The Rumor Mill

Tracking Amazon Rankings

2012-01-11T13:26:00.002-06:00

Okay, I admit it, I'm addicted to tracking my story's rankings on Amazon (and checking sales). I don't know why precisely, but I like to see when one of my stories drops below the 100k mark. That's an indicator of sales, but not an indicator of major sales (you have to drop down into the 10-20k range for decent sales and the 1-5k range for good sales, and the below 1k rank for sellng like hot cakes).

Honestly, however, the sales rankings on Amazon mean nothing to a writer. Not really. Those rankings, according to noted authority James D. MacDonald over on the Absolute Write forum, are for the readers to allow them to judge the popularity of a book they might be thinking about purchasing.

Personally, I'm beginning to think it's a mistake to put rankings up at all. It's definitely a mistake for a writer to obsess over them and fret about them.

I mean, if you walk into a brick and morter bookstore, you're not going to see books arrayed in some kind of artificial ranking system. You'll see bestsellers, new releases, and books laid out for special sales or holiday seasons, but you will never see a ranking number attached to those books or see them placed on the shelves in any specific order.

What the Amazon rankings do is tell a reader "Hey, this book is popular". The idea begins with the assumption that a reader cannot judge for themselves what book they're actually looking for. In essence, Amazon's ranking system assumes the reader is stupid in my opinion. The rankings, made by some arbitrarily mysterious algorithm, can even be "gamed" (and have been) by savvy or clever marketers. The rankings are not, as is commonly believed, based solely on sales alone (though they probably should be), but Amazon won't tell us what the rest is based on. A guess can be made that it's partially sales, partially searches, partially value, etc., etc., all of which factor into the algorthm that spits out an arbitrary number that the writers can obsess over the numbers and the readers can make entirely arbitrary decisions about the work without even sampling it.

The fact is, the only numbers that should matter to the writer are sales - and they shouldn't matter all that much. Stories either work or they don't. It is impossible to predict whether a story will sell or appeal to readers or not (believe me, some of the stuff I thought was my best work has so far flopped worse than a freshly-caught trout on a rock).

Amazon's rankings might be intended to attract readers, but I think readers should think for themselves. Only you know what you like. Amazon can make suggestions based on what you've purchased or searched for previously, but they can't tell the reader what they like any more than the writer can predict what the reader is going to like and buy.

Be your own person. Read what you want. Do not let Amazon or anyone else try to steer you in any particular direction as a reader.

As a writer, forget those rankings. They're not for you. Look at your sales instead, but don't obsess over them either. You've got better things to do.

Like writing your next piece.

Get busy.

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing

2012-01-03T12:55:00.002-06:00

I stumbled over this great post by Chuck Wendig posted by John Helfers today on FaceBook so I'm linking to it. Lots of great advice in this one and I'm guilty of doing a lot of them myself.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/01/03/25-things-writers-should-stop-doing/

The Battle of Christmas

2011-12-24T13:44:00.000-06:00

A horror poem for the season.

###

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the halls
Something evil was stirring, but not in the malls.
Twas at the North Pole all covered with snow
That it all started with no one to know

The elves felt it first and first were to fall
A sickness among them that started to crawl
And one by one they started to blow
To kill one another and redden the snow

That wasn't the end as the reindeer came next
As elves fell upon them with teeth, claw, and axe
Comet went first, then Cupid and Vixen
Till all that were left were Rudolph and Blitzen

Bravely they fought in retreat to the Shop
Where Santa and others with fear were fraught
As two mighty reindeer killed elves by the lot
But step by step were forced back to the Shop

Within the Shop only Santa could think
As dozens of elves brought the whole kitchen sink
Rudolph and Blitzen were doing their best
But a whole day of fighting had measured their best

Within the Toy Shop sat Santa's sleigh
A little red cart just a few feet away
If Rudolph could reach it away they could fly
But elves were before them, behind them, and sly

Then Blitzen told Rudolph and Santa he'd hold
Elves in the snow till the sleigh could be rolled
Out of the Shop and up into the sky
Guided by Rudolph's sole bleeding eye

Though wounded and bleeding brave Blitzen attacked
And countless were the elves that he racked
Rudolph fell back and shed neither tear
For Santa stood there aquiver in fear

Covered in blood and wounded in stride
Brave Rudolph listened as old Blitzen died
Then facing the old man he said with a snark
This is for you you worthless old fart

Into the sleigh he pushed the old man
And under the harness he pushed his own van
A few moments later ahead of the elves
The little red sleigh leaped above the ice shelves

But by the time they reached the first of their stops
Poor Rudolph knew it'd all been for naught
For Santa was sick with what felled the elves
And Rudolph was nearing the end of himself

And when Santa slipped down the first chimney so free
It was with evil intent and malevolent glee
And Rudolph stood by on the roof with the sleigh
Knowing next year there'd be no going this way

###

Infection & After Action Report On PubIt! (B&N)

2011-12-17T15:41:00.002-06:00

Or they soon will be (24-72 hours).

I waited an awful long time to get things working for the B&N Nook, but I have a bit more incentive now. They're another outlet for sales that I've left neglected for far too long.

This gives me Smashwords, Amazon, and now Barnes & Noble as sales points fir my work.

Yea, me!

Short story "Infection" Published

2011-12-17T10:32:00.001-06:00

My 5600 word short science fiction/horror story "Infection" has been published on Smashwords and Amazon for the Kindle. Price is $0.99.

"Infection" is a story of love, loss, and hope in the midst of catastrophe.

HATCHINGS Added To Amazon Prime

2011-12-10T12:01:00.003-06:00

As an experiment I've placed my 80k word hard SF novel HATCHINGS in the new Amazon Prime listing for the Kindle. If you're a Prime member you can download the book for free whereas it's $3.99 regularly for Kindle.

I'm not doing this out of the goodness of my heart. As I said, this is an experiment, and I'll get a percentage of a pot that Amazon has created for books in the Prime listings for each time the book is downloaded.

So, if you want to read a hard science fiction novel with giant insects, action, and adventure for FREE, become an Amazon Prime member and download HATCHINGS. Recommend it to your friends too.

I want to see how this book does over the next 90 days as a Prime listing.

In addition, if you've read any of my stuff, why not drop by Amazon and leave a comment or review? Good, bad, or indifferent, I won't mind (well, I might if it's really scathing, but I'll bite my tongue and withhold any retort)? Comments and reviews are important to writers and maybe more so to reader's. I know a few folks out there have read my stuff (sales figures and a check from Amazon every so often proves that), but my work needs more reviews.

Hunted, for example, just sold another copy, but no one's reviewed it yet. For such an exciting story I'm surprised at this. HATCHINGS sold 3 (yeah, not a huge number, but it's still sales) copies last month, but not a single review. After Action Report has sold dozens of times, but hasn't been reviewed or even comment on. The only review has been for Code Of Law, which wasn't exactly my best effort, and it got 3 stars.

So, go become a Prime member and download HATCHINGS for free. And drop by my G.W. Ellis page and leave some reviews for my other work too.

C'mon, I dare you.

How To Embarass A Writer

2011-11-13T15:06:00.003-06:00

I recently had a poster on another website forum email me, essentially asking for advice, but one of the things the poster said in their message damn near made my hair stand on end.

I quote,

I downloaded a sample of Hatchings, and it seems to be a very American contribution to the British school of Guy N Smith, Graham Masterton and James Herbert. Good show, old chap, haha.

Now, of course, I denied being anywhere near as good as these Masters. In response, the poster stated,

Right, right, I meant 'in the vein of the Brits', not quite 'on the level of' :), although there's really not much difference between what I read of your style and Smith's. In fact yours may be a tad better, but he had the luck of entering the field in the middle of the 70's horror boom. Like entering the romantic werewolf field today, I guess.

If you want to embarrass a writer, this is an excellent way to go at it. Its incredibly flattering, but there's no way I believe I'm anywhere near as good as Masterson, Smith, or Herbert. I'm getting better, but I'm not there yet.

I do find it interesting that the poster noted that my work appeared to be a very American contribution in the same vein as the British Masters he cites. My early upbringing was in a household in the middle of Ohio with a very Scottish patriarchy, a very close relationship to England, and a matriarchal lineage that was also very English and German. There've been times I've been caught slipping into accented conversation when I didn't even realize I was doing it. In addition, for years I used certain wordage in my writing that was very English without even realizing I was doing it wrong for an American audience or in accordance with American English.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a proud American and I'm proud of my heritage.

I just never quite realized how deeply that heritage had actually affected everything I do.

All writers have heritages. Our stories, our characters, our mannerisms are based in our heritage, probably on a much deeper level than we realize. We show a certain face to the outside world, but our stories are dredged up from deep within our psyches. There's a point where we cannot distinguish what's in our psyche and what's flowing from our fingers in our stories.

Please, forgive us. We too, are products of our heritage.

And because I'm a product of my heritage, it's both embarrassing and incredibly elevating to be compared to, or placed in the same vein as, certain Master writers.

Mostly embarrassing right now.

Veteran's Day

2011-11-11T12:37:00.002-06:00

One more thing - if you know a vet, thank him and shake his hand.

Today is the day to remember that, in the words of the Billy Ray Cyrus song, "All Gave Some, Some Gave All".

I'd also like to recommend the video "Waltzing Matilda" that's circulating on YouTube and the video from 3 Doors Down (I think) for "We Are One" that should also be available on YouTube.

Remember the veterans in your own family especially, but remember them all.

All gave some. Some gave all.

God bless all veterans everywhere.

Two New Short Stories

2011-11-11T12:18:00.002-06:00

Two new short stories, Hate Music and Hunted, were posted to Amazon for the Kindle and Smashwords for all other platforms earlier this month. They are both currently available for $0.99 each.

Hate Music is a 1thousand word science fiction story set in my Fire On The Suns universe with a darkly humorous twist.

Hunted is an 1800-word horror story with action so fast and furious it will leave you gasping for breath.

I should have Infection, a 5 thousand word horror story, available by the end of this month (it just needs a final review and editing pass).

Work is progressing on Porter's Way, a western/horror short story (that's trying to turn into a novella) set in a world where magic and the Old West co-exist (but this ain't Deadlands, folks), Fire On The Suns (my military space opera novel based on my FOTS game universe) which has reached 55+ thousand words, and an as-yet untitled short story featuring the Devil being grilled by a talk show pundit on his relationship with God. That one's up to about 2 thousand words currently.

I've temporarily ceased working on The Midnight Box, a Quentin Dallas short story due to "issues" with the legendary source material. Still, I might pick it back up after the first of the year along with the novels Gated and Third Pulse, both of which I expect to finish next year.

To-date, I've finished and published 1 novel, 10 short stories, and a collection since late January when I started this 5-year project. I intend to finish at least 1 more novel and 2-5 short stories between now and the end of the year (my goal was 2 novels and 12-15 short stories when I started this thing). I've noticed that my productivity appears to have increased as the year has progressed and I'm putting up better, more polished, much more professional work as I go along.

Give me 4 more years and I might even be decent.

New Collection On Smashwords/Kindle

2011-10-16T14:49:00.000-05:00

I just put my first 6-pack of short stories up for publishing via Smashwords and Kindle for $2.99. You'll get 6 stories for the price of 3, a couple of them in previously-unpublished form.

The book "The Light Of An Oncoming Train: A 6-Pack Of Short Fiction" ought to be available from Amazon for the Kindle in a couple days. Smashwords might take a bit longer.

Remember

2011-09-11T11:51:00.003-05:00

Today is, as I'm sure everyone knows by now, the 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I remember where I was and what I was doing. Do you?

There's little that I can say that hasn't already been said by pundits and those who survived the attacks already so all I'll say today is remember.

Remember the heroes who went into those buildings while everyone else was going out. Remember the heroes who fought to take back a hijacked aircraft. Remember the heroes who worked themselves to exhaustion trying to save anyone they could in the short time the victims might have had. Remember the heroes who somehow organized the largest waterborne evacuation in history, bigger even than Dunkirk.

Remember the victims who died that day through no fault of their own, struck down by others who only wanted to hurt and kill as many Americans as they possibly could.

And remember that there are still people out there, diabolical, evil, desperate people who still would do anything they can to hurt and kill as many Americans as possible. They remember us.

As we remember our fallen heroes from that day, remember as well the men and women who have fought and died and been injured in the years before and since 9/11 to protect us here at home. I remember them and I stand beside them should the call ever come for me to do so.

Remember, and honor the heroes for the sacrifices they've made and the sacrifices yet to come. In this way we honor them and pay them the enormous debt we owe them all.

Writer worries

2011-08-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

I worry that my first novel was my last one, the only one I had in me despite the fact I've got 2 or 3 others in various stages of competion.

I worry that I can't complete several short stories because my day job is sucking the life out of me.

I worry about my next idea not coming soon enough to write it fast enough.

I worry about the rent and the electrical and the cable and the $900 of new medical bills I recently acquired and the condition for which remains untreated.

I worry about not being able to write with hands crippled by arthritis.

What I don't worry about? The fact that the next story idea will come, that I can write it, that I'll get through the occasional doldrums, that writer's block is fleeting and imaginary, a figment of my own procrastination, that every day is an opportunity to improve and grow, that my stuff will sell, that I'm not good enough, that I cannot fail because I won't let myself do so nor will the people who read my stuff, that I can pay the bills next month via my day job, but one day my writing will pay those things for me, that I have a future and part of that future includes me as a writer.

It's called hope.

It's a simple 4-letter word, but it's more powerful than almost any other 4-letter word other than love which it is closely related to. Hope is stronger than hate, stronger than lust, stronger than words far longer and far more recognized. Hope is what drives every human being to strive, to drive, to continue on when dark clouds threaten and the wolves are at the door.

Hope is why we write.

Hope that we can express ourselves such that someone else "out there" might, just might, one day understand.

Hope that we might one day, somehow, some way, make a living writing.

Hope that, by some miracle, fortune might shine upon us one day and we will find that voice and be able to express it such that we know we will have said something important.

Hope that we might, one day, entertain even one single other person.

Hope that we might leave something of ourselves to friends, to family, to people unknown, who will remember us long after we have gone on to the big office beyond.

Hope that some small piece of us remains when we're gone.

Hope.

It's a simple word. A 4-letter word.

But it's a writer's word.

Every writer ought to have it framed over their desk so they can look up at it when the doubts come.

Hope.

It's a conjure word too. It has the ability to conjure a writer to roust himself out of the worst depression, the worst pain, the worst doldrums, the worst of anything you can imagine and drive him back to the keyboard or the pad and pen/pencil.

Hope.

It's a writer's word.

Emblazoned it on your heart and over your hearth and in your mind.

It's your word.

Amazon Kindle Royalties

2011-07-29T14:19:00.002-05:00

Yup, you read that right - Amazon Kindle Royalties!

I've got the check sitting right here beside me right now.

It's not an amazing amount, only $12.95 for the period February-April of this year, but it's my first royalty check ever for my fiction work. Someone out there's paid to read my stuff.

That is exciting and exhilarating and scary all at the same time.

It means that I have to create more stories for people to read because I can't make a living on this.

But maybe, just maybe, I've got a chance at this after all.

