of people within a month of sending them my books, even that should give me enough time to accomplish significant rewrites, if necessary. Whole chapters, or plot-lines, could be replaced in the time remaining… So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do. Start applying myself. Intensely. Finish three books’ first drafts in the next three weeks, and have them ready for publication within the next three months.

I’d be tempted to find some money in the budget to order a bunch of modafinil, but I suspect that, if all goes to plan, I’ll be done (or very nearly done) with the most intense part of the work before the drugs arrived from my international pharmacy. If I didn’t have an unnatural aversion to 1) seeing doctors and 2) dishonesty, I’d be much better off convincing a local doctor to write me a prescription for the stuff, and picking it up at my local pharmacy the same day. Somehow, violating federal and international laws bothers me less than either of the things involved in obtaining modafinil the way I’m supposed to. Oh, well. If I had modafinil on hand, I wouldn’t have even had to question any of this, as getting this level of work done would become nearly trivial. *sigh*

I’d better go get to work.

First off, the old numbers: Last year at this time we owed $29,439 in consumer debt (including our auto loan) and $39,840 in student loans, for a total of $69,279 in debt. When I posted last year, we’d just paid off one of our cars; a few months later we sold it to my sister. This year we’ve paid off another credit card, and expect to pay off our remaining car in March – plus we replaced two computers, which died, with an iPad 2 and a new Macbook Pro, and decided to buy an HDTV for my birthday. We’ve been getting far enough ahead on our debt payments that I’ve been able to add line items to the budget for things like future computer replacements, new tires (bought a full set in the Fall) every couple of years, vehicle license tax, and other annual-or-less-frequent expenses we’d always had to treat as an unexpected/emergency expense. This is a huge relief, and it’s nice to see our savings account growing and know that the next time a tire blows out or a computer fails, we’ve literally got money in the bank to pay for repairs or replacements. Not everything is covered by this, yet, but we’re a lot, lot, lot better off now than we once were in not just being able to afford living expenses but to plan for those big, rare costs. Of course, those budget items bit into the debt stacking and are eating the car payments from my sister entirely, so we didn’t pay down our debt as much in the last year as we did the year before. Here are the new numbers: Our outstanding consumer debt (including the car) is $21,855 and we owe $38,797 in student loans, for a total debt of $60,652. This means that since last year, we paid our debt down by $8,627, which is still quite a nice amount, even though it is only 57% of last year’s phenomenal number.

Since I have the spreadsheet full of data, I can also give a few other numbers. For the calendar year of 2011, based on numbers from the statements received in 2011 (which is to say that the following numbers represent a slightly different period and may actually represent several different periods): We paid roughly $10,268 towards the principal owed across all our accounts, and we paid roughly $6,488 in interest. Of that, $2,128 was student loan interest, which is tax deductible. If we want to look on the brightest, most skewed side of life, we can pretend that means we only paid an effective 6.15% interest rate on the $70,795 we owed in January 2011, over the course of 2011. On the other, more pessimistic hand, we paid nearly as much in interest in 2011 as our outstanding debt went down from 1/31/2011 to 1/30/2012. Still, we’re making headway.

Potentially big things ahead: We should hear within the next month (or two…) about whether Mandy’s application for a teach abroad program in Japan was accepted. If it is, this will incur some up-front costs (we’ve already set aside the known program costs) and some large expenses in the late summer (airfare for myself, plus living expenses for the first month there), but on the whole it will be a great experience and a good thing for our budget. Unless the economies of the US and Japan experience some radical and unexpected adjustments in the next couple of years, the pay for the position will comfortably pay for our living expenses in Japan while allowing us to pay down our debt significantly faster than we currently do, even accounting for the cost of currency conversions. If we don’t end up going to Japan, the money we’ve got planned for it will likely go toward taking a couple of road trips this summer, at least to visit Mandy’s family in Wyoming, and possibly to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida. Either way, we should still end up paying down our debt by approximately $9k-$11k, or possibly more.

Things change. Things always change. I can’t be certain what the next few years will hold. Barring a lot of unknown unknowns, though, we expect to have our consumer debt paid off by mid-2014, and it looks like the student loan payoff has slipped to mid-2017. These figures are both about six months further out than I was projecting when I posted about all this stuff at this time last year, and it’s because of all the stuff I’ve added to the budget (along with the as-yet-unbudgeted versions of same, such as replacing our computers & tires). A little of it is in “disposable/entertainment” categories, but a lot of it is simply the things we were going to have to pay for anyway but hadn’t managed to plan for before. The tires, the VLT, oil changes & misc. repairs for the car, plus computer upgrades and replacements, plus most of the costs of running my business (web hosting & domain registrations, tax license fees, et cetera, plus a little budget for writing in Starbucks) in case for some reason it stops being profitable… And budgeting appropriately for food, clothes, and entertainment (books, music, movies, games, apps) is important to remaining in the black – we’ve lost over 100lbs between the two of us over the last two years, and the clothes costs kept wreaking havoc with our budget. I think we’ve got everything just-about-balanced now, and mid-2014 isn’t that far away. Being totally debt-free in time for our ten-year wedding anniversary in 2017 will be pretty nice, too.

Maybe to celebrate we’ll take out a mortgage on a house.

Much of the time, I don’t even have the focus required to work at all, or to blog, or get much of anything done. For much of the last couple of months, though I’ve spent more time playing video games than most anything else, I’ve even had trouble keeping focus there – generally unable to play for more than a couple of hours at a time before my mind wanted to bounce to some other thing. Yet here and there, for a few minutes or an hour at a time, I have been doing work.

One of the problems with this is that nothing is getting finished, which I may address separately, but looming larger to me right now is the ridiculous number of different projects I’m working on (or procrastinating) in these little bits and pieces. I’ll work for an hour, or a chapter, on the vampire novels I’ve been working on for the last year, then later that day (or the next day – the next time I get any work done) I’ll be spontaneously working on some other thing. Outlining a new serial thriller, writing a chapter of my book on publishing, researching or brainstorming for a story I’m developing about an end to senescence, coming up with apps I want to develop on iOS (beyond the interactive comics I initially had in mind), et cetera. I made a list tonight (partially so I don’t lose track of all the different work I’m doing) and have found at least nine different projects I have at various stages of development. (Not including writing things like this blog post, or any thoughts about getting back into visual art.)

At the same time, and almost certainly related, I’ve been experiencing significant irrational emotional distress. Feeling good and bad at the same time. Happy and grateful for all the good things in my life; years of happy marriage, paying down our debt & being financially comfortable, being in the best shape & health of my adult life, free to do the work I want to do on the schedule my insanity allows without external financial or emotional pressure, and so on. Simultaneously I’m going through extremes of emotional overeating, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, full-body physical pain (yes, this is a symptom of depression), bouts of mania, antisocial urges, and a wide variety of effects relating to my libido, among other expressions of my depression. It’s all quite difficult to be going through.

Good mixed with bad. I stated earlier that this was, in a way, a return to an old problem, and that’s true. Working on more projects at once than I knew how to keep up with was something I struggled with in the middle of the last decade, though I don’t recall having quite so many different (big) things going at once. Then there have been periods where I didn’t have any projects going. Even most of last year feels a bit that way, though I know I was doing the work to prepare myself to write my vampire duology, I also look back and see eight-plus months where I didn’t produce anything obvious: No big word counts, very few paintings, no new audiobooks… Except I’m looking at it from my (most self-effacing) perspective, when I see it that way. In reality I put out multiple new books in the Spring, my podcast didn’t fall silent until Summer, I published my first book by another author in the Fall, and then immediately started the writing part of the work on two new books. Which was mostly one project followed by another. Now I’m back to a weird state of being unable to keep my mind from bouncing between quite a lot of things all at once. Good to have so many things going, but also bad that I can’t seem to keep focus on (and sooner finish) any one of them. Good to find myself so inspired by my life and the world, so full of ideas. Bad that I still feel (mostly, I’m working on it) like I don’t have a cause or a “purpose” or some deep passion driving me and driving my work – I’m not trying to “say something” most of the time, certainly not in any overall way, I’m just … expressing my ideas.

