transientme

Grind Show Available For Free

2012-01-31T18:56:00.000-08:00

Do you guys recall how over the holidays I made THRONE available for free through the Kindle Select program? And how after 5 days it was downloaded some 27,000 times, and then shot up in the Paid ranks till it peaked at around #250? Well, I've decided to see if lightning can strike twice and have thus enrolled THE GRIND SHOW in the same program.

So, if you want a free copy, head over to Amazon right now and grab one.

I'm really curious to see if it will follow in THRONE's footsteps, and thus far I'm glad to report that it has. As of 10pm it's been downloaded some 4,100 times, and is currently ranking at #84 on the overall Free list.

Now, I don't think I'm going to keep it up there for the full 5 days. Instead, I'm going to do two, maybe three, and then revert to being paid. If my calculations are correct, I should still accrue all the benefits, and reserve a couple more free days to boost sales once more when things slow down again.

Either way, I'm excited to see the numbers jumping up once more each time I click refresh, and can't wait to see how things turn out at the end of the week. Wish me luck!

Making The Book

2012-01-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

So you want to be a self-published author. Good for you. Jump on that bandwagon and make your fortune, seize the moment, the future is yours! First though write a novel. No, not a first draft. I mean something that has been through the tender loving ministrations of countless drafts and revisions, that has been read by friends and enemies and raked over the coals. A finished product, gleaming and perfect, or as close to perfect as you can get. That done, turn it into an eBook, create a cover, write the back copy, upload it to Amazon, et voila! You're self-published. Now get to the marketing, you marketing monkey you.

But, hold up. An eBook cannot be held in your eager little hands. It cannot be shown to your mother as proof that you are actually self-published, since she'll be forced to squint at your Kindle screen and nod dubiously as you assure her that yes, in 2012, that counts as a real book. No, if you want the real thing, and by the real thing I mean what a book was understood to be about ten years ago, then you need to print that sucker. And now we're talking a whole different story.

See, it's one thing to design a cover for an eBook that's meant to be viewed at 72 dpi on the computer screen, no larger than a thumbnail or the palm of your hand. A real cover needs to look good at 300 dpi, and wrap around the spine and the back. You need a theme that holds together across it all, a professional feel, that gloriously silky touch. You need a book that will look sexy on the shelf, that will be comfortable rubbing shoulders with the classics without looking déclassé.

How does one go about pulling off said feat? You either plonk down some hard earned moolah and hire a designer, or roll up your sleeves and do it yourself. Which is what I just did for my three novels.

First off, you start with a template which CreateSpace (the Amazon affiliate that prints your books for a delightfully high fee) generously generates for you. This layout is dependent on the number of pages in your book (determines the width of the spine) and the size of your cover (trade paperback? mass market?). Here's an example of one:

Looks pretty simple, right? It actually is. Now, what you'll already have on your hands is the front cover. What you need to do is resize that so that it fits, and then create the rest. What goes on the back cover? The spine? More graphics? How do you make it fit with the front? How to make a seamless whole?

Here's what I came up with:

I'm actually pretty pleased with the result. The Grind Show is already available directly from CreateSpace, and will soon (as in a couple of days) be available on Amazon too. Throne and Crude Sunlight should be available in a couple of weeks, as I need to still approve the proofs.

Still! Who knew design work could be such fun? Luckily for me, I find it so.

GRIND SHOW available in print!

2012-01-27T10:30:00.000-08:00

There's a rumor going round that THE GRIND SHOW is finally available in print. And you know what? That rumor is true. You can now purchase a copy via CreateSpace, and in a few days it will also be available on Amazon and a whole bunch of other outlets.

If you guys recall I received my proof copy back in December, and then got slammed with work and other projects and never got around to fixing it. Well, yesterday I did, and voila, the finished product is now available for purchase, all 264 pages of it.

Here's the blurb:

For those who can see demons there is but one maxim: hunt them down until your luck runs out, and then hope for an easy death.

Or so Jason thought until one hellish night in a desert ghost town leaves his life in ruins and his soul tainted with demonic power.

Now the tables are turned and he's the prey, forced to fight a running battle to keep himself and his friends alive. But at what price is he willing to buy his freedom? The demons care nothing for collateral damage, and as the death toll mounts the darkness within him grows stronger, making it ever harder for Jason to resist the allure of his newfound powers...

It's received a staggering 4.9 overall rating on Amazon out of some 26 reviews, and is my only novel to never have been sent back by a customer seeking a refund. I don't know what it is about the combination of demons, desert, shotguns and car chases, but it really seems to work for people.

