Lots of News (#IWSG November 2018)

First the good news: I finished the renovations on the Closet! 

Then the bad news: I haven't actually used it to do any writing yet.

Then other good news: I have actually done a fair bit of writing in the last month, just not in The Closet. I finished and submitted one story, and I'm in the middle of two others. I've been scraping to find time to write whenever and wherever I am, I just haven't had time to sit down and do it at my desk.

Sitting down to write this post actually reminds me that I have a bunch of writing-related stuff going on, so I shall get down to it.

THE GUN NUN

For those who didn't stop by on Halloween (shame on you), I have a new story available on Amazon Kindle: THE GUN NUN, the continuing misadventures in the Werebear vs Landopus series.

This long short story (I hate the word "novelette") follows a new character, Sister Siouxsie Cue, a nun of the Gunpowder God, as she hunts a troll and spreads the Good Word of the Gun on her way. While it's technically part of the Werebear vs Landopus series, it stands alone, and you don't really have to read "Tentacles Under a Full Moon" or "Revenge of the Lycanterrancephalopod" to get this one (though the epilogue will make a lot more sense if you do).

If you have read the other stories, you know what to expect: irreverent, black humour with cringe-inducing adult situations in a fantasy setting. A few people have compared it to a Dungeons & Dragons game. It's not technically LitRPG (which is a very specific subgenre), but I see where the comparisons come from. Like any good D&D game, the characters in the WvL series are nuts, argumentative, and often die in random, horrific ways.

The Gun Nun is just 99 cents on Amazon, or free on Kindle Unlimited. If you want a review copy, hit me, up, I know the publisher.

SPFBO $0.99 SALE

The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off lumbers on. The Top-Ten Finalists are supposed to be chosen by the end of December. For those who remember, Hell Comes to Hogtown was chosen as a semi-finalist way back at the beginning of August, and the the final semi-finalist in my group was just chosen this week. The reviewers running my bracket has said they will cull their 6 semi-finalists down to their choice for the finals by the end of November.

I'm not holding my breath on moving onto the next round. When I saw the original bracket I was 99% sure I knew who was moving onto the finals before the contest even started, and based on the reviews so far my prediction hasn't changed. But that's okay. I'm already super honoured and pleased to have gotten as far as I have, and my book has already seen a nice boost in sales and reviews thanks to the contest.

That said, there will be one more 99-cent SPFBO sale coming November 15-19, just in time for the Holidays. Hell Comes to Hogtown and somewhere between 70-100 other SPFBO entrants (not sure what the final tally is yet) will be available for just 99 cents that week, so be sure to swing by and grab yourself some cool fantasy books on the cheap! Unfortunately I don't have the direct link for the full list of participating titles yet, but I will share it as soon as it becomes available.

(I also have it on good authority that "Tentacles Under a Full Moon" will be available for FREE during that same period, for anyone looking to get into the Werebear vs Landopus series).

November 7 Question

How has your creativity in life evolved since you began writing?

This is an interesting one. Overall my creativity has gone down since I started writing seriously. Or maybe I should say the variety of my creativity has gone down. I used to paint, draw, act, play music, do woodcraft, play and make games. As I've gotten older my free time has become less and less, so I've had to focus on one thing. Writing was the obvious choice since it's been my passion since I was a kid, plus I'm pretty shitty at most of the other stuff I listed. Still, I've daydreamed recently about getting on a stage and making a fool of myself, or picking up a guitar and learning a few new songs. And I'm always ready to throw down to play a creative roleplaying game, if time permits. Maybe one day I'll have free time again.

Oh, and maybe I'm making some crappy illustrations for a silly children's book (shh, don't tell anyone).

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.

Well That Went Off the Rails (#IWSG October 2018)

So that closet in the title of the blog? You know the one, it's mentioned just a couple of inches above this line on your screen. Yes, the closet in which I purport to find all my stories. That one.

Here's a closeup, if that makes it easier.

