You’re My Favorite

 

Writers sometimes get asked the question: Which of your books is your favorite?

Some writers offer one up; some — include me mostly  here — will be less forthcoming and default to the books-are-like-children response: Hey, that is like asking which kid is my favorite child.

There are people who have favorite children, but don’t include me in that one, thank you.

Still, truth be told, there are books you like more than others after you have written fifty or sixty of them. Sometimes, in tie-ins, you have less to work with than others; now and again, a protagonist will tickle your fancy and be more fun to put through their paces.

You try to never phone it in, you give each tale as much as you can, but it’s the nature of the endeavor. If you are having fun, it shows.

Writers aren’t always the best judges of their own work. Books I thought were just okay sometimes sold like ice water in Hell; some I loved drew naught but shrugs.

Go figure. 

If you ask me which anthology of short stories I have written is my favorite? That I can say — Gatekeeper in Hell: The Collected Roy the Demon Stories.

Since it is the only such collection I have done, that’s easy …

These tales about Roy are as wild hairs as they get for me, and that is saying something. They are xxx-rated for sex, violence, and language; they are profane; they are, to my warped mind, hilarious. 

Not to everyone’s taste, Roy and the demons and angels who populate Heaven and Hell, and, in fact, not to most readers’ taste. (I read one aloud at a convention once, and when I was done, the silence was deafening. Few things more subjective than humor.)

But nearly all of the stories were written in a state of Flow, unfettered, raucous, just plain fun to do. I just stepped onto the roller coaster and went along for the ride, it was as if someone else had written them.

Would that everything I create came this easy.

Now, this is the place where I should tell you to buy the ebook, but truth is, most of my readers aren’t apt to like this one. So probably better you should save your money.

(If you want to check the short collection out, only nine stories, don’t say I didn’t warn you …)

New Urban Fantasy Novel: Stemwinder

So, I am about to finish the copy-edit on the current book-in-progress, Stemwinder: An Urban Fantasy in 4/4 Time. Probably the subtitle and the cover image are enough clues to tell a potential reader there is music involved.

Bear with me and I'll spin you a tale connected to this biz, and a decision to which I have come regarding this particular book ...

So I am past the Geez-what-a-pile-of-crap-this-is! and to the transient stage where It-doesn't-seem-absolutely-awful, and still a ways from the Hey-this-is-better-than-I-remember-it! phase, which usually comes a few years down the line.

(When I look back at some of my early stuff, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised. I wrote that? Wow. That's not bad ...)

Um. Now the decision comes as to what road I should take to get the new novel into the hands of readers. The choices I see are two, and hereunder, a comparison and a conclusion.

Traditionally, I have gone traditional, i.e., I cleaned the ms up, printed out a copy (and later, emailed a copy) to my agent, and went on about my business while she shopped it around and looked for a New York City publisher to buy it. 

Sometimes, I offered up three-chapters-and-an-outline, which sped the process up a bit on the front end. 

When things went well, my agent would make a sale within a couple of months, the publisher would put it into their schedule, and a year or so later, plus-or-minus, the book would hit the racks.

Part of that process involved me getting some kind of advance against future royalties, and this stipend ranged from so-so, to not-bad, to whoa! depending on the project and publisher, and how well I had been selling other books. If the new title sold well, I got more money. If not, I still got to keep the advance.

Um. Anyway, when things didn't go as well in traditional publishing, the book took a long time to peddle, the pub date stretched out to a year-and-a-half or longer, and they divided the advance up into bits that came in three chunks: on-sign; on delivery/acceptance of the manuscript; on-publication. 

When they really didn't go well, the book came home to live on a shelf in Steve's garage. Some times I'd go back and rewrite 'em and try it again; others abide on the shelf still. Few of us bat a thousand.

When the book market crashed for many of us mid-listers in the nasty recession of 2008, I started poking around in early ebookery, and now have a goodly portion of my backlist up in a couple of places, most lucrative one being Amazon.com, where I get a small monthly check for titles long out of print. It's free money, they never go out of print, and I don't have to do anything past the initial listing.

There were a couple of novels my agent didn't find thrilling, so those I also put up as original ebooks, and they sell a few copies, too. Since my publisher no longer wants any of my Matador titles, any more of those I write will go straight to epub, too. 