I started this endeavor earlier this year with a 5-year plan. I'm slightly behind schedule on that plan almost 8 months into it, but receiving this check today has bolstered my hopes and dreams once again. I'm a long way from the finish line of this plan and there's a lot of work, and a lot of learning, left to do yet.

Bit you know what they say - "Money talks, and bullshit walks."

Well, here's money talking. Amazon's been paid for my stories and now they're paying me as promised. I've made more sales since April so I know I'll be receiving more checks in the future.

This is no longer an experiment, no longer a plan, now it's a business.

It's time to get to work.

HATCHINGS Now $0.99 for Limited Time Only

2011-07-21T19:52:00.000-05:00

For anyone who's interested, I just dropped the price of my SF novel HATCHINGS to $0.99 for a very limited time period only (till the end of the month at the latest). It'll be available from Kindle by this time tomorrow (gotta' republish & review every time you change pricing for Amazon for some reason) and is available for all other platforms via Smashwords.

FOTS Website Back Up

2011-07-08T21:41:00.003-05:00

My old gaming website for Fire On The Suns (FOTS) is back up after a multi-year absence thanks to some good friends who secured the domain name and held onto it until I could get back to it.

You can find the site at www.fire-on-the-suns.com

I've also secured the domain name for GWELLIS.com and will soon make that my primary author site.

I'm looking forward to republishing a large number of items from the old days when my game was going strong and new items that never got off the drawing board. I've got at least 2 novels and a couple of standalone indie games designed by friends from way back too that might actually see the light of day in the future.

It may be that my old desktop publishing company Ellis & Company Piblishing could be raised from the dead due to Smashwords and Kindle.

All hail indie publishing!

HATCHINGS Is Live On Amazon

2011-07-01T12:57:00.003-05:00

Actually the book went live on Amazon for the Kindle last month on the fifth.

I just delayed posting a blog here because I was busy elsewhere.

Mainly at my day job, where I work as a department manager in electronics. Anything to pay the bills. There've been quite a few changes in my life since April including a new apartment, putting my mother in a nursing home, and all the attendant bills that that requires. The last couple of weeks I've been plagued by a swollen right hand causes by an infection in the joint in my right index finger. Needless to say, this has made writing much of anything really difficult the last two weeks.

But enough about me even though it's all about me, let's talk about my book.

Or not.

I seem to have gotten Dragon NaturallySpeaking working adequately and I'm using it to write this blog post. I'll also be using it to write my story "Porters Way" which is a western horror fantasy mixed genre intended to be a short, but will probably end up somewhere above 10,000 words. Right now it's standing about 3500 words, but it's really kind of a fun story to write. The genre mix is something that I did back in the days when I played RPG's, but it's never something that I really intended to try to write until now.

Actually, considering everything that's going on in epublishing right now it's looking more and more like RPG publishing might be an economic opportunity. I used to write some killer adventures. At one point in time I even had my own RPG. Of course I also had the game Fire On The Suns (FOTS) and wrote half a dozen rulebooks and supplements for it as well as a couple of spinoff games. FOTS is still going strong in some limited areas on Yahoo! Groups, but it's definitely a fringe market. There are a number of opportunities that someone familiar with the publishing could utilize to break into the RPG market using Kindle, Smashwords, and PubIt!. Most recently I have been asked to assist a fellow writer in formatting her work so she can get it up on Kindle. I'm going to do this at no charge, of course.

Yog's Law: Money flows to the writer.

I've also learned what the problems were with putting some of my stuff up on Smashwords which prevented it getting into the premium catalog. Turns out was a formatting error which was difficult to find or track down in OpenOffice. Once I was able to track it down and kill it, everything went up fine. I spent 15 years doing epublishing, or what was called desktop publishing back then, so I often know a little bit about formatting some of this stuff. My format for Hatchings for CreateSpace went through flawlessly except for my cover which I need to do a minor correction for. Hopefully by next month, I'll have a POD version of Hatchings available.

Well, that's about it for this post. I really do intend to post more frequently, but the demands of my other jobs like writing, finishing up some stuff, and of course paying the bills, tend to prohibit me from getting here as often as I would like.

IT IS FINISHED

2011-05-05T21:50:00.003-05:00

I finally completed the final edit of my first novel HATCHINGS this morning. I've posted it to Smashwords and intend to post it to Amazon for Kindle tomorrow morning.

I'll post here when everything goes live.

This has been in the works for 4 years. I first write the first draft between January 1st and April, 2007. Sixty-five thousand words were written in 35 writing days. The rest of the time was taken up by research.

The edits have taken me thevrest of the time.

It's like a tremendous weightbas been lifted from my shoulders.

I have other works to attend to and they're all calling me for attention.

HATCHINGS Has A Cover

2011-03-09T14:48:00.003-06:00

The Amazing Artist Ronnell Porter created this cover for my book HATCHINGS and uploaded it to me today (or at least I got it today),

I am absolutely thrilled with this cover as it nearly depicts an image straight from a scene in the book.

Final editing for HATCHINGS will be done in the next 2 weeks and the book should be available by the first of Aprilb(providing I get off my lazy duff and do the final edits).

An Act Of Faith

2011-03-07T19:07:00.002-06:00

Many people probably wouldn't believe it if you told them that writing is an act of faith. In fact, most people would probably scoff if you told them that you wrote and indie-published as that act of faith.

They don't believe that you can succeed if you're not a J.K. Rowling or a Stephanie Meyer or a Larry Niven kr any of a thousand others.

They don't BELIEVE.

Writing is an act if faith.

You set your sights on telling a story that's going to entertain someone and you work your heart out on that story. Then you send it out into the world to sink or swim.

Some stories sink, some swim. Some win Olympic Gold.

But every time you sit down to write a story that's an act of faith.

It doesn't matter if you believe in God or Alah or Buddah or whatever, when you sit down to create you sit down to act with a faith that something you're going to do at that moment is going to do and e something good - if not now then sometime layer.

I've got major life issues facing me right now, and I've been told in the past that I'm not ready, and will not be for years, professional publication. I have stress on my day job and I have stress at home. It all affects my writing and my personality.

But I know I will get through this. I have faith.

And every time a writer sits down at their keyboard and types a story, that's an act of faith in that they are good enough, that they have what it takes, that they have the chops to succeed.

You do. I do.

It takes work and it takes faith.

Believe and you'll get there - with time and work.

Very few things happen overnight, but the sun rises every single morning. Your morning (and mine) is only a few hours away at most.

Sales Reports

2011-03-07T19:06:00.000-06:00

Wonderful! I finally found the sales reports for my Amazon sales. They're not amazing, but they're sales.

For 02/02 to 03/01/11

After Action Report - 7 sales, 1 refund so 6 net sales
Any Minute Now - 2 sales
Knock On Wood - 2 sales
The Light Of An Oncoming Train - 2 sales

For 03/01 to 03/08/11

After Action Report - 2 sales
Code Of Law - 2 sales

Not impressive, but I bet they'll build. I've only been doing the Amazon thing for about a month after all.

Total royalties - $6.30

Hey! That's beer money!

Stories Live On Amazon Kindle

2011-03-05T18:37:00.001-06:00

Yes, I'm spamming my blog (can you do that?) to let all of you know that I currently have 5
stories live on Amazon Kindle. Two of them are directly related to FOTS as they
take place in a slightly-modified universe from the standard game's.

The current list is as follows,

The Light Of An Oncoming Train (Quentin Dallas, PI story)
After Action Report (FOTS story)
Code Of Law (FOTS story)
Knock On Wood
Any Minute Now (Quentin Dallas, PI story)

You can find them by searching for G.W. Ellis or here,

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-key\
words=G.W.+Ellis&x=19&y=25

All of the stories are $0.99 except for Code Of Law which is $1.99.

I'm still working on the FOTS novel and it's looking like I might have to
completely rewrite the 45 thousand words I've got done on it thus far as the
first few chapters are total crap, but my SF novel HATCHINGS will be coming out
as soon as the cover artist gets the cover done.

Anyway, go ye forth and vote and vote often - I mean buy, and BUY often.

Thanks,
Greg

P.S. After action Report seems to be my most popular story thus far. Its highest
ranking was all the to around 40k on Amazon Kindle's Paid Rankings yesterday
(it's around 91k today).

New Story Coming to Kindle

2011-03-02T20:12:00.000-06:00

I'll be posting a long short story/short novella on Kindle tomorrow entitled "Code Of Law". It's space opera centered in my Fire On The Suns game universe. I would expect it'll go live sometime this weekend (if I can find the right darned cover image for it in the meantime).

Epubbing & Business - Writing As Gardening

2011-02-17T13:05:00.003-06:00

A lot these days is being said about the quality of the writing being put up on sites such as Smashwords and Kindle. Admittedly, much of the material is woefully amateurish and wouldn't stand a chance of being professionally published. I've actually purchased a couple of items just to see how horribly bad they really were (bad does not begin to describe some of them).

In addition, there's the discussions regarding whether or not "no name" authors stand a chance in epublishing. Can they rise above the tumult and the tidal wave of crap that's flooding Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and a host of other sites if they don't already have an audience or fan following?

Probably not.

In regard to "no name" authors going the self-pub or ePub route, it's going to be a tough road ahead for anyone involved.

But that's why you don't go in with high expectations. You (I) don't have a ready audience (yet) or even a fan following. That, like all businesses, takes time to build. You must treat yourself and your writing like a business, develop a plan, and work at it. A single book or short story isn't going to cut it. You have to keep producing work, keep producing product for people to stumble upon and discover.

Someone, somewhere out there, is going to like what you write. When that happens that person will tell 2 people and those people will tell 2 people and the snowball effect takes over from there.

Most business plans are 5 years in duration. An author just jumping into self-or epublishing needs to have a similar plan. Most businesses lose money during the first 2 years of their business plan. Authors should not expect anything different. I don't expect more than a handful of sales during my first year with Kindle and Smashwords, but I'll be working and putting up new product all along for "customers" to discover. By the second year some of my stuff should be starting to hit and I should see sales increasing. I still won't be able to quit my day job though.

By the 3rd year sales should start picking up if I've been doing my job right. In other businesses the 3rd year is usually the "make it or break it" year, but it isn't the same with authors. If all you're making is a few hundred bucks a year, that's still free money streaming into your pocket from things you wrote years ago. You'll have better stuff available by then.

In the 4th and 5th years I expect to have an increasing audience and a larger volume of product to sell my customers.

As Dean Wesley Smith states, "books are not produce". They don't expire except with traditional publishers where they go out of print. Ebooks never go out of print unless the author takes them down. Ebooks are product that can sit on the shelves for years without expiring.

Five years down the road I may still not be able to quit my day job, but my audience will be far larger than it is today - and I'll be a better writer for the time and effort invested.

You gotta' have a plan and a main ingredient of that plan is to grow yourself an audience.

Gardens don't grow overnight and neither, in most cases, does a writer's career.

Start with a seed or a number of seeds, preferably different types, and grow what does best.

Link To My Kindle Page

2011-01-31T17:37:00.001-06:00

Here's the link to my Kindle page on Amazon,

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=G.W.+Ellis&x=19&y=25

Note that there are 4 stories live as of today and more still to come.

Amazon, baby!

2011-01-28T18:24:00.003-06:00

My stories Any Minute Now and The Light Of An Oncoming Train went live on Amazon for $0.99 each as of today.

Yea, me!

I still list Smashwords as my publisher since it's through them that I get a free ISBN, but they can argue with me when and if that ever becomes an issue. Right now, I've got 2 stories up on what is probably the best platform for selling epublished works that was ever invented even though it might not have been invented for that purpose.

Somewhere, out there, there are people that my stories will, maybe, appeal to. They might even pay money to own their own copies of my stories.

I have 8-9 more stories currently awaiting approval over on Smashwords, probably another few days to a week to go. Two of those still need covers so it'll be 2 weeks or so before they go up and get approved. In a week or two more I will ge putting together an anthology to sell most of these stories as a package, but they'll all be going up to Amazon and Kindle as individual pieces for $0.99 each. The anthology will likely run $4.99, but I haven't completely decided there yet (I might undercut the price initially to give it a boost off the launch pad).

Just having 2 stories up on Amazon is very, very exciting. I did that!

I did the writing, as mediocre as some might say it is, and the covers myself.

I did.

That makes me proud.

I'm pretty goddamned good at certain things when I put my mind to it and no one is going to convince me that I can't or I'm not good enough or I am " years away from being professionally published."

To those that said and/or believe this, I say "Wake up. You're living in a different world, one that has just suddenly changed in ways you wouldn't understand anyway."

Yes, editors are necessary, but the editors of today had better start waking up and embracing the technology that new writers or early adopters are embracing or they are going to be left wondering where all the dust came from.

Plus, there's Heinlein's Rule - Never revise except to editorial request.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch says that most authors ruin their stories by revision.

Dean Wesley Smith has been putting up first draft (well, maybe with some spell checking done, I would hope) stories for the last several weeks and he's apparently happy with the results.

Me? I tend to revise a couple times before I put things up so some of the stories I'll be posting/publishing have been through multiple revisions. Almost all of them have also been critiqued over at Absolute Write by several people. I won't say I listened to any r all of the critiques nor revised to their comments, but I will say that every single comment had an impact on the stories I've written and posted in some fashion.

I'm still learning how to do this. Putting them out there for the public to say "Yea" or "Nay" is one of the bes ways to do so, in addition to being a good way to build an audience.

As I said, somewhere out there, there are people who will like my stories. I just got to let them have access to them.

The New World of Digital Publishing

2011-01-17T18:13:00.004-06:00

Currently, I have 6 stories up at Smashwords, all but 1 of them priced at $0.99 each (the odd one out is a free vignette of less than a thousand words). The free one I've even gotten some good, not glowing, but good, reviews of. Not surprisingly, it's the free one that's generating the most downloads and it doesn't even have a cover (yet).

Of the nearly 100 downloads or partial downloads, over half of those have occurred in the last 4 days since I got serious about this whole deal and added some of my better stories and created covers for them. Creating the covers was easy, and free if you don't count my time required to find just the right free photo and add a title and author byline to it (usually less than half an hour and that's going to decrease as I start taking photos myself to use as book and story covers).

Now, two of those 6 stories still require some modification for Smashwords to put them in their Premium Catalog (covers), and I've already made some mistakes that I'll try to be more careful about in the future, but overall it's a start. It'll likely be about 2 weeks before everything's available across all platforms, but in those next 2 weeks I'm going to start working up the same stories for PubIt and Kindle (even though Smashwords has access to those platforms, or at least formats for those platforms it will likely pay me to do it myself and make sure the stories get up there too).

Titles thus far are as follows,

The Meadow
The Interview
The Light of an Oncoming Train
After Action Report
Knock On Wood
Night On A Boat

All of these stories are horror or at least horror-themed. Night On A Boat is the free vignette. Go read it. I'll wait.

Back? Okay. How'd you like the story? While I hope you enjoyed it what really counts is that it's out there for you to enjoy and I wrote it, finished it, and put it out there for anyone to read or slam. I don't care if someone slams it. I will not, per the sage advice of James MacDonald over at Absolute Write, respond to a negative review (heck, I probably won't respond to most other reviews either). I know there are a couple things in the story that shoul probably be fixed, and maybe one day I'll fix them, but for right now it's proving a point and teaching me lessons - always spell check your manuscript and always give it a read over before putting it up for publication.