The Closet is actually a real place. It's a small room under the stairs in the basement of my house in Ottawa. Sometimes I also refer to The Closet in a more metaphorical way as well, like it's the space in my head where my stories come from. But in the most literal sense, it is a real, physical place where (among many other things) I store all my old writings and note books, a veritable cornucopia of unfinished novels, unpolished manuscripts, forgotten short stories and more scraps of ideas and outlines than I could shake a stick at. There's also a box of rejection letters in there somewhere, which I used to covet and refer to regularly, but I've lately lost track of it. I don't think I've even put copies of my last few rejections in there.

Anyway, my wife and I recently decided to clear out The Closet, which besides my old writing contained Christmas decorations, board games, the cat's bed and litter box, and every piece of clothing my children have ever worn. My wife organized and sold/donated all of the clothes, so we have surprisingly more space than previously (seriously, it was a shitload of clothes). We've decided to move the cat to another corner of the house, paint the room and lay down some old laminate flooring that was leftover when we did the rest of the house, and make myself an honest-to-goodness writing space for the first time in years.

For those who may not remember, this is where I wrote my last book.

I was actually excited. As mentioned in the last few IWSG posts, I had been scraping to find extra writing time lately, so having a proper desk and my own corner sounded wonderful. This was going to be a good thing! I would develop a writing routine and I would be productive and that creative part of me that's always fighting to get out would finally be satisfied! Sure, I would lost my extra writing time for a week or two while I did the minor renovations, but it would be worth it! How could this awesome new project possibly be making me feel crappy and insecure?

It's been a month and my "week or two" project still isn't finished.

I finished the painting, which took longer than planned because I didn't have enough paint and had to beg and borrow to get enough (we are doing this on literally no budget). The walls of The Closet are now five separate shades of blue, which I don't mind because it's a fucking closet, after all. Three of the shades are quite nice.

Then I discovered I didn't have quite as much flooring as I thought, so much debate was had about which part of the floor to do. This decision changed a couple of times, forcing me to change my plan midway through and I ended up wasting a bunch of wood, so now I have my fingers crossed I actually have enough to finish my tiny corner,  which will now basically just be laminate floor around my desk and chair.

Then we had a tornado. We were fine, we just lost power for 24 hours, and I can't complain because many people lost their houses. But it still ruined the weekend and prevented me from getting any work done (it's rather tricky to do renovations in a pitch-black basement).

Is that my saw or the cat? And what did I just step in?

My wife and I were supposed to go away this past weekend to visit friends near Toronto. It was going to be our first time away overnight by ourselves since the kids were born (almost seven years). I was willing to give up my time for that. Except then my wife and I both got the flu, came down with a fever, and we had to cancel our trip. And because I felt so cruddy I could't get any work or writing done.

So yeah. It's been a month, and I haven't gotten The Closet finished, nor have I done any writing of note. Plus the rest of the basement is an absolute disaster because all the shelves and boxes that are supposed to go back in are all over the place, not to mention all the tools and garbage that goes along with any work of this kind.

I wrote a little bit on my lunch break yesterday, which is something, but I'm still feeling pretty bummed.

So that's my rant for this month. Fingers crossed that next month I can report that The Closet is back together and open for business, and maybe I'll even share some pictures of my work. But until then, I hope your writing month was better than mine.

#

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.

IWSG August: I Just Realized I Don't Know What I'm Doing

"So, how's that novel coming along?"

It's one of those things every writer hates to hear, and it's doubly worse when you ask it of yourself, which is something I've been doing every day for the past month.

See, when I put out Ten Thousand Days earlier this year, I had a big plan on exactly when and how I was going to release my next book. I took what I learned on that release and built a schedule on how the next one was going to work. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to keep to it.

I can make up excuses as to why it's not coming along, but the honest and biggest roadblock is simply me and my relationship with the book.

I've written 8 novels, of which Ten Thousand Days is the only one I've let out of The Closet. For all but one of the others, I simply wrote it for fun because I wanted to see if I could do it. I wrote only for myself and a handful of people who I knew might read it. I would finish the first draft, made a few edits here and there, but then it was done and I moved on. I didn't go back and go in depth into the mechanics of the book.

My current work-in-progress is the first time I've ever written something knowing that I would make it available for public consumption, and seriously considered that I have to make this something that people will enjoy reading.

