You’ve been reading a lot about it here because it’s been dominating my time and my thoughts a lot lately. In case you somehow aren’t aware, I’ve been podcasting my fiction and poetry via the Modern Evil Podcast, and simultaneously releasing my podcast novels over at Podiobooks.com in sync with my personal feed. My feed (the Modern Evil Podcast) has also included (in addition to the weekly, half-hour episodes roughly identical to the Podiobooks release) poetry and short fiction in mid-week episodes.

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What this means, for my time, is that I have effectively been running three weekly podcasts: The podiobooks feed, with just the novel, the Modern Evil Podcast Friday episodes, with the novel and alternate introduction and closing, and the Modern Evil Podcast mid-week episodes, with my poetry and short fiction. ~2.2x the recording and editing, 3x the mixing, converting, and uploading vs. doing one weekly podcast. It’s been a lot of work, and time and thought consuming.
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So, along with the upcoming release of my new book, Forget What You Can’t Remember (now targeting a January release), I’m going to be starting podcasting it. In fact, I’m planning to overlap the two novels’ releases, so that people who listen to the final episode of Lost and Not Found on Podiobooks can immediately go subscribe to Forget What You Can’t Remember and so that people who subscribe to the Modern Evil Podcast will -instead of going for a while without episodes- get an extra episode or two during the overlap. Now, here’s the lazy part:

I’m going to continue releasing on the MEPodcast at the same time as Podiobooks, but Forget What You Can’t Remember is already broken into chapters of roughly even length, each of which should be around 15 minutes long. I’m going to release one chapter at a time, twice a week, into each feed. No poetry or short stories in the MEPodcast during the run, just chapter after chapter of the novel. Also: because of the structure of Forget What You Can’t Remember, the majority of chapters have no “breaks” in them, and thus will have a somewhat reduced editing time and effort - a savings then multiplied by the double feeds.

The Forget What You Can’t Remember podcast should wrap up around mid-April, 2009, according to this release schedule. Hopefully by then I’ll have another book or two written.

Podcasting is getting easier, the more I do it. I’m either getting more confident, or more sloppy, the more hours of audio I record and put online. Today I put together this week’s episode faster than ever, partially because there was less editing required. The mid-week episode wasn’t so bad, either, and for a similar reason. That, I think, has something to do with another thing I think I’m getting better at: writing.

It isn’t necessarily going faster, or easier, during the actual writing. But especially as I’ve been deep in the midst of writing a spinoff novel to Lost and Not Found and my immediate flow into a spinoff of that while recording the audio version of Lost and Not Found, I’ve been able to see how my writing has changed. Or, at the least, to see how much my writing could be improved from what was in Lost and Not Found. Hopefully by seeing that I’m able to steer away from it in my new writing. Even just little things like maintaining tense consistently, or using the same version of a word throughout a book (ie: either the British or the American version, but not switching back and forth between the two), which I thought I’d corrected in the Second Edition of Lost and Not Found, are very frustrating. I don’t know how much time I want to keep sinking into that book, but it isn’t up to my current standards.

I’m writing something very strange, right now. I’m not sure anyone will understand it. I’m not sure what to do with it, this collection of stories. The strangeness, the expected failure to understand, are iterative. I see them in individual sentences & paragraphs, in each story, and in the collection as a whole. I’m not sure it’ll be book length when it’s complete. Maybe, but book length feels very far away, right now, and my list of stories yet to be written for it feels like it’s dwindling. Perhaps I will write a series of stories even further removed from Forget What You Can’t Remember, which are spinoffs of these spinoff stories and which show the stories of characters who are incidental to the stories of the incidental characters in that novel. I already have one in mind, actually. If it’s just the one, I’ll pretend it’s relevant. If I can come up with more, perhaps I’ll divide More Lost Memories into chunks.

