LTUE 2012 - Day 3

Life the Universe and Everything is winding down to its end and I'm home again with a binder full of notes based on the wisdom of many smart and friendly people.  It was wonderful though tiring near the end.  3 straight days of sitting in plastic chairs can do that, I guess.  I definitely want to return next year, perhaps as one of the panelists.  I have ideas too.

Today's highlights included hearing more of James A Owens guerrilla and sometimes Catch Me If You Can-ish efforts to advance his career.  He is funny and inspirational with how hard he worked to achieve his life dreams.  If you ever get a chance, he is worth listening to.

Howard Taylor gave great advice on the Artists On Art panel.  Focused practice on what you are NOT good at and getting a mentor to tell you how to practice correctly so you're not reinforcing bad habits.  Brilliant... and explains Howard's recent focus on boots (In Schlock Mercenary, he was avoiding drawing feet most of the time).  The ingredients for success are: Passion, Hard Work, Time, and A Good Mentor.  Nowhere in that formula is talent. Anyone can succeed but it will take work.

The panel on what authors wished they had done differently if they had known had good advice too.  The writers who fail are those that write one or two books and either never publish or become a one hit wonder that fades and gets forgotten.  Those that succeed keep writing even when many of their stories are rejected over and over or don't sell.  The writers on writing panel echoed that Theme with L.E. Modesitt Jr talking about the massive numbers of stories he couldn't sell, before and after breaking into the market.  Yet, he refused to stop writing.  One question was posed, even if nobody else ever wanted to buy your stories, would you still write them anyway?  My answer is yes!

LTUE 2012 - Day 2

Day 2 of Life, The Universe, and Everything was again wonderful!  It might take several blog posts to share what I heard and learned there.  At least I'll have subject material to work with for a while.  So here's a few highlights from yesterday.

James A. Owen's life is quite inspirational.  He was the event's keynote speaker and he refused to give up on his dreams.  He wanted to be a comic book artist and story teller.  By age 6 he was self published and selling his comic "Goldilocks And The Three Bears And Santa Clause" from his little red wagon to his neighbors.  He and his friend were the youngest independent comic company to set up a booth at Sandiego Comic-Con at ages 14-15, right alongside giants like DC and Marvel.  He worked for Don Bluth studios as a story board artist for all of 6 hours before being let go when the company downsized (he was hired on the same day they cut their staff by 75%, shortest job he ever had).  He had big dreams and many setbacks but the biggest point he made was not to give up on your dream, especially when the entire rest of the world tells you to give it up.

The panel on Science Fiction and Computers was great also.  Right before the panel began, I was thinking that I should mention the 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" by Will F. Jenkins.  At the beginning, they mentioned it too.  It is an amazingly accurate peak at what computers would become.  This story predicted things like Skype, MapQuest, Google, and Youtube in a time when the word "computer" didn't exist yet (at least as describing electronic calculating machines as we know them today).  I highly recommend you look that story up on Baen.com (it's a free ebook download) and be wowed about how he predicted these things in a time when the first computers like Colossus and ENIAC were still largely unknown and nothing like the Logic in Jenkin's story.  Isn't it great when science fiction becomes science fact?

Stay tuned for more posts about LTUE 2012!

Life, The Universe, And Everything

Yesterday I attended the first day of the Life, The Universe, And Everything symposium.  It was amazing listening to some of the great literary talents that live right here in Utah.  I finally gave Lisa Mangum, my thank you letter from all the way back to the Talking Books event last year.  I finally got to meet Dan Wells in person and thank him for his part in the Writing Excuses podcast.  It's funny how I could catch his cohorts in crime, Brandon Sanderson and Howard Taylor, multiple times but until now, Dan had been rather elusive.

James Dashner and Larry Correia were both particularly funny and entertaining in their discussions about evil in fiction and action scenes.  The girl who gave the presentation on villains was great too, even bringing up Peter's Evil Overlord List.

Today and tomorrow, I will get even more instruction and advice from these wonderful people.  I find it wonderful that many of them aren't just good writers or illustrators, they're also willing to mentor and lift others up to their level of quality and professionalism.  That is something we should all do, whatever our expertise, offer a hand and lift those around you up.