Now, the either/or:

The good thing about traditional publishing is the advance. The bad things include the process of submission, waiting, wrangling with agent and editor, and elapsed time before the book sees the light of day, plus a short shelf-life.

With ebooks, these are reversed: No waiting, no wrangling, publication the next day, but also, no upfront money. Yes, the royalty rate is much, much better than traditional, unless you are George R.R. Martin or Stephen King, but in my case, the copies sold this way will be smaller in number and spread out over a longer time. At the end of a couple of years, I might make just about as much money in dribs and drabs as I would have in an advance.

Or not. No way to tell.

One of the things about this particular book is that it is skewed toward readers who are musicians. There are things in it that I hope will make singers and players smile, including some lyrics for songs, and gearhead stuff about guitars and ukuleles and amps and such.  I hope that I'm good enough so the gist comes through in context, but it might be that a publisher will worry that non-musician readers won't get it. And if they don't, it therefore might not sell a lot of copies.

I dunno, there are a lot of musicians out there. If 10% of them bought the book, I'd make millions, and the publisher would make tens of millions ...

Thing is, I don't want to take all that material out. I find it interesting, and I can't help but believe that enough readers will also find it interesting so there will be some market for the novel. Again, no way to tell. 

This is where ebooks shine. They allow a me to produce a work that, even if it does have a limited audience, I can still write it like I want without having to worry that I make a traditional publisher sufficient profit to justify their outlay. I don't begrudge them that notion, if you don't make money, it's harder to stay in business, but I am at a stage in my career that writing what I want and saying it how I want to say it is more important than making a lot of money. Who knew I'd ever get there?

So, yes, this will be an ebook, unless a print-publisher comes calling, and agrees to do it as I wrote it, and I won't be holding my breath waiting on that ...

Onward and upward ...

Musashi Link

Oh, yeah, the link to the eBook version of The Musashi Flex is finally live, over there in the links list ...

Couple Books

Been a while since I did any book reviews, and there are a couple I wanted to bring to your attention ...

I first became aware of Carsten Stroud with his 1992 novel, Lizard Skin. A tour-de-force, off-the-wall romp featuring a loosey-goosey Montana state trooper and a bunch of craziness; I was hooked by his writing and sense of lunatic fun.

So I looked for his other titles, found them, and have enjoyed them all. 

His most recent novels have gone much deeper into Stephen King territory, first with Niceville, which is ever not-so-nice, and the sequel, The Homecoming. There is a third book in what is billed as a trilogy, currently in-progress. 

The man can write, and the books are peppered with bits that the observant and relatively-literate reader who likes old movies will find amusing. A line from The Scarlett Pimpernel here, a comparison to an actor in a certain film there. Odd data that spark recognition and grins, at least in this reader.

Niceville is as spooky as Derry, there's a fair amount of gunplay, and what evil lurks there manifests in deadly ways. These are not for those easily made uneasy. People are murdered, bad things happen to children, and there's a monster at work that make the town a place you wouldn't want to pass on the freeway at eighty wearing blinders.

But the man can write, and he does carry you along turning pages. Check him out, and any of his books will do–they are all good.

Duncan McGeary wrote a trio of fantasy novels back in the early eighties; apparently life happened, he bought a business, (Pegasus Comics, in Bend, OR) started a family, and with this and that, he drifted away from writing.

Fast forward thirty years ...

McGeary is back, and the first novel in a new series, available in ebook on Amazon.com, starts with Death of an Immortal. Terrell is not your sparkly, sweet, doe-eyed kind of vampire, he's a monster. He's not happy with himself, and he'd rather not be, but he can't help it.

There's a subplot with an abusive cop; it's mostly set in Oregon, and if you like your undead to be more along the lines of  Fright Night  than you do Twilight, these will be your cup of gore ...

There are other vampires There is a lot of chomping and blood and some sex, newly-turned vampires arriving in the undead state both hungry and horny.

If you like the first one, the second one is about to be released, and he's working on a third.

Musashi Reincarnated ...

Matador, original art by Michael Lamanna

So, it turns out, that when Ace reverted the rights to the Matador novels, one got lost in the shuffle. Since the most recent one, The Musashi Flex was still up as an ebook, I assumed that meant it was technically "in print," and that Ace would keep it on Amazon.com and such places. Well, no, it turned out, they didn't, and they didn't tell me. The e-version was taken down, and I found out when  fan who wanted it in that format asked where he could get it. 

