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.

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.

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…

The core idea I have for the books is in the world I’ve been building in my mind, where vampires are an accepted part of humanity, using their supernatural gifts to benefit society as a whole, fed by the regular blood donations of the general population (opt-out, not actually mandatory) so vampires aren’t required to be murderous fiends to stay alive, or to live in the shadows, though they most certainly don’t sparkle (and they probably can’t go out in sunlight). I haven’t nailed down all the details yet, though I’ve got quite a lot of detail mapped out that I’m not even hinting at here. The structural concept I’m working on for these books is to write two books, one which presents this word as Utopian, and the other which presents the same world as Dystopian. I want each book to totally buy into its own point of view, for all its evidence, even when questioned my its characters, to come to the conclusion that it is correct, the world is [wonderful|terrible]. I’m structuring each book to be a valid demonstration (think Euclid), proving each book’s position by evidence and argument. I want readers to be so convinced by whichever book they read first that when they read the other book they get angry at the characters in it for being so oblivious/wrong.

As I did with my attempt to write ‘a real zombie book,’ where I read a stack of the popular zombie books before attempting to write my own ((though I still haven’t managed to read World War Z – I kept having people promising to send it to me or lend it to me, so I kept not simply buying it for myself or checking it out of the library, and eventually I wasn’t reading zombie books anymore, and I never got back around to it)), and since the idea for these books was inspired (in part) by my reaction to reading some other dystopian books (isn’t that always the way? You read a book and think “I could do better than this!” so you work hard, study hard, and write your own, in your own way), I’m doing the same thing with dystopian books. I’ve told you before about my not being well read, and dystopian lit mirrors that phenomenon; I haven’t read most of the classics. I read Brave New World in high school for a book report / project, but I never read 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 (or even watched the films). I had never read The Handmaid’s Tale before last year, and it was the dystopia I disliked so much I was inspired to write a better one. I read and watched Never Let Me Go as well, last year, and it was generally quite excellent, also inspiring me to write better books (though in a different way than much-loved yet terrible books do). This year, in addition to trying to read my own books, then, I am trying to read as much recommended dystopian literature as possible.

So, from my own shelves (because they were already on my to-be-read list, or because my wife teaches them in her high school English courses), I’m going to be reading:

• 1984 – George Orwell
• Ape and Essence – Aldous Huxley
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
• The Giver – Lois Lowry
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Philip K. Dick

In addition to these, I put together the following list from recommendations from friends and from books mentioned during Dystopia Week at Tor.com by other SciFi authors & bloggers, when speaking about their favorite and/or formative dystopian books/influences. Bolded items I haven’t acquired yet, italicized items I’ve borrowed (or plan to borrow, mostly from the library):

• The World Inside – Robert Silverberg
• Native Tongue – Suzette Haden Elgin
• He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
• Matched – Ally Condie
• Brave New Worlds (an anthology with a lot of highly-recommended stories)
• The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth – Carrie Ryan
• The Dead-Tossed Waves – Carrie Ryan
• The Dark and Hollow Places – Carrie Ryan
• Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
• Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler
• Cyteen – C.J. Cherryh
• Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
• Julian Comstock – Robert Charles Wilson
• Soft Apocalypse – Will McIntosh
• We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart
• Walden Two – B. F. Skinner
• Ship Breaker – Paolo Bacigalupi
• Across the Universe – Beth Revis
• How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff
• Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras – Scott Westerfield
• The Hunger Games/Catching Fire/Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins
• Birthmarked – Caragh M. O’Brien
• Bumped – Megan McCafferty

Seems like a long list, but I’m already making good progress on it. If you know of other dystopian novels you think I should add to the list, please comment (or email me, or Twitter @ me) and I’ll add them. I’m especially keen on the recent surge of YA Dystopian books, because (something I haven’t told you about the books I’m working on, yet) the books I’m planning to write will very likely be written for the YA market. (Or at least with young/teen protagonists, dealing with that sort of teenage angst/love/drama.)

As I read them, I’m trying to pay attention to how the stories are told, how the characters relate to their worlds, how their worlds are presented, the structure of the storytelling, and on and on, so many elements to try to pay attention to … not because I want to copy these books, but to learn from them so I can make my own informed decisions about how to write my own. What works (for me) and what doesn’t, what sort of arcs characters go through (or don’t), and what I want to take and what I want to leave behind. If you read Cheating, Death, you know I wrote something which was both a zombie novel people who were looking for a zombie novel would enjoy as well as being the sort of book I prefer to write. I hope to do the same with these books, this year.

Oh, and as a parting note, a strange idea: I’m thinking of doing the paperback version as a flipbook (two books, back to back, upside-down of each other), and I’m already brainstorming how I could accomplish such a thing with the eBook and/or audiobook. I may make them two books for formats other than paper. Your thoughts on this strange idea are welcome.

Update: I added a few additional books to my list of dystopias to read. Mandy was flipping through the Brave New Worlds anthology and saw a “further reading” list at the back of it… and noticed that we owned one of the books on the list, so she went and pulled it from the shelf and added it to my stack. So I took a glance at the list and saw a couple of others, and added them to the stack, too. The list at the end of the book was “compiled by Ross E. Lockhart” and is five pages long. I’d already read 5 of them before creating a dystopias-to-read list, and I have another 21 of them on my lists above. This weekend was a Friends of the Phoenix Library sale weekend; they come up a couple times a year and Mandy and I like to go on Sundays (half off) when paperbacks are $0.50 and hardbacks are $1; we take home a good number of books for a small amount of money (usually less than $20 for a couple dozen books). I made a copy of the list and brought it with me to the sale, and got a good-sized stack of books. Then this evening I went through the rest of the list and looked up whether it would be easy to get the remainder of the books to read; I found that a good number of them are in the Phoenix Library system, a bit more than half. The following is a supplemental list. The first four I already had on my shelves (Neuromancer & Grey, I’ve read, but may read again), the next chunk of the list I found at the book sale this weekend, and the italicized end of the list are additional (58) books I found available in the library system and added to my account’s ‘bookshelf’ to remind me to check them out later.

• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Grey – Jon Armstrong
• Player Piano – Kurt Vonnegut
• The Fifth Sacred Thing – Starhawk
• Einstein’s Monsters – Martin Amis
• The Jagged Orbit – John Brunner
• Crux – Albert E. Cowdrey
• Mindscape – Andrea Hairston
• Final Blackout – L. Ron Hubbard
• The Second Angel – Philip Kerr
• It Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis
• Unquenchable Fire – Rachel Pollack
• Postsingular – Rudy Rucker
• Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America – Brian Francis Slattery
• Soulsaver – James Stevens-Arce
• The Mirrored Heavens – David J. Williams
• Random Acts of Senseless Violence – Jack Womack
• A Scientific Romance – Ronald Wright
• Feed – M.T. Anderson
• Yarn – Jon Armstrong
• Pebble in the Sky – Isaac Asimov
• Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
• The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
• The Windup Girl – Paolo Bacigalupi
• Crash – J. G. Ballard
• Jennifer Government – Max Barry
• Genesis – Bernard Beckett
• Genetopia – Keith Brooke
• The Wanting Seed – Anthony Burgess
• The Army of the Republic – Stuart Archer Cohen
• The Pesthouse – Jim Crace
• Prayers For (/Sins of/Heart of) the Assassin – Robert Ferrigno
• Truancy – Isamu Fukui
• Daughters of the North – Sarah Hall
• The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway
• Fatherland – Robert Harris
• Make Room! Make Room! – Harry Harrison
• Hellstrom’s Hive – Frank Herbert
• The House of Dust – Paul Johnston
• The Iron Standard – Henry Kuttner
• The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. LeGuin
• Just Like Beauty – Lisa Lerner
• The Road – Cormac McCarthy
• Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
• Market Forces – Richard Morgan
• Thirteen – Richard Morgan
• Paradise – Toni Morrison
• The Baby Squad – Andrew Neiderman
• The Suicide Collectors – David Oppegaard
• The Last Book in the Universe – Rodman Philbrick
• The Space Merchants – Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
• Anthem – Ayn Rand
• Enclave – Kit Reed
• The Wild Shore/The Gold Coast/Pacific Edge – Kim Stanley Robinson
• Jamestown – Matthew Sharpe
• Solstice – Ulises Silva
• Blackjack – Lee Singer
• The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
• Battle Royale – Koushun Takami
• Far North – Marcel Theroux
• The Gladiator – Harry Turtledove
• Farthing/Ha’Penny/Half a Crown – Jo Walton
• Love Among the Ruins – Evelyn Waugh
• The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
• When the Sleeper Wakes – H. G. Wells
• The Bar Code Tattoo/The Bar Code Revolution – Suzanne Weyn
• Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
• Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy
• Ecotopia – Ernest Callenbach
• Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein

Considering my original dystopias-to-read list was less than 40 books long, and I’ve already picked up an additional dozen-plus, I may or may not choose to work through the other nearly-60 books I’ve got italicized there. There are several among them I’m more eager to read than others, but if you read my previous posts about my reading history the last few years, you may realize reading 100+ books, most of them new-to-me or borrowed, is neither likely nor my intention for this year. We’ll see. Without 2-3 weekly podcasts requiring my attention, no ongoing series I’m trying to complete, et cetera, I may be able to read through a book every day or two (or two books a day, depending on their length and engagement level), and get through even the extended list within a few months. We’ll see.