Contrasting Protagonists

All week, I've been hammering out a new chapter which might need to be broken down into two in my next book, Blood On The Vine.  As I've been writing, I've found it interesting how different the protagonist of this story is compared to Skye from my two Clouded Skye books.  I thought I would write up some of the comparisons.

Skye starts life as an orphaned street urchin.  She grows up to be a curious happy-go-lucky wanderer.  Life is a game, life is fun.  She's rather charismatic and optimistic.

Sanami, on the other hand, starts life as a slave on a plantation where a key ingredient to magic potions are grown.  She is cynical, abrasive, outspoken, and rebellious.  Life is not a game but a war.

Skye is short and skinny, the result of a youth of malnutrition and stunted growth.  Sanami is tall and gawky, the result of being born half Saphiir (a taller people generally), and half Yaddi (a shorter or more average people generally).

Both learned to fight but for different reasons.  Skye learned in order to survive but mostly because she found it fun.  Sanami learned to fight with the goal of rebelling against and destroying her slave masters.  Skye focused on learning to fight with swords while Sanami learned to fight with nothing but her own body.  Sanami's Kamaktan martial art form is heavily inspired by Brazil's Capoeira, a form developed by black slaves on Portuguese settled plantations in Brazil.  It was developed to condition their bodies to fight or escape their masters while being disguised as little more than an African tribal dance.

I like writing about Skye because she's funny and outright quirky.  I like writing about Sanami because she has a fighting spirit, raging against the machine and all that.  The two are nothing alike but they are both strong characters (see my post about strong women).  Both have ample reason to simply sit and bemoan their miserable lives, "Wo is me, my life sucks, poor me".  But no, they don't.  They both attack life head on.  Skye propels herself forward on hope and optimism.  Sanami propels herself forward on anger.  Neither sit navel gazing.

I can't wait till I get Blood On The Vine out for you guys!  You're going to love it!  The setting is so rich and open ended.  I could see myself writing stories in this setting for years.

Blood On The Vine Update

Just thought I'd give a little update on my latest novel.  I wrote the super happy ending and hated it so I'm taking it back out (maybe).  I'm adding an entire middle chapter that will help flesh out the setting and explain why Sanami stays with Thray and Julessa later in the story even though she's not really attached to them.  I'm liking it so far.

With the new Chapter in Burbank, I get to keep one of my favorite secondary characters in the story, a sassy young fortune teller named Mariel.  Sanami, Julesssa, and Cerego all get her attention.  In the earlier versions of the story, only Cerego got to meet her.  His happiness in the end depended on whether he chooses to heed or ignore the words of the Seeress of Burbank.

If the super happy ending went, I thought the seeress would have gone too.  But the new chapter creates the bridge to keep her, regardless of whether I go with the happy ending or the super happy ending.

Who are these people?  My alpha and beta readers know.  The rest of you can read it and find out soon enough.  Stay tuned!

Projects for 2012

So today, I made a list of the stories I want to get published in 2012.  I probably won't get all of them done but I sure hope to get most of them.  Better to aim for the stars and land in the trees than to aim for the trees and land in the mud and all that.

Short fiction (under 50,000 words)
The Adventures Of Kitkia - YA Fantasy
R.E.M.ember Me - Paranormal Romance
Angie's Miserable Life - A Contemporary Life Lessons Tale
Like Snowflakes - A Contemporary Christmas Tale
Food Court - Contemporary Comedy
Bloody Mary - Western
Coyote, Adahy, and The Sun's Fire - A Totally Made Up Native American Legend.

The last one (The native american legend) is already available on this blog so I'll polish it up and make it free and available for Kindle, Nook, etc as a loss leader and advertisement for my other works.

Long Fiction (over 50,000 words)
Blood On The Vine - Fantasy - In Final Editing Now
The Anaaka Chronicles - Fantasy, Compilation of four shorter stories (Anaaka, Aniiki, Trenton, & Hannan)
Halfway to SomeWere - YA Urban Fantasy Comedy
A Fairy Big Problem - Urban Fantasy Comedy
Miu's Vine Story - Fantasy - Working Title, it will have a better one.  I promise.
River Of Souls - Fantasy
A Sky Full of Ships - Steampunk Fantasy - No relation to A Clouded Skye

I've really got my year cut out for me!  So does my poor editor.  I may need to find him some help or a replacement as he's mostly doing it out of the kindness of his heart and has his own projects to work on.