Good and bad. Challenged and successful. Engaged and distracted. Frustrated and content. Happy with my life and on the verge of suicide. All mixed up and exactly how I’m supposed to be.

Also: I’ve begun to suspect that perhaps I secretly live somewhere on Mars, or that I’m natively Martian, or something like that. Left to my body’s natural cycles, I seem to slip around the clock. In the past I’d estimated it was nearly one extra hour per day, that perhaps I was simply running 25-hour days – yet my actual experience seems to tell me it isn’t whole hours. I don’t reliably gain seven hours every week; It’s somewhat less. Mars has a day approximately 24 hours and 40 minutes long. I intend to develop a system for calculating and tracking Martian daylight & seasons in parallel with my own wake/sleep cycles, to see whether there is any correlation. If/when I figure out where on Mars I am (or that I’m actually running at some other regular rate, or a wildly irregular rate, which I also strongly suspect) I’ll be sure to post an update.

On the other hand, it’s ridiculously difficult to try to track how many people are reading such a thing. I’ve tried fixing it several times, but Google Analytics doesn’t report it properly. I’ve been downloading my server access logs and manually parsing them (to get eBook download numbers) since February of 2011, when 1 and 1 (my web host) changed their Web Statistics to “Site Analytics” and removed all the usefulness from the tool for me. I tried parsing out the data about access to the 7 domains/subdomains which hold the web-based versions of these novels, to try to get any useful data about how many people have been reading them, and to start I just parsed out February and December’s numbers (rather than going through the full year before figuring out whether I can get anything useful out of them). (Yes, I know, I could maybe write a script/program to parse the logs for me. That might even work for the eBooks, despite at least half of the logs being garbage (it looks to me like zombies accessing hundreds/thousands of nonexistent URLs, possibly as some wasted DDOS effort), but for these sites … I’ll explain.) The logs are a mess.

I’d have to figure out which IPs are robots, first, I think, so I can get rid of all the requests from them – a lot, lot, lot of the requests are clearly spiders following every single link on every single page. Since every single paragraph has a unique URI for its location and a corresponding link to the separate comments associated with it, there are hundreds/thousands of links per book which I know no human would ever have clicked; they’re links to comments which clearly say there are zero comments. From what I can tell, there’s at least one Russian spider/bot following every link of every page of all these domains at least once a month, using a wide range of IP addresses to do so. Plus google, which isn’t as thorough or as frequent – which seems reasonable, since none of these sites have been updated in the slightest in a year.

ASIDE: Oh, yeah, that’s another thing. There hasn’t been a single comment anywhere on any of the books in a year. (Well, come to think of it, those Russian IPs are probably the SPAM bots posting SPAM comments Akismet has no trouble automatically moderating. There are huge numbers of those.) Whether or not anyone is reading these versions of the books, they certainly aren’t commenting on them. Or linking to them (no trackbacks), or emailing me / calling me / texting me about them. (Aside to the aside: While I was in the middle of writing this post, I received a phone call from someone asking whether I buy poetry. The person says they have, maybe, six or seven poems. Apparently, ever. It’s like people can’t read.)

So I can pretty easily see how much traffic a particular domain/subdomain received, based on the logs. A lot of that is bots, not humans. Worse, the bots make it so, if I try to total up access to individual pages of each book, I’ll have to manually filter out all the requests the bots made for things humans didn’t. There’s no easy script for that, because I have to make a human determination about which pages humans might have clicked on and which ones they clearly didn’t (or aren’t worth counting), and there are hundreds to thousands of those little decisions per domain per month of data. Some of it isn’t just bots, but bot-garbage (requests for non-existent pages). I thought I’d take a look at the 1 and 1 Site Analytics to see what it said, and at the way, way lower Google Analytics numbers to compare, but … they’re all so wildly different from one another. For reference, the 1 and 1 official Site Analytics tool reports fewer than 1/4 of the requests for my most popular eBook file (not the web ones, the PDF) versus the raw logs those analytics are theoretically built from, and for other files I’ve already parsed, even the variations are all over the board. Likewise, if the 1 and 1 Site Analytics tool were to be believed, in December 2011 around a thousand different people each read one chapter of the web version of Cheating, Death (pretty evenly distributed across all 13 chapters), and a small handful read every chapter. My access logs show almost 2k page requests (almost double what 1 and 1 shows) for the same period. Google shows … twenty page requests from 11 visitors… though admittedly, they’ve mixed together numbers from four other books in that (all the books in the Lost and Not Found universe are on the lostandnotfound.com domain, and I can’t get Google Analytics to properly separate out the subdomains) so that’s 20 page requests across the several hundred pages of five books… and only really from 9 different pages, only 1 from Cheating, Death… except it isn’t that, either. Google has no idea what to do with these web pages.

So how many people are actually reading these versions? While I don’t want to actually invest the dozens of hours it would take to parse the data, at a glance it looks like very few. Possibly none, depending on the bots. Maybe a dozen people a month. Why am I asking? Because I have to pay the domain renewal fees on those domains every year, really. Is it worth $9/year (and/or the hassle of moving them to modernevil.com, or moving the registrations to another registrar, or whatever) for zero to perhaps a dozen people a month to read these versions of these books, instead of the other sixteen ways they can read them (seven free)? This year I’m cutting out recurring costs for things which my readers don’t take enough advantage of for them to be financially worthwhile (see my posts on canceling distribution, if you haven’t yet), and I’ve got a few months but I’ve got to decide whether or not to keep paying to maintain the dragonstruth.com and lostandnotfound.com domains… and whether, if/when I release the domains, I should bother getting the web-based versions of the books back up and running on one of the domains I’m keeping.

Speaking of which, what do you think about my moving this blog to, say, teelmcclanahan.com/blog/ ? That site probably needs a revamp, anyway, but if I’m paring down domains, maybe lessthanthis.com is one to subtract, too. Considering I never/extremely-rarely get comments, I’ll probably turn off blog comments while I’m at it. I ask these sorts of open-ended questions, questions only readers of the blog can answer, and don’t get answers… maybe I’d do better about not bothering to ask (or feeling compelled to ask) if comments were just … gone.

Briefly, first, before we get into the hard numbers: eBook downloads were way, way up for Q4 of 2011. This is largely due to traffic from getfreeebooks.com, which linked to Cheating, Death on October 16th, to Unspecified on November 9th, to Dragons’ Truth on November 29th, and to The First Untrue Trilogy on December 23rd. Total eBook downloads (across all titles) were up more than 100%, quarter-over-quarter. Podiobooks downloads continued their decline; my numbers there only seem to hold steady or increase while I’m actively releasing new content, but mostly they’ve just been declining for the last two years. For Q4 I had roughly $29 in eBook sales, and Podiobooks lumped Q3 and Q4 donations together – my cut was $9.74 for the 6-month period (which equates to $12.99 in donations). I also sold a full set of the Untrue Tales series in paper for $50.

