Hey, all. I’ve been off the computer as of late (well, off everything that isn’t Parks and Rec or Justified binge watching), so I apologize for the lack of recent posts, updating my writer’s group, or making progress on my projects. I can’t say why I’ve been off. It’s been more of a general “blah” feeling than anything else. Maybe it’s the winter.
But with the advent of March, I am renewed unto the approach of Spring, groundhog be damned. I’m feeling UP and ready to tackle the blog-o-sphere and my own writing career yet again! Read closely — there is much to catch up on:
– First and foremost, I am a contributing member to SASQUAN, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, and as such I have a terrible and awesome thing: a vote! Yes, it is now within my capability to vote for the (lately) controversial Hugo award for the best works in Science Fiction. Nominations close March 10th, so this is YOUR last chance to make suggestions to me for what should receive a nod. I have no delusions that my own novel or stories will make the cut, proud of them though I am. Nominees don’t need many votes to make the ballot — on the order of 160 or so. I have more than enough 5-star reviews of ASID to think that I have 160 people who would back me, but I doubt the Venn diagram of my readers and SASQUAN voters would intersect to that degree. Back when I had dim hopes that I might make the Sad Puppy slate (one side of the Hugo controversy), I might have had a slot, but it was not to be. Many of the Sad Puppies devotees have read and liked ASID, but there are better books out there and they justifiably got on the slate. The same goes for my short stories — my audience and the average SASQUAN voting pool are not the same group of people, so no joy. That being said, who SHOULD I vote for? I have a few that I’ll be backing, but there is room on my card for others to tag along. Should I fill in my gaps with Sad or Angry Puppies? Should I strike out for balance and vote for books touted by the other, “non-controversial”, “I don’t see anything wrong with the awards”, “there’s no inherent bias among WorldCon voters” side? Check out my existing slate tomorrow and let me know what I should add!
– My active SFWA membership has not come through yet. I’m qualified six ways from Sunday, but no joy yet. Must investigate. I am happy that my friend Joelle Presby got her membership, however. That’s a future SFWA board member there, folks. Me? I couldn’t be bothered.
– I’ve completed about 1/4th of DEMI-GOD and it is going well (except for my operational writing pause throughout much of February). I’m eager to finish, but worry about how the story grabs you. I expect the editing phase to be arduous. This is not a spiffy sci-fi military adventure like my last one. This is much more social science fiction and much more character driven, so I worry about my past readers losing interest. Once I get further on, I will be requesting beta-readers, so let me know if you want to participate.
– I’m spending today re-writing my sci-fi western for the Weird Wild West anthology. Gotta get that in before the window closes. Just need to punch up the beginning.
– I also need to post my new short story for sale as a Kindle Single. Let the 99 cent experiment begin!
– Movies you should check out: Jupiter Ascending (a visual masterpiece that should only be watched completely drunk), Kingsman (an AWESOME flick which is both a deconstruction of Bond and the best of what makes Bond), and The Lazarus Effect (which is being unfairly maligned as either a Lucy redux or a Flatliners copy. It is neither. It is a good low-budget horror flick, though I did think the villain had some issues with her motivation to go FULL-EVIL at the end.) I’m thinking about adding a feature here called the BLUF review for Bottom Line Up Front where I lead with my final judgment and then go into detail.
– Should I get in to You Tube? I have a face for radio and a voice for books, but there is a whole media out there that I’m missing out on. Recommendations?
– And, lastly, for a special treat, go check out The Human Echoes Podcast, where you can hear yours truly debate and riff off of Albert Berg and Tony Southcotte of The Writer’s Arena about the movie Armageddon, space science, the end of the world, and 50 Shades of Grey (which may or may not be related). It was my first podcast, but I had tons of fun, and you should absolutely check it out.
Grab your champagne flute and somebody to smooch, y’all, because the year is done and done well. It’s time to reflect and celebrate! Stick with me as we reminisce about 2014 and look forward to what next year holds:
Instead of going chronologically, I’m going to start with the little things, especially those you might have missed, and move up to the biggest things that impacted my year.
