What I Read in 2013

Here's the list of books I knocked over last year:

About Time vols. 2-5 by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe
English Grammar Essentials for Dummies
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Sub-Mariner Vol. 1 by Bill Everett
Sandman vols. 1-9 by Neil Gaiman
A Memory of Light by Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan
The Quest for Tanelorn by Michael Moorcock
The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells
The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The War in the Air by H.G. Wells
The Wheels of Chance by H.G. Wells
Kipps by H.G. Wells
Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules verne
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
The Armageddon Rag by George R.R. Martin
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone
The Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson
The Forest of Doom by Ian Livingstone
Starship Traveller by Steve Jackson
City of Thieves by Ian Livingstone
Deathtrap Dungeon by Ian Livingstone
Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos by Terrance Dicks
Good On Paper by Andrew Morgan

So I read fifty-two books last year, which is the most I've done in a long while. It came at the expense of my comic reading, but them's the breaks.

H.G. Wells was the obvious winner here, with twelve entries to his name. I have a lot of time to listen to audiobooks while I'm at work, but I also don't have a lot of money to spend; consequently, I've been listening to a lot of works in the public domain. I started with Mr. Wells, determined to get through as many of his books as I could find, naturally starting with the sci-fi and working outwards. I enjoyed his better-known works well enough, but was surprised to find some gems further down the list. The First Men in the Moon was particularly entertaining, and I was oddly touched by The Wheels of Chance, a book about a downtrodden draper's assistant going on a bicycle holiday. On the whole I think he's a better writer when working outside of the science fiction genre; the characters are more vivid, the worlds more well-realised. His sci-fi books were more innovative, and more immediately iconic, though, and thus much more well-remembered.

I also delved into the other two grandfathers of sci-fi, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Verne was enjoyable, if a touch episodic for my tastes. Burroughs I loved. The first Tarzan book is much better than you'd expect, and his John Carter novels are tons of fun. They get repetitive after a while, and Burroughs' reliance on coincidence borders on the absurd, but for pulp action-adventure of the era you can't do much better. He's possibly the earliest author that I'd read for pure pleasure.

George Martin's The Armageddon Rag was very good. A Memory of Light was a fitting wrap up to the epic Wheel of Time series. Sandman was pretty much as amazing as I'd been led to believe.

The Worst Book I Read in 2013: I'm giving this to the gamebook Starship Traveller by Steve Jackson. It's a lazy piece of design from a normally brilliant gamebook writer. Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos by Terrance Dicks was a contender, but I had to admire the ruthless efficiency of its prose; while I didn't enjoy it particularly, it certainly did the job it set out to do. Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Sub-Mariner Vol. 1 was also in the running, but in comparison to other comics of the 1940s it's rather good.

The Best Book I Read in 2013: This is tough. Looking at the list objectively it's probably Moby Dick, only I found that book to be extremely tough going.  The Armageddon Rag was damned good, utterly gripping. There are probably a good four or five Sandman volumes that could win it. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is my favourite book of all time, but I'll discount it on the grounds of nostalgia-blindness. A Memory of Light must be acknowledged for the sheer magnitude of the task that Brandon Sanderson pulled off, and pulled off well. But I think I'm going to give it to Sandman Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman and various artists. It's a volume of short stories mostly divorced from the ongoing saga, but each of them is brilliant. I find that I like Gaiman's work best in the short form, and here he knocks it out of the park with every story.

Reading Plans for 2014: I'm going to continue with the classics, as I have an iPod and the spare time to use it. Once I've listened to all the Burroughs books in the public domain I'll branch out into some less genre-based stuff, maybe Jane Austen or Dickens. I'd also like to read some more modern works. Of all the books I read last year, only three were written within the last few years, so I want to focus on some genre fiction by modern authors.  Perhaps China Mieville or Patrick Rothfuss or Joe Abercrombie. My tastes have become a little stale and old-fashioned. Also, I want to read more comics. There are literally tens of thousands of stories set in the Marvel Universe that I haven't read. I'd like to remedy that.

WHAT ELSE I'M WORKING ON:

It's still the three major projects at the moment. I'm nearly finished a first draft of part 1 of The Lightless Labyrinth. Once that's done I might fling it out into the wild to be savaged by vicious alpha readers. I've nailed down a format for the Marvel Guidebook I'm working on, and am now knuckling down to do the writing. I plan on creating a test volume containing all the Marvel super-hero comics from 1961, just to see how it comes out and whether it actually makes for a good read or not. Finally, I've just about hashed out the story for Jack Manley and the Interchronal Deathmatch Tournament, which will be the opening storyline if I decide to go ahead with an ongoing serial.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth - 1,948 words
Marvel Guidebook - 1,455 words

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading
Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev Ultimate Collection Vol. 1 by those guys in the title
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching
Transformers: The Movie (the rad animated one, not the crap recent one)

What I've Been Listening To
Armageddon by Guy Sebastian (not by choice, even though it's quite a good pop record)

What I've Been Playing
Super Mario Galaxy on the Nintendo Wii

Pre-Publication Preparations

As shown in my post from a few days ago, I'm publishing my first e-book on Sunday.  I haven't been writing anything else in the lead-up to this; getting Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity up to scratch has been my sole focus.  I want to unburden my mind of it before I embark on another novel, and to be honest I'm daunted by the idea of working on something else.  I just spent eight years working on and off on the same thing, so it's a little hard to switch gears, you know?