Now, so they’re in the same format as the other quarters of 2011, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for/through Q4 of 2011, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 494 / 1,376 / 97
• Dragons’ Truth: 2,123 / 1,527 / 155
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 729 / 5,828 / 140
• The First Untrue Trilogy: 1,034 (eBook only)
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: 557 (eBook only)
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / 3,032 / 198
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: N/A / 4,015 / 264
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: N/A / 1,656 / 144
• Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 1,301 / 113
• Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 1,140 / 113
• Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 1,076 / 102
• Cheating, Death: 1,567 / 5,834 / 356
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 260 / 345 / 29
• More Lost Memories (full): 335 / 702 / 39
• More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 3
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 277 / 761 / 48
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
• Last Christmas: 3
• Unspecified: 1,537
• Total Q4: 7,390 / 28,593 / 1,798
• Total 2011: 17,502 / 151,233 / 9,784
• Total all-time: 33,195 / 543,595 / 35,237

re: Podiobooks downloads: It looks like about 200 people started the Untrue Tales series, I lost a good chunk in Book Two, more in Book Three, but the 100 people who made it to Book Four stuck with it to the end – which matches what I’ve previously observed. Downloads of my short story collections and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut were off by about 50% quarter-over-quarter, to fewer than 50 people finishing each title during the entire quarter. Everything else is just less than flat, part of a gradual overall decline.

re: eBooks: Only about half of the people who downloaded The First Untrue Trilogy downloaded the second, which has remained roughly true since I released the eBooks (60% over the life of the eBooks). (This is unfortunate, as I believe books 5 & 6 are some of my best writing to date, and that the second trilogy is much better than the first.) Unspecified was released at the beginning of Q4, and has been downloaded more in Q4 than all but 2 of my titles, which is saying a lot, since it’s a poetry book. The only titles which did better where my YA novel and my zombie novel, and Unspecified was only 30 downloads (>2%) behind Cheating, Death. All free eBook downloads were up for the quarter, probably owing to the free-ebook-seeking traffic linked in as mentioned above, but eBook purchases for the period were down again. It looks like I only sold 21 eBooks across all titles and all platforms during Q4, 2011.

Now, some year-end numbers, with prior-year numbers for comparison. I’ve been doing this full time for four years, now, and looking back is interesting (to me). The following numbers are as follows (dollars rounded to nearest $1): 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / all time

• Total # of paper books sold: 21 / 61 / 68 / 26 / 176
• Revenue from paper books: $293 / $440 / $587 / $484 / $1805
• Total # of eBooks sold: 5 / 38 / 106 / 133 / 282
• Income from eBooks: $15 / $71 / $124 / $267 / $477
• Total # of PB donations: 0 / 3 / 13 / 7 / 23
• Income from PB: $0 / $22 / $60 / $25 / $107
• Total # of books sold*: 28 / 150 / 214 / 201 / 593
• Total income from books: $308 / $534 / $771 / $776 / $2,389
• Total # of works of art sold: 18 / 29 / 10 / 5 / 62
• Total income from art sales: $1,384 / $1,074 / $775 / $1,450 / $4,683
• Total income from art+books: $1,692 / $1,608 / $1,546 / $2,226 / $7,071.63

 *Total number of books sold includes paper copies given away as review copies and PB donations as sales.

This is downloads (estimated – for audio I’m using the “finished” number of downloads of the final episode of a Podiobook), with one number added, showing the number of downloads which were paid for, so the last two numbers are all time/paid:

• Lost and Not Found eBook: 1,079 / 506 / 1,015 / 1,432 / 4,032/7
• Lost and Not Found audio: 80 / 926 / 693 / 417 / 2,116/1
• Dragons’ Truth eBook: 961 / 609 / 1,574 / 4,360 / 7,504/16
• Dragons’ Truth audio: 1,271 / 1,616 / 1,277 / 788 / 4,952/4
• ForgetWYCR eBook: na / 735 / 1,316 / 1,845 / 3,896/19
• ForgetWYCR audio: na / 1,150 / 1,152 / 607 / 2,909/0
• Cheating, Death eBook: na / 8 / 67 / 2,356 / 2,431/23
• Cheating, Death audio: na / 366 / 3,276 / 1,683 / 5,325/3
• LaNF-DC eBook: na / 0 / 20 / 895 / 915/3
• LaNF-DC audio: na / na / 439 / 254 / 693/0
• More Lost Memories eBook: na / 6 / 22 / 1,000 / 1,028/5
• More Lost Memories audio: na /na / 385 / 335 / 720/1
• Time, emiT, and Time Again eBook: na / na / 15 / 935 / 950/7
• Time, emiT, and Time Again audio: na / na / 200 / 249 / 449/1
• Untrue Tales Book One eBook: 948 / 587 / 1,103 / 287 / 2,925/17
• Untrue Tales Book One audio: na / 2,865 / 2,682 / 1,229 / 6,776/3
• Untrue Tales Book Two eBook: 964 / 562 / 989 / 285 / 2,800/6
• Untrue Tales Book Two audio: na / 1,843 / 2,586 / 1,295 / 5,724/2
• Untrue Tales Book Three eBook: 897 / 553 / 1,043 / 225 / 2,718/7
• Untrue Tales Book Three audio: na / 1,002 / 1,644 / 843 / 3,489/3
• Untrue Tales Book Four eBook: na / na / 26 / 314 / 340/0
• Untrue Tales Book Four audio: na / na / na / 875 / 875/2
• Untrue Tales Book Five eBook: na / na /na / 265 / 265/0
• Untrue Tales Book Five audio: na / na / na / 708 / 708/3
• Untrue Tales Book Six eBook: na / na / na / 0 / 0/0
• Untrue Tales Book Six audio: na / na / na / 501 / 501/0
• The First Untrue Trilogy eBook: na / na / na / 2,006 / 2,006/3
• The Second Untrue Trilogy eBook: na / na / na / 1,211 / 1,211/4
• Unspecified: na / na / na / 1,539 / 1,539/4
• Total eBook downloads: 4,849 / 3,573 / 7,271 / 19,041 / 34,734/282
• Total audio downloads: 1,351 / 9,768 / 14,334 / 9,784 / 35,237/23

I’ve highlighted a number at the bottom: In 2011 I had 19,041 free eBook downloads. That’s a lot of downloads, compared to every other annual number I’ve just listed. That averages out to over 50 downloads a day. It also represents more than a total reversal from the ratio of eBook to Podiobook downloads I had last year.

The green numbers running down the right side are paid downloads, which for Podiobooks.com represents individual donations and for eBooks is actually in addition to the numbers in the first four columns. (Because I’m working from several spreadsheets to synthesize this data for you, and because the sales numbers are so small they barely make a difference on a year-by-year basis. If you want all the numbers, again, ask for it and I’ll send you the spreadsheets.) This means that the final numbers are a (backwards) ratio of paid downloads to free downloads across the last four years. All but three of them work out to less than half of one percent (Untrue Tales Book One eBook at 0.58%, Time, emiT, and Time Again eBook at 0.74%, and Cheating, Death eBook at 0.95%) and all of them are less than one percent paid. Some titles do better than others, but when I aggregate all the numbers together I get the following two data points:

• 1 in 290 people who download one of my book-length eBooks pays
• 1 in 953 people who download one of my Podiobooks pays

This is … bad. If I look at all sales of all formats (including paper) compared to all downloads across all book-length titles available for free, I get another data point: About 1 in every 206 times someone acquires a copy of one of my book-length works, they pay for it. So, about 1 in 200 overall (half a percent) pay at least something. Except that where about 1 in 300 people who want one of my eBooks pays for it, only about 1 in 1,000 people who listen to one of my audiobooks pays for it.

Some of that may represent a false comparison. If you’re looking for free eBooks, you can pretty easily find modernevil.com and, faced with the big “pay what you can” banner across every page, make a decision about whether to pay or not. If you’re looking for free audiobooks, you can pretty easily find my audiobooks on Podiobooks.com and in the iTunes podcast directory, and at least one of those makes it clear the only source of income for the creators is donations – but both are distinctly (currently – Evo has been promising for years to make PB more revenue-centric) focused on providing you my content for free. On the other hand, if you’ve got a kindle/nook/iPad/whatever and are shopping in the on-device store for eBooks, it’s pretty easy to find my eBooks, but the option to get them for free isn’t even hinted at. How many of the people who paid for my eBooks would have paid if they’d known they could also have got them for free? Perhaps that ratio would also drop to 1 in 1000 if, from the very start, it was made clear to those readers that free was an option…

Anyway… 2011 was a good year. I sold fewer paper books, but a few more eBooks, and my book revenue was the highest it’s ever been, even if only by about $5. I sold fewer works of art (and only created 3 new works of art all year), but my art revenue was the highest it’s ever been. The number of eBooks I’ve sold and had downloaded for free have been pretty steadily increasing, and both numbers were the highest they’ve ever been. For the second year in a row, Modern Evil Press has come out profitable (for tax purposes), even if only by a small amount – but that’s the highest it’s ever been, too. By some arcane calculations, I currently estimate I’ve gained at least 1,800 new readers in each of the last two years, and that I have been read/heard (or at least downloaded) by at least 7,500 people and possibly as many as 68,000 (though it’s probably closer to the neighborhood of 12k-30k). If you want a really big number, I think the biggest one I’ve got is the total number of episode downloads across all my Podiobooks for all time (through 12/31/2011), which was 543,595. (Interestingly, that doesn’t count any of the downloads of those same books on the Modern Evil Podcast – because I’ve never had a very good way to track that. I simply don’t have those numbers. Sorry.)

