Increased Productivity

About a fortnight ago I had the internet connected at my house.  This is a fairly novel experience for me, as I've spent the last six years without it.  My only regular internet access has been through my job.

One of the fears I had when connecting was that it would impact my writing.  You're all on the internet, you know what it's like.  It's distracting.  If there's anything that the internet is good at, it's distracting people.  I could be watching Bert and Ernie on Youtube right now instead of typing this.  I was rightly afraid that I would spend all my time watching or reading frivolous nonsense (as opposed to writing frivolous nonsense, a much more noble pursuit).

Fortunately, my fears were unfounded.  In fact, quite the opposite has been true.  Just a few minutes before this I finished working on The Lightless Labyrinth for the night.  It's the fourteenth night in a row that I've done some writing for that novel.  This is a record for me; I have never had such a period of sustained productivity before this.  Not every day has been a winner.  There was a day where I only managed 80 words, and a few were I didn't break 200.  Nevertheless, it was progress.  Even a small step is a move forward.

Part of it is that I started tweeting my word counts every day, as well as keeping track of how many days I have written consecutively.  I don't know if anyone is paying attention, but it's enough that I believe there could be.  I don't want to disappoint my phantom audience.  The incentive to write gets larger the further I go, as well; the higher my consecutive days count goes, the more reluctant I become to break that streak.  There has been at least one night where I banged out a couple of paragraphs at 3am just to maintain my run.

It hasn't all been positive, of course.  I'm getting a lot less sleep than before.  I often procrastinate, and don't start writing until after midnight.  In general, I just waste a lot of time.  I get distracted.  Again, it's what the internet is good for.

On the other hand, I get motivated.  I get inspired to create.  The internet is good for that, too.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth: 2,514 words
Marvel Guidebook 1961: 342 words

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading:
The CRPG Addict blog by Chester Bolingbroke
Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching:
The  Walking Dead season 4
WWE Raw and Smackdown (It is Wrestlemania season, after all!)

What I've Been Playing:
The  Dungeon (aka pedit5)
Rogue

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest 2014

About a month ago I submitted Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.  Every year Amazon opens this contest to 10,000 entrants, with the grand prize being a $50,000 publishing deal.  With that on offer, as well as a host of very good smaller prizes and no entry fee, I would have been a fool not to enter.

The contest is judged in a series of five rounds.  In the first round the judges read the author's pitch for every entrant, and narrow the field down to 400 in each category.  (There are five categories in the contest: general, mystery/thriller, sci-fi/fantasy/horror, romance and young adult.)  In round two they narrow it down again, based on a 5,000 word excerpt.  Round three narrows it down further based on the entire manuscript, and so on until there's a winner in each category and an overall Grand Prize Winner.

Alas, I didn't make it to the second round.  I'm not particularly upset about it; rejection is part of the game, and I feel that you have to learn to take these setbacks well if you're ever going to get anywhere.  Not only that, but I also have to figure out why my entry didn't make it.

Unfortunately, that answer is all too obvious: I totally half-arsed the pitch.  I put literally zero effort into it, simply grabbing my back cover blurb and calling it a day.  There's a thread over at the forums for the contest in which people who made it to the second round are posting their successful pitches.  I plan to spend some time going over those, and trying to come up with something better for next year.

Because yes, of course I'm going to enter again next year.  I failed this time around, but that's okay.  It's time to keep writing, keep creating, and plan for my next attempt.  Like I said, I'd be a fool not to.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth - 2,794 words

This is easily my best total since I started this blog, and made my resolution to write every day.  For the first time, I actually did that for a whole week, and the results show.  Even though I had one day where I only wrote 84 words (blame my interrupting wife!), I think I knocked out a respectable total.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading:
The CRPG Addict blog by Chester Bolingbroke
Tarzan the Terrible by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching
The Walking Dead season 4

What I've Been Playing:
Rogue.  Looooooooots of Rogue.

Hitting the Zone

Writing a novel can be hard. Sometimes the plot doesn't come together, or your characters lack drive, or there's just no drama or excitement.  It could be any number of problems that don't seem to have an obvious solution. Whatever you do, however brilliant and talented you are, at some point in your writing career there will be a project that just refuses to work.

Earlier this week I was feeling that way about The Lightless Labyrinth. I couldn't get into my protagonist's head. There were too many characters clogging up the narrative. I just wasn't feeling it, and when the writer can't muster any excitement for a project it's probably time to chuck it in. Indeed, I had practically done that, not having worked on the book for over a week.

Then, just a few days ago, it all clicked. I had a revelation about my protagonist that suddenly made him interesting. My large ensemble cast started bouncing off each other, providing banter as well as drama. And just like that, I was getting excited to write it again.