The process of getting the book ready hasn't been as difficult as I had feared.  I designed the cover myself, with a minimum of fuss and (most importantly) no expense.  I even designed the thing using MS Paint, which has got to be against some kind of law.  What can I say, it's the only image manipulation program that I can wrap my head around.

The editing process has been pretty time-consuming, I'll admit.  Officially there have been seven drafts, but in reality it's probably double that.  I didn't get the book professionally assessed, but I did get some professional feedback from some editors after it won second prize in a competition.  Mostly I went with my own instincts based on that feedback and the feedback of some trusted associates.  The final draft bears only a mild resemblance to my chaotic first draft, so at least I can say that I put a lot of work into it, regardless of the final result.

I've read in various places that an e-book writer should not design their own cover, or do their own editing.  I'd love to have gotten some outside help, but unfortunately money has been very tight for me lately.  It wasn't an option, so I knuckled down and did the work on my own.  I'm also something of a control freak when it comes to my own stuff; I'm actually happier to have done my own cover design, and I think the result is great.  I guess I'll know in a few weeks time if anyone else agrees.

Aside from the writing, the hardest part of the process so far was getting my tax sorted out.  As an Aussie trying to sell my wares through an American company, I am subject to the IRS taking their tax cut from my earnings.  I could have ignored it and let the IRS take 70% of my profits, but luckily there's a tax treaty between Australia and the USA that cuts this significantly.  All I had to do was fill in a form and apply for a US Tax Identification Number.  Then apply for the treaty.  Two forms doesn't sound like much to fill in, but I am a dunce when it comes to accounting and finances.  It was hard going, with a weeks-long before hearing back to find out whether I'd filled out the damn things correctly.  So far everything seems to be legit, and I am clear to do business in the US.  Still, there's always that element of nervousness when it comes to the IRS...

The last few nights I've been doing research on marketing and pricing.  The current consensus seems to be that $2.99 for e-books is the sweet spot, so that is what I will probably go with.  It's also the point where Amazon's royalty rate jumps from 35% to 70%, which works in my favour.  As for marketing, my budget is zero.  I'm okay with this, because what I've been reading suggests that the effects of paid advertising and publicity on sales is virtually zero.  I always suspected that any sales bump from paid advertising wouldn't be enough to cover the cost of the ad, so I'm fine with ignoring that option.  For the moment my promotion will remain here, on Facebook and on Twitter, and I'll try not to spam any of those too hard.

WHAT ELSE I'VE BEEN DOING

As my job affords me a lot of time on my own with a minimum of human interaction, I listen to tons of podcasts and audiobooks.  Since I discovered librivox.org I've been getting through a lot of audiobooks, taking the chance to sample some supposed classics.  Currently I'm slogging my way through 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.

I say slogging, but that's not entirely fair.  When the book focuses on the mysteries surrounding Captain Nemo, and the efforts of the three main characters to escape their captivity on the Nautilus, it's rather good.  The problem comes in the chapters that focus heavily on the "wonders of the undersea realm".  Beware any chapter that is named after a sea or an ocean, because you're in for page after page of descriptions of fish.

It reminds me of a story I wrote when I was ten.  When it came time to describe the Black Wizard's army, I literally named every evil creature from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual.  Terrible stuff, but I had an excuse: I was ten.  I suppose that Jules Verne has an excuse as well, because part of the whole point of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an exploration of the awesome stuff that's in the ocean, exotic fish included.  It makes for bloody tedious reading, though.

Moby Dick was much the same.  There's a lot of fascinating material in that book, and a masterful command of language, but it often gets side-tracked with the minutiae of whales and whaling.  There's a whole chapter devoted to listing the books that have illustrations of whales, and discussing the accuracy of each.

The thing is, I can see where all of this is coming from.  People in 1850 didn't have TV (no shit Sherlock).  How would most of them know what a whale looked like?  Books would be the only possibility, and Herman Melville used that to provide his readers with the most accurate depiction he could, pointing the reader to specific volumes for the most accurate depictions.

Older books and stories tend to have too much description and exposition for modern audiences; just listen to the constant complaints about the dialogue in Silver Age comics.  Or my complaints about classic works of literature.  No doubt there are examples of stories that did exposition badly even at the time they were printed.  Just as some stories that seem over-expository now were perfectly pitched for the audience back then.  I suppose the lesson I have to learn is to think about this stuff, and where it's coming from, so that I can look past it and take the good elements from those stories.

For my own writing, I need to think about my audience and what needs to be explained and described for them to understand the story.  Jack Manley is quite terse, which is something I did on purpose.  I didn't do long descriptions, because I wanted the book to be about action.  If it's not necessary to move the plot forward, I cut it out.  I took a similar tack with exposition.  Alternate universes are central to the book, but I didn't bother explaining the concept.  Modern audiences are savvy, they know about these things.  But if I was writing, say, Moby Dick for a modern audience, I wouldn't include the lengthy descriptions of whales, or talk about books with whale illustrations.  There are photos now, and videos, and aquariums.  I would keep all the stuff about whaling ships, though, and harpooning, and how the whales are carved up once they've been caught; chances are very high that a modern reader doesn't know that stuff.  So what I've learned today (and it's not exactly a profound lesson, but it is an important one for any writer) is to know your audience, and what they do and don't need explained.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES

What I'm Reading
Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos by Terrence Dicks
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Marvel Comics circa 1964

What I'm Listening To
Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin

What I'm Playing
Hot Wheels: Beat That! on the Nintendo Wii