((Also of note, I’ve been writing this update while growing ever-sleepier, so there are probably some unusual typing errors mixed in. Sorry about that.))

1. What is your book about? I never know how to answer this question about my books, and that failure is probably the biggest reason my book sales are consistently slow and low. If I had to answer, without going into great length, I’d say perhaps that the Untrue Tales series is about watching reality unfold around you and the uselessness of trying to control anything. Ask me again in a week/month/year and I’ll probably have a different answer.
2. How long had the idea of your book been developing before you began to write the story? Ooh, this is a good question, for this series. I actually started “working on” what became the Untrue Trilogies over twenty years ago. All through my youth (I can’t be sure when it started, but perhaps age 10 or 12?) I was a storyteller, often with myself at the heart of the stories. Rather than writing my stories down, I practiced oral storytelling, and I told my stories as though they were true stories about my life – and believe me that trying to tell the story of how I accidentally bested Satan at age 12 and was forced to take over the day-to-day operation of Hell in a realistic and convincing way was a learning experience. All the basic threads of story which ended up in the Untrue Trilogies (and quite a few which didn’t) were part of these overlapping narratives I developed primarily during my high school years (roughly age 12-16), which I then adapted into a new story, not about me, beginning in 2004.
3. What inspired you to write this particular story? I guess I partly answered this, but the development of these stories was in large part an attempt to gather people’s attention. Prior to high school I had been largely an outcast and picked on to the point that it got me kicked out of school (you can read a modified/compressed/fictionalized account of this, buried in my first novel, Lost and Not Found), and when I finally got back into school, a new school, I was determined to do things differently. Developing these stories, largely in collaboration with the friends I was making, seemed to help cement my role in several social circles. Years and years later, after I’d written a couple of novels, I decided to try to resurrect those stories, rather than allow them to be forgotten, and thus began the seed that led to these six books.
4. How much of yourself is hidden in the characters in the book? Around the time I wrote Untrue Tales… Book One I was likely to be heard saying that all the characters in all my books are me, and that’s still true, in some ways. Without giving away the ending of the last book, I’ll say that there’s quite a lot of me in Trev.
5. Tell us a little about your main characters. Who was your favorite? Why? My favorite character? Is it cheating to say it was my daughter? Err… Trev’s daughter, Neyal’h… Except, she almost isn’t in these books at all. She’s practically peripheral, the entire journey, despite being central to all the action in most of the books. Why is she my favorite? Don’t you love your daughter? … If you check with me here in “reality” I don’t even have a daughter, so I suppose this answer doesn’t make sense. But if you’d read the stories I was writing, all the way back to when I began writing stories, you’ll find her there. Maybe someday I’ll re-release an updated version of The Vintage Collection (everything I wrote as a teen, which I’d made available in paperback for a few years), and you can see for yourself.
6. Who is your most unusual/most likeable character? My most unusual/likeable character? Probably Maheu’le. I can’t even accurately describe him, and had a hard time expressing his true physicality in Books Five and Six, and I certainly didn’t get his voice right in the audio versions. (That might be a spoiler, but only if you’ve read through Book Two but not started Book Five.) He’s some sort of giant, psychic monster, but friendly, helpful, and a good teacher, too. There’s a level of relationship with Ms. Charming implied at the end of the series that I can’t even imagine the specifics of… you’d have to ask them about it yourself, I suppose.
7. How long did it take you to write your book? This is a tricky one, but I’ll try to be brief (You can go back through the blog and find more detailed explanations for most of these): Book One: 2 weeks (NaNoWriMo 2004), Book Two: ~3 weeks (~Feb. 2005), Book Three: a weekend, an afternoon, and a day (Labor Day Weekend 2005, and a day & a half about a year later), Book Four: ~11 weeks, less than half actually writing (7/2010-10/2010), Book Five: 33 days (10/2010-11/2010), Book Six: 1/2 in one long day, the rest over a couple weeks a couple of months later (11/2010-2/2011). I write in bursts of activity, often writing 5k-25k words in a single, long sitting, usually at a coffee shop (usually my local Starbucks), so when it says “months” it means a few days here and a few days there and a lot of thinking without writing a single word in between.
8. How much of a story do you have in mind before you start writing it? For this series? All of it, and almost none of it, at once. What do you mean by story? How can I put this? I know the story in much the same way you remember something that happened to you long ago, but for most of the books in the series I didn’t make any effort to plan out how they would be written; I just set down at a computer and let the words flow out in a torrent. Often I’d read the sentence I’d just written and find myself laughing, surprised, or worse, and I almost never knew what was going to come next until the words were already on the page. On the other hand, I had all the “plot points” and “twists” and “reveals” mapped out / known years before I ever tried to turn them into a series of novels.
9. Did you do any research for the book? If so, how did you do it? (searching Internet, magazines, other books, etc.) When I wrote the First Untrue Trilogy, I was decidedly against what I thought ‘research’ meant, and wrote by the seat of my pants and the ideas in my head … except that I also did a lot of research that I didn’t think of as research, just looking up information, words, facts, figures, locations, et cetera online while I raced through the writing. So when they’re discussing the physical characteristics of Hell, all that math is accurate, and correlates accurately to the description of ‘the pit’ in Book One, for example, and so is everything in the sex scene in Book Three. In the years between writing the first trilogy and the Second Untrue Trilogy, my attitude toward research had shifted a bit, and I didn’t shy away from blatantly brushing up on the math and science surrounding relativistic travel, nanotechnology, black holes, information systems, et cetera, so that while building a totally fictional and wrong world, I could do so with a basis in sound science.
10. How do you develop and differentiate your characters? For the Untrue Trilogies, that’s difficult to answer; to me, most of these are characters who have been with me for decades, they’re like real people I recall. Come to think of it, almost all the characters in all my books feel that way; not like “characters I develop and differentiate,” but like people who are already differentiated and it’s my job to try to describe what’s already there, to show who they are through what they say and do.
11. Do you have specific techniques you use to develop the plot and stay on track? For the final two books of the series, I was crunching to get the story ended and a lot of ground covered -I’d originally (back in 2004) mapped the Untrue Tales… out to at least 7 books, and potentially up to 11 books, just for the part of Trev’s story I’ve squeezed into 6- so I did a fairly heavy amount of outlining from about halfway through Book Five, on, to be sure I’d hit the pacing and plot targets I needed to. Having moved from writing purely-for-paper to a serialized-audiobook mindset in the years between Book Three and Book Four also meant I was chunking the story into half-hour-long ‘episodes’ as I wrote it, and the outlines reflected that structure. The decision to try to keep all six books within about a thousands words’ length of one another also helped keep everything moving forward and toward impending conclusion. (Unlike, you may have noticed, this interview/post.)
12. How (or when) do you decide that you are finished writing a story? For the Untrue Tales… books, it all started with NaNoWriMo, so the 50,000-word goal was how I sized-up the first couple; I’d actually intended to write Book One and Book Two back to back during November, doubling the goal to 100,000 words, and I finished Book One on the 14th, wrote 1 more sentence, and then … failed to come up with any more words until the next year. When I wrote Book Two, the length goal stuck, and after that it was a pattern.
13. What is your goal for the book, ie: what do you want people to take with them after they finish reading the story? Shit, I knew I was forgetting something. Uhh… Let’s make something up after the fact, alright? How about… Question everything? Or: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?
14. Is there a message in your writing you want readers to grasp? Yes, but since, in over 6 years of people reading and listening to these books, not a single one has expressed any awareness of it, let’s just pretend it isn’t there. (Hint: The entire thing was supposed to be a subtle satire of everything I hate about popular fiction, but most people just take it at face value as pop fiction, and don’t notice the extremes I’ve taken some of the elements to.)
15. What challenges did you face as you wrote this book? The biggest challenges I faced were that, after beginning the series I had a change of heart and decided that these aren’t the sort of books I want to be writing at all, not even to try to show what’s wrong with these sorts of books, and then (after Dragons’ Truth, my worst book ever) they became my most popular books, and the majority of contact I’ve received from readers has been “when will you write more Untrue Tales?” I didn’t want to write more. That’s the biggest part of why I never returned to the series, and it’s been a huge challenge to write Books 4-6. If/when you notice a significant change in tone and character of writing between the First and Second Untrue Trilogies, this is why: If I’d been required to write three (or more) books like the first three Untrue Tales… books, they would never have been written.
16. What was the most difficult part about writing the book? Starting again. See above.
17. Do you think writing this book changed your life? How so? Nah. Not yet, anyway.
18. What has changed for you personally since you wrote your first book? So much. I wrote my first “real” book in 2002. I was single, still looking for work in computers, my paternal grandparents were still alive… right after I wrote that book I moved 100 miles to live with my grandparents and help them in their declining health, and it was in that year (before my grandmother’s death) that I first had the time to work on my art and writing nearly full-time. In 2004 I moved back to Phoenix, took a day job, fell in love again, and wrote Book One. 2004 through 2007 were a rollercoaster of life experience and emotions (I’ll almost certainly write about a lot of it if/when my book about writing/publishing happens) culminating in my getting married 12/1/2007. In March, 2008 I left my day job and returned to being a nearly-full-time creative (I’m also a househusband, an equally important job), and I’ve been at it ever since. How has my life changed? Tremendously, and for the better.
19. How has your background influenced your writing? Have you finished reading Book Six yet? No? Let me just say: Significantly.