Outside of borrowing it from an e-library or a pirate site, it wasn't available.

So, I figured, once I got caught up with books that are due and in the pipe, I would stick the electronic version back up. Have to have a new cover, but it just so happened that I came across this lovely piece of art, above, that would be perfect. So I contacted the artist, a most reasonable fellow, who was willing to allow me to use it for a modest honorarium. And I saw that tiny bit of red in the painting, and came up with this design, which I like.

I'm talking to Dan Moran at Fat Sam books, who is my e-publisher of choice, a terrific space opera writer, and a helluva nice guy, despite the fact he is a stone Lakers fan, about possibly putting it up on his site, and then eventually I'd port to other ebook stores. 

Yeah, yeah, I know, the other Matador books I promised, I haven't forgotten 'em, it's just that life keeps getting in the way ...

Once I get the current WIP done for Ace, I'll address this. I'll put up a note here and on other social media and all like that, so completist collectors can get a copy.

Ranger is Up

As I warned you earlier, the forthcoming ebook of Stellar Ranger is now come forth ...

The Truth Waits ...

... for eyes unclouded by longing.  

Which in this instance means I won't be spending too much time with the truth today ...

The grass has riz. Flowers have bloomed every which way, the sun is shining through clear skies, and it's gonna hit seventy-five degrees F. here today, maybe a tad warmer, which has resulted in spring fever.

Spring fever. Those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means that my desire to work is nil. Not so much that I want to go bask in the day, though walking the dogs is more fun when it's not raining and forty degrees; it's that the desire to play hooky permeates everything. 

Didn't want to get up from the cozy bed, don't want to crank on the book that's due next. Don't want to think about responsibilities I slip into with my clothes each day. Kind of feel like playing the guitar or the ukulele and staring out the window at passers-by is overly ambitious ...

But, okay, a little work here, for the writers ...

Pursuant to the Stellar Rangers ebook coming out, which I happened to mention in the post immediately prior to this one, I picked up a yellowing copy of the novel last night and started to read it. 

But before I get too far down that road ...

Writers, like actors, have different relationships with their work. Some never look at stuff they've done before. Once it is finished, they move on; that story is over, finished, no point in going back and noticing all the spots that weren't spackled and painted cleanly because you really can't fix it. (Yep, I could touch-up an ebook, it being a new edition, but some of the touch-ups go to things like fixing yesterday's future. Book was written nearly twenty years ago, and some of what was cool and futuristic tech looks a little dated. I could change the CD-ROM into a biomem or visual purple storage, but the tone would still be off without a major rewrite. I read a couple books of collected short stories by John D. MacDonald once upon a time, in which he had gone back and tried to update things like how much a new radio cost, or what a train ticket ran. It clunked–and that didn't happen much with Travis McGee's daddy. The reason was that a fresh coat of paint wasn't enough. Sure, he could make the radios and bus tickets more expensive than they'd been when he'd written the stories in the 1950's, but listening to radios instead of watching the tube, and taking the Greyhound instead of riding in one's car were part of the times-tone. Better he should have left them period pieces; didn't hurt Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.)

In the course of a book's creation and going off to market, writers are apt to read it several times. There is the day-to-day re-reading of what's partially done. A read for errors once the draft is finished, and again after the rewrite. Once the editors go over it, there is the copy-edited manuscript. Then the galleys. And when it is published, a final read to check for typos. So five reads, which is enough for most of us. It goes onto the shelf. Slightly fewer reads with an ebook, since there isn't a copy-edited ms, nor a galley, but still.

Now and again, after a decade or two, I'll pick one of my books up and start into it. I find it interesting to see how I treated certain tropes and situations of which I am fond in earlier incarnations. Oh, yeah, that's where I came up with that the first time. Huh.

By and large, rereading the old stuff is not an unhappy experience. I was on a panel with Ursula once, and a fan asked her if going back and reading her early stuff was painful. Actually, no, she said. I'm usually surprised with how much better it was than I remembered.

Me, too.

So, there is something to be learned from revisiting stories from long ago.

