Category: book

ooops hiatus.

I just made the realization regarding how long it has been since my last actual blog post, and not just me advertising the vlog and whatnot.
(while I’m on the topic, please subscribe)

Allow me to take your time to remind you that my book is available on Amazon and a few other places.

If you have already picked up a copy, please remember to leave a review! Even just some-number-of-stars and no text is fantastic. It really does help the recommendation algorithm, if such a thing exists. Plus, if I sell just 3000 copies, I can afford to release my next book, which is already complete! Also, I started another one. So, that puts my current list of WIP’s to 3, which is both intimidating and awkward, yet interesting and exciting!

Anyway, I will be taking the rest of the year to catch up on stuff and HOPEFULLY get my shit together.

Have a great festive season, and may your New Years be exciting (in a good way).

it’s HERE!!!

I finally have my copies of the You’re Not Dead re-release! It’s beautiful! I am ecstatic!

…ahem…

I will be posting a more comprehensive list of places to buy it soon, but in the meantime: I will post a link to the Olympia store here. I know that it will be available on Amazon.co.uk, and I know of a couple others by name, but the Olympia store is the best and most immediate way*.

I hope to have more information by next week, but the announcement of this will hold you over, I hope.

SUCH A BETTER COVER!!!

*If I am wrong, in anyway, I am sorry.

reviews

No, this is not a link to a known review. This is a request for writers of reviews to reach out!

I have the final PDF for my book that comes out in 4 days. I would love to send it to people who want to write a review for it.

Just comment below, or find me on Twitter. I will get back to you in a matter of hours, and we’ll work together!

Preorders

Some exciting news:

YOU’RE NOT DEAD GET’S REISSUED THROUGH OLYMPIA PUBLISHERS ON THE 25TH!

Ah-hem. I will remain calm.

There have been some issues with l the information on certain websites. If you have no idea what the book is about, I recommend going through Olympia to figure things out. It’s good, it’s depressing, it’s uplifting, I’m not biased.

The book will also be available on Amazon, Book Depository, and Waterstones. I can only find listing in the UK right now, but pass along anything else you find, please!

Do you need this version if you have prior ones? Probably not. I mean, I would be so happy if you picked it up! Not only does it not have that horrible cover that I made, it does contain over 300 corrections and that fat chewed off! I am incredibly proud of how it came together this time, and that is coming from a very cynical mindset!

Anyway, I should get back to doing the last couple of things to my next work that will simply be titled “anewsin”. If publishers are happy with the direction that I went with, it will be a collection of 5 short stories that share a theme.

K. Back to screaming in excitement instead of rage for the first time in forever.

Editing is depressing

Yes, I love it when someone else edits my work. Yes, I love when someone tells me what I did wrong, and I love trying to fix things.

HOWEVER.

It will always be depressing when I get work back and see the edits in the triple-digits. Especially when most of the mistakes are stupid and seem like they are things I would NEVER do wrong. Examples are using the wrong “there/their”, switching affect and effect, and missing commas.

Yes, it was a “book” that I wrote in a week. Yes, it was under 500 edits in a manuscript that was well over 15000 words long. I mean, with all of these considerations, it is amazing that there were so few mistakes. Yet, I felt my soul cry a bit with every red-mark that I located.

On the plus side: only 3 comments were made towards content. They were good points, and my logic behind the mistakes was horribly flawed. The other saving grace was that I noticed the mistakes as soon as I read over the sentence. I cannot decide whether that is because I am a much better writer, or because I have no read the material for so long.

My eventual point is that, if you can, get someone else to edit your work. Especially because, in my case, over 50% of the mistakes were words spelt correctly, and the grammar was sound enough to be ignored by spellcheck.

Fictional Time

I am having a hard time rationalizing time in relation to my next book.

It is supposed to take place over years. Decades, even. I am very comfortable with that concept.

HOWEVER.

I have a couple of events that happen back-to-back, narratively. However, I have made them take place years apart on a literal scale. That was kind of by accident, kind of not.

Let’s start with the not.
I intended for the events to happen with a large gap between them. Of course, by large gap, I ment a few months. I am dealing with hours, however, and made it 10,000 hrs (~416 days) and 100,000 hrs (~4166 days).

Now, I could narratively make that gap make sense. I could express how time has little meaning, or do little vignettes further explaining events over that time.

The other direction I could go is to shrink the time by a factor of 10. That would make it ~42 days and ~416 days. That makes a lot more sense, as this is dealing with space travel. I am trying to keep some sort of realism in the story, and oxygen alone would make 11 years difficult, at the best.

If you haven’t noticed yet, I am writing this more out of a selfish need to rationalize my decisions than I am writing this for a concrete answer. I have given myself a plethora of time to figure this out, and it really has little bearing on the grand scope of the narrative.

Just, trust me. It will all make sense in a bit.

…like a pee.