20. How does your environment/upbringing color your writing? Less than I’d like, more than I’d like to admit.
21. What’s your writing schedule like? Do you strive for a certain amount of words each day? Partially answered above, largely answered in Time, emiT, and Time Again: What schedule? I can go months or years at a time without writing any new stories, then suddenly write a book in a few days or weeks. Writing “a certain amount each day” kills me. Yech. I write what I’m interested in writing, when I’m in the mood.
22. Do you have any rituals that you follow before sitting down to write? Not rituals, per se. I do like to have a clean work area, though I’m not beholden to the idea, so sometimes I’ll take a bit of time before trying to write to clean. When I do, I’ll clean not just the work area, but often several rooms. Somehow, knowing the toilets and sink are clean and the floors are vacuumed can make it easier for the words to flow. Alternatively: I leave the house altogether, and write where someone else is paid to keep things tidy.
23. Do you prefer to write at a particular time of day? If by time, you mean ‘quiet,’ then yes. I like to write at the quiet times. Not just literal, physical quiet, but mental quiet. An active mind in the next room can, at times, be too noisy for me to get any creative work done. Depending on when my family members are working, that sometimes means I have all day to write and it sometimes means I have only the night to write. I’m writing this at night, for example. During the summer (my wife is a teacher), I often only have the hours she’s asleep.
24. Do you have a favorite snack food or favorite beverage that you enjoy while you write? Several. Most of the drinks are caffeinated. Mountain Dew. Mostly Diet, since I can easily drink 2-4litres/day. At Starbucks, depending on budget (both money and calories), it ranges from a Grande Nonfat Mocha with Sugar-Free Vanilla to a Venti Breve Black&White (full pumps of both) with Vanilla & whip… or all the way down to a Venti Passion Tea sweetend with (a lot of) Splenda. Basically: sweet, sweet, sweet. And when I can, high-fat, high-sugar, highly-caffeinated, and usually hot.
25. What are you working on right now? Several things. I’ve got a Kickstarter fundraiser running to maybe do a book of my experiences writing and publishing. I’ve been working on plans for what I’m calling a vampire duology; two books, one which sees the vampire-laden SciFi world as a Utopia and the other which sees the same world as a Dystopia, and each of which is (hopefully) fully convinced and convincing that its view is correct. Plus, I’ve been researching (off and on since NaNoWriMo ’09) for a series of books in an alternate history universe where, rather than the flu, there’s a zombie outbreak in 1918, and I’ve got at least 3 books planned for it, spanning 60+ years and at least 5 genres… but I really want to do a good job on the historical & medical aspects, plus I need more time to work out my concepts for ‘SolarPunk’ that will form a foundation for at least one of the books (and the world from that point forward). And I get new ideas all the time.
26. Are you writing to reach a particular kind of reader? Yes. Readers who like to think. Like: If you spend time sitting in silence, thinking, for hours or days at a time, and you like doing it and like that you do it, you’re who I’m thinking of. If people tell you you ‘think too much’ and your initial response (at least in your mind) is that there’s no such thing as too much thinking, you’re who I’m thinking of. If you’ve been accused of ‘overthinking,’ especially books, then please, read my books. Think about them. Overthink them. I have a feeling that someday there will be a few people who, upon overthinking my books, finally begin to see what I was thinking about in the first place.
27. What was the first story you remember writing? When I was 5 or 6, I wrote a SciFi story about a time traveller who encountered giant, sentient food in the future which was really quite glad to be able to solve its overpopulation problem and the past’s global hunger problems by making use of his accidental time machine. No, really. There were illustrations, including at least one giant donut with arms, legs, and a face. It may not have been the first story I wrote, but it’s certainly stuck in my mind.
28. What is the most difficult part of the whole writing process? Writing copy. More generally: marketing, promotion. I was simply not made for Marketing. Almost all marketing feels like lying to me, which I can’t stand to do. I’d rather no one ever read my books than that I put out dishonest, manipulative marketing copy.
29. What is the easiest part of the writing process? Coming up with and writing the stories, themselves. Sitting down is hard, but once I’ve sat down, sitting there letting the words flow out can be amazing.
30. Does writing come easy for you? Often. Not always; it depends on a lot of factors. Generally, if I can get a block of time set aside for writing and actually get myself to sit down to write, the writing comes easily.
31. What’s been the most surprising part of being a writer? Learning (years ago, now, before I even officially started Modern Evil Press) the realities of the publishing industry. The terrible economics. The low numbers most books ever move. The insane number of books pulped every year. Most of all, probably the idea that most full-time writers don’t earn a living wage from their writing. In almost any other field, if people worked full time at a job and didn’t get paid enough to survive, wages would eventually go up. Somehow, in writing/publishing, the concept of paying writers/authors enough money to live on is actually laughable. Out of the question. Not even a consideration. This is ridiculous.
32. Have you ever had difficulty “killing off” a character in your story because she or he was so intriguing and full of possibility for you, his or her creator? Not yet, but there isn’t a whole lot of actual death in my books. (except for the zombie book, but it’s a zombie book: everyone dies)
33. Do you have mental list or a computer file or a spiral notebook with the ideas for or outlines of stories that you have not written but intend to one day? Mental lists, pocket notebooks, several pocket notebooks I carried until they were either full or falling apart & have stored and/or lost… I get ideas all the time. In the last couple of years, I’ve only written a tiny fraction of them down, and I’ve only developed a fraction of those into books/stories, so far. But I’ll always have paper/pen and/or iPhone at hand to take down ideas.
34. How many stories do you currently have swirling around in your head? More than I can count.
35. What do you like to read? That is a good question. I’ve been taking up reading more and more in the last few years, after quite a long time with almost no reading at all, and I’ve found that I don’t like to read a lot of different kinds of books. In fact, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that I dislike reading most kinds of books. I’ll tell you what, though: I suspect I like reading books that were intended for people who like to think. Books that require thinking.
36. What writer influenced you the most? Douglas Adams and/or Roald Dahl.
37. What one book, written by someone else, do you wish you’d written yourself? This is a silly question. I’m not even sure I understand it the way you mean it. The only way the answer can make sense is for me to wish I were that other person/author, for only they could have written that book the way they did. If I wrote that book (and were me) it would be a totally different book. Sometimes I think that if I tried to write one of my own books at a different time in my life, it would be a totally different book. We’ll find out soon, I suppose; I’m beginning to think seriously about completely rewriting Dragons’ Truth. Anyway, I don’t wish I were someone else, or some other author. I’d rather be myself. And I’d rather write my own books.
38. What, in your opinion, are the essential qualities of a good story? No idea. I’ll try to think about this as I read the next several hundred books I read and dozen books I write, and maybe in several years I’ll have an answer. Right now I’m of the opinion that there really aren’t any essential qualities; that good stories may be wholly different from one another and still be good stories.
39. Who gave you the best writing advice you ever received and what was it? Huh. Can’t think of any in particular. Sorry.
40. What advice you would give to an aspiring author? Write.
41. How have you marketed and promoted your work? Not enough, some would say. I run a handful of websites with details. I talk to people. I introduce myself as an author and hand out business cards that point to modernevil.com. I Twitter and facebook and blog about the writing I’m doing and the books I’m putting out. I give away free copies of my books digitally, as eBook and serialized audiobooks. Probably the most successful promotion tool I’ve ever used has been podcasting audio versions of my books for free, in terms of getting my work in front of readers/listeners. Other people work hard to promote their podcasts, where I see the podcasts as promotion for my books… But promotion and marketing are an anathema to me.
42. What are your current writing goals and how do you juggle the promotional aspects with the actual writing? The only kind of promotion I can really do much of without getting sick is just talking to people about what I’m doing. Twittering status updates as I work through projects. Writing blog posts about what I’m going through, what I’m thinking about, what I’m planning, hoping, dreaming, et cetera. This means that it’s easy to make it a normal, ongoing part of my process. As far as current writing goals, my vague goal is “write 2-4 new books a year.” I already mentioned the books I’m working on; if it gets funded, I’m going to try to get the book on writing/publishing done & printed before the end of May. Otherwise, I’ve already hit my goal (Books 4 & 5, not to mention the paper release of the new Untrue Trilogies) for the year, so any other writing I accomplish is butter. I was thinking of writing a short story I got an idea for the other day, and submitting it to a local thing (plus putting it online for sale and as a podcast episode), and the submission deadline is just a couple weeks away, so maybe that, too. Really, my goal for the rest of 2011 is to get a lot of reading done. I have a whole shelf of books to read before I can even begin work on that alternate history, and I keep starting new writing projects instead of investing enough time reading…
43. What advice would you give other novelists about book promotion? Do as much as you’re comfortable with, and expect proportional results. I don’t do a lot of promotion, and I don’t get very numerically big results. You’ll probably be lucky to get a single percent of people you reach out to even looking your way, and perhaps a single percent of them to spend any money on an unknown author, so set your expectations reasonably. If you’re one for significant promotion, you can get significant results, but I think (except for a few lucky breaks) most everyone’s results are disappointing, at least for the first several years of continuous promotion.
44. What words would you like to leave the world when you are gone? This notion of leaving something for the world isn’t important to me. I am but a vapor on the wind. Nothing I can build will last; only God lasts, and in the end only his mercy will remain. If I can accomplish anything in this life, it will be to disappear so that when (perhaps, someday) you look my way you see only Jesus and his love.
45. Have you written any other books? Yes. Lots.
46. Where can people learn more about your books? modernevil.com