So far, I'm enjoying the ranger as he moves through his adventure against the bad guys. There are some fun touches, nods to the Matadors, guns, martial arts, and one I had forgotten: The old rancher he's working with is named "Gus Kohl." If you are a fan of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, and how can you not be? this is a pretty obvious pairing of names in a bow to the master.

Um. Okay. All done now. Let's go see how I can fritter away work time doing something else ...

Big News on the eBook Front

Amazon.com has finally cranked up in India. Folks there will be able to buy ebooks online; stores will carry Kindles; and they can pay in rupees.

I don't know how well my stuff will go over where the Raj once held sway, but it is a potentially-huge market, given there are more people who speak (and read) English in India than anywhere except the U.S.

Stay tuned ...

The Writing Devil is in the Details

When you are writing fiction, especially in this new age of direct-to-eBook-publication, you have to sweat the small stuff.


A few random notes ...


Traditionally there have been editors and copy editors who will address the content and nuts-and-bolts construction of your book, respectively, but while both can sometimes save you from yourself, sometimes they can't.


The small stuff slips past.


Gave your heroine blue eyes in the first book of your new series, then green eyes in the second book? Chances are your CE won't catch that, because you usually won't get the same person from novel-to-novel. I know this from experience. (Fortunately, in science fiction, you can, if you finally do catch such mistakes, sometimes fix them. Blue eyes there, green there? Why that's due to droptacs, which come in colors. Or, um, you know, an alternate reality ...)


The late Avram Davidson used to tell a story about reading a student manuscript. The hero is climbing up a sheer cliff face, monsters climbing up after him. He looks, up, sees more monsters appear that the top, waiting. He's trapped. How can he escape? And the student actually writes: "Oh, wait I forgot to tell you, he has wings ..."


It's not a bad idea when you start out to do a quick character bio, with a physical description of your character. Any time you put in new stuff showing your reader what this player looks like, or where she went to school, or how many siblings she has, refer back to the bio until you have it nailed correctly. Use the same ruler, you get the same measurements.


Prop continuity is another one. If your character lost his cell phone in Chapter Two, but makes a call in Chapter Five using a cell phone, where did it come from?


Ever notice in the movies how the hero's gun is cocked, then not-cocked, then cocked again, in the space of a couple of screen-minutes? That's because the continuity guy screwed up. 


Don't be that guy.


How many times have we seen some moron rack the slide on his pistol to chamber a round, then holster it, then a few minutes later, rack it again? Once is all you need, otherwise you are throwing live ammo onto the carpet.


Plot-devices sometimes require you have a character do something odd because you need them to be naked or unarmed or whatever in a subsequent scene. Be aware that there are clever ways to achieve this kind of thing. Go watch Die Hard and see how to set up stuff. Why is Bruce Willis running barefoot over broken glass? No better example, that, and everything else that gets paid off all the way through. 


And, as long as I am here ...


Rant interlude: 


For God's sake, if your hero is unarmed, gets into a fight with one of the bad guys, knocks him down, but LEAVES THE BAD GUY'S GUN LAYING ON THE GROUND and runs off, just so you can have him stay unarmed for the next fight scene? Come up with some kind of reason! Otherwise your guy is a dolt, an idiot, a lame-o, and readers will start rooting for the bad guy to put him out of his misery; surely I will. 


You can have your character make a mistake, but past a certain point ... ?


Hey, Roy, didn't you just knock one of the minions out?


Yeah, I kicked his ass real good!


So ... why didn't you pick up his gun?


Um. I ... forgot ... ?


There's a well-known private eye character who usually leaves her gun at home. One fine morning, somebody up and took a shot at her, put a round into the front porch wall next to her head, thunk!


So the next day, the next day, when she went out, what did she do? 


SHE LEFT THE FUCKING GUN AT HOME!


No! No! No! HELL NO!


Oh, yeah, I forgot. Somebody shot at me yesterday and it might be, you know, A GOOD FUCKING IDEA TO TAKE MY FUCKING GUN IN CASE THEY TRY IT AGAIN!


Why did the writer do this? She needed her heroine unarmed in a subsequent scene. 


This is not how to do it.