Oh, and I don’t know whether I’ll be doing posts exactly like this, this year. I’m not confident there’s much interest in all these details. I’ll probably post sales numbers monthly, as I’ll need to calculate them monthly to update my prices, but that won’t take long unless things really start to take off. Perhaps I’ll do some vague posts – I’ll surely still be gathering all these numbers and wrangling them into my spreadsheets… Part of the problem, as I see it, is that I’m not some one-title author blogging about their sales of their one book, and their one-weekend pricing experiment. I’m an independent publisher, reporting on the sales and downloads of dozens of distinct and interrelated titles which have been made available at a dizzying array of prices over time, and usually each at several prices at once. I’ll almost certainly do another post at this time next year, to compare year over year how things go.

Here’s some backstory before I get into the numbers: Back in the before-times, I began writing stories. By the turn of the millennia, I’d begun thinking about writing novels. By the end of 2002 I’d written (and published, albeit in extremely low quantity and quality, and quietly) my first novel. By 2004 I’d done a nearly-professional job publishing it, and my second novel, though I still lacked distribution. At the end of 2004, my life went off a cliff, right after I published my 3rd novel, and publishing my 4th novel in 2005 was part of the long descent into Hell, which didn’t begin to let up until the Fall of 2006, when I also finished my 5th novel. Coming out of those dark days, I decided to take publishing seriously, started Modern Evil Press officially in 2007, and re-published my first 5 novels via Lightning Source (LSI), along with two poetry books. With LSI, I had professional (though not offset) printing, and I also had professional distribution (though not the sort of distribution where sales reps were trying to get my books onto store shelves; ‘distribution’ has two definitions in the publishing world, and mine just meant that if a bookstore ordered a book, it would be printed & delivered), and my books began appearing on Amazon &c. in their new forms. In 2008 I left my day job and began working as a full time creative, putting out professional-level eBooks and near-professional audiobooks along with the paper editions. Since then I’ve continued writing, editing, recording and publishing books, and as of right now I’ve written 11 novels, 2 short story collections, 2 poetry collections, and edited & published my first book by someone else. I’ve also published one short story exclusively in digital (eBook & audio).

If you read here much, you probably knew all that. (If not, please check out modernevil.com.) You may even have some idea of my financials. But… Did you know that, of my books released on paper, none one of them has ever made enough sales (even including sales across all formats, to try to make up for the cost of the paper editions through digital sales) to cover the cost of putting out that paper edition? My only “profitable” titles are the ones where I either 1) never published a paper edition, or 2) sold the original work of art I created for the cover of the book. Then there’s that short story I linked to in the last paragraph, Last Christmas (have you read it? It’s only $1.99!), which has both earned more than it cost me to publish the eBook (I still have to buy an ISBN) and for which I sold the cover art. Including some of the other books’ cover art means it’s not my most profitable book, but it feels that way, since it’s earned close to $70 but cost me less than $10 to publish.

Here are some fun numbers about my relationship with LSI: Since I began working with them in 2007, I have paid LSI $2163.46. By my calculation, $408 of that was in “Digital Catalog Fees”, which is an Invoice-y way of saying I pay $12/year/title to have my books available for distribution to booksellers (i.e.: Amazon &c.), and the other $1728.46 was for things like setup fees, shipping and handling, proof copies, oh, and actually printing copies of my books for me to have for direct sales. Let’s take that second number first, and compare it to the total revenue I’ve had come in from direct sales of paper books, which is approximately $1531.33, or a couple hundred dollars less than I spent getting those books. That’s from nearly 5 years of sales. Of course, I have a fair amount of inventory on hand. If all the books I have on the shelves next to me sold for their full cover prices, my bookkeeping software tells me I’d have another $4716.93 from the sale of those 307 books. By retail value, roughly 40% of that is in the two Untrue Trilogies I published this year, fewer than ten of which have sold (between the two titles), so far. Theoretically, if I could ever sell all these books, I’d still make quite a good margin on selling paper copies directly. With the nearly-2/3 margin I calculate for that, I can even afford to do some discounting (which I regularly do, a dollar or two at a time, whenever it’ll help make a sale).

Now let’s look at that other number. The Digital Catalog Fees. I spent $408 to make and keep my titles available for distribution over the last 5 years. I earned $131.26 from wholesale sales of my books (after LSI took their cut for printing them). That’s right. Over the last five years I spent $408 to earn $131.26. On one hand, I’m also paying for visibility; that fee covers getting my books listed on Amazon, bn.com, and theoretically hundreds of other online booksellers, plus it gets them listed as available in the computers of all the bookstores, large and small, across the country. On the other hand, they (bookstores, and customers of online stores) rarely, if ever, order my paper books. Of the 13 titles I’ve printed & distributed with LSI, only 5 titles have ever sold wholesale via LSI, and only one title earned enough from wholesale sales to cover its own Digital Catalog Fees (until/unless I get one more annual fee, then it’s just as red as the others). That includes zero books sold in 2011. (Actually, technically, I sold negative two books via LSI in 2011 – I recently received two returns. Because of strange LSI policies I didn’t fully understand, the cost of the return of one of them exceeded the value of all 5 sales that book had made in prior years. Five sales, one return, zero profit (for that title).) So what is that visibility getting me? Not more sales from my own website. Maybe more eBook sales, though that’s impossible to track. Oh, and speaking of eBook sales: For the 5 titles which had wholesale sales, all earned more from eBook sales than from wholesale paperback sales. All. To readers who paid at least 50% less than those who bought paper copies.

So, what do we learn from this? Well, for one: Paying for distribution of paper books doesn’t make sense, at all. Also: I need to better gauge the number of paper books I’ll be able to sell directly; when I sell them, they’re profitable, but when they sit on my shelf, they aren’t. (To clarify: It was a terrible idea to publish a new edition of the First Untrue Trilogy, and was probably a bad idea to put out a paper edition of the Second Untrue Trilogy. Of the ~$1700 I spent on getting paper books made in the last 5 years, ~$700 was for those two books. Which is to say: Without those books, I’d have had ~$1300 in direct sales and ~$1000 in printing costs, and at least that aspect of it would have been profitable.) Another detail which comes up: Publishing digital-only is much more likely to be profitable for me, even when only a few copies sell.

Really, because only a few copies sell.

I can pretend that “someday I’ll reach a bigger paying audience”, and maybe I will, but I can’t count on it. I need to make decisions based on reality. Right now the reality is that I have a few, very dedicated readers and supporters (the so-called “true fans”) and a whole lot of readers who are very unlikely to spend anything at all on my work. (And when they do, it isn’t on a paperback.) So: I’ve already begun taking my books “out of print”.

I told LSI to “cancel” my two poetry books (right after publishing Unspecified), which have earned about $70 between them and cost me somewhat over $480, so far. They weren’t making even enough sales to cover the annual Digital Catalog Fees, so I cancelled them. (I’ll have full eBook editions for sale… soon.) I’ll probably cancel all the rest when my LSI reps get back from holiday. I have literally no idea when they’ll stop being listed as available on Amazon and other sites. Right now my poetry books are listed as “temporarily out of stock” on Amazon, even though I cancelled them months ago. Note: I still have plenty of copies available. That actually goes for all my books. I have over 300 books sitting here, waiting for readers. Even after they’re removed from all the bookstores’ databases, I’ll still have them for sale. I’ll work on updating modernevil.com in the new year, too. I’ll probably offer them unsigned for the cover price and signed for a little more, close to what I have now, but my own buy button instead of external links. (Since those links literally never worked for getting sales, anyway.)