I’ll have my copies of the books this Thursday (March 10th, 2011), and will make them available for purchase from modernevil.com as soon as possible after they arrive. As detailed in my last post, I’m planning on offering them at the following price points:

• $50 for both Untrue Trilogies, unsigned
• $50 each ($100 for both) Untrue Trilogies, signed

No additional shipping/handling charges, sent via USPS Priority Mail with delivery confirmation, packed and shipped by the author… signed & personalized by the author, if you pay for it. Is my signature worth that much? Maybe, but that isn’t the point: The point is to give people the option of becoming a patron / benefactor / philanthropist / supporter of an independent creator, rather than just a blind consumer looking for the best price. If you want the best price, currently $28.92 for the pair, go buy at B&N (or wherever), and I’ll get about $13.88 of that. If you order unsigned from me, depending on what shipping costs me (I don’t have the final weight of the books yet, and it depends on where you live, but it’ll be somewhere from $6-$11 for the pair), I’ll net $25-$29. If you order the signed copies, I’ll net $75-$80. See how that works?

Oh, and in case you didn’t read my last post (because it was over 2k words long?), you may have missed that I’m giving away FREE copies of the full Untrue Tales… series. You can enter right now on Goodreads, or you can go back and comment on that post and have a much better chance of winning. (Currently, I’m the only person eligible. Maybe I’ll win copies of my own books…)

Ignore the following paragraph if you are allergic to details about money:

With shipping, all 100 books cost me $719.52, or $7.20/book. The printing cost when they’re ordered wholesale is $5.56, and the discount on both books (for now) is 50% which, with a $24.99 cover price for each trilogy, means I’d earn $6.94 if you bought one through, say, Amazon. That’s about $2.31 for each of the three books included in each trilogy. To earn at that rate per title, if released as individual paperbacks, they’d have to be priced at $11.99 each (because of rounding up to the nearest $.99, it actually goes up to a net return of ~$2.62 each, so a little more), or $35.97 for 3 (That’s $71.94 for the full series, vs. $49.98 for the two trilogies at list price, and while you’d pay $21.96 more for the 6 individual books, I’d only net $1.84 more.), which seems a bit steep. On the other hand, if you ordered straight from me, say, in person at Phoenix Comicon 2011, (presuming you don’t take one of the deals I’ll certainly have, some of which I’ll discuss below) paying a full $25 (I don’t usually screw with pennies or charging sales tax; I pay your sales tax for in-person book sales), then after I cover sales tax ($2.32), printing and shipping ($7.20), I net $15.47, which is a much better return on writing three books than $6.94 is. That’s almost $5.16 per title. (Which is, admittedly, a couple of dollars less than I’d earn hand-selling the individual books, if priced as above.) Anyway, although it seems like $15.47 is the lionshare of $24.99 at a glance, I have to sell 47 of the 100 books I just ordered, at full price, to just cover the cost of ordering the paper books; that doesn’t cover any other expenses involved in writing the books (paper, ink, computers, typewriters, time, et cetera) or marketing the books (web hosting, space rental at Comicon, business cards, et cetera), just the printing & shipping & the convenience of not asking people for $27.31 (or $54.63 for both trilogies) when I can ask for $25 (or $50). I’m reconsidering the tax thing, with sales tax nearly at ten cents on the dollar, but I know it’s my preference as a consumer to pay round-numbered amounts. Your feelings are welcomed.

So, less detailed here, though still about money, I want to write out some thoughts on various pricing options. Right now at modernevil.com, you can order any of my books at a flat rate of $25 each, and I’ll personally sign it and ship it to you. Except for the First Edition First Untrue Trilogy, which is $50 (since the cover price is already $25). The idea in those prices was that, if you wanted to get the books for less, they’re available at Amazon (Audible, et cetera) for their cover price or less ($10-$14, or $25), as eBooks for half that or less (currently $3-$5 each, no combined editions available), and for free as downloads (eBooks, audiobooks). If you wanted to support me, my writing, my publishing company, and the idea of independent creators succeeding as much as possible, then you order directly from me at the higher prices. $25 isn’t that much more for a reader to pay, but it means $15-$20 in my pocket, vs. $2-$3 when you order any other way. And I do really believe in “pay what you can” – that people who can afford to pay more should pay more and people who can’t afford to pay more still deserve access to great content. So I want to offer as many viable options as possible for the Untrue Tales… series, but I don’t want to over-complicate things, either. So I’ll probably over-simplify them, instead.

I think the numbers support, for the 14 people who purchased the existing paperback version of The First Untrue Trilogy (when it was all that was available of that series), offering the option of buying both of the new books (so they’d have a matching set; the new ones aren’t even the same size as the old one) for just $25. In fact, that’s still (slightly) profitable. Almost as profitable as selling just one of the trilogies at wholesale. I know for certain who 4 of the 14 buyers are, and would gladly accept visual proof of ownership (bring it with you to the con, post a photo of you holding it to Twitter/facebook/blog) for the other 10. But how to communicate that? Well, I’ve just said it, here. Maybe, if I can get my nerve up (I’ve been building toward it for a year, I hope I can), I’ll send out a sort-of-a newsletter to my mailing list between now and Memorial Day, and hope most of them are on it.

For everyone else, I’ll probably offer two options for ordering from me: $50 each for signed copies, or $40 (maybe $50 and no add’l shipping charge) for both books together, unsigned. Plus, if you pay the $100 for the signed pair, I’ll throw in something extra. Does that sound fair?

Then there’s the question of eBooks and audiobooks. First, eBooks: I’ve been contemplating whether I ought to continue to offer the series only as individual eBooks, or add the combined trilogies to the mix, or offer only the trilogies and pull the individual eBooks, or somehow put together all six books in one eBook with an unreadable cover…? I think I’ve decided to offer only the trilogies and pull the individual eBooks. (and that the covers with 14 titles each are complex enough, trying to fit 26 titles on one cover would be overkill) Covers is taken care of for that, since I would have parity between the new paper books and the new eBooks. Pricing is a concern, though eBooks pricing deserves its own long post, soon. (My eBooks pricing experiment is going exactly as expected; sales dropped off with the lower prices.) Probably I’ll try to keep some sort of parity with the relative prices of my other paperbacks and eBooks, so if (for some crazy reason) I keep individual eBook prices in the $3-$5 range, the trilogies will be $9.99 each or if I raise individual eBook prices up to the $8-$10 range, the trilogies will be roughly $16.99 each. And, yes, still also available for free.

But what about the audiobooks? Do I remix/remaster the entire series as two long podcasts/audiobooks? One? If I don’t combine them, covers becomes a question again. Should I go to the trouble of creating a cover for Book Six that matches the 5 old covers’ style, or recreate all six covers in a style which matches the new paper books’ covers? Probably I’ll do the latter, and remix the entire series anyway (to adjust the outros of every episode to correctly refer to the availability of the completed series), all 60 episodes of it. Well, maybe just 50. Book Six doesn’t start podcasting until after everything else will be settled with the new releases; I can just do them the new way the first time. That should be fine.

No, where was I? And where was I headed? Let’s see… finished editing/creating the new print versions of the books… talked about pricing, profits, and plans… talked about eBook and audiobook versions… Did I mention I put the new books up on Goodreads? (The First Untrue Trilogy, The Second Untrue Trilogy) No? Well, I did. In fact, I’ve just (now, in a pause from writing this post) submitted giveaways there for both books. One should start any moment now, with details listed here when the Goodreads staff turns it on. It’s for two copies of the first trilogy and it runs from … whenever they turn it on through March 16th. The other one, which I’ll probably post about on or after the 17th, is for two copies of the second trilogy and it runs from March 17th through March 30th. Except that I’ll actually be sending both trilogies to all four winners, so they can read the entire semi-epic series. Except that what this series of six books really needed was six free sets given away. So in addition to the four copies I’m giving away via Goodreads, I’m also giving away two copies here on my blog. I’ll give away one in this post, and another later.