Rather, this is stupid, stupid, and did I mention, stupid? and that's when your reader–certainly this reader–will put your book down and leave it there, never to darken your sales rack again. I don't want to read about a detective who doesn't have enough smarts to pour piss out of a boot. She's as dumb as the woman in the nightgown who goes into the graveyard at midnight looking for what made the unearthly moan. Take her out, and do the world a favor. 


Rant over. 


Be aware of time: Days, dates, how much has elapsed. If you switch viewpoints, and your players are living in the same continuum, be careful that you don't have one doing something out-of-synch when you switch POVs. Better not have both of 'em walking to meet each other for coffee one fine morning and one of them takes five minutes but the other goes home and takes a four-hour nap during the same five-minute span. 


Unless, of course, it's time-travel or madness.  


You can control typos and grammatical errors, and even though the spellchecker won't save you from using "see," when you mean "sea," it will collect some mistakes. Run it.


Having somebody with sharp eyes read your mss will help. When you write something, as often as not, when you scan it for errors, you aren't really reading what is on the page, but what you think you wrote. I'll miss the same typo three times.


One trick I've learned is to change the device upon which I'm reading. For some reason, I will now and again catch a typo using the iPad that I missed on the desktop computer screen. Couldn't tell you why. 


There is another problem I have noticed in going to electronic publication, the transfer artifact. The file was fine when it left here, but by the time the publisher's conversion software got done with it, there were glitches that appeared in the final. Sometimes lines get broken like 
so. Nothing you can do about that, nor the funny characters that show up as little hearts or  or Ω other ding-batteries. I have revised some of those, only to have a different set show up on the next version. 


Enough for now. 


As with any rule-of-thumb, some of these can be ignored if you are a good enough writer. But if you are, you didn't need to read any of this, did you ... ?

Censorship - Another Slippery Slope

Got a long note from Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords–me and probably several hundred thousand other people–regarding a policy change for publications there. It seems that PayPal, through which Smashwords channels its money, coming and going, is asking them to eliminate certain books from their list.


Here's the gist from Coker, in regard to PayPal's concerns:


"Their hot buttons are bestiality, rape-for-titillation, incest and underage erotica."


PayPal swings a big and heavy stick, and Smashwords doesn't want to be whacked.


"Your ebook Your Way" might have to be altered to "Your ebook Our Way ..."


I'm not the guy to stand up and argue for any of these taboos. And if you are writing such, you won't get many sympathetic ears when Smashwords starts pulling those books from its list, but–and you knew there was a "but"–that line is going to be drawn by somebody. There will be obvious offenders, and easy targets. 


There will almost certainly be many shades of murk, where vision won't be so clear.


If you have a rape scene in your book, who decides if it is done for dramatic reasons or titillation? If somebody mentions in passing that the bad guy probably buggers sheep, will that be enough to get a book pulled? If, as in a book I wrote long ago, the villain is a child-molestor who dies a horrible death? True, there wasn't anything graphic nor intended to titillate in that character's actions, and in the end, the villain was duped by somebody pretending to be something she wasn't; still, it's a new can of worms, and I expect there will be some noise made. 


As Smashwords reaches countries all over the world, and as Amazon.com moves a lot of books worldwide, social mores in Africa or India or the Middle East start to come into play. At the very least, it is going to be like the Chinese curse: If you are a writer, the times are going to be interesting. 


Stay tuned.

Inspiration

Got a message on Facebook from a writer/editor I know earlier today, putting together a theme-anthology with another writer and editor, and would I be interested in doing a story? (Or at least would I indicate that I would be interested in doing one, to help sell the idea.)


Original anthologies are tough sales, and one of the ways to help make it go forward is to have a list of writers who have enough fans to tempt a publisher. My name doesn't carry much weight, but if you could get a couple of Neil Gaimans or China Miévilles or Connie Willises to sign up, that would probably be enough to interest a publisher.


These days, I'd guess the chances are much better that it will go as an ebook instead of treeware, but you never know.


No money up front, but if it sells, the writers split the pie, usually a pro rata share based on story length, and probably about what you'd get if you wrote it for a treeware 'zine.


Um. Anyway, I was asked, and I said "Sure." The gimmick is, there is an opening line that everybody will use, and then sky off in our own directions with it. This is usually a fun thing, because of how different those directions tend to be when you ask a bunch of writers to take a line and run with it. 