First, that which had the least major impact was my on-going and new projects. I’ve learned that it is a tough thing to balance being a professional officer, a husband/caregiver, a father, and an independent publisher, and the thing that got the least attention in that mix was ongoing long-form work. Short stories I was able to knock out with relative ease, with four published this year alone and another on hold with Baen’s Grantville Gazette for a possible buy. Long-form, novel-length works proved to be my Achilles heel. I have three projects in the hopper: first, the sequel to A Sword Into Darkness, titled Lancers into the light, because EVERYBODY has been asking about it and I’d be a fool not to do one. That one is still in the outlining phase, primarily since I needed a break from ASID, and also because I have two other projects to finish. One of those is my long-suffering urban fantasy Echomancer, which is about 1/3rd complete and suffers from a lot of time/will/desire based writer’s block. Basically, I hit a snag and never went back to it once I moved to other projects. One of those projects is my last long-form unfinished work, which is going between the titles of Demigod and Dattoo, a Christian near-future hard-science young-adult philosophical thriller. Is it a total genre mash-up? Yes. Is it going slowly? Yes. Is it my most exciting project and my best second bid for traditional publication? YES. So, the short answer is that I am working on the next book(s), but the going was slow in 2014, and I hope for more positive news in this next year.
Next in the highlight hit-parade is TNT’s “The Last Ship,” a great little show that premiered this year. If you haven’t had the chance to check it out, you absolutely should on Blu-ray, DVD, or your streaming service of choice. Eric Dane, Rhona Mitra, and Adam Baldwin star in a loose adaptation of William Brinkley’s 1988 post-apocalyptic novel. It’s all about the last US warship, the destroyer USS NATHAN JAMES, which has escaped infection from a worldwide lethal pandemic, and which has the bead on a cure. It is cheesy, fun, well-acted, well-plotted, and surprisingly accurate and respectful of how the actual US surface Navy works. As a lark, I blogged about it all from a USN officer perspective and it did wonders for me. It consistently brought the most traffic to the blog, and brought me a number of new fans as well, who took a chance on my reviews and tried out my books as well. So, overall, a great success.
This next is not such a success story, at least in the relative sense. Following good advice from my friend and mentor Jeff Edwards of Stealth Books that I needed to have something else out on the market to serve the audience that ASID was growing, I published five of my military and artificial intelligence short stories as a collection on Amazon Kindle. REMO has been well-reviewed (39 Amazon reviews with 4.2 stars) and has sold all right, but it never has done the numbers that ASID did. I may have been spoiled by how my first foray into independent publishing did, and I realize that collections don’t tend to sell as well long-form works, but I would have liked for it to have done better, for more people to have tried it out. As of this post, REMO has sold 1937 copies on Kindle, with an additional 362 provided through Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (which I still get paid for). That’s around 2300 more people that have enjoyed my stories than would have if they had stayed on my computer. Good, but not as good as magazine circulation. One story in particular, “Dogcatcher Blues,” is my favorite and — I think — is almost Hugo-worthy (though Baen did not originally buy it and I failed to shop it anywhere else), but I doubt any Hugo voters will ever see it. I guess I have no room to complain, but relative to the rest of the year, REMO is my regrettable disappointment.