To whom? To people who read all the way through my 2000+ word posts, of course! Heck, you wouldn’t even be hearing about these free books if you weren’t among that tiny, elite group of people! So, how will we do this? Comments? Some sort of quiz, testing your reading comprehension? (Or is it your comprehension of rambling?) What do the other blogs do for book giveaways? One entry for commenting, another for tweeting about the new books, another couple for blogging about the new books, another for adding the books to your library on Goodreads, another for telling me who your favorite character from any of my books is and why, and one final entry for posting a photo of yourself holding one of my books to twitter/facebook/etc? Then I put all the entries in a hat and pick one, right? Sure, that sounds fun. Do that.

ie: At least comment, if you’d like a shot at $50 in free books. Help spread the word, and you increase your chances… as long as you comment again to let me know you’ve done so. This contest ends … let’s say on March 16th. Then I’ll do another post and another contest for the second half of the month. Then, on April 1st, the books come out.

Oh, that’s another thing I forgot to mention. (Though if you ‘Like’ me or ‘Like’ Modern Evil Press on facebook, you may already have some idea.) In order to get the free setup from LSI, I had to submit by the end of February, so I did. So as of March 2nd, the books were officially approved, ready, and “available for printing” … and ordering … from LSI. Now, it typically takes 1-2 weeks after approval before new titles begin appearing at booksellers’ sites (ie: Amazon, bn.com, et cetera), though bn.com seems to add books based on ISBN data and already has both books listed (for $16.86 apiece, for members!) with incomplete data, but that’s still a couple of weeks before the official publication date. I’ve added both the “publication date” and ‘on sale date’ of 4/1/2011 to both books’ ISBN metadata, and I’m hoping (but not expecting) that some book stores will honor that. Heck, it’d be the first time any of my books was available for an actual Amazon pre-order, if Amazon did. (Signs I’m a nothing-of-a-publisher: I don’t even have sufficient relationship with Amazon to get them to list my upcoming books for pre-sale. They’re either not in the system, or for sale.) When will I personally start selling/shipping the books? Meh. I don’t know. Some time after I receive them. My order will take a few days to print and a business week to ship, so I’ll probably have them by the 15th… Probably I’ll put up the Google Checkout ‘Add To Cart’ buttons as soon as I have the books on hand, and then no one will order them between then and 4/1/2011 so this question will be irrelevant.. Oh, well.

Oh, and on the subject of hand-selling books at Phoenix Comicon – I’ll probably also have mega-combo-deals again, then, like I did last year. Things like all 5 books in the Lost and Not Found universe for $50, or maybe the Starter Kit for $55. And the “all books from Modern Evil Press” option, of course. That’s 11 books (15 titles) whose cover prices total $158, and I’ll probably sell it for $125 or $135. Maybe less. And I’m thinking of running whatever sales/deals I offer at Comicon at modernevil.com for the duration of the con, so people who can’t make it to Phoenix can still get the deal (plus S&H).

I think that’s everything. Did I miss anything?

Update: For the purposes of the contest, if you wanted to blog about the new books coming out, you can link to either the Goodreads pages I linked to mid-post, or to the pages I just created for the books on modernevil.com. The First Untrue Trilogy, The Second Untrue Trilogy. Or both.

I “cheated” for NaNoWriMo this year. You’re “supposed” to start a new project from scratch and finish it during the month…

Though the focus has certainly shifted significantly in the direction of paying more attention to reaching 50,000 words than to finishing a novel. For a lot of pro- and aspiring- authors, there is much derision of the ideas that 1) 50k words constitutes a novel or 2) 50k words is a lot to write in a month. Still, none of the writers I know who have made such comments have come close to keeping pace with NaNoWriMo this year, and quite a few people I know who have no intention of ever seeking publication (or worse: becoming a professional writer) have kept up or outdone themselves, and while carefully following the rules. Others are struggling, even while including all the words they write for school, their blogs, short stories, grocery lists, anything they write all month.

Of course, a struggle I see every year (my sister & wife, included) is in reaching the 50k word goal but not getting near the end of the story. My sister thought she was about 1/4 of the way through her story at ~30,000 words. She’s revised her plot since then, to reign it in to a reachable target. My wife is about to hit 50k tonight (the 27th), but is planning on continuing to write for the next week or more until she gets to the end of the story. And because the focus of the people in charge at the OLL, and thus of the participants, is on the 50k instead of the finished book… They’re both going to be winners. As a 9-year veteran of NaNoWriMo I have no disagreement with this assessment; anyone who sets themselves an ambitious goal like this and succeeds is certainly a winner. 50k words in a month, a book in a month, a screenplay (Script Frenzy is in April, I think), a long reading list… Set yourself a challenge that you never thought you could beat, then beat it, and you’ll certainly feel like a winner.

Within three or four years of discovering NaNoWriMo, I’d already ruined myself of the idea of writing a book / 50k words in a month being a challenge. Certainly not one I don’t think I can beat: the first year I tried, after setting aside 2 partial manuscripts, I wrote a 50k-word novel in under 8 days. The next year I wrote Dragons’ Truth on a manual typewriter in (I think) 26 days. For my third try, I wrote Untrue Tales… Book One in 14 days. (I intended to write Book Two in the 2nd half of the month, but when my writing stalled, I instead edited Book One, designed its cover, wrote its copy, did its layout, and got it printed & available for sale by Nov. 30th. Because I was already teaching myself to be a publisher by 2004.) Book Two came out of me a couple months later, within about 2 weeks. In September, 2005, I wrote the first 48k words of Book Three in a “single sitting” 60 hours long. So writing a book in a month is… Not a challenge, as far as getting the words down, for me. It makes it so NaNoWriMo isn’t much more of a good/winner feeling over simply finishing a new book, which is something I do 2-4 times a year, most years.

This year, I’d intended/hoped to get the entire Untrue Tales series finished (at least first drafts) by the end of November/NaNoWriMo. I started Book Four in July, didn’t write much in August or the first half of September, then buckled down and finished it by … October 14th, I think. Started Book Five a few days later, hoping to get it done before November, but only wrote 20k words by the end of the month. So the first 30k I wrote was the end of Book Five. Which is “cheating” unless I also wrote the whole of Book Six by the end of the month (which had been my plan), right? Sorta. But not really. Last Thursday night, around 10PM, I began working on Book Six. On a manual typewriter (my ‘new’ Royal Futura, which I wrote the bulk of Book Five on), so these word counts are estimates: I wrote the first 14k words in the next 18 hours, took a 6 hour break for my nephews’ birthday party, then wrote another 6k words by ~7AM Saturday morning. Which put me at 50k total new words in November. Yay!

Then … I’m thinking something in my brain chemistry must have shifted, dopamine levels dropping or something, because my writing speed and quality dropped precipitously. In the next 3.5 hours I wrote one page, in which one of my characters was suddenly and unexpectedly suicidally depressed. Probably a reflection of what was going on in my own head at the time. I knew I probably ought to give up writing, but I was already committed to going to an all-night write-in Saturday night, so I just kept trying to write, all day Saturday, not calling it quits until around 4:30AM Sunday morning. I managed to write about 4k words in around 20 hours trying. Which is slow. And I think a lot of them are repetition of things I’d already written. Or out of character. Or wrong in other ways. So probably that 4k words will be deleted. But… I still wrote 50k words in November, right?

This week I thought I’d try re-reading Book Five and what I’ve written of Book Six before trying to write any more. To try to get a handle on what was repetition, where the story was going, et cetera, and get the rest of Book Six well in hand. Alas, whatever was going wrong with my brain, which began Saturday morning, continued at least until Thursday morning. I couldn’t read my book for very long, I couldn’t stay awake, I felt terrible, I couldn’t concentrate. All reasonably normal symptoms of depression. Not being able to work is a key problem of real mental illness. I managed to get through a day and a half of baking and cooking, getting Thanksgiving ready, and everything turned out good enough. (I still need to work on my pie crusts…) But I’ve decided that, as long as I actually have several months to get all this completed and still be on schedule (a schedule I invented), there’s not really any reason to be stressed out or trying very hard to struggle through to the end of Book Six by the end of the month. I’ll probably get it done in December. After my mind has a chance to recuperate/repair/recover from whatever this is.