What about my future books, you may be wondering? Well, how about digital-first? (Maybe digital-only.) How about digital first, and maybe a Kickstarter or just-straight-painting-sale or maybe a pre-order signup process to see whether there’s any interest in a limited-edition, direct-only, paper version of the book (probably hardback). If I’m not doing distribution, if each paper book is limited edition from copy one, the whole thing gets turned on its head, from price to quality to design. Offset printing still won’t make sense until/unless I get that theoretical larger-audience, but I can design a very nice hardback edition for LSI to print just for me and my readers. If I don’t have to give a retailer 50% (or more) off the top of every sale, even POD hardbacks can be reasonable prices. If I’m producing collector’s items, even relatively affordable ones, even just selling a few can make me a lot more money than I’ve been getting from book sales. It’ll be a sort of cautious Freemium model. Less-popular books will make most of their money from digital, more-popular books will make vastly more money from paper books, and I’ll still probably make more money from art than from books for years to come. (These aren’t final numbers, but it looks like for 2011 I’ll have had a little over $700 in book sales, a little over $1400 in art sales, and a little over $1600 in expenses. Profitable again, which is good, but not by a whole lot. If I just get an order of magnitude more successful, I might actually have to think about things like paying quarterly estimated taxes! In the meantime, I’m generally happy where I’m at.)

I’m going to play around with numbers a lot more in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes out for a new set of quarterly (and end-of-year) download numbers, with some interesting spikes, some time next month. I’ve actually got about 3 months of bookkeeping I’ve got to go through; I’ve been slacking. (The numbers above are all estimates; I have numbers, I just haven’t got them all in the right places for business purposes, yet.) I’ll also want to run all the numbers I can think of on … everything I’ve been talking about. And some projections into the new year.

Oh, and I’ve got to finish writing those books. I’ve not been working on them in the last week or two, partially because sitting down every day to grind out more chapters was beginning to feel more like work and less like something I wanted to be doing – and I want to write these books. So I’m taking most of the money/expenses out of my business, and I’m taking most of the pressure off my process, and I think I’ll be better off for it. In fact, I think my business will be more successful, financially, and I’ll personally be more successful, creatively and emotionally. Win, win, win, and win for anyone who likes reading my books, too.

When I started outlining the first book, a few days before November, I determined that at least the first book wanted to be over 65k words. Because of what I’m planning on doing with them, I want the books to be roughly the same length. Consequently, my word count goal for the month was set at, roughly, one hundred and thirty thousand words. Which is about 4,334 words/day, every day. I kept up a pretty good pace for the first week, almost ten days, then began to taper off. This was largely due to difficult things taking place in the story, but once I’d lost my momentum, around 50k words, actually, I wasn’t able to regain it. Different things kept happening, coming up, interrupting, et cetera. I didn’t finish the first book, yet. I wrote to the point that one of the main characters from the other book is introduced – I need to know what he’s like, what he’s been going through, where he’s at, and how the events about to take place in Sophia’s story are going to affect Emily in hers before I can write them. So I stopped that one and started working on the other.

The outline for that one seemed to imply that it wants to be shorter, which is especially frustrating since Sophia’s story seems to have gone even longer, currently on track for somewhat over 70k words. We’ll have to wait and see how that one actually ends up, but so far the chapters want to be short, too, which is frustrating – but maybe later chapters will want to be longer. Meh. I’m sure it’ll all work out alright. When I get around to writing it. Probably slowly over the next month or so. I predict a lot of workdays writing. Maybe not 5k-10k words/day, but some.

It’s more important to me to get the books written well than to stress out over any artificial deadlines. I recently determined that, by the time I’m done working on these two books, I’ll have spent around a thousand hours on them, between research, planning, writing, editing, recording/editing, and publishing them. Trying to rush any part of the process for books I’m investing so much time in seems inappropriate. So, I’m trying to get back into the right frame of mind for writing these books. This one is a tough one, for a whole stack of reasons I’ve mentioned on Google+ as I run into them, but I’m dedicated to doing it, and doing it well.

Anyway, I’m over 60k words so far on the novels this month, so I’m a “winner” of NaNoWriMo. I may write more this week, depending on what else is going on, perhaps another 10k-20k words… but I don’t expect to finish the first drafts of the two novels for at least several more weeks. If you’re interested in helping me with them, in becoming a ‘Beta Reader’ of my unfinished books, to give me feedback on them before I move into the final editing/layout/recording stages, comment or email me, and I’ll add you to the list, then send you copies of the books when I’m finished writing them.

By the end of the first day, I had basically nailed down the core idea and the story structure I wanted to use, as well as some detailed characters and settings, some of them well-visualized for the comic. I had ideas about exactly how the possibilities of multi-touch interaction combined with some limited animation and the infinite canvas could be used to more fully immerse the reader in the story while also being invaluable to conveying the inner lives of the characters as well as the exterior spaces which represent such a significant part of the protagonist’s journey. The next two days were spent filling in the story details, outlining, doing research on recent history and on interstellar physics, plus some preliminary sketching, and by the time Mandy was done with her final session I had a plan for every “page” of the comic, good ideas about the “panels” they’ll each be composed of, and excellent ideas about the transitions / interactions between them.

Since then I’ve been mostly thinking (ie: no more writing/planning, and not much sketching) about everything, trying to more fully visualize the characters and really get into their minds and to understand their backgrounds, their hopes, and their fears… plus figuring out more and more of what’s going to work best for creating the sort of finished experience I want to create, and coming to the conclusion that in addition to working on my illustration skills (esp. vector illustration) and programming, I’m going to have to learn 3D modeling and animation, too. All of these areas of creative expression are things I’ve explored or worked on before, but never to a professional level of expertise, so each aspect of this project represents a major challenge requiring a significant investment of time and effort. Without intending to, and in service of exploring an avenue of storytelling potential I put on hold seven years ago because I thought I needed to tend to reality and get a “real” job. Of course, I did spend that seven years working on my writing and storytelling, plus developing my painting skills/techniques, so it wasn’t a total loss, but a period of mostly gradual development… which will be an excellent foundation, but not directly applicable to the present mountain of challenges. I can see working my way through this project taking easily over a year, possibly eighteen months or more, before there’s much of anything to show for it.

Also, while I was in Vegas, the copies of Scott McCloud‘s books, Reinventing Comics (which I read when it first came out ~11 years ago) and Making Comics, arrived in the mail. I also read through those in the last week and a half. They gave me a lot to think about, though mostly they reiterated what I’ve had in mind for years, confirmed my thoughts about the possible future of comics, and got me pretty excited about everything I have planned for this project; if I’m able to do everything I have in mind… let’s say I’m going to be standing around all four bonfires at once.

I’ve got some serious doubts, of course, as is my way. I’ve never programmed anything particularly sophisticated, and I stopped learning to program a bit before object-oriented programming hit the scene. I have fewer than, say, 25 hours practice working with vector graphics in my entire life, and probably fewer than that many hours in 3D modeling and animation, combined. I have very little experience writing a story with a formalized or formulaic structure, or anything which would be appreciated by a broad/general audience and risk becoming popular. Oh, and this whole project, which might take the next year or two of my life, is really just a proof of concept for me; not really what I expect a full-fledged interactive graphic novel to be, but a brief exercise to help prepare myself for projects yet to come.