Back in the day, some of the magazines used to do a variation on this by showing a picture and then asking writers to do a story based on it. Those invitation were usually more limited, a handful, but it's still an interesting trigger. 


I dunno if the project will go, and I can't talk about it in detail yet, but the opening line was intriguing enough that it immediately bought a scene to mind, so I thought, Huh, I'll just write that down. 


Which I did. 


And then the scene moved into the next scene, and the next, and in an hour or so, I had a story. Less than 1800 words, and I dunno if the editor will like it, but hey, it's done.


I had no idea where it was going when I started, just that one short scene, but halfway through the second page, a light bulb lit and I knew who the main character was, and then I just followed him to see what road he'd lead me down. Flowed like warm oil down a clean glass pane. 


Sometimes it happens like that, and it's always magic when it does, because you lose track of everything save the tale, entering into the state known as Flow.


Click, start. Click, done. No sense of elapsed time. 


If the anthology doesn't get picked up, I'll probably eventually stick the story up somewhere. I can tell you my working title: A Few Minutes in the Kitchen and Dining Room of Hamelin's Restaurant.


And now, back to the novel ...

New Space Opera Series

I believe I mentioned that I had turned in the manuscript for the first of the three-book military space opera series I'm doing for Ace.


Cutter's Wars: The Ramal Extraction.


Apparently it's not so awful they wanted to burn it, salt the ashes, and get their money back, and I am told it is scheduled for publication in January, 2013. As a paperback and an ebook, for those who might be interested in one over the other ...


Meanwhile, I hope to get the next Matador book, Churl, done before I need to swing into the second Cutter's Wars. I'll give it a try ...

News From the EBook Front

Just under a month ago, I uploaded the rest of the Matador novels to Amazon.com. While Dan Moran's Fat Sam store is still my market of choice–the links on the right mostly go there–Amazon.com has a bigger pool of readers.


(I can't wait for Amazon.com India to come online, supposedly later this year. More English readers there than in the U.S.)


I didn't expect to blow the bestsellers on Kindle out of the water, nor did I. First batch of these books are twenty-five years old, and most of them long out-of-print. They did sell enough copies to make me smile and shake my head. My best month at Amazon.com.


At this stage, it's all free money.


What I found most interesting was something I had heard from other writers who have ventured into ebookery: The titles I already had up got a bump in sales. Again, not major, no new, custom-made concert-class guitars in my future from the profits, but noticeable. A title that had been selling eight or ten copies a month jumped to twelve or fifteen. Even a couple titles that were moribund trickled up to three or four copies each.


Allowing for the new readers that people got for Christmas, that's still a snowball-effect I find intriguing.


Here's the deal. It sounds like a "Well, duh!" but attend:


The more books you have available, the more sales you are apt to make. I'd heard this from writers who have a backlist a mile long, and it seems to be true in my case.


I can understand why. If you have one book up, it's hard to get it noticed. If people find and buy it, and even if they love it, then they are done–there's nothing else of yours to read. If you have five books up, then if they like one, they will probably at least preview the others. 


If you have twenty books up, there's is a built-in momentum factor. Find a writer you like, enjoy one of her books, chances are you will check out her other work. Get into a series, if you are like me, you want to read them all. What happened the character before and after this one? 


The rising reader floats all boats ...

Down on the Farm

When we were hippies, we decided to get back to the land. A bunch of us, mostly family, found a decrepit old house on seventeen acres, next to the river in Brusly, Louisiana. The owner would allow us to live there rent-free if we fixed the place up.


It was a big, concrete-walled house, built after the levee, on a long, narrow strip of land, and the place had been, we guessed, primarily a small ranch, cattle or horses–the acreage was mostly fenced-in grassy pasture.


So we acquired some livestock–a horse, a pair of goats, some chickens, seven dogs and a duck. Wife and I, two small children; my wife's cousin and his spouse; my sister-in-law; and a few assorted friends who came and went. We did some rude plumbing, hung paneling, built a carport, re-roofed the place.


Along the way, Cousin Jay got an old boat he worked on in the back.


I borrowed a rototiller and went to plow a garden space.  First furrow, thirty feet, I hit a buried pipe and blew up the rototiller. Went to Sears, bought parts, and fixed it, in the process learning that I was about as well-equipped to repair small engines as I was to be a farmer.