I discovered in the last few days that NaNoWriMo doesn’t really matter to me, any more. Not in a giving up way, not in an apathetic way, but in the following way: This is my job. It doesn’t matter whether I hit your word count goal, as long as I reach a length that I, as the publisher, feel is ‘book length’. It doesn’t matter whether I hit your time goal, because if I finish early then great, get to work on writing the next thing sooner and if I don’t finish on time I still have to keep writing. This is my job. This is what I do. I write. I make publishing decisions. When one book is done, I work on another (I’ve got at least four books either partially written or entirely written and partially edited right now, with at least a couple more ready to be worked on, and an endless supply of imagination) and when that’s done this will still be my job. So it doesn’t matter. Not practically. Although: we did buy Little Big Planet as NaNo-bait, and we aren’t allowed to open it until both Mandy and I finish our books. So, there’s that.

Alright. It’s 5AM. This isn’t an early post, it’s a late one. Been up all night. Barely written anything. Even more fun, I need to be up on Saturday, during the day, for North Valley Art Walk, followed by an Iron-Chef-type battle (Pumpkin), followed by the NaNoWriMo all-nighter, followed by church, then probably the Scottsdale Art Fair, and then my Nephews’ birthday party. No, seriously, if I don’t get to bed on time tomorrow night I’ll be running from early Saturday morning until late Sunday evening on almost no sleep at all. Because my life is awesome. Time for bed. Whenever it is I get up, I’ll record an intro for the Modern Evil Podcast, mix the episode, and get it online, ASAP. I’m going to aim for …9AM? Someone call me at 9AM.

Friday afternoon, Mandy and I were poking around, asking people on Twitter what we should do for the evening, and we were considering one of the (apparently several) regular poetry readings around town, but then we heard about a meetup of Podcasters and other social media types (whatever that means) from around the valley. So, we went down to Tempe Marketplace (fashionably late - plus ten minutes just to get into the parking lot from the turning lane) and met a whole bunch of new people (plus a couple of people we’d met at Creative Connect a week or two ago) and had a good time hanging out until we’d literally closed the place down.  THEN, because Mandy and I weren’t done with our night out yet, we went to see Zombie Strippers at the Valley Art in Tempe.  It was much more fun than we were expecting.  Not to mention nudity, gore, zombies, and dark comedy, there was plenty of anti-GWB sentiment from even the first scene.

Anyway, as I do, I discussed my writing, my art, and my attempts and plans for making a living from it with the people we met.  I’ve previously spent a fair chunk of time formatting and transferring photos of my art to my iPhone for just such conversations - people like playing with the iPhone enough that it’s fun to go through dozens of pictures in the midst of conversation - so I had the opportunity to share my art with several people.  And my art really resonated with a couple of people.  And long story short, they decided they wanted to buy Betty.  So Mandy and I hand-delivered it to them on Sunday and hung out with them some more - they’re good people, and we all got along well, which is even better.

This is all good news.  Very encouraging.  Not selling a lot of books (yet - still working on getting the word out there), but that’s two direct book orders (five books total) and two art orders (five paintings total) so far this month, which is more than I sold all last year and the first quarter of this year combined.  And there’s been additional interest in some of my other pieces expressed from a couple of corners, so perhaps we can turn that into sales down the road, too.  Word of mouth is always good. And my “big marketing push” for Dragons’ Truth (my first audiobook, currently being recorded and edited) should start next month, so hopefully that will sell some paperbacks and a few CDs.  Oh, plus I’m going to (finally) start showing at First Fridays in May.  Just a 10×10′ space with the Roosevelt Row folks, but I’ll have my art, I’ll have my books, Heath will be there with his chainmail jewelry, too.

So, times are reasonably good, so far.  I spent all day today (literally from 7AM until Mandy came home around 4:30PM (and a while afterward, as well) just going through stacks of paperwork and filing things, sorting papers, getting things organized into the “new” filing cabinet, and samesuch.  Yet the table I’m trying to get cleaned up to use as a working area is still entirely covered in mess.  More work on it tomorrow, but I’ve also got to take care of the Roosevelt Row paperwork tomorrow, so … maybe we’ll get done.  Maybe we won’t.  Having a couple extra days off the audio work is good, though, even if it is all business-side, mostly paperwork stuff.

You guys better love the audiobooks.