Now, here's the thing - Dean Wesley Smith is doing the same thing with his 2011 Challenge and Guess What?

His stuff has errors in it too - misspellings, errors of omission, plot holes big enough to drop a supertanker into.

Does he care?

No. In fact, he cares so little he has disallowed comments about his challenge stories because people were focusing on the mistakes instead of the fact he's actually getting work done, publishing stories, and making a buck or two on it as well.

I'm not DWS and, thus far, I'm not making even a buck or two off these stories, but I've only just really started and really started getting serious about it all. I hate retail sales, but that day job is going to keep me with a roof over my head and food in my stomach until sometime, somewhen, somehow, my stories start to sell. And they will. And there will finally come a day when I can shake off that day job and concentrate on what I really want to do for the rest of my life - write great stories that entertain people.

See, that's the thing. I'm not the best writer on the planet, but I'm not the worst either. I'm going to keep writing and putting my stuff out there for people to read until I do start to make a buck or two on my writing. The new world of digital publishing has opened doors to me I never would have guessed were even there 15 years ago when I first started self-publishing my Fire On The Suns rulebooks and tech manuals. Back then it was desktop publishing all the way and it was expensive and sometimes tedious beyond description. I made beer money on that game for years and one day I'll republish some of the old stuff along with my friend Jeff Engel (the FOTS heir apparent who's currently rewriting the core rules manual and several of the tech manuals). Along the way I also learned a helluva' lot about formatting and cover design. I think I make a pretty decent cover and I've used lots of programs over the years to try to build cover images so I've learned a lot along the way there too.

I haven't finished learning yet, though. Because of my experience in self-publishing I was reticent about outfits like Smashwords and PubIt. I was leery of scams and scanners and vanity publishing. I'd tried to go the traditional route and run into self-absorbed, conceited editors who thought they were God's gift to writing and writers. Maybe they are, I don't care anymore.

In this new world of digital publishing I don't need them.

Maybe I never did.

With money and time I believe I know enough right now to publish an electronic magazine. But I don't know enough to edit one - and I don't have the time or the money (there's that day job thingie that gets in the way not to mention the bills I still need to pay). But there are people out there who do and who can and who will.

We live in a new world of digital publishing. Outfits like Smashwords are making publishing easier and more convenient and even profitable (for some). That's going to increase geometrically as more and more smart people start to realize they no longer need to go the traditional route to getting published or worse (shudder), pay some scam outfit to publish their stuff for them.

Everyone on the planet these days ha a digital camera, a cell phone with a camera in it, or some other way to take photos. those photos can be your stories covers. There are free photo-editing programs available which you can use to resize and add cover blurbs to. I used to do this with something like 6 different programs. Today I can use 2 or 3 if I really want to go wild and add special effects.

There are free 3D modeling programs such as POVRay and Moray and DoGa and more which allow you to build and light and add special effects to a cover image and render it in real time (you'd be amazed at what an expert can do with any of those). I used to use a program called Universe which allowed me to create a render an absolutely amazing variety of space shots and effects.

The fact is, this amazing new world of digital publihing is unlocking and opening doors to people that might have once believed they wre barred forever from achieving their dreams.

I'm telling you, those derams are within your reach, right now.

All you have to do is stretch out your hand and grasp them.

Like I am.

New Story Up At Smashwords

2011-01-13T14:01:00.004-06:00

My story "After Action Report" is now up at Smashwords for $0.99 (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/37184).

There's no cover for thisonee either, but I'm working on that (got a new digital camera for taking cover photos with, but I'm having a difficult time actually getting the pictures or staging them for the covers I want).

AAR is a scifi story set in my Fire On The Suns universe. It was inspired by a story submitted to me many years ago by Chris L'Etoile (who's gone on to bigger and better things). I've edited the hell out of it over a few months and years, but the idea is still basically Chris' though he was writing for my universe.

I've got a few other FOTS stories up my sleeve and an entire novel or two in the works. This year promises to be better than last in terms of production and goals though Idoubt I'll meet Dean Wesley Smith's challenge.

Never the less, if you're a writer and you're not reading his blog, you ought to.

It's Been Awhile

2010-12-30T14:48:00.003-06:00

It's been awhile since I posted last, and for the few people who actually bother to follow this blog or check in from time to time, I apologize. The period from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after Chrustmas is a prolonged Hell Week at Walmart. Bitchy people, bitchier customers, management that couldn't find their asses with both hands and a road map (and that need to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to take a breath in most cases), and a generalized feeling of total hysteria amongst the employees and general populace, all gives way to a feeling that if I ever get though this I'm going to be looking fir a new job in the next year.

Welcome to my world.

But it's not all bad -except for the assholes who walk up to you and ask "Do you work here?" when you're standing there looking at them with an armload of freight, still in the boxes ready to go on the shelves, or "Can you get a game for me?" or any of a thousand other stupid questions.

"Why, no. I don't work here. I'm just picking up twenty pounds of freight because I like too."

"No, I don't work in this department just because my badge says I'm the Merchandise Supervisor. Where else would I be?"

" Who, me? No, lady, I'm stealing this shit. I suggest you grab that shit over there."

I HATE RETAIL!

If it wasn't for working nights and never having a holiday, I'd go back to working security ( it paid better).

On the only good note of the whole process, I picked up a Fuji FinePix S1500 sub-DSLR which I intend to use to shoot short story and novel cover photos with. It's a great camera and a step up from the point-and-shoot digitals I've been using for years. I cut my photography teeth on a Pentax ME and once had about $3k worth of equipment, lenses and darkroom setup, but that was long ago. This new Fuji packs in stuff I used to have in my old Pentax, like the ability to set shutter speeds and ISO's which P&S digitals don't generally have. Here's a full video feature as well as a continuous shooting mode too.

I've already produced some great shots with this camera and I'll have some great covers for my books and short stories coming soon.

BTW, if you aren't reading Dean Wesley Smith's blog, you ought to be.

Ex-Heroes

2010-11-15T19:10:00.002-06:00

I just finished reading Peter Cline's book Ex-Heroes and I'm here to heartily recommend it.

It's a cross-genre zombie/superhero novel, but it is, frankly, absolutely awesome.

If you're a fan of zombie novels (and who isn't?) or a fan of gritty superhero genre, then this book is absolutely going to please.

I should write half as well as Cline does.

The Light Of An Oncoming Train

2010-11-08T19:43:00.001-06:00

Just a "bye the bye", but my story "The Light of an Oncoming Train" is out today at Bewildering Stories (www.bewilderingstories.com).

Just thought you'd all like to know.

This is the introductory story for my character Quentin Dallas who is rapidly turning into one of those characters who is the most fascinating and whom you want to listen tell you his stories over and over again.

Stories Up On Stanza

2010-11-02T14:22:00.002-05:00

My short stories The Interview and Knock On Wood are available for Stanza from Smashwords. If you have Stanza installed, just search the Smashwords catalog for "Ellis" and you'll find them (and me). My Fire On The Suns: New Technology, Volume I is also available.

I'm working on the novel Third Pulse, which will almost assuredly go up at Smashwords within a month or two, for NaNoWriMo (the original aim was for Gated, but a recent incident with my iPad resulted in the iCard Sort outline going to data heaven), and if I do not hear from Tyree Campbell at Sam's Dot Publishing within a week or so Hatchings will be released there too.

On a good note, I finally figured out what the problem was between my iPad and my netbook and got the two of them synching up again. It turns out that the netbook had apparently lost the pathway to the Apple iPad driver and I had to reinstall it.

Now, back to work on Third Pulse, which is coming along nicely - so far.

Publishing On Smashwords

2010-10-30T18:33:00.003-05:00

I just published one of my older short stories, Knock On Wood, on Smashwords. You can grab it here for $0.99,

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/28573

I think...

I've been reading Dean Wesley Smith's blog of late and finally decided, based on the fact that he had pubb'd several short stories at Smashwords at $0.99 each, that it was time I dipped my foot in the water as well. Maybe, if I get a few hits, it'll hep me plant my lazy butt in the seat of the chair once again and finally finish a few dozen things that have been lingering for far too long.

I have several additional short stories coming out soon. A some of you know, there's The Light Of An Oncoming Train which will first see the light (pardon the pun) of day over at Bewildering Stories on November 8th. Ninety days after that the story's mine again and I'll be pubb'ing it at Smashwords as well - for $0.99 as well (so consider the pub at BWS your chance to read the story for free). In the meantime, however, I'll be publishing After Action Report and Any Minute Now and maybe a couple more stories at Smashwords.

With any luck at all, shortly after NaNoWriMo, I'll be publishing Third Pulse, a novel (superhero genre), with Smashwords (and quite possibly my FOTS (Fire On The Suns) novel as well if I can get off my lazy duff and finish the last 25k words of the first book)

I may or may not be publishing Hatchings through Smashwords, but I might do this via PubIt if a certain publisher does not answer my multiple queries within a week to 10 days or so. Certainly I will if I don't hear from him by Christmas (when your website promises 2-4 weeks for a review of a partial and then 4-6 weeks for a second review by other editors and you've waited months for any kind of response other than "We're reading it this week" (back in June when the partial was submitted in April) it seems to me I've exercised considerable patience).

Anyway, go to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/28573 and buy the story. I could use the ego-boo (not to mention a couple of bucks to buy a beer with and give me some incentive to keep on writing).

The Light Of An Oncoming Train

2010-10-07T17:07:00.002-05:00

I learned today that my story of the above title is due to be published in issue#407 of Bewildering Stories (an exposure only market so don't get all excited) which should be out around Nov. 8th.

Yea, me!

This is the Quentin Dallas Introductory story and was described by one critiquer over at Absolute Write as one of the best non-vampire vampire stories she'd ever read.

New Look For An Old(er) Blog (continued)

2010-10-06T18:00:00.001-05:00

Oops!

I seem to have lost the blog roll from AW. I'll retrieve that probably sometime tomorrow.

Drat!

New Look For An Old(er) Blog

2010-10-06T17:56:00.002-05:00

Seeing as how I completely screwed up the HTML of the old blog format for The Rumor Mill yesterday and couldn't figure out how to fix it, I decided to update the blog with a fairly simple template design rather than go back and try to retrieve everything except the stuff I didn't want.

I think it looks a little cleaner anyway.

Let me know what you think.

NaNoWriMo Countdown

2010-10-03T17:56:00.002-05:00

It's only 29 days until the begining of National Novel Writing Month. I've already started laying in some supplies (I've learned to love those little black & white semi-hardcover notebooks you can buy at Wal-Mart for $0.77 each - i've been using them as my daily logbooks for almost 10 months now) and I'm starting to rework the outlines for my stalled projects "Gated" and "Third Pulse". I'm pretty sure I'm going to be working on "Gated" again this year as that's one of my novel ideas that really, in my opinion, has the kind of legs to really grab a publisher and an audience.

I've started using this nifty little iPad ap called iCard Sort that allows you to set up, arrange, and edit stacks of index cards. You can group the cards by specific order, rearrange the order, shuffle them around, and there are a few more bells & whistles in the program that I haven't discovered yet.

The best part is that the ap is practically made for index card outlining and it's dirt simple to figure out and use. I'm basically following Alexandra Sokolof's method fir index card outlining since the method described by James D. MacDonald just hasn't worked out for me. I'm much more of an informal formulaic kind of writer (or is that infernal?) and Uncle Jim's method of numbering, etc., all those cards is just too formal a formula for me. My first outline for a book was a series of chapter numbers followed by a 2-3 sentence description of what was supposed to happen in that chapter. I still outline that way (though, when I was running RPGs I used to use a more complex map method for plotting adventures which still works for those who lie to draw maps - I do, and did, but the method might be a little too tedious for some).

Managed to get into a conversation the other day with Mark Ellis (no relation) on Absolute Write. It turns out he's quite the author himself under both his own name and the James Axler pen name. Based on what he said I purchased and downloaded the Outlanders series book "Oblivion Stone" and that's on my current "being read" list.

Now, off to craft a few more scenes fir Gated and maybe start work on tbe future scenes for Third Pulse.

Keep your fingers crossed.

My IPad

2010-08-19T18:44:00.002-05:00

BTW, I love my iPad. I have almost, literally, given up my Acer net book entirely in favor of my iPad. It's simply a more convenient machine to use and has a more comfortable suite of applications to use than the net book (and an awful lot of them are free and easier to use than firing up the net book and waiting while the system loads).

I still use my net book to save files and synch things up, but the iPad has become my primary working device right now.

I have 32GB wifi model with an added Virgin Mobile mifi device (which is also super-cool).

Reading As A Writer

2010-08-19T18:21:00.002-05:00

I've noticed since I've been reading many more books recently on my iPad that I'm now reading much more as a writer than as a casual reader.

This is not to diss the casual reader, but a writer needs to read with a much more critical eye - even for pleasure - and when it becomes almost unconscious, I think you'll know at what level you and the author you're reading are writing at.

Now, without pointing fingers, I've read more than a half dozen books in the last 2 months, mainly on my iPad. The experience has varied from thorough enjoyment to wondering WTF the author was doing anyhow they managed to get the crap past an editor - and these are professionals I'mtalking about.

Again, I cannot and will not name names, but some of the stuff I've read over the past week or three wouldn't have passed my personal smell test for editorial professionalism. I'm always disappointed, as well, when an author I think I'll like literally phones the story in and completely glosses over key items such as characterization, story, scene, dialog, and even plot.

Still, they get published and paid money for their work and I literally spend years writing and crafting a work and get rejected over and over. I've literally had a work rejected for spelling blond "blonde".

Go figure.

Tastes may differ, but crap is still crap and some editorial staffs continue to put out books and pay authors for stories that are pure crap - poorly worded, poorly plotted, poorly edited, and poorly just about everything else.

Just slapping a great cover on a book doesn't mean it's a great book. A great cover and a crappy book equals a crappy book and the likelihood I'll never touch that author again.

Is Horror Dead?

2010-07-02T16:17:00.002-05:00

That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with stranger aeons, even Death may die.

H.P. Lovecraft

I firmly believe that this quote can be applied to horror in all its varied cloaks and disguises. True horror never really dies. It may lurk, recede from our collective consciousness from time to time, lying fallow, allowing fakes and charlatans to cloak themselves in its guise, and readying itself to come round again and blow our socks off.

It takes time for a horror author to craft a good horror story. It's not done in a day or a week or a month or even a year. True horror is a learned craft, like medicine or oil painting. It doesn't just happen and those who think they're writing "horror" all too often are writing something that touches upon horror, but is more realistically romance with trappings of things they think are horrible. Examples are Dark Shadows (the TV series, not the movies - the movie House of Dark Shadows is virtually a classic evil vampire movie full of vicious killer vampires and blood), Twilight, TruBlood, Kindred: The Embraced, and a few more. These programs and books attempt, rather openly, to disguise a classic romance soap opera by draping it with the trappings of a few hints of the horror genre. Note that all of the referenced works drape their offerings in vampirism as if vampires are the ultimate in horror.