I'm not thinking about catering to a particular market or preference, but I am suddenly acutely aware of all these things I've never paid much attention to: Are motivations consistent? Is dialogue believable? Does the progression of action make sense? When I wrote in the past, I just wrote what was fun and what I thought was enjoyable to read. I never considered how people were going to read this and judge me.

You know we all do it.

For instance, yesterday I had to cut out an awesome scene that I really loved. I thought it was hilarious and really fed well into the next chapter, but the truth of the matter was it made no sense. The characters shouldn't have been doing what they were doing in that moment. It was just unbelievable and nonsensical. Not to say the book is hyper-realistic - far, far, from it - but the logistics of the scene just didn't fit into the story. It survived the first two drafts but it kept eating away at me and I had to go back and remove it. It sucks, because now I have to replace it with a much less interesting exposition scene, but I really think it has to be done.

And that's been my feeling of the whole manuscript lately. Is any of this any good? Will anyone like this? I've spent months working on this, but am I wasting my time? I thought I knew the basics of what I'm doing, but I've been questioning it a lot lately...

Anyway, I'm just about to the point where I can send the manuscript out to my beta readers - that should happen this week. I'll find out then if this book is worth continuing or if I should just chuck the whole thing. I'll be sure to keep you posted...

So just we don't finish on a completely negative note, there were a couple of good things to report from last month.

• Ten Thousand Days is now officially available for purchase in paperback form, and amazingly a couple of people actually bought it. It's exactly the same as the eBook version, but I guess there are still a few holdouts who prefer to hold a dead tree in their hands. I also sold a few more eBooks on Amazon and Kobo during July as well, presumably thanks to the price drop and promotion.
• I received my first royalty payments from Amazon for my first month of book sales in May. It certainly won't buy me a new car, but it covered dinner for myself and my wife. So not only am I a published author, but I'm a paid one as well. 

Maybe with the next book I can cover drinks, too.


The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group here.

IWSG June: A Month After Coming Out of The Closet...

(Once again, not that closet. This Closet.)

I've been a writer for a month now.

Well, technically I've been a writer for about 30 years, but I've officially been a self-published writer for a month.

How has it been going?

It's had it's ups and downs, for sure. I was all set to write a long, pessimistic post about the negative points and pitfalls and look for pity. This is the INSECURE Writers Support Group after all. But you know what? It really has been going pretty well.

I've found tons of support from the writing community as well as friends and family. I had lots of people jump on board and buy the book when it first came out, which was flattering and more than I expected. I was truly serious when I said I would probably only sell 3 copies. But no only did I get a flurry of interest in the first couple of days, I've continued to sell books - a few here, a few there - continuously for the last four weeks, which is hugely encouraging. Some of those books I can't even account for - meaning they're actually being bought by people who don't know me, or barely know me. That's both amazing and terrifying.

It's like handing out hundreds of these to strangers.
Every day.

I'm getting lots of activity on my Facebook page (You should check it out, all the cool kids are doing it), and my posts are being shared far and wide, allowing me to interact with people I would normally have never met. I'm hoping my natural charm will help convince them to buy a copy and maybe even tell a few more friends about it.

I've gotten several fantastic reviews, which warms the cockles of my black little heart.

Pictured.

I've done some guest Blogs as well as a podcast interview which was super fun (You should definitely check that one out). I've got several more scheduled for June, so you're going to be sick of me before you know it.

The book has ranked a few times in the "Contemporary Fantasy" section of Amazon.ca, peaking on Monday at #13. Since the number "13" is an important plot point in the story, I find this a good sign.

So yeah. As of today I'm optimistic, which I don't say very often.

Sure there's some hiccups. I STILL haven't gotten my tax paperwork sorted out, so all of the (admittedly meagre) money I've made so far is going to be cut 30% to pay Uncle Sam. I had some technical issues whilst tinkering with the file and ended up taking the book offline for the better part of a day. But it's all good now.