Literally, I’m aiming at what I consider to be 24 “pages” of content, roughly equivalent to a single issue of a monthly comic book… though admittedly each “panel” will be a beautiful, full-color image which fills an iPad screen, and I expect there to be 4 to 9 “panels” in the average “page” of content… which, when it makes any sense in the scheme of the panel layout and story, you will be able to zoom out and see a full page of panels at once. It’s effectively a short story. I haven’t actually got a full script fleshed out yet, but it I’m guessing “short short story” might be a good estimate of the length. I’m guessing it’ll take less than half an hour to experience the entire story, though I’ve already got ideas for several rabbit holes / easter eggs which might add a considerable amount of depth and background to people who are interested, in addition to the fact that the story is designed to change significantly based on user inputs and I’ve thought of creating alternative, unlockable story modes as well, which will require at least new framing, possibly new art, and maybe a sort of “creator commentary” option as well. Because it’s possible, and I’m interested in seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Then, after I’ve accomplished this “small” project, I can begin to imagine new projects which, when I first imagine them, will probably present what looks like the same level of real challenge. Perhaps an actual graphic novel, created from the ground up to be native to a full-color, multi-touch device like the iPad while still being grounded by the heart of what defines comics as comics, and something which tells a compelling long-form story with characters of depth and reality. Or something else, entirely. Who knows?

Oh, and I’m still planning on (and working toward – I also read another dystopia this week) continuing my dystopian research and then writing the dystopian/vampire duology I’ve been talking about and preparing for… and it seems like it should remain on track for my getting started writing later this year. So there’s that, too. Writing books is easy, right? I’ll just squeeze the books in beside all this other stuff I’ll be doing. No problem.

So… that’s what I’ve got on my plate. Luckily, there are no real temporal deadlines, only levels of quality I intend to reach. You may not see these works soon, but when you do I want you to be impressed.

I’m totally out of touch with the modern world of development. Computing power has increased at least a thousandfold since I last dabbled in programming, and I’m confident the entire situation has become more sophisticated and complex… though probably not a thousand times more complex… I hope. The iPad 2 I’m typing this on is ridiculously more powerful and capable than the best computers available to me in high school, and lots of people who had never programmed anything before have been developing iOS apps. So there’s hope.

Every time I’ve had an idea for an interactive story, an “enhanced eBook”, or an online video game or app in the last several years, I’ve put it off. Sometimes after discussing it with my brother, who always says he intends to develop video games, or that he’s developing this or that tool or engine for building video games or online interactive experiences, but often without even making detailed note of my ideas. Partially this has been in deference to my brother; he has a mindset where, often, if I accomplish something, he loses interest in pursuing it for himself. Since his most clear interest/pursuit since he was in high school has been to develop video games, I have done my best not to usurp -or to appear to be trying to usurp- that pursuit. Now and again I’ve attempted to work with him on project ideas, but I’ve always tried to let him stay in the lead on any such project.

In light of a lot of things which have been going on lately, some inside me and some around me, I think now is the time to take up programming and the interactive arts again, myself. I feel my deference to my brother these many years has been sufficient in this regard, and that the friction I’ve been feeling re: books is part of my mind’s (and perhaps the world’s) efforts to push me to consider other forms of expression beyond simply writing several simple/straightforward (ie: text only) books every year from now to eternity. This direction also provides an answer to the question of where to take my art, which has been on my mind for over a year.

I’ve added a few books on Objective-C to my library book lists, and I’ll begin studying programming post-haste. I’ve also begun thinking about which project or projects I’d like to try to address first, with thoughts toward careful planning so that any project can be reasonably carried out by one person. Since I’m just one person.

I don’t intend to give up on my current plans; I’ve still got dozens and dozens of dystopian/utopian novels to read through, and a pair of ‘em to write… but perhaps some of the stories I’ve been avoiding developing, because they required some level of interactivity to be properly told, will come to fruition in the coming years.

Or perhaps I’ll find I’m not well-suited to some aspect of what I have in mind… and I’ll either give up or … learn to work with other people, somehow. Bah.

Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking I might begin doing, now. If you have any suggestions for good resources for learning to program for iOS, for how to manage indie game development, for interactive storytelling, or interactive comics, or whatever else, please let me know. I’m open to suggestions.

Either way, I’m glad it’s nearly over. I’ve been wanting this series to be behind me for quite some time. Also, this is the last remnant of any ongoing work for any of my existing projects. After the final episode of Book Six is uploaded to Podiobooks.com, everything is potential future projects. Stories I haven’t written yet, books I haven’t read yet, art I haven’t thought of yet… no schedules, nothing set in stone, nothing ongoing or weekly or really even seasonally or annually, since my plan for this vampire duology doesn’t neatly fit NaNoWriMo, just… nothingness. Err.. I’m supposed to say “possibiltity” instead of nothingness, right? Make it seem less suicidal to be happy to be clearing my plate?

Anyway, the final episode of Untrue Tales… Book Six, the final episode of the entire six-book series, goes live at Podiobooks.com this Wednesday. Perhaps I should write a paragraph or two to hand Evo to post on the Podiobooks blog when it goes up, commemorating the end. I’ll think on that.

I’m thinking I may also need to go back and review some of my old journals, as well. I feel like I’ve already faced some (all?) of the questions, problems, mysteries of life I’m currently plagued with, some of them again and again. Some of them, I recall the answers and conclusions I came to before, others I don’t recall ever discovering an answer to, except to just go on living as though those questions needed no answers. Some of them I believe I wrote the process of going through the problems down. I wonder whether, if I dug out those old journals and read them now, would I be dooming myself to repeat the mental states I adopted then, which led me here? Or will reading them enlighten me about ways I may have changed since then? Or frustrate me that, over and over, year after year, I continue to fail in the same ways, fall into the same darkness, feel the same emptiness.

You hear a lot about teenagers getting depressed to the point of facing suicidal feelings. Not so much people in their 30′s. I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only one, but that our society simply pretends (and the other depressives in their 30′s and beyond pretend) that we’re all okay. I’m not okay.

Sometimes I feel like all I have to say about the books I’m reading is a laundry list of the things I don’t like about it, that I don’t think I could ever let myself emulate, and/or that make me feel like perhaps I don’t like books at all. The last of which is a pretty terrible conclusion for an author to come to. To a certain extent, this is just my self-doubt talking. What I feel and what the data bears out do not always agree; a quick glance at ‘my books’ on Goodreads shows that, of the books I’ve read so far this year, I’ve given over half of them 4 out of 5 stars. Of course, those ratings are all subjective and, for the most part, I’ve tried not to let the things I don’t like but which I know are part of that terrible writers-religion drag my ratings down. ie: a formulaic, peril-filled book with ridiculous stakes, and no adverbs might still get four stars if I liked the characters/story/ideas despite the handicap of being written in the modern ‘popular’ style. So what does that mean? I don’t know.

Maybe it means I shouldn’t let random people construct my reading list for me. Maybe It means I need to learn to quit books more easily, and not read the ones I don’t like. (Except that, perhaps I need to read those books to fully understand what I don’t like, so better to understand what it is I do like to read and what I ought to be sure to try to avoid writing, myself?) Maybe it means the last decade of my life, spent writing books, has been a mistake or a waste of time or a misguided result of following through on the wrong answer to one of life’s deeper mysteries, come to long ago and never yet re-examined.

Maybe it means I’m in some sort of middle ground where my taste is sophisticated enough not to like the pulp/pop/genre fiction, but not sophisticated enough to appreciate real literature. Maybe I need to keep at it, push through, and I’ll find a new appreciation for really good books…

…or maybe, as I’ve been finding, the more I read the less I’ll feel like I ever liked books at all.

…

Then there’s the part of the explorations of recent days and weeks which leads me to conclusions like “visual forms of expression are almost entirely lost on me,” which is a terrible conclusion to come to, for an artist. The idea that, as a general rule, I’m unable to (or uninterested in, or consider it unimportant to) follow story when it’s presented in strictly visual terms is a frightening idea, when I realize it that way. I’ve spent the last year and a half not working directly on my art, but thinking about it and where I wanted to go with it. Some of the questions which have come up in that time are answered quite definitively by the idea that my mind doesn’t process visual communication “correctly”.