They ain't.

In fact, Kindred: The Embraced and Twilight share so many features that I'd have a squad of lawyers chasing each other's tails if I was the designers of the original RPG or the author of the books (but we know which came first and who stole what from whom). But I digress...

Vampires are not horror anymore. They can be horrible, but the idea of vampires has so infested our cultural more's that we cannot even conceive of them as being all that horrible or "bad" anymore these days.

There are other things that affect our every day lives that are far more horrible.

The trick is to find and expand upon the genre and mythology in such a way so as to find a new way of presenting an ancient and undying idea and feeling to new readers.

We used to do it around a campfire. Then it was called a ghost story. Today we do it in books and in the theaters.

Usually badly.

Movie Review - The Zombie Diaries

2010-05-15T14:58:00.003-05:00

Well, I finally saw the movie The Zombie Diaries yesterday. The British newspaper The Guardian rated it as "one of the best of the genre", but before I give you my review, allow me to state that this is a spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert!

Spoiler alert!

You have been warned that "Here There Be Spoilers".

In my not so humble opinion this movie is far from "the best of the genre". In fact, the movie is choppy, poorly filmed, often confusing, and misdirected into what can, by the end, be considered a sadomasochistic exercise that wasted the viewer's valuable time. It is put together as a set of poorly- and confusingly-related video diaries which appear to have been filmed by an amateur cameraman attempting to splice together another Blair Witch Project. In many cases the film so closely resembles BWP that it is obvious that the director was extremely heavily influenced by that film (not that I cared much for BWP either).

The film begins with a brief montage of a military platoon cordoning off and clearing the outbuildings of a farm. A pair of guys in biological protection suits examine a body on the side of the road and remove something from it. The film then switches to 12 hours earlier and follows the apparent outbreak of some kind of viral plague in China and a TV film crew as they head out of London to visit a farm where the farmer has apparently been forced to slaughter his chickens and has lost his livelihood. Leaving London, one of the lead male characters is informed by his producer that something appears to have happened in New York City, but he cannot quite determine what yet. As the crew arrives at the farm they find it apparently deserted, but their car breaks down as they attempt to leave and, of course, the two female characters and the cameraman wander off to the also-apparently deserted village nearby in search of help as their cell phones are not working. Shortly thereafter they return to the farm where the other male character receives a phone call (Huh, what? The phones weren't working just a short time ago at the farm, right?) stating that something has happened in London, 3/4ths of the city have been blocked off, and the hospitals are filling with victims of the virus.

The crew breaks into the farmhouse where they find the body of the dead farmer and are attacked by his apparently zombified wife or daughter. They then return to the village where they encounter and escape several more zombies.

The film then switches to a month later where several survivors are on the road attempting to retrieve supplies. The cameraman is apparently the only survivor of the earlier TV crew. This group narrowly escapes another group of zombies (these are the slow kind) outside a food store, and return to their sanctuary. There is a choppy nighttime scene, intended to be using night vision cameras, as the survivors fight off a group of zombies attacking them across an open field. The survivors, instead of fighting from a fortified position, engage the zombies with their guns, at night, in the open field, with flashlights illuminating the key figures (can we say let's destroy one's night vision), and some of the fighting gets within hand-to-hand range.

As I recall, because at this point I'd probably had one beer too many which is the only way I managed to watch this entire piece of crap, the film switches again. This time, we have the same, sort of, group of survivors with one or two new members. Several of them are again on the road while one of their leaders has gone off by himself. The group is hunting supplies on foot, find a body, check it (but not thoroughly enough), and declare the thing dead. As they move on they are attacked by the zombie and one of them is bitten. They jump in their vehicle and attempt to escape, but run into another group of zombies and have an accident. One of the female characters is knocked unconscious and the three men with her, one of whom is bitten remember, leave her behind in the car where she is eaten alive. On foot, the men attempt to escape through the woods, but the injured man is unable to go on and they kill him as he sickens further (as they should have earlier). The survivors manage to make it back to their camp where there's a confrontation, shot at night using night vision, between the leaders.

The next morning, two of the group move out to investigate the far side of the forest that the zombies have been coming from (crossing that open field mentioned before). Here they find the deserted farm from earlier in the movie (surprise!) and move in to investigate. They find one of the female TV reporters from the earlier video diary, naked, zombified, and tied spread-eagle in a stall inside the barn (you can guess what she was being used for).

From this point on the film switches back to a short segment of two, apparently Middle Eastern, men who joined the group a short while before. There is a segment where one of the men is apparently torturing a zombie by cutting off his finger joints one by one which was filmed by the cameraman earlier. Discovered, the villains set about killing the male survivors and tying up the females for their own private usage.

By this time I am thoroughly hammered, not to mention extremely tired of this pile of crap so I'll spare you the final details. Let's just say that no one wins in the end.

Overall, this is a poor film, hardly among "the best in the genre" unless one completely fails to understand the zombie genre in the first place (which The Guardian's reviewer apparently did). It is badly-scripted, horribly acted, shabbily shot, and has a plot line so inconceivably imagined it boggles the mind how it ever managed to make it to DVD though, luckily, it was never shown in US theaters as near as I can tell. Oh, and the DVD cover shot which shows zombies wandering through London near Big Ben? It's never even seen in the movie. Even the movie Lifeforce had the decency to show us a few London locations being overrun by the alien vampires.

Two big thumb's down on The Zombie Diaries. At $7.50 that's 3 less beers I could have had this week (hmmm, a rating system based on the number of beers the movie cost me? That might just work... - a 3 beer movie (meaning you'd better have 3 beers in you before watching it)?).

What Makes A Story "Good"

2010-05-06T19:53:00.002-05:00

New writers and not a few more experienced writers often come against the dilemma of "Is my story any good?".

What constitutes "good"?

Well, a few people from over at the Analog forum have come up with a list of what makes a story "good".

If it makes you want to turn the page or read the next paragraph and it keeps going on like that, it's a good story.

If it makes you laugh somewhere along the way, it's a good story.

If it makes you think somewhere along the way, it's a good story.

If it makes you wake up in the middle of the night and reach for it, it's a good story.

If it keeps you awake long after your regular bedtime, it's a good story.

If you find yourself talking about it with your friends, it's a good story.

If you find yourself looking for it online or at the library or a book store, it's a good story.

If you find yourself re-reading it for the second or third or tenth time, it's a good story.

If it makes you lose yourself in it for an hour or a day or week and forget the cares of the day, it's a good story.

Marian added that "If it makes you remember it years later, it's a good story".

Conestoga 14 Report

2010-04-24T20:24:00.000-05:00

Well, a visit to Conestoga 14 this morning and this afternoon might (remember might) have paid off. I put a partial for Hatchings into the hands of Tyree Campbell, editor and publisher of Sam's Dot Publishing this morning and he asked to see Night On A Boat (my short Quentin Dallas vignette) in an email Monday.

This evening I met Travis Taylor and during our conversation he offered to give me a copy of his book on planetary defense (which sells on Amazon for $35). I turned the offer down, of course (stating that I appreciated it, however), but if I see him tomorrow morning I might just take him up on the offer (probably not; I'm far too polite for my own good sometimes).

I haven't seen S.M. Sterling yet, and naturally I expect a rejection from Mr. Campbell (even though he complimented me several times for knowing how to format a manuscript and to use commas) and after saying he wouldn't read the partial and synopsis during the Con when I left he was sitting there reading it anyway (he thought the idea of a secret government agency buried inside FEMA was a remarkably plausible one).

So, for what it's worth, and the remarkably short time I've actually had to spend at the convention, it was well worth the $35 registration fee. I just wish I could have stayed for the "meet & greets" and the parties tonight (I don't see too well at night these days (badly need new glasses) and I have a taillight and a rear blinker light out so driving at night is only done on as as-needed basis).

So, all-in-all, it looks like the July epub date for Hatchings is off the table for the moment (though I need to dive into that final, final, final edit again and git 'er done).

Covers

2010-04-21T12:28:00.005-05:00

Cover designs can be an important part of your book, possibly as important as the writing inside those covers. After all, what attracts you a book first aside from the name of the author? The cover, right?

Here's another cover design I'm toying with for the book,

The original cover, which was done by a friend over at Absolute Write is on another computer and I'll amend this post later to show it.

Here's the other cover design,

So, which one do you like best?

Rejection & Depression

2010-04-05T18:23:00.002-05:00

Every time, every time I submit something I'm absolutely sure it's going to be rejected. I'm a hack and I'm proud of my hackness. I've been told by a professional (associate) editor that it would be years before I was writing at a professional level.

But, I've had 3 short stories published by the same online 'zine and they're a pretty big venue (and very well-respected for the most part). Yes, they're a nonpaying venue, but do I give a rip? Nope. I'm gaining a reputation there.

Every single time I get something published out there wherever by whomever for whatever I'm putting my stories out there to entertain people and more people are getting to know me and my writing. That means that eventually people will start to watch for stuff I write - and maybe even buy it now and then.

Every time I get something published I think of that editor and say to myself "See what you missed, a$$hole? You tried to discourage me and to extinguish my career before it had even started. This is my payback for that."

Starting small and working up? I can live with that. Starting and stopping altogether? No way. I have been writing since I was in my pre-teens. I'm now past 50. I've published a buttload of non-fiction in various venues, but I've never had a story or novel professionally published. I might never see that happen. Does that mean I'm going to stop writing?

Not just "No", but "Hell, no!"

Just the mention that I'm going to self e-publish a book this July made an acquaintance of mine at my day job happy. He's as anxious about seeing the book come out as I am (which surprised the daylights out of me) and he's happier about it than I am because there is a great deal of trepidation I feel about this particular venture.

But he's going to tell 2 people and they;re going to tell 2 people and so on and so forth.

My writing's going to make someone else happy. It already has and that person hasn't even read the book yet.

Yours will too - if you stick to it long enough.

It's hard. It's dirty. It's cutthroat, and it's inefficient - but if you've got the bug for writing you cannot ever lay it down.

If you can walk away, you should. But think about those people you might disappoint, those people who will never be delighted just to hear that you have a story or book about to come out.

Can you walk away from them?

It is a wonderful thing to be able to inspire delight, anticipation, and yes, hunger, in another human being with your imagination.

So, when discouragement and depression, and rejection get you down, remember the guy I told you about above. He could be anyone you know. He could be a lot of people you know. You have stories to tell. Tell them and forget about everything else.

You may not be a master today, but who is? It takes years to become a master in any field. Be a hack instead and tell stories that delight and entertain and thrill.

Another Story To Be Published

2010-03-27T12:07:00.002-05:00

I just received word today that my story The Light Of An Oncoming Train is going to be published by Bewildering Stories. Both Don Webb and Bill Bowler (Managing Editor and Publisher) at BWS replied to my query from Thursday regarding the status of this story.

While BWS is a non-paying market, it is probably one of the best exposure markets going on the web today in y not so humble opinion. I've had 2 other stories published by BWS in the past (The Meadow and Knock On Wood) so I am justifiably proud of the stories that have appeared there. I think The Light Of An Oncoming Train is one of my best (and the Horror Hounds over at Absolute Write seem to think so as well) and it introduces a character, Quentin Dallas, who has become one of my favorites. I currently have 2 additional Quentin Dallas stories written and another 2 in the works so I expect you'll see more of him in the future.

You can visit BWS at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/

I'll be letting everyone know here and elsewhere when the story goes up on BWS's schedule.

Open Invite - eBook Reviews

2010-03-05T18:11:00.004-06:00

I'm sending out an open invite. Anyone who would like a review of their new ebook can email me a copy and I'll review it asap here on this blog.

I doubt I'll get a lot of hits initially, but I imagine I'll get one or two here and there. In addition, I cannot promise to do this indefinitely or as a full-time career (I do have a day job after all).

Regardless, if you send me a copy of your ebook to fotsgreg@aol.com I promise I'll do the best job I can to review your book here asap.

Here are the conditions, though (you knew I'd get to conditions eventually).

My reviews will be honest. They might even be harsh at times. I expect the authors to be adults and to not take offense at anything I say in my review of their work.

My review is my opinion. Please do not take offense. Opinions are like... and we've all got one and they pretty much all stink. Be professional about your writing and your responses. Please remember James D. MacDonald's advice "Never respond to a negative review". I do not exist and nothing I say about your writing is ever going to make you less of a writer or less of a person than something you say.

I'm not a professional reviewer, but I know what I like and what I don't. I'll review your ebook for free. I will not edit it and I will post my opinion of it here. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

Let the games begin.

All The Drama, None Of The Waiting

2010-01-30T19:16:00.002-06:00

Okay folks, I haven't posted here in quite some time because I've been working on other things not to mention working in real life. In the meantime I've managed to get quite a bit of work done on a couple of works in progress, signed up for a Google AdSense and AdWords, it made a couple of decisions regarding a couple of works that have been in progress for far too long.

As my previous post might have indicated, I've basically come to the decision that the current wait of a year or two to write a novel then a year or two to find an agent or publisher then a year or two to see that novel published is simply far too long for me to wait.

Yes, there are those who would say that this is just part of paying one's dues, but the simple fact is that for me a six-year wait to do anything more to get anything accomplished is pretty much intolerable. If I have to wait another six years to get a book published it's not going to happen. I will have moved on to other methods for getting the things I write out in print or some other method of getting them to the public.

Honestly, I think that waiting 12 weeks for a short story to be reviewed and decided upon as far, far too long. That book, once it even enters the publishing pipeline, that is upon acceptance, cannot be expected to be printed for about two years is almost as intolerable.

Now, I know the publishers have a lot of things on their plate and publishing is a time tolerant business. It's also monetarily expensive business and a massively expensive business, and I've got some experience doing editing and wading through slush piles so I don't envy editors at professional houses their jobs whatsoever.

I guess, however, for me, that some of the comments I've received from editors and publishers and agents and some of the things that I've seen regarding a person's chances of being published in the traditional fashion have me saying and thinking to myself that it is a complete waste of my time and effort to go through the traditional route. Now, I've been told that I am still years away from being professionally published (by an editor, naturally), but I don't choose to believe that sonofabitch. If what he said were true, it might be that I should wait those years to be professionally published, but quite frankly I don't have that many years of absolute faith in a system that is obviously badly broken already left in me. I'm 50 years old, an asthmatic, with bad knees and arthritis. I'm also an impatient curmudgeon who has very little patience with inefficiency and ineptitude.

So, I've decided that by the second quarter of this year I will release my first book as a self published e-book. I don't know who I'll be distributing it through yet, but I definitely will be distributing it off of this blog site for starters. some of you out there might begin to see ads for the book Hatchings run by Google AdWords soon. That would be mine.

Hopefully, some of you out there might even buy and enjoy the book which I will be pricing at much less than MacMillan's suggested retail price for an e-book starting at $15 were even Amazon's suggested retail price.

In the meantime, I'll be trying another experiment here on the blog in which I will be releasing chapters of my space opera novel Fire On The Suns, prior to what I hope will be a release for it sometime later on this year.