I was talking to a friend of mine about how I was at an impasse in my book. I have been struggling with the idea of my main character being credited with creating a scientific discovery which has been a torn in the side of science for centuries. The character creates a way to move at near lightspeed. According to the science available now, the speeds she grants humans the ability to travel at is impossible.

The impasse comes at whether or not I pretend to explain it, using a mcguffin, or just leave it as a fact that she discovered this new thing and never even try to explain it. They are both easy to do, but the first creates new avenues that I can explore in the work, but also generates more work for me to explain, in universe, how that works.

The second feels like me admitting that I do not know how it could work. Though true, I am not sure how I feel about it. Maybe my huberus is taking hold, but there is also the feeling of leaving the rhamifications of such a discovery up to the imagination of the reader. I am not totally opposed to the idea, but I fear that it might create more questions than the reader would have otherwise.

Either way, my friends recommendation of just letting the story flow “like a pee” is not quite addressing the block that I am stuck behind. I agree that, a more conventional story, needs to have a little more of a natural progression behind it. In that case, his helpful insight may have helped a little more.

I am not saying that there is no appreciation in his statement. He at least tried his best to give me the advice that he thought I may have needed. Unfortunately, for me, it does not accelerate my process.

Reality

I have the strangest bit of writer’s block.

Well, to call it “writer’s block” is a bit of a misnomer. It is more of a crippling wall that I find myself behind.

Okay, let me backup a bit:

I am a fan of writing parts out of order. If I find myself stuck at an important part, I leave it alone for a bit, and move forward. I then go back to the part that I find myself stuck behind and hope that what I have done moving forward has either answered what I am stuck on, or given me an out.

The story I am writing right now involves a bit of physics that does not exist. It involves movement faster than light, which is empirically impossible (as of the writing of this journal) and shows no possibility of being conquered. So, in usual fashion, I started writing further into the story to fill out other ideas.

I wrote over 10,000 words when I hit another wall showing me that I need to, at least, fudge the concept into some kind of in-universe reality. The part that makes it so hard is that I am trying to keep the world that I have built at least KIND OF realistic. It involves science that does not exist: it involves science that we want to exist. This means that I have a lot of information that would not work, and what makes it MORE frustrating is that if I try to use the thing that doesn’t work, people will quickly debunk it and the story becomes tainted.

I know that I am putting too much faith into the reading community. I should just write something and stop worrying if it makes sense. I should just ‘yadda yadda’ the movement thing when it comes up in the future. I should have written something easier.

I is not that brite an’ is no gud at riting.

Unfortunately for me, and my back account, I am an arrogant fucker who wants to create something that warrants respect. I am sick of being the “guy who helps do stuff” and I want to become someone worth a damn.

Speaking of being worth a damn, did you want to be in the thank-you section of the book that I just spent the top portion of this post bitching about? Donate as little as a dollar to my Patreon a month, and that will happen! It also helps me keep this blog going for another year. I mean, it will anyway: the monetary gain just makes it worth it.

Serious question…

Just wondering: how many pages would be satisfactory for a novel?

I realize that is a loaded question. Inquiries may arise over how interesting the content is, or does the story miander, but I like to set a realistic goal to strive towards.

Right now, my goal is 100,000 words. That’s roughly 200 pages. I feel pretty confident that I can hit that goal. One of my favourite books (Fight Club) is only 49,962 words. My last book, in its final form, clocked in at 39,130 words. I currently sit just shy of 10,000 in my next work. I set myself a deadline of the end of May to have it completed. I feel this is very possible. I just have not decided if being finished includes editing or not…

I implore you to respond in comments, either on here or my FaceBook page, to tell me what you think is a good length. Am I over-reaching? Under-reaching? Both, somehow?

Independent Book Sales

I have not talked much about my book in a while.

I assume that, if you are interested, you have already picked up a copy. After a conversation with a friend of mine on Twitter, I realized that I should really stop thinking that way.

So, I re-edited and re released my book back in March. I expanded it with several short stories, and moved it from 73 pages to 195 pages.

On the physical copies, I have made the cover art black with white writing, but the opposite is still true for the digital.

I have been pushing towards buying from Friessen Press for two reason: They pressed the book, so they are going to have the proper copy. AND I try to damndest to support private and independently run storefronts, whether digital or physical.

NOW, FOR SOMETHING MORE DOWER.

I know I expel the great parts about being independent often, but the bad parts are starting to become to big to handle.

Since the initial release of You’re Not Dead back in 2016, I have made a total of 832.89 in total sales. For one month, that would be decent, but we’re talking a period of over 4 years. Considering by outgoing was 4878.93, I have not even made a full quarter of my outgoing back. To top everything off, that payout doesn’t include things like web hosting, facebook ads, or physical copies to be reviewed on the international stage. The real number is closer to 6000.

Anyway, the point of this post is to ask that you at least consider looking over my book. There is a review posted on the linked page, and you all have a feeling for my writing style by now.