Thursday they turned on the NaNoWriMo word count validator. I took Book Five and a few extra words to get what I uploaded to equal my actual (estimated) word count and threw it in. So I’m officially a “winner” again this year, at 54,150 words. I didn’t start a book from scratch & finish it during the month, but I worked on a book I was 40% of the way through, finishing it, and I got another one started and worked on it until it was 40%-48% done, which is mathematically very similar to writing one book from start to finish, right? Once again, I don’t like this year’s shirts. Mandy, who did win while I was writing this post, says she would like the winner T-Shirt if it didn’t have the arrow pointing up at her face. I definitely agree that the arrow makes the shirt less wearable. The only shirt design they have in stock right now that I really like is … only for women? Sigh. Mandy wants me to order it for her, instead. I’ll check finances, but I think the bill for eating at Denny’s tonight (at the write-in, where she passed 50k) ate the money we would/might have spent on that shirt.

Anyway, that’s that. My ninth year, fifth definite win (finished my 14th book & started my 15th). Mandy’s second attempt, second win. My sister’s first real attempt, and it looks like she’s going to win, too. I think I’ve decided not to try to take over the ML duties for Phoenix for next year, but my sister thinks she will, so that’ll be better than either: 1) the main ML they’ve had the last few years, or 2) no one, since both MLs are talking about quitting. We mostly participated in the East Valley region, this year, even though it meant several long drives back and forth from North Phoenix to Tempe and Mesa. The events were awesome, though, even when my writing was going badly last weekend, so it was a good decision. I’ll keep my eye on the situation, next year. It’ll be my tenth year doing NaNoWriMo. The books I’ve been working on this year will certainly be published by then; I don’t know which of the many ideas I have waiting to be worked on will be at the front of my mind when November rolls around again, but I know I’ll work on something. I think the challenge, for me, isn’t in hitting 50k words but in having my mind in the right state with an idea properly matured & ready to go when November hits. Last year I wrote Cheating, Death 6 weeks early, and wasn’t ready with anything else in time for NaNoWriMo. Always a crapshoot, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to just do 1667 words/day, all month long: Like every other attempt I make at writing, it comes in fits and starts, bursts of writing 5k, 10k, 20k in a day, sometimes several such days in a row, and then days or weeks or months with nothing. …and 1k- to 2k- word blog posts every week or two, too, eh?

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book One:
An Introduction to Dodgeball
-or-
Conception and Induction
-or-
How To Begin An Apocalypse

At the time I’d not yet begun thinking about marketing. Not the way Marketing people think about marketing. Perhaps a pinch of the way Salesmen think about sales, but really I was mostly thinking about writing the stories I wanted to write and giving them titles I thought were appropriate. The idea, when I titled it originally, was that the book took place in the universe of the “Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction” of which many various stories and series may eventually be written, and that the series I’d just begun was called the “Recollections of an Alternate Past.” The first book, “Book One” had three titles, each of which was an appropriate title and none of which, I felt, properly encompassed the full scope of the book. That part, I can understand, might be confusing at first. Most books have only one title or, at most, two titles. Three is just, whew, confusing?

After that, in 2005, I wrote and published the next book in that series. I gave it a title commensurate with the first book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Two:
The Twofold Invasion
-or-
Penetration and Destruction
-or-
How To Make Love With Twins

Again, with the two series titles and the three book titles. In 2005-2006 I wrote (& in 2006 published) the third book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Three:
Escape From Exile
-or-
Confusion and Contraction
-or-
How To Get Out Of Hell

Yep. 5 titles. Again.

In 2007 I decided to take my publishing company into the major leagues by buying ISBNs, registering with the Library of Congress, properly registering as a business with the state, and signing up for printing & distribution with Lightning Source (LSI). Based on my research at the time, the choice between Lulu.com and LSI was a false dichotomy, since all of Lulu’s printing was done by LSI. Cafepress wasn’t (and still isn’t) taking publishing seriously, and Amazon’s CreateSpace/whatever cost a bit more than LSI & limited distribution to Amazon, which seems more like bush league than major league.

In 2008 I began working full-time as a creative, and began to look into marketing a bit. As I’ve recently written about re-realizing, I had accidentally let myself slip into a mindset of thinking sales & marketing were important. In two years of frustrating myself, I did get a smidgen of understanding about marketing. By 2009 I was aware that it was considered a bad idea for a book’s title to be longer than 3 or 4 words. If you look at the New York Times Bestsellers this week, in Hardcover Nonfiction four of the top five books have a one-word title. (Did you notice none of them is a word over 5 letters long?) In Hardcover Fiction, four of the top five have two-word or three-word titles, and that trend covers most all mass-market books by all major publishers. It’s good marketing, you see, to have a short, memorable title.

In 2010, I’ve begun to come to terms with the fact that the entire publishing world (both in books and in music/audiobooks) has been built around the assumption that all publishers follow that sort of thinking. The relevant metadata fields for books, eBooks, audiobooks, et cetera are small. On some eReaders, books’ titles simply get cut off if they’re more than about 25-30 characters. On some eBook stores, book descriptions can’t exceed a few hundred characters. I can still name paper books whatever I want, but in the transition to digital, I lose a certain degree of creative freedom with regard to titling books. I “can” put my full titles in the title fields of my eBooks, but I can’t guarantee potential readers will actually be able to see the full titles there. (In fact, in 2009 I discovered that I literally can’t use my full titles on my audiobooks because of how RSS/WinXP handle the titles of podcasts episodes. I compromised on an abbreviated title because not doing so prevented people from hearing my books. (ie: not about money, but about readership))

This year I’ve also been going back and forth with Mark Coker / Smashwords on the subject of titles. Smashwords didn’t like how I initially named my short stories from short story collections. I thought about it for a month or so, then decided to change the way I arranged the titles of my short stories (going from collection first to individual story title first), trying to make it more clear, in light of my discoveries about how eReaders display the titles. I also decided to use a similar tactic to rename the eBook versions of my Untrue Tales… series according to the compromise I’d made on the audiobooks, waiting until Book Four was released, 11/5/2010. The full title of Book Four is:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Four:
Explorations of Ridiculous Realities
-or-
Corporation and Collusion
-or-
How To Subvert Corporatocracy

But in the “title” field I put the abbreviated version, “Untrue Tales… Book Four” when I uploaded it to Smashwords, the Kindle store, and when I gave Bowker the information for the eBook. At the same time, I updated the titles of the first three books to the abbreviated versions on all sites, putting the full titles in the books’ description fields instead. I feel that, under the circumstances of the limitations placed on book titles for eBooks, this is a good compromise, allowing me to communicate basic info (this book is in a series whose name begins with “Untrue Tales,” and is book number “Four”) in the limited space of the title field, along with the full title to people who click through, look at the book cover, or actually download the book and look at the title page.

Mark Coker disagrees. In fact, as someone with a background in Marketing, his opinion is that I ought to just rename my books. I complained a bit about this current disagreement on Twitter and someone chimed in to the same effect; if it helps sales, change the titles. To me, this is like a teacher asking a parent to rename their 6-year-old because it might confuse the other kids at school.

Yet, even after working on this blog post for 3-4 hours, after spending another while writing another response to Mark Coker via email (highlight: “As far as I’m concerned the only problem is when retailers decide not to display the correct/full titles. Since they seem to accurately display covers and descriptions, but not titles, I moved my titles to where they could be seen: the book covers and the book descriptions. I then put an abbreviated (as your reviewer noted: incorrect) title in the title field, in order to fit the limitations of the system.“), I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Usually I write posts like these to work through sticky ideas, and after a thousand words or so, I know what I mean to do. I’m still a bit conflicted. Only about the metadata, though. The other two books in the series are all going to get the 3-titles-each treatment, and the series still has two titles. Here’s what I’ve got for the recently-finished Book Five:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Five:
The Bloodless Battles
-or-
Conscription and Revelation
-or-
How To Break Into Prison

I’ll start work on writing Book Six pretty soon. Hopefully I’ll have it’s ridiculously long title by the end of the month (or early December, at the latest).

I started work on Untrue Tales… Book Five on Thursday, and when Starbucks closed & kicked me out last night (Friday), I’d already passed 10k words. My current goal is to finish Book Five before the end of October so I can go into NaNoWriMo with a blank slate & have a more relaxed schedule (a whole month?) for Untrue Tales… Book Six. Which will be the end of the series. Two trilogies. I’m making good progress toward my goals of getting them done, one right after the other, so I can get the entire second trilogy out in paperback in the Spring of 2011.

Depending on time availability I’m planning to start podcasting Book Four on the Modern Evil Podcast starting Friday November 5th, which puts Book Five’s start in mid-January, so I’ll probably hold off on the Book Five eBook release until January as well. Then I can aim to release the Book Six eBook and the 2nd-trilogy paperback around the end of March / beginning of April (April Fool’s day?), 2011… That sounds good.  Gives me time to edit & get feedback, lets me do the audiobook versions before the print version (recording the audio version always catches a few more flaws, trust me), but doesn’t make my audience wait too much longer to get the rest of the story. People who can’t afford to buy the eBooks (they’re just $5.99 each!) or the paperbacks ($24.99/trilogy retail, $50/trilogy signed & author-direct) will be able to hear the whole thing for free on the podcast before summer. (Or read the free eBooks not long after that.)