Got it fixed, tilled the space. The women planted stuff. 


Organic, of course. 


The bugs in Louisiana loved us. No spray? They ate well at our place.


We learned that you don't plant watermelon next to gourds, because they cross. You get something that looks like yellow watermelon and tastes like wood pulp. Even the insects wouldn't eat it.


Mostly what survived were carrots and green onions. We went through a fifty pound bag of brown rice that year, fried with carrots and onions, and we all turned orange.


The horse, Miso, was a stallion, insane and never ridden. A neighbor who was a cowboy offered to break him to the saddle. He stayed on three, maybe four seconds, was bucked off, and the only thing that got broken was his arm. 


The goats–Nan and Bill, of course–ran and hid every time we approached them.


The chickens didn't last long enough to have names. They escaped the coop, and one at a time, jumped into the yard where the pack of waiting dogs ate them. After the first one, we sat in the kitchen and watched. Birds that stupid deserved it, we thought.


The duck fell in love with Giesla, the mini-daschund, and followed her around everywhere.


We were probably the worst farmers who ever lived.


After the house was fixed up, the owner threw us out, and that was that. What I learned was: Never again ...


I told you that story so I could talk about this one:


A woman I know has written, under a pseudonym, Tammy Owen, a memoir of her farm days, House of Goats, and it is well-written, funny, touching, and actually useful for anybody who is considering the idea of becoming a gentleman (or lady) farmer. It's an ebook, available at Amazon.com or Smashwords. 


You should check it out. 

Research

I was cleaning out a section of the store room and came across a big box of books I had stuck out there. We were about to make a Powell's run, so I figured I'd go through them and see if there were any I could lose.


Turned out there were more than a few that could go away, so I stuck them into the trade-in bag.


A decade and some ago, I wrote a novel set in a fantasy version of Nineteenth Century Java. I was deep into my silat training, and, doing research, I found all kind of things I thought fascinating, so I figured what-the-hey, I'd use it in a book.


The book, Master of Pamor, couldn't find a traditional publisher who wanted it, so I eventually stuck it up as a POD, then an ebook, where it has sold slowly but steadily since. 


While I would have loved to have seen it become a bestseller, it was an odd duck, and hard to categorize: It had a little fantasy, but ambiguous enough so it wasn't right to stick it under sword & sorcery. The historical stuff was fun, but it didn't feel like a historical novel. The martial arts were thick, and so much a part of the thing that it was probably more information than most readers wanted. Rated R, for sex and violence. It fell, as they like to say in New York publishing, between two stools. Who was the audience? 


Mostly, the audience was me. I wrote it because I wanted to write it, and after that, it did what it did. I liked it, that was the main thing. Sometimes, that's how it happens. Type -30- and move along.


But going through the box of books, I realized how much research I had done on the sucker, There were nine books about Indonesia in the box–histories, culture, language, and even a cookbook, as well as a couple of detailed maps. I also had a fat file on the computer with web research, and maps I had made detailing my fictional landscape, as well as a slew of pictures.


Most of the writers I know like to do research. It means you don't have to actually write if you are poking around for background material. (And let it be known that if you aren't putting pages into the pile, you aren't really writing, you are getting ready to write, or avoiding same. Yeah, yeah, you have to answer fan mail and do research and drop by the bank and read galleys and ninety-seven other things necessary for the maintenance of your career, but if you aren't getting pages and chapters done, none of that really counts. You aren't writing.)


There's a trap here you have to watch for–two of them, actually. First is, you could spend too much time and energy doing research, and not enough writing the book. Second is, you love the stuff you found so much you want to put it all into the novel, and you run the risk over overloading the story. 


I've done both, so hear me now but listen to to me later: Do enough to make it feel real, then stop ...

Emile and the Matadors

Okay, the sidebar lists the the titles available, all at Dan Moran's store, FS&–save for The Musashi Flex, which Ace still has up at Amazon.com. I added a link to that one, too.


They are in chronological order, not the original publication sequence. And Dan has added a neat timeline at the end of each book, showing what happened, when. More or less, taking into account where I got sloppy with details ...


Click on an image, it will take to the store. And here's the sales pitch: If you want these in ebook form and would like to see Dan and me make a little money, this is the only place you can legally find them. 