Pictured: Uploading a file to Kobobooks.com

Plus, I had some horrifying moments of personal introspection where I realized "Oh man, this was a terrible idea. This book is lousy and it has problems that I should have fixed and I'm going to shoot myself in the foot and even if anyone reads it now I'm going to turn them off and no one is ever going to read anything else I write ever again." But all writers go through that, right?

Right?

I'm not going to dwell on it now. Like I said, today, I'm in a pretty good mood.

Here's a happy puppy as proof.

Not to mention the next book is well underway...

So how has your month been?

I Guess I Am a Writer...

So this happened.

On May 6th, 2015 at about 10:30 PM EDT, I pushed the "Publish" button on Amazon (and Kobo!) and became, officially, a self-published author. It was a momentous occasion, one I've been anticipating for years, and had been actively anxious about for months. After a lifetime of scribbling stories in private, I was finally putting something out there for the world to see. It was a big step.

And then I got the message: "Thank you, please wait 24-48 hours until your book becomes available in our store."

Oh well. I went to bed and when I got up the next morning it was already available, so the time estimate was obviously a worst-case scenario. Moments later I made my first official sale (and it wasn't even to myself or a family member!). I had truly arrived.

I sold three copies that first day, which reached my unofficial sales target. Everything else from now on is gravy.

The release was very much a soft-launch. I didn't have any major promotions planned and I've just been kinda easing into getting the word out to friends, family members and various online communities I'm a part of. But a few interesting things have happened.

First, I got an unsolicited request to do a podcast interview about my book from a friend of an aquaintance. I'm doing that on Wednesday and I'll let you know all the deatils as soon as I have them. Assuming I don't sound like an awkward weirdo in the conversation, in which case there's no way I'm telling anyone about it.

Second, I set up a Facebook page which actually got my in touch with some acquaintances and people I haven't spoken to in years, and they actually purchased copies, which was a pleasant surprise.

Third, I have author pages on Amazon and Goodreads, now! It almost looks like I know what I'm doing!

Would you buy a book from this man?

The biggest news of the weekend was that on Saturday night my book reached #20 in "Contemporary Fantasy" on Amazon.ca. I'm assuming it was some kind of mistake, but it's still pretty damn cool. (I also reached #43 in "Romance > Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost" at one point. I have no idea why, but hey, I'll take it!)

I've also been working on some promo material and a list of blogs and websites to approach about doing some guest posts. (Big thanks to Serins Sphere for the help and suggestions on that front). It will continue to be a slow rollout instead of a full-on blitz, as I'm still easing into this. Just because I got into the pool doesn't mean I have to start doing laps.

But you know what? The biggest thing to come out of this wasn't a huge desire to make sure Ten Thousand Days does well (I mean, I hope it does well, and I'll do what I can to help it on it's way), but it has shown me that now that I can do it, I want to write more.

I've got a short story I'd like to put out that I think is a lot of fun and I want people to read. I might even make it free so that as many people as possible will check it out. I'm also just about finished the first draft of my work in progress, and while it's currently a jumbled mess I think it could be really good. Not to mention I still have lots of stuff in The Closet that I could take out and pass around...

They're going to get out eventually...

Ten Thousand Days is good, and I think you should read it.

But I think the next one is going to be even better...

(Seriously though, read Ten Thousand Days. Pick it up right here.)

IWSG May: Confessions of a Writer Hiding in The Closet

No, no. Not "that" closet. This Closet.

Thirty five years ago today, I was born in a small town in Newfoundland (it's an Island province off the east coast of Canada - look it up). For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. I can't remember exactly how old I was when I wrote my first story - probably 5 or 6 - and my babysitter had to find a dictionary to look up the spelling of "extraterrestrial." I would not simply accept "alien" (even then I knew word choice was important).

Sometime in elementary school - grade 5, I believe - I dressed as a "writer" for career day. While most of the kids dressed as doctors or lawyers or park rangers or you know, anything else that had an actual recognizable outfit, I just wore my regular clothes and carried a typewriter. No one knew what I was supposed to be, so I scribbled "writer" on a bunch of scraps of paper and handed them out as business cards.

(Had I my time back, I would have worn a house coat and carried an over-sized cup of coffee. Or if I really wanted to be hardcore, a bottle of Jack Daniels in the pocket of the house coat.)