I've already got a good cover for Hatchings and a pretty damn good cover for Fire On The Suns as well. I don't think these are your typical e-books they've been edited, revised, and edited again and again, not just by me, but by other volunteers as well. While I don't expect these books to make or set a new standard in e-books, I do expect that they'll set a standard that you will come to enjoy in my writing and that you will enjoy. I have been told that they are both very Heinleinian in tone and, to me, that is a high honor. I hope you will find them enjoyable when they finally come out.

Look for Hatchings, as I said, by the second quarter of this year and Fire On The Suns by the fourth.

Online Novels

2009-12-31T18:14:00.002-06:00

There's been a lot of chatter in the last few years in regards to what's popularly called online novels. More than one writer has started blogging his novel and suddenly found his way to fame and fortune. A particular example that I can cite is the online novel 30 Days of Night. Obviously most people know by now that the author originally started his blog story posting chapters every day or every other day or so and this eventually grew into a novel that was published in print and eventually became a hit movie.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing the author of 30 Days of Night. Indeed, I'm considering following his example.

As most of you probably know I wrote a game about 15 or 20 years ago called Fire On The Suns. It's never been hugely popular, but it has had its fair share of fans over most of those 15 or 20 years.

About seven or eight years ago I actually started writing a novel based on a game within the FOTS universe that was one of the best games we've ever had as well as one of the most memorable games that most of the players has ever experienced. It was so memorable that it stayed with us for a long long time. At various points in time through the years I've worked off and on on this novel cutting it adding to it moving pieces of it around and variously editing it for wider consumption. Last year or the year before I decided it would probably be too embarrassing for me to seriously consider trying to publish this novel not because it's bad, but because it's a gaming novel and most of them generally end up pretty poor. to be honest there is also not huge market for gaming novels, unless of course you're one of those huge Halo, Warcraft, or other game related tie-ins.

Obviously my poor little game isn't one of those.

However, we came up with a pretty damn good storyline that combines over a dozen different alien races, all unique, a mechanically internally consistent universe, and thousands upon thousands of star systems. There's also ancient technology, ancient alien buried secrets, a race against time, lots of unique characters, conversations between characters that actually developed from conversations between players, and one hell of a lot more.

Given that this book will never see the light of day in a professional publishing environment, I'm seriously considering posting chapters of Fire On The Suns on this blog at least a weekly basis.

If anyone out there is reading this, I'd kind of like to see what you have to say in regards to reading it online space opera blog that has elements of science fiction, horror, real space physics, in a universe that is infinite and vastly expandable.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Naturally, I will intersperse postings that deal specifically with more intricate and detailed writing topics. I will not completely abandoned that topic in favor of a novel. I just thought it might be fun for some of you to read a bit more of what I write. Let me know what you think.

Thanks.

Starting Again

2009-12-14T16:48:00.004-06:00

I haven't been up here longer than anticipated because last November 4th my 15-year-old dog, whose name was Shadow, died suddenly.

It came as a tremendous shock since I had to rush him to the vet and then make the tremendously hard decision to put him down because he was in such tremendous pain. I don't know if any of you have ever heard a dog scream, but it is a terribly heart-wrenching sound. Since this boy had been with me since he was 13 weeks old, it was also gut-wrenching and a terribly difficult thing for me to do personally.

I've watched relatives die with less personal pain.

Having to put down a personal friend was a tremendously difficult decision.

So I had to take some time off and figure out who I was and where I was in my personal life.

Nevertheless, I'll be getting along with the business of this blog site in the very near future as time and situations allow. Naturally, I'll be drawing from my postings at Absolute Write as inspiration for my posts here.

I hope you all had nice Thanksgiving in that you're all going to have a Merry Christmas. Despite all the hardship and the heartache I too had a nice Thanksgiving and will have a Merry Christmas.

By the way I'm writing this using Dragon Naturally Speaking which is a wonderful program which I purchased today for about 40 bucks at WalMart where, as many of you know, I'm currently working as electronics department supervisor, what used to be known as a department manager.

DNS is a great program so far as I've seen so far and is a wonderful tool for writers and bloggers as well. There's a bit of training that has to be done for the program, but damn is it nice.

I have written the entirety of this blog, with the exception of a few edits, entirely using Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I hope you'll all try DNS and I hope you all have Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll see you all first of the year with new blog entries. Thanks for everyone who has been following this blog and will get back into things at the first of the year.

Outlining (Oh, The Horror!)

2009-10-14T17:28:00.001-05:00

As our esteemed Mr. Konrath points out there are different ways to outline and not everybody's way meets everbody else's needs.

In school, we're taught a very meticulous, detailed, and inflexible style for outlining. You end up with,

A)
A1
A1.1
A1.2
A2
etc.
Summary

The style is extremely rigid and, as I said, relatively inflexible as it was designed to analyze a story not design one.

Nevertheless, that methodology can work for some people and if it works for you, I'm all for it.

It is, I believe, one of the reasons why so many people hate and despise outlining so much.

However, there's another style of outlining that essentially uses the same methodology, but refrains from the rigidity and inflexibility of the formal style and that's the 3x5 index card method. Essentially, this method is a series of notes placed on 3x5 index cards which provide you with an expandable and easily reformattable style of outlining while still allowing you to provide yourself with a roadmap.

Uncle Jim explains it here...

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/...&postcount=219

Notice that the system is essentially a collection of short notes regarding your chapters, scenes, characters, etc., etc. You are not confined to using a specific numbering system and if you want to move scene 23.4 from chapter 23 and put it back in chapter 22 as scene 22.8, you're free to do so. Your characters, scenes, special notes to yourself, chapter excerpts, and more can all be added to the system at any time and the stack is essentially infinitely expandable.

It's also organized so that if you drop the file folder or box or stack of your cards it's easily reorganized unlike a folder full of notes or a raft of Post-Its and loose-leaf pages.

It's also enjoyable in that you're not stuck in a confined space doing a confined method-outline. You can mix and match virtually at will, insert new characters and scenes, etc, etc simply by adding or subtracting a new card.

You can even color code and index everything if that's what floats your boat, but the method will ultimately provide you with the roadmap you're going to need to finish a long work especially.

I've used techniques as simple as writing 1-sentence notes for the 3 major scenes I wanted to use in each chapter and as complex as the one Joe used for Bloody Mary. My first novel's first draft was essentially a 65k word outline of what my 7th draft turned out to be.

And there's another method - consider your 1st draft to be your outline for your work. You know it still needs work and the hard part is done once you've finished that 1st draft. Now you have the road map you need to really work the words and the story and find the real place you're trying to go with the story.

You can view Joe Konrath's outline for Bloody Mary at http://www.jakonrath.com/bloodyoutline.rtf

Outlining & Plotting

2009-10-13T17:17:00.001-05:00

Well, over at Absolute Write Water Cooler we had a drive-by example from one of my favorite authors (who will hopefully be lured back by the promised 6-pack dangling from the gallows here), let's go on a bit and talk about outlining or what some might call plotting.

Many authors will tell you they don't outline or plot. However, I think that in some way most authors do in some way. Some authors will write copious notes and details on every scene - to the extent that their notes sometimes equal or exceed the word count of their novel. Others will just scribble away writing a note on a Post-It and sticking it in a file somewhere. I've seen authors who had a dedicated file or notebook or box for every novel they had written and every single one of them was practically overflowing.

Whether you call it outlining or plotting or simply jotting notes about what you need to remember about your story the result is essentially the same. You're creating a roadmap for yourself about where you want the story to go and what you want to have happen along the way.

Think of starting a novel like starting a long road trip - they're essentially the same.

You wouldn't dream of starting out on a long road trip without a map, some idea of what your gas mileage is in your vehicle, where you might want and need to stop for gas, rest, sleep, food, coffee, see some sights, take a tour, meet some new and interesting people, etc., etc., would you? You need to know where you might need to turn, what exits to take, where you might have to go long periods without a gas station in sight, and what the weather is going to be like along the way.

Your story is a long road trip. If it's a short story, it;s still a road trip. If it's an 80 thousand word novel it's a much longer road trip. There are always going to be bumps in the road, gas stations you need to use, coffee to keep you going, and sights and things along the way to do. The longer the trip, the more important it is, to me at least, to know a lot of things right up front before I set out.

Last year I completed an 1800+ mile move from California to Oklahoma. For those that don;t know, that's the equivalent distance from Paris to Moscow. I did it with my dog in a 26-ft moving truck in 35 hours time (32 hours of that actual driving time). I also had several acquaintances drive my car that same distance. I had the mielage of the truck and the car down such that the amount of money needed for gas along the way was almost precisely accurate. I knew the sights I wanted to see along the way (but didn;t bother to stop at since I was anxious to get the trip over and done with once I was underway). I knew where the truck stops were. I knew where I might run into slowdowns due to traffic or speed traps.

You need to know the same things and more before you start out on the road trip that is your story. You do not want to end up a quarter or halfway or even three-fourths of the way through the story and suddenly lose focus, forget, or have to go away from the story and come back and be completely lost.

That's what an outline and a plot is for - it's a road map for your story.

It doesn;t have to be pretty. It doesn;t have to be organized.

It has to be accessible.

Tomorrow, I'll go over a few examples of how various authorities say the proper way to outline and plot is, but if you want to read about a good one, you can visit Joe Konrath's website and read his outline for Bloody Mary or you can search Uncle Jim's thread for the 3x5 index card technique.

Wrestling "The Bare Bones - The Mechanics of Horror Writing"

2009-09-29T16:40:00.002-05:00

A poster over at Absolute Write asked if horror had it's own grammar and syntax. Not only did this promt a response from me, but it also prompted an entire new thread which will have a weekly topic over there.

You can see the thread that started it here,

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156416

Here's my response to Cassiopeia,

-----
Cassie, Horror definitely has its own grammar and syntax, I think. However, that grammar and syntax is intended for purposes of holding the reader in suspense and not explaining what is going on to them. In this manner the grammar and syntax of horror is very different from science fiction and fantasy, some might even say simpler.

However, if it is simpler, then it is also more psychologically complex and complicated because the writer must somehow manage to engross the reader in his imaginary world and hold their attention, their suspension of disbelief, and their sense of apprehension and, 'fear' perhaps is the best word, in a much more careful manner. A mere turn of a phrase can serve to ruin an entire story if it is not handled with the utmost deftness. A single word or miswording can throw the reader entirely out of the psychological state they have placed themselves in when reading horror.

Horror writing, however, does not require the command of language that science fiction or literary novels do. The words themselves can be much simpler. There's little or no technobabble of bafflegab in good horror (there is enough in bad horror, of course). The best language is often the simplest. The best words are often the most straightforward just as the best actions by the characters are often the most straightforward.

If the characters speak like real people, it is much easier to get the reader to suspend his or her sense of disbelief and become engrossed in the story world in my opinion because the reader wants to become part of the story world. They want to be scared, to get that adrenaline rush as the hero faces up to the challenge presented by the story's monster (be it human or otherwise).

So, in order to have our characters speaking like real people, we have to use simpler grammar and syntax. That is not to say that real people are simple. But examine the way you use language in everyday conversations or when under stress. You won't find too many characters in a horror story saying "Cap'n, the warp convutranslationers are positively ionized and we'll all die if I don't depolarize the Gable-torsioners within the next fifteen seconds."

Instead, we have a character in a horror story saying "Cap'n, we're all going to die if I don't fix this right now!"
-----

Stay tuned. Our next topic is probably going to be about beginning a horror story. If you're reading this you're also invited over to AW to comment on the ongoing discussion.

2009-09-17T17:57:00.002-05:00

As nearly always, this post is a crosspost from a response to a poster over at Absolute Write.

The poster, named "showtimecircus" asked if any of us felt guilty about writing outside their chosen genre. My response follows,

-----
Showtime, Nope. Write what you want and need to write. Write what comes to you and how it comes to you. The muse is too fickle to not be listened to and the more you refuse to listen to her, no matter what genre she's telling you to write in, the less often youre going to hear from her.

Plus, writing (and reading) outside your genre is inevitably going to lead you to introduce some different elements into your writing. It's going to help build you as a writer and to introduce you to new elements of your creativity and writing ability. Introducing new elements into an old genre is practically the definition of "published writer". Too damned many people try to imitate this writer or that writer to the extent that they forget that this writer or that writer got themselves published by trying something new and different.

There's nothing wrong with introducing elements of detective fiction into science fiction (Glen Cook does it in fantasy). There's nothing wrong with introducing elements of science fiction into a thriller (Jon Land, Timothy Zahn, and Dean Koontz). There's nothing wrong with introducing elements of fantasy into police procedurals (Fred Saberhagen did it with An Old Friend of the Family and Dean Koontz did it with his Frankenstein series).

Reading Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Glen Cook lead me down a road to the creation of one of my favorite characters who happens to be a pretty hard-boiled private investigator who just happens to attract weird.

Do what you want to do. There are no rules and no binders saying you must write only in one genre (James D MacDonald writes in several just to name one example who lives here at AW).

Break the rules. Do it with originality and talent and the next thing you know we may be talking about you as a "published writer".
-----

Self-Confidence In Writing

2009-09-08T19:22:00.001-05:00

I find it disturbing how much self-doubt there is floating around these forums, while there are FEW writers who appear to have any positive feelings about their progress and achievements.

There are a few things about self-doubt that we can learn from Master Yoda.

The story-killer self doubt is.
Infects us all it does.
Continue only will those who prevail.

To a certain extent, writers (and Jedi Masters), have to learn to have a bit of arrogance about themselves and their writing. You have to believe in yourself and your art first and foremost. Self-doubt will kill your muse, your imagination, your ability to plant BIC, and ultimately will show in your stories.

Ignore it. Be arrogant about your writing and your ability. Be overconfident. Just don;t be so arrogant and overconfident that you alienate editors and agents with a lot of egotistical claptrap about how you're the best writer since Stephen King and you're going to welcome the agent or editor onboard your bandwagon to fame and fortune. That ain't gonna' happen.

Sooner or later, that massive ego, that arrogance and self-confidence, is going to come up hard against the cold, hard realities of the publishing industry and the writing life.

It's a cold, hard, dirty business filled with potholes, pitfalls, and bumps in the road.

If you do not have confidence in yourself and your writing, who will?

You are your own cheering section and you must continue to be your own cheering section.

There are a thousand venues out there for your stories. Who cares if one editor turned you down? Send it out to the next one and the next one and the next one and the ones after that until that puppy sells somewhere, anywhere. No one's going to like everything you write, but someone out there will like something that you write.

You have to persevere and overcome. You must maintain your self-confidence and that requires maintaining an egotistical and arrogant attitude about your writing.

That is not, however, to say that you should not listen to editors and agents who ask for revisions. They know their markets and publishers. Assuming a compliant and cooperative attitude with them is usually in your own best interests.

But you have to sell yourself to an agent and editor very nearly as much as you have to sell yourself to a prospective employer in an interview. Every time you query you should consider the query letter to be your interview introduction. It is. You get your foot in the door and then you sell yourself via your self-confidence, your assurance, and your "can do" attitude.

Most employers appreciate a little arrogance and self-confidence in their interviewee's. It shows that the interviewee has at least been seasoned a little.

An agent or editor will appreciate self-confidence in a writer.

Just don't overdue it and tell them you're going to make both of you rich beyond the dreams of avarice. They know better - and you should too.