It isn’t even difficult to find evidence that this has been the case the entire time. As a general rule, my artwork isn’t about anything, doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t tell a story or even pretend to, most of the time. After I’d made that observation about my comics-reading yesterday, it also occurred to me that my perception that the purpose of the images in a comic are mostly to communicate who is present, speaking, and/or acting bears out to the comics I created during the years I was making online comics; the images were basically just cut and paste, it was the words I used to tell the story… even to the point that my last comic’s art & character design was built around the idea that the art and character design in my comics was meaningless and irrelevant to telling my stories. I suppose I didn’t do it particularly consciously or deliberately, but looking back now, after (finally) taking some time to think about my art and writing (at all), it seems obvious.

Of course, there’s the reality that meaning is generally lost on me.

My art, my books, mostly they don’t mean anything, but it’s because nothing means anything to me. Mostly. And apparently a lot of the meaning other people carefully put into things is totally lost on me, too, because of my uncertainty/inability re: implied meanings. Which might be why life/everything seems to be so meaningless to me? Sigh.

…

Alright, I think I had a few more ideas about what to explore here when I began, but I’ve been watching comedies and other generally mood-improving things on TV for the last 4-5hrs while I’ve been writing and … I’m not in the right state of mind to want to explore these concepts right now, anymore? Oh well. Give it a few hours, I suppose. I’ll try not to post too much, too often, but I’m feeling pretty … broken and wordy, right now.

I watch a lot of TV (mostly DVDs and online streaming; almost never broadcast), but most of the time I’m doing it, it isn’t the only thing I’m doing. For example, right now I’m watching Doctor Who: The Ark while writing a post for my online journal. Other times I also play games (on my iPhone & iPad), browse the web, et cetera. In fact, I have found that for most programming, if I try to simply sit still and watch, I get antsy.

I would estimate that, for probably 90%-95% of the shows or movies I watch, I only need to actually be looking at the screen perhaps 5%-10% of the time. Thinking about how I watch my TV, and about my preferences re: going to the movies, I think I’ve determined that -for me- generally, story comes to me via my ears and spectacle via my eyes. Most of the time, what’s going on on-screen isn’t really important to see, certainly not enough to hold my full attention; I don’t need to see it to know what’s going on. This corresponds roughly to my experiences with show/tell in the written word; a little bit of showing, when appropriate, is reasonable, but I need to be told what’s happening to really understand. Otherwise, like when a film (almost never a TV show) insists on actually making good use of the visual aspect of the medium for key storytelling, I find I’m either fully engaged and watch without doing anything else or I’m frustrated that I’m unable to follow the story… depending on the skill of the filmmaker.

I wonder how I’d do with, say, an audiobook with illustrations… or probably an audio drama, rather than an audiobook, with sound effects and voice acting, rather than so much description of action… Perhaps I’ll produce one, someday. Telling the story with words and showing what’s necessary to be shown with images.

Thinking about it, I suppose I do something similar with comics/graphic-novels as I do with TV/film; I get most of what I get out of them from the words, and probably only absorb 5%-10% of the details of the images on the pages. (Most of the time; some few comics actually use their images well for storytelling; most images in most comics seem to me to be a waste of ink and effort.) Which is like saying only about one panel per page or two has anything in it necessary to understanding the story… Showing me what a character looks like, or a setting, for the first time, and then every time that character/setting appears from then on, why would I need to see them? Most of the time, I don’t. Same as TV/film, same as books, you only need to show me a little, and then tell me the rest.

Or, if you’re going to show, show, show, you’d better do a damn good job of it. It better be like well-crafted poetry. What you’re showing had better communicate clearly, effectively, and explicitly. It had better be showing which has a purpose, not showing for its own sake or -worse- showing simply to avoid telling.

Alright, that’s all I’ve got for now. Sorry it wasn’t better-thought-out.

Update: (6/24/2011, 3:13AM-4:09AM)

As I write this update, I’m watching an independent film, the trailers prior to which on the DVD gave me an idea about another way to express my trouble with show v. tell. My example has to do with the difference between a trailer for a film in English and a trailer for a film where the primary language is not English. Now, this is not universal, but there is a certain subset of trailers for non-English-language films which are largely free of language; they are largely silent, or have only music. They are all show, no tell, because … I suppose because someone’s worried subtitles will scare potential viewers off, or … maybe they didn’t have subtitles ready? (That would be hard to swallow, considering the other titles required for a trailer but not included in the film.) Anyway, they attempt to sell you the film exclusively through showing. Showing characters, settings, actions, the things which happen in between the words, and the viewer, the potential audience, is left to infer the story. Completely.

On the other side is the trailer for an English-language film which, because it can include dialogue without the bother of making anyone read, is able to both show a few visually gripping scenes and to tell me what the story is. At the extreme end of this, the total opposite of the wordless foreign trailer, is the trailer which includes not just dialog, but also titles, and enough scenes and words between them to give you the entire film’s story from beginning to end (no surprises left, if you were watching closely!) in the space of two minutes. The only things such a trailer leaves for you to infer are the scenes in between the glimpses and explanations given in the trailer, but this sort of trailer has spelled out for you what those scenes will contain. It has told you what to expect.

With the former sort of trailer, I may not know after watching it whether I have any interest in the film, because I probably don’t know what the film is about. With the latter sort of trailer, especially the extreme form of it, I may not have any interest in watching the film, but if so it’ll be because I already know everything there is to know about it… or if I do want to watch it, I won’t be confused or disappointed when I do, because it’ll be what I was told it would be. The “Show, don’t tell” sort of trailer leaves too much up to chance. Often a 100-word (or less) description of the film is of more value to me, especially with regard to marketing the film to me, since at least then I know for sure what it is I’m considering seeing, and can make an informed decision; I’ll almost never choose to pay to see a film when I don’t think I know what it is.

To a certain extent, I’m sure there are people out there who, if they read these last two posts, would condemn me for, say, “wanting everything spelled out for me.” I’ve often read this complaint, from self-proclaimed film buffs, that American films leave nothing up to the imagination and that the reason Americans don’t appreciate European filmmaking is that it doesn’t spell everything out and hand it to them on a silver platter. The implication being that Americans are too stupid to understand anything but the most obvious. I’m not a stupid person, but I’ll admit that there are some things which are very obvious to the average person that I can’t seem to grasp. I’ve written about such things at length in the past. Apparently, these sort of things, where I’m expected to draw my own conclusions about what happened, where I’m not expected to take everything at face value, and where I’m not told in any clear way what’s going on, what characters are thinking and feeling, et cetera… is one such area I have trouble with. I just don’t get it, most of the time.

The terrible (to me) thriller I’m reading right now seems to be doing an admirable job balancing show with tell, by the way. With all this writing about it, I’ve been paying a close eye today. The author shows what’s going on, then confirms it (backs up what you were meant to infer) by also telling what’s going on. There are patches where it’s more tell than show, and others where I get lost in the showing and can’t tell what’s going on, but most of it seems well-balanced. Also working in its favor is that, 100 pages in (probably 40k-50k words, these pages are so word-dense) and it hasn’t even finished setting things up enough to make any stakes clear, so at least it isn’t hip-deep in ridiculous stakes out of proportion with the characters’ capabilities, less than 20% of the way in. There’s basically no real peril, yet (there was one chapter, early on, where a character was in peril, but I haven’t seen him since) – unfortunately, this is largely because the book is totally disjointed and most of the dozen disconnected story lines are still miles from getting up to speed. Oh, and so far most everyone who could have been said to be in peril wasn’t one of the main characters but was put in peril by the main characters, usually “off-screen,” as it were. So, that’s something. It isn’t entirely clear to me why this book was on the dystopian fiction list, yet. Oh, well.

I’ve seen other writers, and people giving advice to writers, describe in detail the absolute requirement of this ridiculous, frustrating, and annoying feature in all fiction. Every scene must have challenges to overcome, they say at the less-ridiculous end of this ridiculous religion. In thrillers and adventure stories, those challenges must be thrilling in order to engage the reader (so they say) and as the story progresses, each thrilling challenge must me more thrilling and challenging than those which came before it. In modern books (and other media; I bemoan the same thing on TV and in the movies), I have found, that this leads very rapidly to quite ridiculous levels of peril, usually in parallel with stakes so high as to be totally out of scale with the capabilities of the characters involved.