Seriously, the JD worked for him. Remember how prolific King was in the 80s? I've often considering taking up heavy drinking to try an emulate his career.

Anyway, my young self was so embarrassed by the situation that the next year for career day I dressed as a wizard. For career day.

Let that sink in for a moment. My 10-year old self thought that being a wizard was less embarrassing than being a writer.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life through high school. I continued to write but kinda knew it wasn't a feasible career choice (that pointy hat with the stars on it really stuck with me). Though I did well in Math and Science, somehow I ended up getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in University - my second favourite love after writing is making a fool of myself in front of an audience.

There's another gut punch for you. My 20-year old self thought being an actor was a more viable career choice than being a writer.

Writing never got me groupies.
To be fair, I guess being a rock star didn't get me any, either.
(Yes, that's me in the centre)

Shortly after university I completed my first novel, a Chuck Palahniuk-esque absurdist mess. I think it had some good ideas but was all over the place and had no structure or style worth mentioning. I sent it to a number of publishers and agents and of course got an equal number of rejection letters back, most of which were generic form letters.

After that I kinda retreated again from trying to be a writer. I certainly kept writing, I just didn't put myself out there as "a writer." I wrote 8 novels and dozens of short stories through my twenties and into my early thirties, but no one read them besides my immediate family and a handful of friends. When people heard about this they would ask me "Oh, you're a writer?" to which I would reply, "No, I write." I would never call myself a writer. I had too many wizard's hats and rejection slips under the bed to be comfortable with that.

A couple of years ago I discovered that self-publishing on sites like Amazon was a booming industry (maybe industry is the wrong word - past time?). I thought about it for a long time, since I was sitting on several nearly-finished manuscripts that I could easily publish any time I wanted to. Hell, I could write another book I wanted to (Erotica seems to be popular, I could write erotica). I thought about it and thought about it and even took out one of the books out of The Closet and started tinkering around with it, doing a few edits, changing the ending I was never really happy with. I told myself "I'm going to publish this by my birthday."

That was last year.

Well, now it's my birthday again. I found some beta readers to give me some feedback. I paid someone to design a snazzy little cover. I got my Amazon (and Kobo!) accounts set up and the book is loaded and ready to go.

In case you're wondering, here it is.

I still haven't pushed the "publish" button yet.

My current excuse is that my tax paperwork still hasn't come through for Amazon yet. In theory I don't HAVE to wait for this to come through. I can always file next year to get the taxes back, and it's not like we're talking about a huge sum of money anyway. Thirty percent of the royalties on like, 3 books sold is not exactly a staggering figure. But part of me just doesn't want to give the US government a dime if I can help it.

Again, I know it's just an excuse. Previous to the tax thing, for a long time I said I wasn't going to publish the book until I knew for sure what we would name our baby daughter (as the name of the character in the book was the same name we were considering for our little one). Nothing stopped me at any point from changing the character's name, so I am conscious of the fact that I am literally making up one excuse after another.

So why haven't I pushed the button? My mouse cursor is hovering over it right now.

The scariest yellow button known to man...

Once it's out there I can't deny being "a writer" any longer. That will be what I am, for better or for worse. Except what if I'm just that writer who has one self-published book that sold 3 copies? Is that really any better than not being a writer at all, or being a "writer" who has a Closet full of unpublished work? Where is the line where I will feel good about this? I don't care if the book gets bad reviews - at least that means someone read it. But what will it take to actually make me happy?

My cursor is still hovering over the button.

Do I push it?

Or should I go dig up my old wizard's hat?

For reference, it was stuff like this that really helped convince me to publish my book.
Check out the stellar reviews here.

This post is part of the monthly Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. Check them out. They always welcome people to cry with them on their keyboards.

Characters You've Never Heard Of: DARKLIGHT

"You want this, don't you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant. It is unavoidable. It is your destiny."

- Emperor Palpatine, Return of the Jedi

Back to nerdy RPG stuff. Nomi Darklighter was my character from a Star Wars game many, many years ago (holy crap, it was a good 20 years ago, now that I think about it). She was a pirate and bounty hunter but was Force sensitive and started some irregular Jedi-type training that led her down a dark path.