So. If you're without an eReader, or would simply like a copy in trade paperback, check out the CreateSpace store here.

The Da Vinci Code Imperative

2012-01-27T05:46:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I decided to give THE DA VINCI CODE a shot and bought the audiobook to listen on my way to work. I was curious: despite being universally panned by the critics it was selling like hotcakes laced with crack, so I put on my detective hat and gave it a go. About halfway through however I caught myself yelling with startling fury at the narrator and punching my steering wheel, and so decided to turn it off and never, ever listen to it again. I did, however, manage to determine a couple of reasons why it was selling so well, and can now trace a certain difficulty I'm having writing novels to that very experience.

First, why did I get so mad? Because Dan Brown didn't trust me as a reader. Time and time again one of the main characters would learn something of importance but Brown would refuse to reveal what it was. It would go something like, "And then Robert opened the letter and read its contents. What he discovered therein drained the blood from his face as he realized that everything had changed in such a horrific way that nothing would ever be the same again. He quickly ate the letter and jumped out the window." And I would be left going, "What? What? What was in the letter? Are you kidding me? You're not going to tell me what he just read?" And then a chapter later the problem would be compounded as Brown would refuse to reveal a second plot point due to its being based on the first. By the time I started screaming I think there were literally five crucial pieces of information being withheld from me, and I flipped.

Yet Brown did write a thrilling page turner. He did this by writing five page chapters that always ended on a cliffhanger. The tension was ratcheted up to 11 all the time, and the characters never stopped screaming and running and outwitting their enemies and shrieking and being shot at. It felt like being thrown off a cliff or being driven in a convertible at bewildering speeds through a rain forest, with fronds and branches smacking you across the face every second.

The Hunger Games followed this model to good effect. Short chapters, killer cliffhangers, tension ratcheted up to 11. That's why people pick it up to start it before bed and then set it down at six in the morning, unsure as to what just happened. Main difference? Good writing, good characters, good plot.

This falling off a cliff method of writing is insidious. It develops in the author a tendency to want to end every chapter in a ridiculous cliffhanger. To keep your chapters short. To ratchet the tension up right to the edge of credibility. It's no longer sufficient to have a chapter where the son tells his father he's not going to graduate from college. Now you have to have the son also come out of the closet as he does so while a car full of werewolves execute a drive-by, Tommy Guns blazing.

I followed the cliff method with THE GRIND SHOW, and sure enough I had people tell me they read it in one sitting. But not every novel should be written in that manner, and now that I'm writing END CITY I just had a moment where I had to resist the urge to kick up the drama levels. I want to write THE DARK KNIGHT, not a '60's Batman episode, and so restrained myself throwing in a gratuitous werewolf drive-by, pork pie hats flying as they howl and fuss with their zoot suits while trying to squeeze off a shot or three.

What about you, dear reader? What was the last book you enjoyed tremendously and tore through at a gallop? Does Dan Brown's method work for you?

Lessons from Downton Abbey

2012-01-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

On a whim, my girlfriend and I began watching this series a few days ago. I had heard the show's composer explain on NPR how he had gone about creating the score, and then read an article on Andrew Sullivan's site shortly thereafter that sought to explain the mass appeal of the show. Curious, Grace and I sat down to watch the first episode.

And were captivated.

Now, I'm not a TV kind of guy. We don't even own a set, instead preferring to watch the occasional documentary or film via Netflix. And yet. And yet.

What a brilliantly written show. What fine actors. What subtle nuance, what development, what masterful handling of emotion. We've just finished episode 4, and in such a short time already feel incredibly familiar with each member of the ensemble cast and Downton Abbey itself, as if it were a real place that we could visit. So swept up have we become that it takes genuine effort to step back and as a novelist scrutinize the story so as to take it apart and see how it was done.

For what the show's writer has accomplished is to weave a complex tapestry with such effortless skill that all eighteen characters have their own narrative arcs, concerns, and dramatic moments. It is such a finely balanced juggling act that we never feel as if we've lost touch with one set in favor of another, nor does it actively devolve into following one subplot at the expense of the general furthering of the main tale. How on earth does Julian Fellowes do it?