In fact, it's like the book has started writing itself. This is, of course, a terrible cliche, and it's not strictly true. I've got an outline, and character arcs, and scenes worked out in my head. I'm still writing to my original plan. But now I've reached a place where I barely have to think about how the characters will react, and the words are flowing out pretty quickly. If I just had more time to write, I could get a hell of a lot done right now.

Even so, I've been feeling productive, and The Lightless Labyrinth is going ahead very well. I've hit the zone, where the book is coming together with little effort. All of a sudden, at least for now, writing a novel is pretty easy.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth - 1,794 words

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading
The CRPG Addict blog by Chester Bolingbroke
Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching
The Walking Dead season 4

What I've Been Playing
Adventure (the original text adventure game from 1976)

Things I Learned as a Writer in 2013

Because nobody asked, but I'd like to codify it for myself, here are the top five things I learned as a writer in 2013, in no particular order.

1. IT'S A BUSINESS. This point will not be foreign to anyone who has published through Amazon, but it bears repeating. I've never been all that business-minded, and setting up my payments for Amazon was a real trial. Being Australian made it that bit harder, as I had to register with the IRS, and there was no shortage of paperwork to be done. I'm almost glad that my book wasn't a roaring success, because then I'd have to deal with some nightmarish tax issues. As much as I'd like this writing thing to simply be just about the writing, that's not how it is. If you want to make money, you've got to run it like a business.

2. DON'T SWEAT THE FIRST DRAFT. The first draft of Jack Manley was a mess. Scenes were repeated. Characters changed names half-way through. Inconsistencies abounded. It was a genuine train-wreck. But here's the thing: you can fix all of that stuff. It took me a while, and it was not an easy process even for such a short book, but I got there eventually. It's a learning process, and I expect that my next book will not be quite so disjointed, but what it taught me was not to worry so much about what I'm writing on the first pass; just get it on the screen and come back to it later.

3. BOOKS DON'T SELL THEMSELVES. Psst, let me tell you a secret: my book has not sold a ton of copies. More like a few pounds. I haven't done any paid marketing. I focused on Facebook, Twitter and giveaways on Amazon and Goodreads. None of these have pushed my sales to any significant level. I'm considering some paid advertising, but I'm not even certain that this will make a difference. What I do know is that there are hundreds of thousands of ebooks out there, and with that amount of volume it's hard to get noticed. I need to get out and push this thing if I want to sell some books.

4. THIRD-PERSON CINEMATIC. This is what my writing style is called (at least according to noted writer and homophobe Orson Scott Card). If you read Jack Manley you'll notice that at no point does it go into the character's heads, and there are no interjections from the narrator. I tried very hard to keep things visual, to keep the narrative rattling along as fast as possible. Everything is described from the outside, and that's Third Person Cinematic. It's the style I naturally gravitate towards, to the point where I'm having some trouble getting into my protagonist's head in The Lightless Labyrinth.

5. RELEASING THINGS IS AWESOME. Seriously. It gives me a massive charge to know that I have a book out there and available on Amazon. I am a bona-fide self-published writer, which is a pretty damn radical thing to be. So don't expect this thing to slow down: I'll be doing this thing until I die, because it's what I love to do most.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth - 871 words
Marvel Guidebook - 0 words

Yes, those word-counts are super-low, but this week at least I have some decent excuse. Firstly, I have entered Jack Manley into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, which could net me a cool $50,000 publishing contract (to be honest, I'll be happy just to make it past the first two rounds). Secondly, I have been formatting said book for Smashwords. It should be available through them within the week. So not much actual writing got done, but plenty of writing-related activity. I call it a win.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading
Marvel Comics from 1964

What I've Been Playing
Super Mario Galaxy on the Nintendo Wii (I finally finished it, only to discover that I need to play through the whole thing again as Luigi. Not right now, Shiggsy!)

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

Some Unrealistic Goals for 2014

As you all may have noticed about a month ago, probably due to the proliferation of fireworks and people setting themselves unrealistic goals, a new year has begun. As usual I am late to the party (I moved house, and that's my excuse), but I want to add my own set of Sysiphean Labours to the throng. Last year was probably my best as a writer thus far: I finished a novel and self-published it, but I still have problems with self-motivation. Keeping said lack of will in mind, I present to you my list of goals for the year 2014 AD:

1. SPREAD SOME MANLEY AROUND: At present Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity is exclusive to Amazon. I intend to get it out there on a bunch of other digital platforms, Smashwords at the very least.  I also intend to scrape some cash and willpower together to promote the damn thing.  Book ain't selling itself, ya know?