Actually, to be 100% honest, she gave the Emperor a lap dance and his man juice gave her Jedi powers. I take no responsibility for this. That was entirely on the guy who was Game Mastering at the time. I thought it was ridiculous, but I didn't argue because I got the Force powers for free and saved a ton of Character building points.

Shut up, we were 15. All of this happened while another player character was being crushed to death by mindless repair droids for the Emperor's enjoyment. (Actually, it was mostly for the GM's enjoyment - he was being a total dick at the time)

I wrote an extended Star Wars fan fiction a year or two later that featured Nomi prominently. In my version she became Empress Darklight, taking over after the Emperor died and becoming a formidable dark Jedi in her own right. That version of the story glossed over the lap-dancing-Jedi-apprenticeship. I have no idea what happened to that story - it's probably on one of the many floppy disks buried in The Closet. That's one I'm actually glad will probably never see the light of day.

A-to-Z Challenge Theme Reveal

My daughter is due to be born any day now, so I'm actually writing this some time in advance, just in case. I've actually written quite a few of next month's actual posts already, too, as I suspect I'm going to be pretty busy for the next little while.

So what could possibly be so important to talk about that I had to make sure I got this theme in ahead of my child's birth? Sweet f*ck all, honestly. I'm going to introduce, over the course of 26 days in April (minus Sundays, of course, cause God told us to play video games on Sunday... I think, I admit it's been awhile since I've been to Sunday school), 26 amazing, incredible characters that will mean absolutely nothing to you.

That's right! My 2015 A-to-Z Blog Challenge theme is...

CHARACTERS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF!

I'm not talking about amazing historical figures that got left out of the textbooks, or interesting fictional characters from little-known books that you should have read. Oh no, these are 26 characters from my own unpublished stories, so that's why there's no way in hell you have ever heard of any of them. There's no way you could have heard of them, unless you're creeping around in my basement when I'm not home.

You see, I've written about this before, but there's a closet under the stairs in my house (usually written as The Closet) that is stuffed with boxes of manuscripts and scribbled story ideas that I've been working on for some 20 years. Some are printed, some are scrawled by hand, some are stored on digital media for which I no longer have drives to read. In many cases there are multiple, slightly different copies. All of them are covered with dust and cat hair (I share The Closet with our cat, you see). Over the past year I've been taking a few of them out, dusting them off, fiddling with them here and there, hoping quietly that one day - soon - I'll get around to self-publishing these things digitally so the world can read them (or not, most likely not).

I went through a phase in my early twenties when I tried to get a few stories and novels published by legitimate publishers. All I have to show for that is another box in The Closet stuffed with rejection letters. I don't necessarily thing my writing was bad, but I know I still had a lot to learn and perhaps I didn't choose the right places to contact at the right time. I don't want to go through that again right now, which is why I'm going to try the self-publishing route.

Why am I telling you about characters that haven't appeared yet in print? Maybe I'm hoping you'll see something you like, so you'll pick up a story or a book when it (eventually) becomes available. Maybe I'm just tired of sitting on all these ideas, and want to get them out there so a few people (and I assume very few) will actually see them and I won't be alone in The Closet anymore.

It's dusty in here. And lonely. And I'm really, really allergic to cat hair.

The Not-So-Accidental Blog Tourist Hop: C.D. Gallant-King

I blame everything on Philip Overby. Except for my addiction to WWE Supercard. That's not his fault.

1. What am I currently working on?

WWE SuperCard for iPhone. It's an addictive time-sink game app that sucks away so much productivity I'm just embarrassed. Amazingly, despite the dozens of hours it's stolen from me in the past week alone, I haven't spent a cent on it yet nor do I feel inclined to. I have no idea what the point of this game is. Aren't these things supposed to try and trick you into spending money?