After I finish writing the end of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series (fingers crossed; by November 30th!), I can maybe get back to doing research for that alternate/zombie history series I was talking about this time last year. I have at least 10k more pages to read before I’ll be comfortable tackling that one. Lots of histories, biographies, and philosophy books, plus probably another stack of zombie books, and almost certainly a stack of steampunk (since I intend to invent the ‘solarpunk’ genre with the series). But that’s later. Right now, I’m writing about Trevor. Last night I wrote Trevor’s first confrontation with God. It was neat. Trevor and Toni got to go to Heaven, then God took them for a walk in the midst of the Garden. I think you’ll like it.

I know that for Book One and Book Two (not to mention: Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, all versions of Lost and Not Found, and a good chunk of Dragons’ Truth) I got my most productive work done while spending time at a coffee shop all day, drinking overly-sweet coffee drinks. ((For Book Three, I wrote the bulk of the book in a single 60-hour session, in my bedroom, while using modafinil to stay awake and only white tea to drink.)) While in Vegas I had 3 days to write. The first day I tried writing in the hotel room, drinking water, and barely passed 1k words all day. The second day I went to Starbucks and, after spending an hour updating podcasts/etc, I tried to get by on cheap iced tea drinks… slow. Then a bit after mid-day I ordered a super-sweet espresso drink I’ve dubbed ‘liquid awesome’ and proceeded to write at over 850 words/hour for the remainder of the day. The third day, feeling the crunch on my wallet from a few of days in Vegas, I tried switching to the cheaper drip coffee and iced tea, and only wrote ~1500 words all day (though that’s partially because I spent a couple hours chatting with a stranger).

What I’d like to be able to do is to take my laptop to a local coffee shop in the morning, sit all day drinking fancy drinks (and eating coffee-shop sandwiches/etc) and working on the book, and repeat that day after day until at least Book Four is done. ((Preferably until Book Six is done.)) I wrote most of Book Two over about a week of such days, and expect to be able to repeat that performance for the rest of the Untrue Tales… series. The only (big) problem standing between me and this goal is money. As you know from my other posts, this writing gig doesn’t exactly pay the bills. Not even close. And while my wife’s income is sufficient to cover our monthly expenses, allowing me to be a full-time creative, after going to Vegas and San Diego Comicon this summer our “disposable” money is used up for now. So while we aren’t behind on any bills, and we can afford groceries, there’s no extra money (at least for a couple of months) for spending days/weeks in coffee shops.

You can help, and I’ve thought of a couple of possible options:

First, easiest, is that you could buy the $50 signed paperback copy of the first trilogy of the Untrue Tales… series from modernevil.com. I currently have 6 copies of this edition “in stock.” Sales of the last couple copies have to pay to re-order,  so they don’t help as much with coffee unless even more people order. I also have a limited number of copies of the not-currently-in-print individual paperback first editions of Book One, Book Two, and Book Three available signed for $25 each. Order any of these 4 books directly from modernevil.com at these prices and I will personally sign it (and can personalize it) and ship it to you, then add you to the acknowledgements / Special Thanks page of the second trilogy (and of the individually available eBooks)… and use the proceeds to do the coffee shop thing, for as long as the money lasts.

Second, if you run a local (Phoenix, AZ), independent coffee shop (or are friends with someone who does) and would like to sponsor or co-sponsor my writing, I would be glad to give you my loyalty, Special Thanks in the books, and lots of mentions on twitter/facebook/yelp/this-blog/my-podcasts as I work on, publish, and later podcast each book remaining in the series. I realize this isn’t a traditional way to advertise, and doesn’t reach a vast/huge/mass-media audience, but the majority of my paperback sales are hand-sales in the Phoenix area, most of my facebook friends are in Phoenix, and a reasonable chunk of my twitter followers are in Phoenix. If you’d like to be seen as an author-friendly place to be, this could help. Even something as simple as first-drink-free/day would go a long way to stretching the dollars contributed by supporters who take advantage of the first option, though if you’re a coffee-shop-owner and a reader, I’d be glad to work out a books-for-coffee exchange, too.

Third, even if you can’t afford a signed paperback right now (or already have one and can’t think of anyone to gift a copy to), or aren’t a coffee shop owner, you can help: Spread the word. Link to this post. Give people my email address. Tell someone at your favorite Phoenix-area indie coffee shop you know an author looking for a spot, or just tell me what/where your favorite local coffee shop is so I can go talk to them myself. Tell your friends who read books about my books, and about this offer.

Until something happens on this, or until November (when I should begin to have a bit of “disposable” income again), I’ll keep slogging on at home, a couple hundred words at a time. The current setup of my desk/home, while great for podcasting, just doesn’t seem conducive to writing books in the Untrue Tales… universe.

I’m working on Untrue Tales… Book Four. I know I mentioned it on Twitter/Facebook, but in case you haven’t been following me; I began writing Book Four while I was in Las Vegas recently. (During the day while we were there, my wife Mandy was at a teaching conference, so I had plenty of time to work. Evenings were for having fun.) I got about 5700 words written in Vegas, and haven’t added a word in the three weeks since. Actually, I’ve been pretty darn depressed lately -including the last three weeks, comicon, Vegas, and for quite some time before that. I’m a bit surprised I was able to write anything at all. Luckily, I’ve been working on feeling a bit better and in the last week or two, and while I haven’t managed to get any actual writing done (and have actually experienced stress to the level of physical pain the last two times I tried to sit down to work on Book Four), I have been working through the story quite a bit.

I’ve seen/remembered quite a bit of the rest of the story, and it looks like instead of 7 books (or more) as I recall originally envisioning, the story will be well told in 6 books. The first three are done, you can read them now. I should have Book Four done within a couple of months. (ie: before NaNoWriMo’10) Then maybe I’ll write Book Five for release in early 2011 and Book Six for release in mid- or late-2011. I am planning on keeping them all very close to the same length as each other and as the first three books. The writing may (or may not) go quickly through all 3 books, one after the other, but I’m beginning to get used to the idea of investing months per book for editing/preparation/recording in advance of an official release.

I’ve just looked at a calendar, and if Book Four is ready by October 8th & I start podcasting it on the Modern Evil Podcast that week (immediately after TeaTA finishes its run), then it’ll run out in mid-December… Two more books of the same length would be another 5 months of episodes, if posted back-to-back, which would put the release of Book Five in December 2010 or January 2011 and Book Six in March 2011. Which I suppose would be alright. The first three were released in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I somewhat wish I could release the next three in 2010, 2011, and 2012… but I also don’t like the idea of sitting on a finished book for a year or more… and I kinda want to get all three books written as quickly as possible.

Of course, pre-2008 I was only writing/publishing about one book per year.

Now, for the release, I’m thinking of doing a modified version of what I’ve been implementing with my more recent releases (though certainly in line with the current availability of the first three Untrue Tales… books). I’m thinking of releasing the individual books 4-6 as eBooks and audiobooks and not as individual paperback books, then putting out the second trilogy as a combined paperback after all three books are done. I brainstormed a variety of models for putting out various other combinations of paper/eBook/audio at various intervals, doing various fundraisers, even thought about limited hardback releases, but due to the expense of paper (and the miniscule interest I’ve seen over the years in the individual books in the series in paperback) I think this will be the most reasonable plan. Then, maybe, I’ll look into doing a limited hardback release encompassing the full series.

On the writing itself: (Possible spoilers ahead) I haven’t written -or been in the mindset that created- books in the Untrue Tales… series for over four years. Since then I’ve been through a variety of life changes, not the least of which was my marriage in 2007. Despite Trevor’s having been reunited with his wife at the end of Book Three, their being together for the remainder of the series, and Book Four being about their life together before his being exiled to Earth, my relationship with my wife actually distances me from the relationship Trevor has with his wife. Writing Book Four has been an emotional stumbling block since (perhaps) 2005, and is the primary reason I’ve not previously continued the series. It was supposed to be about Trev & Toni’s love story, which led directly to his exile on Earth… and writing the core of that story is one I may never be able to do.

Luckily, upon examining the way the story needs to be told and how events unfolded prior to Trevor’s exile, I discovered that the emotional core of and the how-they-met-and-fell-in-love part of Trev & Toni’s story doesn’t get told in Book Four or (probably) anywhere in the series. Book Four is still nearly-all-flashback to what led Trev into exile, as told by Toni, but she’s keeping a vital element secret. Something that won’t be revealed until the cliffhanger ending of Book Five. Something which, since she’s keeping it secret (for good reason), means she won’t be telling the story of how they met, fell in love, et cetera, either. This takes a huge weight off my back re: writing Book Four.

I’ve also discovered that the tall man, the closest thing to an antagonist in the first 3 books, figures into Trev & Toni’s backstory and into future books – would you believe he’s actually a complex, sympathetic, and manipulated character? His love story, I get to tell.