For this next paragraph, I have absolutely no complaint. Short stories have been my sort of thing for a while now. I started writing them years ago, to hone my skills and get my foot in the door of the traditional publishing industry, but success had eluded me. I had two stories bought in years past, both by Baen publications (my favorite publishing house), but nothing to anyone else. This year, in large part due to synergy with ASID’s success, I have published four stories in pro and semi-pro/amateur markets, with a fifth on tap for the new year. I kicked ass in 2014 when it comes to short stories. First was my sale of “The Rememberists” to Daily Science Fiction. That story was HUGE for me, though it was my first flash-length story and literally VERY short. I’ve had tons of tweets, facebook posts and fan e-mails from that one, along with two short-film producer/directors who intend to turn it into a film project. Next, I came into contact with the crew over at The Writer’s Arena, who allowed me to participate in one of their short story contests. Basically, you and another writer get a general topic and you each have to complete a short story in a few days, which the audience and two judges then vote on. And my story, “The Gaslight Consultant” won! That led them to checking out ASID (as well as my old Masters thesis online) and mentioning me a couple of times on The Human Echoes Podcast. The first mention was all zany fun, and the second mention garnered me a very good, well-balanced review for ASID. My next pro sale was as part of the Riding The Red Horse anthology from Castalia House. I got an invitation to participate in their inaugural volume, and after a prompt from the editor Vox Day that they were looking for a literal sea story, I turned in “Within This Horizon,” which is now featured alongside stories and essays from Dr. Jerry Pournelle, Tom Kratman, Ken Burnside, Steve Rzasa, Christopher Nuttall, Chris Kennedy, and many others. The association with Castalia House and RTRH has been all positive, leading to potential new projects and hopefully a chance to participate again next year. And lastly, a little bit of victory fun. For the holiday season, I participated in Liberty Island Magazine’s Alternative Holiday Fiction Contest, looking for genre-alternative Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus stories. I turned in a cute little redux of the Christmas Truce of 1914, but this time between our AI robots and the combat drones of our bitter enemy Canada. And it won the grand prize!
And the last bit of professional writing news had the second biggest impact on my life: the independent publication of A Sword Into Darknessthrough Stealth Books. I cannot thank enough my publishing partner Jeff Edwards and all the readers who gave me a shot. You guys made my year. As of this posting and not counting an unknown number of pirated copies (I’ve truly arrived . . . people are stealing my shit), I’ve sold just under 30,000 copies of my little military sci-fi / hard-science space opera. Here’s how the percentages break out:
As you can see, ASID is available in trade paperback, on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, Kobo, iBooks, and as an audiobook read by Liam Owen from SciFi Publishing. And it is a well-regarded debut novel, with 4.4 stars on Amazon out of 349 US reviews, 3.88 stars on the tougher crowd at Goodreads through 33 reviews and 525 ratings, plus reviews and accolades from Winchell Chung of Atomic Rockets, PT Hylton, Carol Kean at Perihelion SF, 20four12, PG’s Ramblings, Castalia House, Kaedrin Weblog, the Human Echoes Podcast, and others. I even got the Christmas treat of making PT Hylton’s favorite 14 books of 2014 in song form:
I don’t know how others do on their debuts because I’m too new at this, but I’m very very very happy and blessed with how ASID has done. And I’m very hopeful about the doors it may open up for me. I got a whole lotta nothing from agents and publishers for the last three years, but over the last year I’ve proven that I can at least sell a well-regarded book as a solid mid-list author. They say you should not use self-published titles on your query letters to publishers, but if I can tell them that on my own, with no resources other than help from friends and a few judicious ads and sales, I sold 30,000 copies of my debut. maybe then they’ll give me a closer look. Oooor, I’ll just stick to the indie crowd and continue taking in 70% royalties instead of settling for 10-15%.
And last but certainly not least, the thing that had the biggest impact on my year. It was not the job, though that did have biggish news and a may appear here next year. It was not my kids, though I am very proud of them and the improvements in their grades and schooling. It was not my personal health journey as that mostly involved me getting fatter and slower despite my half-hearted efforts. No, the biggest thing for me this year was standing by my beautiful wife, Jen, as she kicked breast cancer’s ass. She is an inspiration to me, and I don’t think she adequately realizes how proud I am of her, how humbled I am that she continues to put up with my crap and allows me to walk beside her in life. This woman faced down a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, reconstruction, complications to her own gastric bypass from years ago, and all the ravages to the body, psyche, and soul that all of that can wreak upon someone, and she refused to let it break her. In fact, she used it to inspire others to get tested and to persevere, no matter the diagnosis or prognosis. She endured shaving her head (my son and I joined her in this), losing her hair, dealing with the pain of neuropathy, the fatigue, the burns, and the fear that it would all be for naught. She had low days indeed. Who wouldn’t? But she always came out on top. And now she is on the mend and headed to being certifiably cancer free. Her mother and I served as her caregivers, but that never stopped Jen from providing care to her family and a wider circle of friends than I will ever know. Jen Mays, I love you and my hopes and prayers are for a great 2015 for us both. We deserve it, and especially you.
The Improbable Author 