Seriously though, if you want to know what I SHOULD be working on, the list looks like this:

- Splatter-Elf the Role-Playing Game
- Finishing the editing on Ten Thousand Days

I was about to list 20 more projects I've started, thought about and/or fiddled with, but if I focus on those two things I think I'll get farther ahead. I have the game nearly to the point I can stop tinkering with it for a while and just play it and test it, while Ten Thousand Days has been sitting in The Closet for ages and really needs to come out. Then I can work on something else.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

If I can help it, I want my work to be as genre-anachronistic as possible. The Splatter-Elf table-top game is setup to be a pretty simple joke game, but there's a depth underneath (I hope) that you can turn it into a long-term campaign if you wanted to. Ten Thousand Days is a somewhat conventional modern/urban fantasy with a touch of humour, but everything else I've worked on is all over the place. My ideal series would be one where every book is a different style (the first is a hardboiled detective mystery, the second is a western, the third is a Vonnegutesque satire and so on) and the main character dies in Chapter 3 of Book 1.

To be fair I honestly have no idea if there is a market for this kind of contet.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Because I have to. I have the stories in my head and I need to do something with them. If I was a better artist maybe I would paint. But words are all I have.

4. How does my writing process work?

Do I have a few minutes?

Is the baby asleep?

Does the lawn need to be mowed, the dishes washed, laundry folded?

Then, as long as it's not 2:00am, I can write.

I used to be able to write for hours and hours without break. I've never had writer's block. I could write 10,000 words a week easily. I once wrote a 40,000 word novella over a long weekend. I don't have that luxury of time anymore. I'm definitely on a low-swing of my writing productivity. I tinker with games and blog as a way to keep writing something every day (or almost every day, depending on if I'm in a tournament in SuperCard).

When I do write, I usually just sit and write. I don't really create outlines or plot much in advance. Like I said, the story is usually in my head, I just need to put pen to paper (well, fingers to keys) to get it out.

5. Have you participated in this type of blog hop yet? If not, consider yourself tagged!
If you decide to the blog hop, please tag me and let me know as I'd like to check it out. (Standard terms and conditions)

I Drew A Map

I didn't say it was a very good map.

I've been on a major role-playing game kick the past few months, the most I've been into it in years. You can follow my adventures over at Rule of the Dice. It's been a lot of fun and I've used it to connect with some old friends as well as make new ones. I've been so into it that for the first time in I have no idea how long (fifteen years, maybe?) I actually put pencil to paper and sketched out a little map of the area in which my game is currently taking place.

Maps in role-playing games, much like fantasy fiction, are very important and exceedingly helpful. It shows where everything important is in relation to everything else, and gives you an idea of how long it takes to get from point A to point B. It can spur interesting story ideas based on how certain places react to their neighbours and environment.

A well-made map is a work of art, and can be enjoyed just for it's own sake. How many of us poured over the maps in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit? My maps have never been pretty, better described perhaps as functional at best. I'm not sure if my newest creation is even that, but at the very least it lets me orient myself in the space of my game world. If I have the time, I will go back and make it neater and prettier, but time is a luxury as elusive as those winning lottery numbers.

My original point for this rambling was that because of all the time I've been "wasting" with silly games, I haven't had the chance to get my book(s) where I wanted them to be at this point. I'm not going to get into where my priorities should be, that would be a much longer discussion that I will probably write about some other day in lieu of actually working on the book, but the short version is that it seems the damned story has slipped back into The Closet for the time being. It's at the top of the pile, and closer to the door, but still tucked away for now...

One of these days I have to pick it up on the way back from the bathroom and put it back on my desk.

Where does the time go?

Answer: In the closet.

It's a running joke my wife and I shared for years.  It's a major plot point in my first novel I hope to publish very soon. It is both a literal and figurative description of what I've done with my life.

There is - literally - a closet in the basement of my house that contains dozens of notebooks, computer disks and several bankers boxes full of manuscripts, half-finished stories and hundreds of pages of notes and ideas for other tales.  I have no idea how many hours, days and years of my life are piled on those shelves under the stairs, but it is a substantial portion.  From my high school years right up until the birth of my son I wrote frequently and prolifically.  I went through phases where I tried to get novels and stories published, but it never really went anywhere.

Coincidentally, we also keep the cat's litter box in this closet, which I hope isn't symbolic of something.