((For example, in the YA series which began with Uglies, in the first book the stakes ramped up from danger of getting caught breaking the rules to risking the lives of the protagonist and her close friends. The second book ramped the stakes up from risking a few people’s lives to risking an entire city. When the third book ramped the stakes from endangering one city to the equivalent of international war, to be resolved by a 16-year-old girl, I predicted that the fourth book would have to threaten the entire world population to keep with the ridiculous requirements of this writer’s religion… and indeed, very quickly in the fourth book the stakes are raised to the annihilation of the entire world, with only a fifteen-year-old girl to save everyone. With her video-blogging prowess as her primary tool to do so.))

Some writers handle this better than others. Within each book of the Uglies series, Scott Westerfield handled the escalating peril reasonably well; it was only as the series progressed that things got so far out of hand. Other authors get their characters too rapidly into life-threatening situations in the beginning of the story, and find they’ve nowhere reasonable to go – they must depart from reason to keep readers interested. Narrower and narrower escapes. Increasingly dire situations. Protagonists disarmed, injured, in foreign, inhospitable places, facing more (and/or tougher) enemies than they faced in the last dire situation. Yech. I have a really hard time maintaining suspension of disbelief in the face of such dire peril. The story could be firmly grounded in present-day, real-world events, histories (accurate or alternate), or outlandish fantasy, but if the situations become unreasonably perilous I simply can’t maintain immersion. I can’t buy in. It’s too silly. Especially when the protagonists are the ones whose lives are supposedly threatened; I know another tenet of this religion of writers is that their main characters are protected from true/permanent harm, especially if a book is to be part of a series. Side characters may die or face serious injury, but certainly never the main characters. Which means that the peril is all false; it’s only a waste of time and effort, a waste of words and pages. I don’t like it.

I’ve also oft-seen/read from these writers-religion-believers the repeated chant, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s difficult for me to wrap my mind around. I didn’t understand it at all, at first, though I’m beginning to. Like most anything else, there are ways of doing it well and ways of following the command as mindlessly as it’s repeated by and to writers. When it’s done well, the reader tends to be unaware of it – and the writer usually hasn’t stuck religiously to it. Alternatively, when that tiny idea is too religiously followed… books go bad. One of the adventure-type books I’ve been listening to of late, which has raised the stakes within the first third to the total annihilation of all life, is also so religious about “Show, don’t tell” that I keep finding myself unable to tell what’s going on. Rather than tell me what’s going on, what the characters are thinking or communicating or planning, sometimes even what the characters are doing, the author describes (in detail) the fashion and fabrics of their clothes, the shape of their nose, the color of their eyes, the look on their face, the way they stand, the tone of their voice, where they stand relative to one another while they speak… except the author never tells the reader what they mean, they only imply and the reader is expected to infer.

I’m not being clear here, partially because I don’t get it. Without quoting long sections of a book and breaking it down sentence by sentence I’m not sure I’d know how to accurately describe how, by showing me how the characters feel and what they want by the way they act, by the twitch of an eye and the speed of their step, say, or by stilted dialogue interspersed with descriptions of body language, rather than simply telling me, you’re leaving a whole chunk of your story out… And I keep getting lost. Hundreds of words will pass where nothing sticks, as I listen. ((I’ve run into this a few times in paper/eBooks, too, and I have to go back and re-read, sometimes whole pages, again and again because it’s so show, with no tell, and I just … get lost.)) I recently finished a several-book SciFi series and had to listen to the last 15 minutes three times because the author never actually states what the protagonist’s decision about what to do with his life has been; he simply shows how the characters react to that decision, never telling what the decision was. I was supposed to infer the answer. Except that, based on the words in the book, it’s unknowable. Either answer fits the behavior, as far as I understand it. I only know what the author believes the answer was because I’ve seen the author talk about the books/character in such a way that it can only be one way, not because the author put the answer in the book itself.

My brain maybe doesn’t work quite like other people’s. (Except I’m pretty confident that lots of people must be in the same boat.) ((Or the opposite one.)) I’d had similar problems absorbing books, or sections of books, in the past, but it wasn’t until I’d tried to understand the religious litany of “Show, don’t tell” that I began to understand what it was I was having trouble with. Again and again in recent years I’ve found that those difficult sections are, in fact, too strictly trying to avoid telling me what’s going on. It’s not an elegant mantra (yet), but I keep finding myself exclaiming to books (on their authors’ behalfs) something like “Stop trying to show, just tell me what’s happening!”

Sadly, it seems that the more closely authors hew to the tenets of this strange writers-religion, the more likely their books will find popularity and broad audience appeal.

I increasingly believe I’ll never write popular books.

I don’t think I could stand it.

Despite the fact that I write books, books don’t seem to “do it” for me. I read a lot of books, lately, and there were periods here and there in my youth when I read a lot of books, but … I don’t think I like books as much as book-lovers do. When I was younger, there were a few books I would read and re-read and re-read. The one graphic novel was one of those, I read it at least once a year during my teens. Then there was that period where I wasn’t reading much, and since I began reading again, I haven’t had time. I feel like there aren’t enough hours in my life to spend them reading books I’ve already read. It’s hard to even spend 2 hours watching a film I’ve already seen, at this point; I built up a collection of over 300 DVDs before something happened in my mind and now I can only make time for films I’ve never seen – I probably only see two or three of my hundreds of owned-DVDs a year, despite watching at least several hundred hours of films and TV on DVD each year. The films I re-watch, even now… they’re the ones that I know will make me cry. And I’m up to a rate of reading over a hundred books a year, but it’s difficult for me to imagine wanting to re-read any of them. (Though I’ve just realized that there was one small thing in The Hunger Games that made me cry and which, when the sequel made an allusion to it, very nearly did – if I ever went back and re-read The Hunger Games, I might cry at the appearance of that loaf of bread again…) So maybe books *can* affect me as much as films, and I’m just reading the wrong books?

Anyhow… my favorite stories tend to be the ones where I become so emotionally involved that I am overcome, usually exemplified by the tears in my eyes. It occurred to me today for the first time (no, it never occurred to me before (though now that I’m thinking back on my own books in this context, I’m realizing that there were parts of Untrue Tales… Book Six which already did, which -over and over again as I read and re-read Book Six to edit it, and to record it for the podcast- brought me to that level of emotional involvement and, a few times, to tears)) that I might want to try, with the ‘utopian’ book of the duology I’m trying to ready myself for, to strive to reach that pinnacle. It’s been becoming, increasingly in my mind, a potentially very emotional story. This girl’s story is very difficult, a real challenge, and if the reader doesn’t buy fully into her experience of it, they won’t be able to believe the interpretation of reality I’m trying to present. I’m still not convinced I can write it in first-person perspective well enough; I haven’t the practice with first-person. (Though I suppose I’ve got to write in it to get better at writing in it, like anything else, so avoiding it because I’m not yet good means avoiding ever getting better.) Alternatively, I’m not sure I can create the required level of emotional involvement without using first-person perspective. Perhaps a narrower form of the narrow third-person perspective I normally use, which hovers close, practically over the shoulder of the protagonist, rarely venturing anywhere away. …but probably it’ll have to be first-person.

Perhaps spending half a year or more on ‘research’ (read: thinking about what I’m going to write before attempting to write it) wasn’t such a great idea; almost every time I resolve another aspect of what these books must be or what I’d like to attempt, the challenge increases. Doing better, doing things I’ve never tried, striving toward greatness… Perhaps without so much forethought I might be less disappointed with whatever result I end up with. Or perhaps with enough planning, with high enough goals and sufficient passion, I might achieve something worthwhile. The only thing to do is to keep working on it. Keep thinking. Keep dreaming. Keep striving. Keep feeling. Keep crying.

…and when the time comes, I suppose, try to make other people cry, too…