2. FINISH THE LIGHTLESS LABYRINTH: Yes, I want to complete a novel by the end of the year. Yes, I'm aware that the last one took me over six years. Shut up.

3. START JACK MANLEY AND THE INTERCHRONAL DEATHMATCH TOURNAMENT: I have plans afoot for running a Jack Manley serial, with sections to be released for free every fortnight and eventually collected as a novel. I have the first story arc planned out, and it's going to be a corker.

4. RELEASE VOLUME 1 OF A MARVEL GUIDEBOOK: I'm still working on a multi-volume guidebook for Marvel's superhero comics that will incorporate a whole year's output and integrate it with the previous volume. So the first book will cover 1961, and act as a test-bed for the format and style. Book two will cover 1961-1962, the third 1961-1963, and so on, hopefully giving an unfolding overview of possibly the largest collaborative fictional work in history. The first volume won't take much writing, but I think the formatting and design is going to be tough.

5. WRITE EVERY DAY: Yeah, this is the tough one. I can already write off the month of January, due to the house move from Hell.  But I've got the rest of the year to make up for it.  I'm not gonna miss a single day.  Not one.

Is this a manageable list? For any normal, dedicated writer it probably would be. For me, it is perhaps a little pie-in-the-sky, but what's the point of setting goals for myself if I'm not going to go big? If I'm going to fail in 2014, I'll do it by setting my sights too high. Or perhaps by being too lazy. Which reminds me, I have a 6th goal...

6. STOP TALKING ABOUT BEING LAZY: It's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm hoping that by the end of 2014, any mention I make of myself being a worthless procrastinator will be purely for dramatic effect, and not at all true. We'll see.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading:
About Time Vol. 6 by Tat Wood

What I've Been Watching:
Doctor Who: The Daleks
Doctor Who: Time of the Doctor
Walking Dead season 4

What I've Been Listening To:
A Night at the Hip-Hopera by The Kleptones

What I've Been Playing:
Super Mario Galaxy on Nintendo Wii
Forza 5 on X-Box One (Yeah, my son bought one. It's totally going to help me get more writing done.)

Say Something

Lately, given my lack of output and the internal questioning that results, I've been wondering if I have anything to say. At some point I think every writer confronts this question. I started writing because it's fun, and I loved creating stories like the ones I was reading. I have written a lot of stuff, but eventually I have to wonder: do I have anything worthwhile to say?
At the moment, the only work I have with any widespread availability is Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity. It's a straightforward action-adventure story and that's all I intended it to be. It touches on some deeper themes (which I'm not about to elaborate here; I leave that for the analysts), but at the end of the day it's about a man punching another man in the face.
Still, I've long believed that even the simplest stories have something to say. Take, for example, the average Marvel super-hero story written by Stan Lee. Many of them follow a formula: hero fights villain and is defeated, hero mopes, hero comes back and defeats villain with brains/guts/a-gadget-whipped-up-in-three-panels. The majority of them aren't classics, but they are good entertainment. Yet despite their simplicity, they have something to say. You just have to look at the traits that make the villains villainous, and the heroes heroic. If Ant-Man wins because he's loyal to his ant friends, then his story says something. Not something profound, but something nonetheless.
And here's the thing: I can spot a Stan Lee story from a mile away (you can tell them by the exclamation points). I've read so many of the bloody things by now that his style is imprinted on my brain, and if I read a one sentence plot outline I could safely tell you what the theme would be, and what Lee was trying to say. He's created such a large body of work that it's possible to get a very good handle on how he thinks, and the things he feels are important. (As an aside: you should all go read Lee's Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Thor comics.  They're amazing.  Also check out Silver Surfer if you want to see a silver alien on a surfboard angsting about what a bunch of giant cocks the human race is.)
That's what I think I need to do: just create a body of work, even if nobody is buying it. Even if I'm not trying to say anything, eventually some meaning will accrue through sheer volume, a meaning and outlook thats intrinsically mine. I'd like to think that, at the very least, my son could one day read through my work and get a better sense of who I was, and my views on life. Or that I could write a hollow yet exciting thriller novel that sells millions and allows me to retire to Spain for tax purposes. Or the meaning thing. That would probably be better.
WHAT ELSE I'M WORKING ON
I have three major projects on the go 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 (all three of them!) 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.  Now all I need is a work ethic.
OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES
What I've Been Reading
About Time Vol. 5 by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs
What I've Been Watching
Red Dwarf seasons 7 & 8
The Walking Dead season 4
Pacific Rim
World War Z
What I've Been Listening To
Hello Nasty by The Beastie Boys
What I've Been Playing
Super Mario Galaxy on the Nintendo Wii