Horror vs Gore-er

2009-08-16T10:42:00.004-05:00

I get a lot of the material for this blog, possibly the majority of it, from responding to comments over at Absolute Write's Water Cooler (www.absolutewrite.com/forums) so it shouldn't be surprising to anyone reading that this is another one.

The original poster, satyesu, wanted to know about some resources for someone who wanted to write what they called "horror as opposed to gore-er" and stated that they were coming at it from the perspective of someone who was more familiar with the movies than the books.

I responded as follows,
-----
Also, remember that the movies and the novels are often vastly different. Movies made of King's novels often have more gore in them than the books do because the producer and director know that movie audiences want visual "impact". They enhance certain scenes in ways that King never actually did to make the impact more visceral to the audience's experience.

There is a certain implied level of "gore" in the horror genre for novels, but it's not as extreme as it is in movies. Recent audience experience for horror movies certainly revolves almost completely around gore. Movies like Saw, Friday The 13th, The Haunting In Connecticut, The Ring, Final Destination, etc., etc. have gore and death as their central themes. Novels can be completely different. The threat of imminent death or doom in some fashion should be there, but you do not have to be extremely visceral about describing it. You also should not be afraid to directly confront it when it happens. Hinting around or dancing about showing us the actual gruesomeness can be considered a form of "cheating" and a reader will feel cheated for exactly that reason.

Audiences, and readers are your audience, pay good money for their movie and novel experiences. Don;t leave them feeling cheated. When it's necessary, slap them in the face with the blood and guts of a scene. Just don;t do it so often they become immune to the gore.

Gore is there for impact. Use it for that reason.

Psychologically, humans become immunized to the most horrible of atrocities rather quickly. We can, on occasion, walk through buckets of blood and miles of dismembered body parts without really even seeing it or feeling anything while we're on our trip. Just look at the denial that normal German citizens in towns surrounding camps like Buchenwald or Auschwitz had when they knew pretty darned well what the trainloads of people going into those camps and the empty trains coming out of them really meant. Just read about some soldier's experiences on battlefields. Read about Rwanda sometime.

Humans can be pretty darned thick when it comes to seeing things they really don't want to see or acknowledge.

The gist of this all is to use gore only when you have to - and then use it for the full force of impact you can get out of it and then go on. Don't do it too often or your readers will find themselves yawning when the next scene comes up.
-----

It's also important to remember that the poster stated they were coming at their objective from the viewpoint of one who was more familiar with the horror movie genre than the horror novel genre. I'm not entirely certain you can reasonably try to write horror without being familiar with the novel genre. An important quote goes "You have to read it in order to write it" and I believe that is entirely accurate.

Without being well-read in any genre you're likely to have a very difficult time trying to write it. I know some authors have stated that they do not read within their own genres and I believe this really shows in their writing within their genre. Without reading Lovecraft, how could you expect to write like Lovecraft (if you would want to - while I am a fan of Lovecraft, I am not much of a fan of his style or his mindset which was definitely a product of his upbringing and culture)? If you wanted to write about vampires, how could you write about them without being familiar with Brian Lumley, Bram Stoker, and even (shudder) Stephanie Meyers? If you wanted to write about evil clowns, haunted Buicks, and extradimensional entities run amok how could you do that without being familiar with the writings of Stephen King or Dean Koontz?

I'm of the opinion that you could not do it with any skill or justice.

To write it, you must read it.

Being familiar with the movies is not the key to writing the horror novel.

Now, with that said, I hold the opinion that the movies show writers a number of good techniques and methods that can be used to sharpen our writing and our viewpoints, but it's not by watching the movie as part of the regular audience or from the audience's POV.

No, the key, I think, is to watch the movie from the director's POV.

Look at how the scenes were staged, dressed, and managed. Look at the lighting. Look at where the actors were positioned at the start of the scenes. Watch the scenes play through as they were filmed and managed by using your "director's eye". Develop and use your director's eye to visualize your scenes in your mind and write them down such that when you read them back you can see the scene in your mind's eye just as the reader will be able to.

When you've got a scene that springs to life in the reader's eye, you've got a keeper an not something that's going to end up on the editor's cutting room floor.

Fight Scenes

2009-08-14T19:21:00.003-05:00

Once again, a poster over at AW asked a question and I'm posting the question & my response over here because I think it's important.

The question was - "Anyone have any suggestions on how to work out battle sequences and fight scenes? I'm trying to work out a scene which is going to involve several fighters and half the village as audience, and I'm trying to figure out ways to keep track of who's doing what to whom and where.

My first thought is to draw it on a piece of paper. My second is to get out my Dungeons and Dragons figurines and play it through like a melee. Once I understand what happens, I can figure out what I need to write."

(posted by TheIT)

My response was as follows,
-----
Fight scenes need to flow, but unfortunately most of them don't. A real life fight usually occurs in a blaze of action, pause, action, pause as the combatants struggle to gain the upper hand on one another, etc. That really doesn't work in a story or novel because the pauses will have the reader wondering what happened in between the blazes of action and wandering off to do something other than turning the page.

So a fight scene has to flow smoothly.

That's not to say that there are not or will not be pauses within a fight scene. They just have to be strategically placed.

In real life, a fight is usually over in a matter of seconds. In a novel, the fight can go on for pages and minutes, at least, of reading. The trick is to translate what happens in real life into something that flows smoothly in the story. I'm currently reading Monster Hunters International by Larry Correia (Baen Books). The book opens somewhat slowly, but quickly develops into a fight scene which flows so quickly and naturally that I found myself wondering what had happened when it was over and having to go back and reread sections trying to figure out where I had missed the moves. It wasn't that the action was choppy or the writing was choppy, it was that the scene flowed.

D&D action doesn't flow. It isn't normal or real. However, using the figures to stage manage the action is something that can be easily done (you could do it with pennies and a hand-drawn map for all that matter). When you know that character A can move here and perform this action while character B is involved doing something else, you start to have the sequence for how the action must flow. You also begin to be able to see why character B might not be distracted by something else or where he might be distracted by something else that allows character A to make his move.

I think the Star Wars movies are another good area to watch for how to choreograph action scenes, especially between individual characters. The action flows between the characters because the director knows it must if the action is to be believable and realistic even when it's not even semi-realistic.

Use a "director's eye". Set your stage, position your characters, and have them move around the scene performing their actions. You don't need a map and a set of fancy figurines. You can see all this in your mind.

Flow is what happens when the scene runs naturally and without anything seeming out of place or silly (like "Why didn't Charlie hose the hallway that the Master Vampire charged down with the M60 in his hands before the Master Vampire got to him and tore the team to shreds?").

You're the director. You get to set the scenery, the stage, and position the actors - and if it doesn;t work the first time or the thirtieth time, it doesn;t cost you anything to run the scene a thousand times or more until it flows.
-----

BTW, I'm currently reading Monster Hunters International as stated above, but I just finished The Strain one of the authors of which is Guillermo del Toror. It's the first part of a trilogy and has an interesting take on the vampire legend and a plague upon Manhattan.

While it is reminiscent of a book a few years ago by Craig Skipp & John Spector titled The Light At The End (as I recall) and another that dealt with a plague of vampires overrunning Los Angeles whose title and author I don't currently recall (The Thirst?), the premise is entertaining and the follow-on books will be out in 2010 and 2011.

I did have a few problems with The Strain, the main one being that it is written by 2 authors who obviously didn;t see eye-to-eye on several things. There appeared to be a constant editorial argument occurring that raised it's head on several levels, the main one being regarding how much information to convey to the reader and when. In all too many cases the story is broken by a paragraph or more of unnecessary info-dumping which could just as easily have been relayed to the reader through casual conversation between the characters.

Regardless, it was a good book for the most part and I'll likely pick up the next two when they come out - but I am glad it was 20% off at B&N and I got an extra 10% due to my membership card.

Motivation

2009-08-01T09:36:00.003-05:00

Another response to a post over at Absolute Write regarding "motivation",

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You want or need motivation? Read my blog (well, the posts prior to the last 2 or 3) and you'll find motivation (I hope to provide more motivation there in the near future).

You want motivation? Tell one of us that you do and we'll be more than happy to provide you with enough to get going again.

In fact, most of us will kick your ass until you produce something.

None of us are ashamed we write horror. None of us are Stephen King either. King won the frakking lottery, but he did it the same way everyone else does - by hard work, perseverance, learning his craft, telling a damned good story, and lucking in.

Yeah, guess what? King got lucky. He tells you so in his book On Writing.

But he got lucky because he perservered, stuck with it, and learned how to tell a story that readers wanted to read (and publishers wanted to buy).

There's no one here who cannot tell a damned fine story and who is not, in my mind, the equal of King in their particular method of storytelling.

It only takes 1 person in the publishing industry to believe in you and your career can be "made".

It only takes 1 person in the writing profession to believe in you, but that person has to be you, first and foremost, but guess what? You're not the only person who believes in you here. That's what we're here for - to show you that fellow writers believe in you and what you're writing and to help you improve and learn and perfect your craft.
-----

A couple of people responded and thanked me for posting this response over there so I figured I'd share it since I haven't blogged in awhile (4 or 5 days).

Motivation can be as simple as planting your butt in a chair, powering up the old computer, and pulling up whatever file you've been working on and going to work. For some people though, that's not as simple. Writers find all kinds of ways to avoid writing and a lot of use crutches to get themselves to write. For me, it's usually as simple as the old BIC method.

I really am serious though when I say "go to your fellow writers" if you need motivation. Once someone knows you're working on something they'll start to pester you about it until you absolutely have to sit back down and get back to work.

I certainly will.

So, if you need some motivation, come here, comment, or send me an email. I promise you I'll do everything in my power short of showing up on your doorstep to get you writing again.

Remember, a pro is an amateur who didn't quit.

Back Among The Gainfully Employed

2009-07-26T11:24:00.003-05:00

After a 3 month (almost to the day) period of unemployment I managed to land a new day job as Lead Electronics Department Supervisor III at a new WalMart superstore that's still under construction. My official hire date was the 23rd of this month and I spent Thursday and Friday in orientation and staring a computer screen going through training modules.

I spent the last 5 out of 6 years working in the security field as you might know if you'd read some of my earlier posts, but my last security gig was incredibly boring and I just had to get out. It was a dead-end. Wages had been frozen at my site for at least a year with the signing of a new 5-year contract which could, in theory, have frozen wages for the entire length of the contract (by my calculations the contract was worth $3-5 million to the company I worked for). This was also for one of the biggest companies in Oklahoma (the outfit we did security for) and for one of the biggest security firms in the United States (the company that I actually worked for). Both of them are around a billion-dollar-a-year companies so I really thought they might have been able to afford a paltry $0.50-1.00 per year for the folks tasked with guarding their stuff.

In addition, I wanted to get out into a more professional and more white-collar field. My background has pretty much always been in the white-collar and professional areas except for when I was working security. I loved my job at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and felt there was always a way ahead there (we were actively encouraged to apply for jobs at the Lab which we thought we might be qualified for), but that ended when a new company took over and started making changes and replacing the "old guard" with their own people.

So, I'm learning how to be a WalMart department supervisor and am on a management professional employment track. It certainly looks like it's going to be a challenging period ahead of me and I'm looking forward to it.

The most important part of this new day job is the regular paycheck and the benefits. I'm not getting any younger after all and those benefits look awfully good (as does that regular paycheck). Unemployment in a downturned economy is never a good experience, but I count myself lucky that my own period of unemployment only lasted 90 days (and part of that time I made some money on the side doing business paperwork for a friend who runs a roofing company here).

The next few weeks look like they're going to be interesting and intensive as we're already about 3 weeks behind in getting the store up and running.

I like a challenge. I'm looking forward to this one.

First Moon Landing Anniversary

2009-07-20T17:07:00.003-05:00

Forty years ago today men first walked on the moon. We spent billions of dollars and more than a few lives to get there. We haven't gone back since 1975.

It's time to go back.

Today, I'm saluting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin for that momentous achievement.

Today, I'm screaming at my government to get their freakin' head outta' their collective as$.

Note: Note a word out of the President or the Veep or the Congress about the anniversary. All they want to talk about is health care reform (and the CBO estimates it's going to increase the top income tax bracket to 57% in some states - we fought a revolution over substantially less than that).

Go here,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071702019.html

Read this article before it's too late.

NASA get's $16-20 billion per year. The Pentagon has a $534 billion budget. They probably waste $16-20 billion every year. Lord knows Congress sure as hell does. I won't even talk about the waste in various welfare programs or the Department of (Not) Education.

We need a new direction in this country's attitude towards exploration, but we're not going to get it from this administration. They have their heads buried in the sand and are willing to give other countries "the high ground".

YA (Young Adult) Horror

2009-07-18T12:45:00.002-05:00

Another post response over on AW references young adult (YA) horror and asks if it's still popular. My response follows,
-----
YA is hot and it's going to stay hot for quite awhile I predict.

Harry Potter produced an entire generation of young readers who are still craving their next reading experience. Stephanie Meyers produced another generation I believe. These people are mostly still young, but they're going to grow up remembering those great old stories they used to read and they're going to want more.

Some of them are going to want to continue to read at the Harry Potter or Twilight level, but some of them will grow out of that (I'm not saying that's wrong - bear with me) and will eventually crave more adult and literate writing.

The estimated reading level of most of the population of the United States is approximately 6th grade. That's the comprehension level and the level at which major newspapers now aim for their articles (USA Today, for example, openly proclaimed that's where it was aiming a few years ago). So, yes, YA is going to remain popular.

YA does not aspire to literary writing. It doesn't need to. YA sells and it sells HOT. Even such big names as James Patterson are breaking into YA with novels because that's where the money is right now and where it's going to continue to be for some time to come.

YA sells because it entertains on a wide level and reaches a far wider audience than simply the youth of our culture. It reaches teens, young adolescents, and adults alike through its sheer ability to keep people entertained. Parents like to know what their kids are reading. Brothers and sisters like to know what their siblings are reading. Teachers need to know what their classrooms are interested in.

It's not a disease, it's an opportunity.

More On Horror Writing

2009-07-18T12:43:00.001-05:00

I went over and read the blog post that the AW poster referred to yesterday and, quite frankly, I don't know precisely what the guy (Robert Dunbar) is bitching about. Maybe I'm outing him here, but he seems to be saying that horror writing should aspire to more literary traditions, but he makes a point of stating that his last book "ate" his life with TV and radio show interviews, readings, and more.

He does make a point of stating that he believes many horror writers are aiming at the gutter, what he calls "vampire bodice rippers, torture porn, and zombie sitcoms" and that he believes the critics of his book probably thought they were picking up a more traditional sort of horror novel and then found something completely different.

Now, I haven't read Dunbar's book, but it sounds interesting, being based on the legends of the Jersey Devil, but if he's being successful, and he obviously is, I don't see the need for him to bitch overly much. It's a little like the pot calling the kettle black. His main point seems to be that the vampire bodice rippers, torture porn, and zombie sitcoms are bringing literate works like his own and the entire genre down into a "gutter" level where he gets no respect.

Dude, stop being so full of yourself.