Eventually, they'll show up on Amazon.com, but what you get with Dan are five versions of a title: epub; plain PDF; and a POD .PDF. (For those you who want a hardcopy. Take the file to a POD store at any big U, or send it to one of the online places, they can produce a treeware book.) Also you get html, and .mobi. This will give you at least one way to view the books on pretty much any device that will allow it: smart phone, laptop, tablet, dedicated book reader, or a computer. 


Dan went to a lot of effort, and his piece of the action isn't very big, so the more copies we sell, the happier we'll both be. Christmas is coming–already I'm inundated with TV ads reminding me in case I  somehow forgot–and you were thinking of getting that e-reader, right? Get some books to go with it ...


Thanks. 

Story Portals - Katya the Assassin

Larry Segriff has gotten the first e-collection of Kat stories up on Amazon.com, direct link here. These are fantasy stories about a woman who majors in assassination, with minors in magic and courtesanship. One of the tales is mine, "Just Desserts." A mere $2.99 as an ebook, and certainly worth it for my story alone, hey ... ?

This is how Story Portals is making money, so if you are so inclined, drop round, read a sample and consider buying a copy. Not likely I'll see any more than the advance I already got, but if it hits the bestseller lists and blows Harry Potter out of the water, I will get a small piece of it.

Writing Biz

Those of you who are professional writers, or aspiring to same, would do well to check out Kris Rusch's blog, especially her most recent post on the fear in publishing. 


If you haven't been keeping up with things, ebooks are becoming a game-changer, and Amazon.com's new tablet–which is only $199–is going to be shipping in the next month or two. I don't think it will be the iPad killer, there are still a lot of bells and whistles the new Kindle Fire won't have, but it is going to pull more people into the notion that ebooks have some advantages, not the least of which is storing your books in the cloud.


As e-readers get cheaper, more people will indulge their curiosity, and some, if not many of them, will stick around the platform.


That ebook-train I keep talking about? It's getting to the "All aboard!" stage. 


It will be leaving the station soon. 


This is stuff you need to know if you are in the writing or publishing biz. Really. 

The Return of the Matadors

Ahem: 

Can I get a drum roll here? 

Good, good, bring it up louder ... hold for the dramatic timing ... and ...

The Matadors are back.


Hit the ride cymbal.


Yes. Finally. 


I got the rights reverted from Ace. Dan and Amy and I think even a son or two worked really hard and a bunch to get the manuscripts cleaned up, and the artwork done. We've put together our deal, and here we go. 


Khadaji, Dirishi, Bork, Sleel, Geneva, Red, Sister Clamp, Pen, and all the rest now blossom into electronic life.


This will be the first time the entire series will be offered in ebook format. Initially, the original trilogy, with The Man Who Never Missed; Matadora; and The Machiavelli Interface. Over the next couple of months, the other titles will come on line.

I love these covers. Simple, clean, classy, and readable. The artist, Angel Greenwood, did Dan Moran's latest ebook covers. 

Note: For those of you who would rather something with dynamite action/adventure cover art, do this: Take one of the images above and shrink it enough so you can mostly cover it with with your outstretched thumb. 

Okay. Now, move your thumb out of the way ... 

Notice that you can still read the title and author's name. In the world of ebookery, that's what matters the most. Any fine details go away once you get to postage-stamp-size, and that's what most people will see first, the itty-bitty image. Yeah, they can blow it up, but if the title isn't enough to grab a reader, chances are the artwork won't do it, either. 

Traditional publishing has started to take note of this, and you can already see cover layouts shifting because of electronic editions. 

But: The Matadors.

These will be available exclusively at FS& (aka Fat Sam, or FSand–sometimes Blogger doesn't let that ampersand get by, but prints it out and adds a semicolon. Whatever. If you want 'em, that's where to go. Also a link over in the list, and the images in the sidebar.

Dan has all the popular formats available, so whatever your reader, he should be able to supply a file that will work with it: Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, laptop, whatever. There is a version suitable for print-on-demand.

Go. Buy copies. Tell your friends. Tell them to tell their friends. Help it go viral. Blab all over Facebook and Twitter. Somebody call Stephen Colbert ...


The author will appreciate it.