The short fiction should be quite doable as many of those stories are done already.  The long ones are pushing it.  Only Blood On The Vine and The Anaaka Chronicles are close to ready.  I'll get as far as I get and take care of the rest in 2013.

Anyone who thought I only had one book or one series in me was mistaken.  I have hundreds of stories bouncing around in my head.  The next few decades of writing are going to be a blast!

Remembering Back and Looking Foreward

Today is the final day of the year 2011.  As I look back on the year, I feel rather pleased overall.  Back in May, I attended Con-duit, a science fiction and fantasy convention held each year in Salt Lake City.  I listened to published authors and artists talk about their craft and the industry.

I listened to Tracy Hickman explain how in the digital age, authors can go directly to the reader in ways that they never could before and try methods of publishing that never existed before.  I took meticulous notes as panelists in one session discussed available resources for epublishing and self publishing.  Afterwards I followed up on blogs and podcasts that further discussed the matter.  And I was energized!  With inspiration drawn from Tracy Hickman, Howard Taylor, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Katherine Rusch, Michael R. Mennenga and Michael A. Stackpole, I knew I could do it too!

I got to work and polished up my first novel for publication and got it published in August (or was it september?).  Now on the final day of 2011, a mere seven months after that fateful convention, I have two novels and one short story published with another novel and another short story to become available in early 2012.

What are my hopes and plans for 2012?  I'm going to keep writing novels and short stories and I'm going to work on promotion and marketing.  In these first few months of my published career, I have not sold many copies.  I feel that the major thing holding back sales so far is that few people that read fantasy know I exist yet.  The stories are solid and enjoyable.  The stories are merely circling in the slow eddies of my close friends and family when I need to push the books further away from the shore into the main river current of readers worldwide.  I can cite instances where I have squandered opportunities to get word of my books out but I will get better.  Failure isn't stumbling, it's not getting back up after you fell.

A common saying among successful writers is that this is a marathon, not a sprint.  As long as I keep writing, as long as I keep telling people that they can buy my books and where to find them, sales will eventually pick up.  My books, at 3.99 each gives you many hours of satisfaction for less than the cost of a value meal at most fast food restaurants.  And with my 0.99 short stories becoming available too, the menu of available reads just gets better and better.

To all of you who actually read my blog, Happy New Year!  We're going to have a wonderful time together next year!

Fixing Literary Flat Tires

I was working on the final scenes of one of my upcoming books, and hit a snag this weekend.  I was writing and writing but something didn't feel right about the direction the story took and I got stuck.  Today, I took a step back and studied it more critically.  I found out what my problem was and now I can move forward again... after moving backward and rewriting about two thousand words.

I had placed my antagonist in a position where he needed to let go of his anger and hatred so that he could return to the love of his life without our protagonist's blood on his hands (the "super happy ending" I had mentioned in a prior post).  The problem was that he was at the place physically to have his change of heart but the catalyst for the change was not present.  She got left behind before she could give her "I can make you happy, but if you get in that boat and go after him, we're through" speech needed to make him weigh the cost of his revenge.

I could just force my way through as is but then at the very last minute of the story, the dear readers will feel that the antagonist's actions feel emotionally false and become disconnected from the story.  Readers will let you get away with fire breathing dragons and alien spaceships as long as the characters act like genuine people but they will bail on you if they act out of character because the plot says they have to. 

The ending is a critical moment in a book.  A mediocre book with a good ending will actually get better praise than a good book with a mediocre ending thanks to the way the human mind only remembers clearly the final impression or most recent experience with something.  Also, throughout the story the author is making promises.  At the end, if those promises weren't met to the reader's satisfaction, they feel robbed.  And robbed people are unhappy people.

So just give me a few days to fix my most recent literary flat tire so you don't have to feel the bumpy ride.  Thank you.