Horror should be fun, first and foremost. People like to be scared. Yeah, some authors have gotten rich writing at a particular level (Dunbar sees it as YA at best), but so what? They're not taking food from your plate or money out of your pocket so far as I can see. Who really cares if a lot of people out there are trying to write like Stephanie Meyers, Laurell Hamilton, or Max Brooks? Those people, by and large, are going to fall by the wayside with the next wave of whatever that occurs when someone produces a really good horror novel that finally gets published (I'd bet it's going to be someone here, eventually).

The real beef seems to be that of "literate" horror vs "YA" horror.

Well, to be honest, that's a false argument. All horror is, to some extent, YA by its very nature. People love to be scared. They love to feel like the little kid scared of what's under the bed or hiding in the closet or opening the attic door. It does not require great "literatary" ability to write a horror novel. That's been well-proven by the current wave of popularity of "vampire bodice rippers". Nobody's going to say that Stephanie Meyers is a great writer, but guess what - she sells books! Nobody's going to say that World War Z is the Frankenstein of its day, but guess what - I liked it!

It's not about literature, it's about entertainment.

Entertainment sells books and that's the bottom line with publishers and authors. That's the way publishers make their living and that's the way authors get paid.

It's not about literature, it's about entertainment.

My books aren't going to receive any awards for their literary contributions to society, but I hope, one day, to sell a few books and get paid. That's my bottom line. Getting paid means I have to entertain and in order to entertain I have to tell a ripping good story that not only catches a reader's imagination, it must first go through a whole series of agents, editors, and publishers before those readers will ever even see it.

So, if you don't like a particular book or a series or even a particular author, it seems to me that rather than bitching about the genre you write in and despairing about its literary value you might try upholding and motivating new authors in the genre to do the best they can and get themselves published. Nobody's holding anyone hostage to any genre. If you don't like the genre you're writing in, get out. Stop writing or try telling a different type of story.

As I said yesterday, it is within the capability of anyone writing today to produce a work that has the potential to change an entire genre.

All you have to do is stop bitching about everybody else and do it.

Horror Writing - A Waste of Time?

2009-07-17T14:26:00.003-05:00

Once again, a poster over at Absolute Write inspires a comment there that deserves a blog posting here.

The poster asked if, considering the doldrums that the horror genre currently appears to be in, if we were all wasting out time writing this stuff. The following is my response,

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In a word, No, you're not wasting your time.

First of all, writing is a creative outlet for those of us who perform it. In a sense, we can be likened to actors on a stage only the stage is our mind and the actors are our conscious and subconscious minds. The metaphor can also be likened to a director directing a stage play as well as that of the producer (actually, the producer might be better likened to the publisher, the director the agent and editors, but I'm getting away from the point), but in reality, we're more like the actors themselves. We see the stories in our imagination and we play them out in our minds. We invent the situations, set the stage, choreograph the moves, write the play, build the props, set the lighting, and raise the curtain. We are the whole kit-and-kaboodle of the acting genre right down to the folks who make and fetch the coffee and donuts. We write the stuff that others make work. Those others are our audience and we owe it to our audience to work at mastering our craft, hone our performances, and set the stage properly for the scenes they're about to witness.

That's the writer's job.

A writer never wastes their time writing. Never. Every minute spent writing is a minute spent creating something that, even if no one else ever reads it, helps us to define our own lives, our own purpose in the greater scheme of things. If someone else does happen to read it, we have provided a valuable service by entertaining that person, boring them to tears, or pissing them off. Ultimately, we've made that person feel something - and by the simple act of making ourselves and them feel, we have done something that is good.

The horror genre may be experiencing some doldrums these days, but horror has gone through doldrums before and it's always come back roaring out of the darkness to scare the audience with something new and frightening. It's good because people, for some strange reason, always like to be scared. From the times when we sat around a fire listening to the creatures scream and prowl outside the cave we've been entertained and frightened by stories. The fear of the unknown and that little screaming reptile in the backs of our minds is still there, buried inside us, waiting for something to leap in the cave's mouth and drag one of us off screaming into the darkness.

We love it. We have to have it. It's like a drug.

There's a metaphor there too that it would pay us to take heed of. Horror and fright is like a drug. If there's too much of one kind of horror or fright that's inundating our senses we quickly become used to it. It doesn't give us the same sort of high any more. We're currently inundated with frightening scenes in our real world - economic collapse, terrorism, the fear of losing our jobs, murder, rape, violence rising seemingly all around us. So, the horror that used to scare us doesn't seem so frightening anymore. We need more, more powerful, different types of scares.

That's part of our job as horror writers too, to come up with new ways of telling tales that frighten people, that touch them and put them in touch with their emotions, to create that emotional reaction in our readers, our audience, and in ourselves.

That does not mean going with the flow. Going with the flow is part of what's wrong with today's horror. There are too many people trying to write like King, or Keene, or Lumley, or Lovecraft. There are too many stories like Saw, I Know What You Did, Friday The 13th, etc., etc., ad nauseum. It's gotten old. It's not even that scary anymore. People have complained that vampires aren't scary anymore, that zombies are old hat, that crazed psychopathic axe-wielders are things of the past.

So, as a horror writer, it's part of our job to come up with new variations on old themes.

They say that every story that can be told has been told, but people still keep buying books, still keep flocking to see movies, so there must be something in all those old, often-told stories that keeps people coming back to them to read and re-read, to buy tickets, and to sit in those chairs and watch as the curtain goes up.

You never waste your time writing. You might waste someone else's time reading what you wrote, but that's their decision, not yours.

You, and that means every writer out there, has the opportunity and the ability to redefine an entire genre.

All you have to do is figure out how and then commit to doing it.

The Meadow

2009-07-13T18:16:00.003-05:00

I've been contemplating posting this story for some time now, but what the hell. It was originally published by Bewildering Stories (www.bws.com), but has long since reverted to me.

It's crude, primitive, and sorely in need of a drastic rewrite, but I loved this story when I first wrote it. As a little bit of background, I initially conceived the story while standing traffic duty at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The gate officer said something that I found funny and I responded to her with "Well, what if the grass had teeth?". I then invoked a bunny that the grass subsequently ate. She was shocked and amused. That inspired the following story...

-----

THE MEADOW

The meadow was idyllic in its unspoiled grace. Sunlight danced off the green, knee-high grass. Pollen dusted the meadow, giving it a misty quality. A narrow, two-lane dirt path cut across the grass between the groves of woods surrounding it on all sides. The buzz of insects and the twittering of birds broke the early morning silence. The trees sighed in a light breeze. The trudge of shoes through dry leaves silenced the woods. The meadow drew silent and seemed to hold its breath as small voices disturbed its revery.

“Hey! Look there,” said Bobby Waislow. He and his brother stopped at the end of the path through the woods. They stood at the edge of the trees, looking out onto the sunlit meadow that opened on the top of the hill.

“What?” Tommy asked. He started to unsling the .22 rifle he carried on his shoulder like he had seen soldiers do.

“Shhh,” Bobby whispered. “You’ll scare it away.”

“What?” Tommy asked again. He looked down the path where his little was pointing.

“A bunny rabbit. Right there on the path,” Bobby said. He voice carried his excitement to his brother.

“Shucks, Bobby. It’s just a gosh darned rabbit,” Tommy said. He felt a shivering thrill in the freedom to cuss out of earshot of his father. The thought of the backhand his mother would have given him on hearing him speak such words did not escape him either.

“But it’s so cute…”

“It’ll look better with one of its feet hanging from my keychain.”

“No, you can’t shoot it!”

“Why the heck not?”

“’Cause it’s so cute. But look, it’s acting all weird. Maybe it’s sick or something?”

Tommy looked at the rabbit. He admitted that it was acting strangely.

The rabbit seemed frozen to one of the two dirt paths through the grass. It faced the boys, its nose twitching in the air, its hind quarters quivering. Its short white tail was raised in the air, a clear sign of fear. Tommy could see nothing that might have frightened the rabbit, but it was frozen in place, cringing in the dirt, as far away from the grass as it could get.

“Why’s it doing that, Tommy? Maybe it’s sick or something?” Bobby asked. “Why’s it just sitting there?”

“Shucks, Bobby, I don’t know,” Tommy said. He shouldered his rifle, pointing it at the rabbit. He took another few steps out onto the path, coming out from under the leafy branches of the woods.

The rabbit bolted, no longer able to contain its fear. It darted off the path into the taller grass. It leaped, seemed to hang in mid-air for a heartbeat as if struck by a snake, then crashed to earth, thrashing. It rolled, giving voice to a thin high-pitched wail that sent shivers down Tommy’s spine. He heard agony in the animal’s scream. Long strands and blades of grass wrapped themselves around the rabbit as it struggled. As Tommy and his little brother watched, the rabbit was wrapped in blade after blade until all that was left was a round, green ball lying in the meadow.

Without warning, the ball erupted in a spray of red and brown. A fine mist of blood sprayed the surrounding grass and dirt, hanging in the suddenly-still air for seconds. The ball of grass collapsed in on itself then the grass begn to release its hold, folding back, untangling and standing erect once again. The grass seemed to sigh in the light breeze that came up again, standing tall and green in the morning sun.

“Tommy, the grass ate the bunny rabbit,” Bobby whispered. Tears began to run down his ten-year old face.

Tommy stood, trying to find his voice. His mind raced. He thought of the long walk home, the tall expanse of grass that stretched around and along the path through the fields behind them. The fields had seemed warm and friendly until now.

The grass ate the bunny, he thought. The grass ate the gosh darned bunny! How could the grass eat the bunny? Grass doesn’t have teeth! He realized he had dropped his rifle in the dirt of the path.

Tommy looked at Bobby. His little brother stood, looking up at him, tears streaking his dirty face. Bobby’s blond hair ruffled in the breeze. It always seemed to be messed up, no matter how many times Bobby combed it. He started to cry. Tommy wanted to slap him to yell at him, to tell his little brother to grow up. He held his hand, kept his temper. He felt like he was about to wet his pants. He looked up from Bobby, turning his eyes back to the meadow and the long grass, sighing in the breeze.

Was the grass leaning towards them? What’s that noise it’s making? Is it all leaning just a little bit towards us? Tommy thought. Against the wind?

Tommy looked over his shoulder, back along their path to the woods.

It’s going to be a long run back home, he thought. He looked back at Bobby, picked his rifle up from the dirt. He smiled at his little brother. He knew just how he was going to distract the thing in the grass long enough for him to make it home.

The grass began to sigh, a soft, hissing whisper of sound that echoed across the meadow as the shot rang out and the screaming started.

-----

There's actually another version of this story that was heavily modified. I might put that up tomorrow.

Horror Writing & Writers

2009-07-07T17:25:00.003-05:00

A friend of mine over at Absolute Write Water Cooler made the following comment to which I responded,

dgrintalis wrote, I think people sometimes are ashamed they write horror, as if by writing dark things, they are somehow less of a writer.

It's quite possible that some people are, were, or used to be. Horror was, for awhile, the dark cousin of scifi or fantasy that was kept locked in a cage in the basement that everyone heard the cries from late at night, but no one talked about. King and others like John Saul, Peter Straub, V.C. Andrews, and a few more really dragged horror fiction kicking and screaming out into the bright light of day where, prior to the advent of these writers, it had really languished as something that only seriously disturbed people wrote and normal people only admitted to reading as a kid in Weird Tales or Vampirella (and we all know why we boys were reading that mag, right?), or Blood of Dracula (this may not be the right title, but it was actually a pretty darned good B&W comic in its time), or something.

I think one of the things that really kicked off the whole horror craze of the 1980s-90s was the success of the movie The Exorcist. Only rarely before had audiences been so deluged with a sort of "in your face" kind of horror and the kind of images that did not hesitate to offend, to really put you right there in the room with a peasoup vomiting, demon-ridden, head-twisting little abomination and the horrors of demonic possession. It was unheard of at the time. Hollywood discovered that the audience craved the thrill and demanded more and more.

What we got was splatter-film after splatter-film. Today, the audiences laugh when Jason comes out with his machete and butchers the hapless, stupid college students trying to get some up at the lake. I've actually heard people cheer the murderer on because the characters/victims in some movies are so freaking stupid. Theres a even a commercial that openly pans a movie that shows a character going down into a darkened basement against the viewer's judgement "Girl, do not go down into that basement!"

Today, as horror writers, thriller writers, SF writers, etc., etc., we have to be smarter than the average Hollywood script writer because our audience today knows a helluva' lot more than they used to. They know they speak Farsi in Iran, they know there's these things called cell phones that people can use to call for help or which can be used to locate them in an emergency. They know that going down into a dark basement on a stormy night when the lights have suddenly gone out without a flashlight (and maybe a weapon) is just stupid.

Today, we have to be smarter than the average bear, I mean reader. The audience wants more than just (sub)standard slasher-film drek and schlock from our fiction writing.

Yes, they still want to be scared, they still want to be involved in the chase, but they want smarter characters, braver characters, more ingenious characters, more diabolical plots, more evil villains, and more insidious and devious plans than just "kill everything that moves or looks like it's going to get some".

Oh, look - I just wrote my blog for today, I think.

Sorry...

John Scalzi Scolds The Big Three...

2009-07-04T10:35:00.002-05:00

...(Asimov's, Analog & F&SF) for resisting email submission. Go thou here and read,

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/07/03/and-yes-in-fact-while-were-on-the-subject-of-the-big-three/

I believe Scalzi makes some excellent points. I submitted a story to F&SF a couple months ago and received the rejection in about 33 days. Now, that's amazing turnaround time for a print publication, but seeing as I've received a rejection last week from GUD in something under a week (in fact it was something like 2 or 3 days; I'm thinking the likeliest reason for the rejection was that it was submitted on the last day of their reading period and they did, in fact, not read the story, but rejected it as they already had too many other submissions they needed to go through, but that's merely a suspicion), one has to wonder why the Big Three haven't gotten into the act of accepting email submissions. Scalzi's points are all dead-on accurate in my opinion.

Now, I am regular over on the Analog forums and occasionally visit the F&SF and Asimov forums as well. We've had some discussions regarding this, particularly over on the F&SF forums. Scalzi's a participant, as I recall, over at F&SF too and most of his points can be lifted directly from F&SF's webpage regarding electronic submissions (http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/eitems.htm), but they don't make much sense to me except for the one regarding not liking to read a document onscreen (more on that in a minute).

The webpage states that it would take them approximately 2 hours each day just to download the submissions. Considering that my home desktop connection is cooking along at 100 Mbps and a 400-page Word document is about 800 kb (1.68 MB in rtf format), that document should download in something considerably less than a few seconds by my calculations. In my opinion, this argument doesn't hold water unless the magazine is receiving thousands of submissions every single day.

The webpage states that the risk of computer viruses is higher if they accept electronic submissions. My answer to that is also simple - get some good virus protection software, multiply-redundant layers of protection, or as Scalzi suggests, simply require the submission to be pasted into the body of an email (there are potential problems with this using Word, however, but I get around that by cutting & pasting and then saving the document in Notepad) use a form submission system such as PseudoPod does or as a special submission message like Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show does. Running a computer of any type today without some kind of virus protection is simply inexcusable and begging for attack. Several of the major players in the email markets today also have auto-scanners built into their email software (I know Yahoo mail has this, for example).