Most of the rest of what I have planned, I can’t tell you about here. It would give too much away. But it’s going to be awesome. The main battle sequence in Book Five is mind-blowing, and the twist at the end of Book Five… well, the main storyline has been planned from the beginning, it’s just a few details that have needed ironing out. Most of which happens in a process very similar to remembering something that happened to me long ago… or far into my future. It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

It’s coming. If you want to get early access, you can volunteer to be a ‘Beta Reader’ – you’ll get to read the books before the general public does, in exchange for giving me feedback on them. You don’t have to be a professional editor, you just have to be an interested reader (and familiar with the first three books in the series).  Email me, or comment below, if you’re interested.

I do not recall the precise details of the conversation, but it began with a confusion. When the caller insisted that something must be wrong, that Untrue Tales… wasn’t all there, I immediately went into tech-support mode and tried to determine where their problem downloading might be. Soon, as they explained further and my mind wakened more, I realised that what they meant was that the story didn’t have an ending.

Which is correct. Only the first three books of the series are written, so far, and I have plans for at least another four (possibly six) books to complete Trevor’s story. I have been putting off continuing the story for the last several years. Book Four is supposed to be nearly entirely flashback, filling in the story that led to Trevor’s exile on Earth and separation from his true love, and I’ve worried that I won’t do the story justice.

I wrote & published (via Cafepress, originally) Book One in 2004, Book Two in 2005, and Book Three in 2006. In 2007 I began seriously working on starting Modern Evil Press, buying ISBNs, contracting with Lightning Source, and getting several books both in print and available for purchase everywhere. And got married. In 2008 I stopped working a day job and started being a creative full-time, devoting quite a bit of that time to creating audio versions of my existing books and writing Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories, which were published on 1/1/2009. In 2009, in response to certain feedback from readers of FWYCR, I spent the better part of the year doing research on zombie novels, then wrote Cheating, Death. Then edited together the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut for sale as an eBook. So far this year I’ve put out the print edition of LaNF-DC and am nearing completion of this new collection of short stories and essays, Time, emiT, and Time Again. I’ve been busy.

Then, while I was working on Cheating, Death I had a few ideas for an alternate history universe where I could tell at least a few good stories. I’ve been doing a fair amount of research on the period and characters from which I intend to develop these stories from, but the task is far and away the most research-intensive project I’ve ever attempted. (Normally I prefer simply to write the stories and worlds that originate in my own imagination, rather than to attempt to start anywhere near actual history and real people.) So I’ve postponed it a bit, too. In fact, putting together (and expanding) Time, emiT, and Time Again was partially because I suspect that I might not feel ready for the first book to see print by the end of 2010, and I wanted to be sure to put out at least 2 new books this year.

On the other hand, I’ve received my first enthusiastic contact from a fan since Dragons’ Truth also led a few people to ask me if/when there would be a sequel. (My response to that is a question of where, exactly, one might go from the end of Dragons’ Truth. As soon as someone has a reasonable idea, I don’t see any problem with pursuing it.) I know thousands of people have downloaded the eBook and Podiobook versions of each of the three Untrue Tales… books, but the dropoff in readers/listeners from Book Two to Book Three is fairly significant, feedback & reviews are sparse & mixed, and I’ve long suspected that people aren’t getting to the end or don’t like the series very much. The only people who, prior to today, had asked me about continuing the series were people who hadn’t read it yet and were avoiding it because it was unfinished.

Actually, I’ve still been asked more frequently about the description of the fireplace in Book Three than when or whether Book Four will be written. As in: “I really liked the whole series, except for the description of the fireplace in Book Three. What was that about?” That, dear readers, was in the same vein as the entirety of Forget What You Can’t Remember; I was trying to simulate in the reader, via writing style and structure, the experience the character is having – forced on you by the act of reading itself. You like to feel tension and excitement while reading the tense, exciting parts of a thriller. You like to feel as though you are being romanced while reading a romance. I just tried to do the same thing with irritating distraction (in the fireplace), depersonalization disorder, and amnesiac confusion and ethical doubts (in FWYCR).

Yet I’ve now had a great conversation with someone who not only liked the Untrue Tales… books, but is eager and excited to read the rest of the series. Eager enough to look up and call the author’s phone number, to ask about the rest of the story. Which is, in itself, perhaps enough motivation to attempt to squeeze Book Four into my schedule before starting on the alternate history series. At first glance, I think perhaps if I start thinking about it now, I might be able to finish it & publish it by the end of August. Or perhaps September.

Even though I’m not much motivated to write it. I’m a bit distanced from the explicit erotica, violence, and (the core of the thing, which most readers will never notice) the central motivation for the whole project being the satire by exaggeration of the way series like Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events were unfolding at the time. Rather than despising such frustratingly written yet inexplicably popular books and wanting to mock them by emulating and exploding them, I just don’t care about them any more. Technically I had already got to that point by the time I published Book Three, but it has been a real stumbling block to the continued writing of the series. I will have to determine whether I can either simulate or replace that motivation, in order to continue the series without drastically altering the storytelling style.

Perhaps this comes down to that question of ‘why’ – Why I write, why I publish, why I do all this work. If I write “for the readers” I’ve got to finish the series. If I publish to be able to write what and how I want to write, I’m fine to go on ignoring it. I think it’s complicated and contains some of both of those (and other factors), which is why I’ve neither written the next book nor taken the first three out of print. I shall continue to think about  it, and I’ll see if I can start working on it this summer.

So I took some time on Monday and put together a quick “Director’s Cut” that had all the love story and fantasy adventure that had ended up being the last third of Lost and Not Found, cut out the few scenes that had connected it further to the confusing-and-irrelevant characters-who-get-found-and-forgotten, and re-attached the part of the story that goes to Skythia (released earlier this year as a short story in More Lost Memories). I wrote a few words about why I was creating the Director’s Cut, put them up on modernevil.com. I wrote a quick marketing summary so I could put the book up for sale as an eBook on Smashwords. Whoosh, from frustration at people misunderstanding my book to publishing a version of the book that those frustrated people would hate outright, in the space of an afternoon.

Yesterday I sketched for a while & then painted an image for the cover.  I’ve been thinking about doing this with other books (have you seen the covers of More Lost Memories and Cheating, Death?) and I’ve finally decided to do it with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: I’ve put the painting I did for the cover art up for sale at a price that will allow me to fund a paperback release of the book. If you buy the art, I’ll make the book available on paper. ((Alternatively, if I can get, say, 25 people to pre-order a paper copy, I’ll make the book available on paper.)) Otherwise, it’s going to remain available only in formats that cost me nothing to make available: eBook (and probably audiobook, later this year, especially since I’ve already recorded most of it).

I’m thinking of trying this with some of my future books:  Release them as an eBook and if 1) enough eBook copies sell or 2) the original painting for the cover sells or 3) enough people are willing to pre-order then I’ll put out a print edition.  Because realistically, right now, I’m not even breaking even on the publishing costs.  I sell too-few copies.  I’m not saying this is permanent/final, especially since I sell a lot more paper copies by hand (and make more money per copy) than I sell eBooks, but I figure it’s worth a try.  It’s my publishing company, I can do what I want, right?  The only rules to follow are my own.

So, here’s the brief marketing summary I wrote for Smashwords:

A non-traditional story; no real conflict, no struggle, no antagonist, and -some would say- no plot. A love story of fantastic proportions, of two people who realize that the less-than-comfortable normalcy they’d felt responsible to is the only thing keeping them from achieving true bliss. With a faerie, titans, a two-headed monster, a flying city, amazing museums, unusual time mechanics, & more.

And here’s the page-or-so I wrote “About the Director’s Cut”:

Lost and Not Found was the first look at the storybook universe expanded upon in Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, and Cheating, Death. This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found comes closer to my original intent, and to the original first draft of my 2002 NaNoWriMo novel, originally released in limited edition under the title Forlorn. Forlorn was written in the final 8 days of November, after a similar ordeal to the fictional one presented in Lost and Not Found.

In response to the criticism and feedback from a very vocal and adamant subset of the people who read Forlorn, and based on advise about what “all” fiction “needs” I spent the following year trying to find ways to give the story I’d written in Forlorn things like conflict, character arcs, and a three-act structure. I ended up cutting Skythia out completely, and writing a significant amount about the writer’s life and the journey toward the heart of the story, which I’ve always believed starts with the word ‘Forlorn.’

I released the First Edition of that expanded, “fixed” book as Lost and Not Found in 2004, and I’ve been receiving two kinds of feedback from readers in the five years since then: One group of people liked the book right up until the word ‘Forlorn.’ This group thinks the rest of the book is a “wrong turn”, and they were disappointed by it. The other group of people typically don’t even remember what happened in the book before the word ‘Forlorn.’ They understood the heart of the story to be the same thing I did, and they loved it.

This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found is bound to divide readers in the same way, though I expect to a more significant extreme. The people who would have been disappointed by the end of Lost and Not Found will be disappointed by this entire book. The people who would have loved the end of Lost and Not Found will probably love this entire book. And I, increasingly emboldened to do what I want to do with my books and with my publishing company, love the idea of releasing a Director’s Cut of the book, one that I prefer and that I think my true audience will prefer.