F&SF states that the editor doesn't like reading on the computer screen. Well, what the heck does he think the people submitting to his magazine are doing every single day for hour upon hour? I'd bet he has a Kindle or a Palm or some other type of PDA. How's he like reading that? My Palm is very convenient to read with. I can even edit documents right on screen using it. The newer iPhones and Blackberries all have easy-to-read screens and built-in editing tools.

They say that's it's inconvenient to pass an electronic document around in their their office. Does the office need a computer or networking update? My Palm, my Blackberry, and any of my computers will send data to my computer, my Blackberry, or my Palm with at most a few keystrokes. My desktop and my 2 laptops and my mother's laptop can all share documents in the blink of an eye on my home network. Hire an intern to network your office machines and teach your office personnel how to use your devices more efficiently. That's my solution for your inconvenient problem.

The webpage states that printing out the submissions would use a ream or more of paper a day. Okay, that one I can buy, but it does draw into question the statement that downloading the documents would require 2 hours a day. A ream of paper is 500 sheets. A typical 5 thousand word story runs about 20 pages (double-spaced in 12-pt Courier New). So, a ream of paper should net you around 20-25 stories printed out. A good Brother laser printer ran me $200. A ream of paper (good stuff, 24-lb, 98 brightness) costs me $3 at WalMart. I can buy it cheaper in bulk with a case of 10 reams running $25-30. The Brother laser cartridge is rated at a duty cycle of around 1500 pages for $50. That's 3 reams or somewhere around 60-75 stories printed per cartridge - and that's if you bother to print out everything. That seems like a pretty trivial cost to me. By the way, that laser printer spits out 17 pages per minute so it won;t take much time to print an entire month's worth of submissions.

Finally, the F&SF webpage states that the editor has found it much easier to lose electronic documents than paper ones. I find this preposterous on the face and nearly a blatant admission that the editor is either extremely disorganized or extremely ignorant of the way email and electronic submissions work. I have documents online with AOL (my primary email client) that go back years. I keep my emails separated in specific folders and route them to those various folders with a click of my mouse. Simple, easy, cheap, and searchable if you need to go back and find something from several weeks to months to years ago. I have a 750 GB MyBook standalone hard draive which is used to store important documents. I have a CD and a DVD burner with which to store documents offsite. I have a 2GB and an 8 GB thumbdrive and several 1GB SDRAM chips to move documents around from my computers to my Palm and vice versa. Backup documents are cheap, easy, flexible, and extremely convenient to manage. I keep an Excel file that tracks my submissions and which could easily be jiggered to manage submissions received by F&SF. I'll send them a copy for free if they'd like to see it.

Here's the way I see it - the editors of the Big Three, while they champion science fiction and fantasy - have been left in the dust by modern technology. They don't understand how it can be used to make their lives easier and their submission/rejection processes far more convenient and flexible. As Scalzi states, they seem to be stuck in the 1970s with slow machines, slow connections, slow technology, slow mindsets, and they're resisting being brought into the 21st Century kicking and screaming.

Now, for what it's worth, F&SF turns around its slushpile amazingly fast and I'll submit to them again, but the statements being made on their webpage regarding why they do not accept electronic submissions are either blatantly false or show an amazing degree of unsophistication with modern technology.

I'd be happy to help them at least move into the 1990s if they'd like.

Publish America

2009-07-03T10:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had a little run-in with an individual over on the Absolute Write Horror forum who was advertising for a horror writer to write a third novella for an anthology he and another writer are putting together. I checked out this person's blogsite and noted to him that there were several typos and misusages in the first couple of paragraphs.

Needless to say, while I might have been a little more tactful (tact hasn't always been my strong suit), the poster became a wee bit upset with me and sent me a nastygram that essentially boiled down to "How dare you criticize me. I'm a published author".

Now, this didn't make me think much of the person's ability to perform professionally in a collaboration so I checked him out a little further. It turns out that his publishing credits are largely through an outfit called Publish America and a couple or three of what appear to be non-paying online 'zines, only one of which is even mentioned on Ralan's Webstravaganza and which is long dead.

Now, as anyone who is even reasonably connected with the professional writing field should know, Publish America is a scam outfit that has been involved in numerous lawsuits involving its editorial practices and the way its business model operates. Essentially, PA offers to publish your book - for a price - and it's usually a steep price. They hold absolutely no legitimacy as professional book publishers. Their books are overpriced, undermarketed (if they're marketed at all it's at the author's expense), and of extremely low quality. No legitimate brick & mortar bookstore stocks PA books.

PA charges their authors to produce their books. They pay a token $1 advance when and if they pay an advance at all. They have a habit of going after anyone who criticizes them in any manner (and I'll probably get hit for posting this, but there's nothing they can get out of me and this is free speech so "What the hey") and of sending their authors to harass people who criticize them. PA also has the habit of trying to lure more and more new writers to their side of the playing field stating that they're leveling it for everyone by challenging the business model of the bigger and more professional publishers.

Yog's Law, coined by James D. MacDonald, states "Money should flow toward the author". PA reverses this process. With them, money flows toward the publisher, right out of the author's pockets. The author receives a crappy product, no marketing services, no ability to get their work into legitimate bookstores or online markets (for the most part - Amazon does advertise some PA books for some silly reason, probably profit-based), and no legitimate publishing credit.

Essentially, PA hurts mainstream/legitimate publishing by convincing gullible or unknowing writers to spend tons of their own money getting their work published by an illegitimate and unethical publishing company. For some reason they've also managed to convince hundreds or thousands of writers that their model is legitimate and that, if the rest of us would only get out of their way and give them the chance they deserve they'd be a huge success. PA has also managed to convince these people, who are generally probably good people themselves, that they are in fact legitimate authors and to go out en masse and counterattack anyone who attacks PA as illegitimate. They tend to be a bit belligerent about their writing and their association with PA as well. PA convinces them that their the best thing since sliced bread and some of them take it to heart, unfortunately.

Jim MacDonald has almost made a profession out of chasing these scammers in an effort to try to protect writers from themselves.

Publish America has zero professional standing in the legitimate publishing world. Advertising a PA work is nearly the proverbial "kiss of death" for your work if you mention it. No legitimate agent or editor is going to credit you for anything done through Publish America. In fact, it's probably going to get your manuscript summarily bounced to the rejection pile unread if you mention it. All the while, PA is lining their pockets with your money.

Writing is hard work, folks. It takes time, learning, education, and more time to hone your craft. Most professional writers will tell you that they're still learning the craft. You spend weeks, months, and sometimes years working on a manuscript, writing and rewriting it until your baby's perfect. You then spend more time finding an agent or publisher and then you have to work with an editor and do it all over again. You deserve to be paid for your work. You deserve to work with professional editors who know the markets and the language usage far better than you probably do, even if you've been in the business for years. You deserve to be treated better than receiving a $1 advance or no advance at all) and then having to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars of your own money getting your books printed.

Don't fall for the PA scam. Don't let PA authors tell you how wonderful their relationship with PA is and how much they love them.

"Money flows toward the author" not the other way.

A Few More Words On Life

2009-07-01T11:30:00.000-05:00

I was just reading over my first post here from 4-1/2 years ago and Wow! Just Wow! I was quite the curmudgeon back then.

While I'm still a bit of a curmudgeon, I think I've softened up quite a bit from back then. A lot of other stuff has changed as well. I spent from January, 2004 through August, 2007 working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a security officer and, to be quite honest, it was one of the best jobs I've ever had. In August, 2007, however, the contract changed hands and I left in a bit of a huff. The new people running the operation there didn't have a clue what they were getting into in my opinion and they had little idea what "continuity of command" meant. They seemed determined, I felt, to put their own people into place ahead of the "old guard" who had been there for years and promoting people who had little experience into positions of authority they really weren't prepared for and/or didn't even want. I felt they were "profit people" rather than "people people" so I got out while the getting was good.

Then, just when things started to look up (I was invited to take the physical to join the police foce at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) I got really sick. On the day the test was being given I was laid up in bed with knees the size of a grapefruit. In December I went into the hospital with a golfball-sized ulcer on my right lung, my left lung partially-collapsed, and both lungs so heavily infected the doctors thought I had tuberculosis. I spent 3 days and 4 nights in an isolation room in the hospital, but fortunately I tested negative for TB and responded well to the antibiotics. I did return to the hospital 3 more times in 2008 for pneumonia and complications due to asthma though so I wasn't at all healthy during most of that year. I did a lot of writing, learning, and thinking during that period though.

In October of 2008 I relocated from California to Broken Arrow, Oklahoma for cost of living reasons. My 2 dogs, mother, and aunt relocated with me. It might seem an odd living arrangement, but it works for us (I initially moved in with them to help out after my mother had an iner ear operation from which her hearing and balance never recovered). I'd been wanting to move to Oklahoma since traveling through the state back in 1998 or '99 on a driving vacation (my preferred vacation travel method).

I worked as a security officer for Wackenhut Corporation from October, 2008 through April, 2009 patrolling the BOK Tower, the tallest building in Oklahoma and something like 4 neighboring states, but quit there when our wages were frozen and there was no possibility of moving up or sideways where I was. I also wanted my nights, holidays, and weekends back after a long time.

Currently, I'm working part-time as a bookkeeper for a roofing company, and seeking more gainful employment or to expand my home business while writing.

In 2006 I had my short story "The Meadow" published by Bewildering Stories, an online weekly publication that's been going for a number of years (they're up to Issue #310 or 311 currently). They published my short story "Knock On Wood" in 2007 as I recall and selected it as one of their featured stories for their 2008 1st Quarter Review.

I also completed the first draft of a science fiction novel "Hatchings" in early 2007 and have been polishing it up for the last couple of years. A partial is currently under consideration with agent Jason Yarn at Paradigm Talent Agency.

In the meantime, I'm shopping several short stories around to various publications. My short stories "The Light Of An Oncoming Train", "Night On A Boat", and "The Interview" are currently on the subbing rounds. The first two are part of a sequence I've been working on featuring the private investigator Quentin Dallas. Dallas attracts weird so the stories are a combination of detective thriller and horror with, I hope, a large dose of humor. I've been working, off and on, on another story in the sequence titled "The Midnight Box" wherein Dallas investigates the theft of a rare and valuable Irish box that holds a unique mystery of its own. I think Dallas is one of the most fascinating characters I've ever invented and I owe a lot to Raymond Chandler and especially Glen Cook and his "Garrett, PI" series for the inspiration. I also owe J.A. Konrath for not a little bit of inspiration from his "Jack Daniels" series. If you haven't read Chandler, Cook, or Konrath, I highly recommend them. Konrath's "A Newbie's Guide To Writing" is an invaluable tool (and it's free!). I met Glen Cook at last April's Conestoga 13 in Tulsa and I'd love to get Joe Konrath to come to Tulsa so we can go bookstore-and barhopping together.

I'm currently reading Jack Kilborn's "Afraid", Joe Konrath's "Rusty Nail" and just finished David Gerrold's "Worlds Of Wonder" (another highly-recommended "how to" book for writers that has an incredible amount of information in it).

In the meantime, I make the rounds at Absolute Write Water Cooler and Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact Magazine's forum and am a member of the Analog Writer's Group, Critters Online Workshop, the AW Horror Hounds, and a few others. Maybe, one of these days, I might actually sell something.

Who knows? Worse things have happened.

Why We Like Being Scared

2009-07-01T02:50:00.000-05:00

I'm trying this again after a delay of 4-1/2 years. Those years have seen a lot of changes which I'll tell you about later, maybe. Suffice it to know that I intend to keep this blog up on a more or less regular basis from now on.

I've become quite the regular poster over at the Absolute Write Water Cooler forums since I've become more and more dedicated to my writing. You can find them at www.absolutewrite.com

I can't say enough about AW. The forums there are a goldmine of information for writers and about writing. If all you do is read the "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" thread you'll be there for days and will learn more than you thought was ever possible about the craft. The thread's moderator is the reknowned author James D. MacDonald, just so you know.

Today, there was a posting by a member who asked "What Makes A Story Scary?". I didn't have to think too hard about this and made the following post,

-----

"The question's answer is probably different for everyone, but the basics are probably nearly the same for each of us.

There's something deep in our psyche that likes to be scared, that likes the feeling of hiding in the dark and listening for the monsters under the bed, the creak of the attic door opening in the darkness, the howl of a wolf on a night of the full moon, the creep of the fog as it slides slowly over the landscape...

The "fear" does not have to be visceral. In fact, most books probably work better when the fear is intensely psychological and leave you breathless with anticipation. I think Hollywood gets it completely wrong with their indulgence of the chase and the gore over the suspense and the anticipation of the final outcome.

Look at the types of psychological drama that Alfred Hitchcock was able to convey with almost zero gore factor. Yet, even though there's so little blood in Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo, North By Northwest, etc., etc., those movies work so much better than schlock and shock pieces like Friday The 13th, Caw, or several others I could name. Even the first Halloween movie worked better than Nightmare On Elm Street or Friday The 13th because of the sense of suspense and oncoming doom for the character of Michael Meyers' sister.

Alien and Aliens are good examples of good psychological suspense movies as is the 1982 version of The Thing. Night Of The Living Dead (the original) has its share of gore, but the real suspense is between the characters inside the house awaiting the moment when the zombies are going to break in and eat them alive.

It's not the moment of final drama, it;s the suspense leading up to that final moment that keeps us on the edges of our seats, that gets our hearts beating faster, and makes us clutch the arms of the theater seat tighter as the moment looms closer and closer to characters we have somehow come to care about. Remember that - as several have pointed out above, it's about the characters and the suspense, not the moment when the axe falls and the blood splashes..

It's about that deep-seated thing in our psyche that loves to be scared, that loves it when our heart races faster, our blood pumps harder, that tenses our muscles and makes us feel alive and connected.

It's a connection with our world and the characters in a book or story that's important to us because all too often in our world today we are so disconnected from what's going on around us. We don't hunt for our food. Picking up a chicken at the grocery is a far, far cry from chasing it across the range and killing it with our bare hands. But that little piece of what we once were is still inside us, hidden, but still rails against being trapped in an 8x6 cubicle all day long with no glimpse of the sun or the fields or the mountains or clouds beyond the cold gray concrete walls of the city. It wants out. It wants to feel again. It wants to feel the thrill of the wind in our hair and the thrill of the chase and even the moment of the kill. We evolved as hunters and that hunter is still within us.

But we also evolved as the hunted and there's this tiny speck within us still that loves the thrill of that chase too. It gets our blood pumping, our heart racing. It makes us feel alive again in a way that sitting in an 8x6 cubicle never can or will. It lets us know that there's still a life out there, that there's still life in us too.

It's fear and yearning and the desire to chase and be chased. It's emotions and characters and connection.

We love to be scared because it helps us feel alive.

Please forgive my pontification. Yee, Gods I'm longwinded tonight..."
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Yup, it was a bit long-winded, but I think it gets to the heart of the matter.

I'd like to know what you think.

Boy, Howdy!

2004-09-30T22:14:00.001-05:00

These post has been deleted as repugnant and no longer indicative of who I m or what this blog is about.