Here, as best I can manage on short notice, are some observations:

When handling a large cast, give each member a defining characteristic. The honorable Lord. The Machiavellian grandmother. The kind hearted youngest daughter. The villainous footman. The naive scullery maid. Each character has one defining trait, which is then actively played upon or which brings them into conflict with another character. The lesson here is that simplicity is best when the numbers are great.
Engineer crises that will evoke the strongest emotions from the audience. You have 18 characters stuck in one vast household. What manner of conflict will stir the audience's interest episode after episode? (Warning: skip to point #3 if you wish to avoid mild spoilers). The new valet's struggle to serve despite his lame leg which was injured during the last war. The maid's desire to leave service and become a secretary, against all odds and misogyny. The new heir's struggle to remain true to himself. The second footman's torment over being bullied by the first footman and snubbed by his love. The point is that these conflicts are simple and involve powerful issues that the audience can't help but be caught up by.
Set the story in an interesting locale. Grace had never encountered pre-WW1 British society before, and was shocked, appalled, and utterly fascinated by the world of the nobility and their servants. Downton Abbey and how it runs is as much a focus of the show as the actual plots that take place within it; having a fascinating setting against which to place the struggles of the characters enhances the appeal of the story incredibly.
While the characters can be reduced to one trait, and the conflicts are powerful yet simple, the tale is still told with a refined and subtle touch. The dialog is excellent, and the actors display such a depth of emotion that we feel as if we're watching real people go through excruciatingly intense moments, not two dimensional caricatures plodding through a script.
Make sure that everything that makes it onto the screen is essential. Let everything we see is further some plot or revealing some crucial facet of the setting. Downton Abbey is told with the same economy that one sees usually reserved for short stories--nothing is superfluous.

So there you have it. The recipe might be reduced to the following: take a large cast of striking characters with easily identifiable traits in an exotic setting and have them undergo powerful yet simple conflicts that are told in a nuanced and masterful manner.

Sound simple? Ha! If only it were so. Here's to episode #5!

Bad Reviews

2012-01-03T19:57:00.000-08:00

Note: each quote is from a different review.

Once a writer publishes his novel, people are liable to read it. Upon doing so, some of them may come back to his book page and post their thoughts on what he wrote. What they think is largely outside an author's ability to control; while he can work as hard to craft the very best novel he can, striving for depth of narrative, and to create striking characters and a compelling world, inevitably some people will find his effort lacking.

"One of the few books I've ever had to abandon."

Reading a negative review is never fun. There is that initial shock as you realize that you've been hit with a 1 star review. A moment of morbid curiosity as you click over to look, akin to slowing down to stare at a car accident. A sensation of dull disappointment as you read the critic's words, strive to understand why they disliked your novel so, to see your work from their point of view.

"The whole book was like a run on sentence. The ending was the worst, like the author missed the deadline and still didn't know how to end it, so made up some more crap and bam, you have a lame ending. It is so laughable, I want my money back!"

When you finish reading the review, your first instinct is to immediately navigate away, to close the window, to make the words vanish. But they linger like a retinal afterimage, hovering in your mind's eye. The tone. The energy behind the words, whether it's amused contempt, sharp derision, boorish intolerance, or cruel barbs.

"The writing is also very clunky and nonsensical in some parts. For example, one passage went something like this - "She saw people. Who were flying. In the sky. With. Wings. Of. Fire." (this was NOT an actual passage in the book, but it's very close.) The author's period use was way off. I know what he was trying to do - place pauses for effect, but he did it all wrong. Instead, it was distracting and puzzling. I had to read a couple passages two or three times to even make sense of them. Note to author - don't use punctuation effects if you don't know how to do it effectively. "

Now, a part of you know that this is how the game works. If you put your work out there, you will get bad reviews. Your work can't be everybody's cup of tea; in fact, given how you feel about many other popular novels and television shows, you fully realize that you actually don't want your novel to be loved indiscriminately by everybody. At least, your mature, adult mind doesn't. But that part of you that's still six years old, that dreamed of being a successful author, that part doesn't listen to reason, doesn't care about logic. Instead it just feels confused and upset.

"Action packed but more like reading a comic book without pictures."

What's an author to do? In the end, nothing. You can't respond without making things worse. You can't delete the reviews, nor should you try. After all, regardless of whether you agree with them or not, each reader is absolutely entitled to their view. In the end, you can only ignore them if they are poorly written or displaying ignorance, or try to absorb something useful from them if they are well written and cogent.

Or you can take heart from your positive reviews. The following came in a couple of days ago. It was a wonderful ray of sunshine through the low hanging clouds of recent bad reviews:

"My attraction to Throne began with the description. As curious as I was to read it, I was also slightly apprehensive concerning the treatment of such a loss; within a few pages, however, that apprehension disappeared. Regardless of whether or not Phil Tucker has ever experienced or been witness to such grief, he captured the extreme range of emotions perfectly. I felt as if I were reading my own story...with a few extra mythological beings.

Although I'm a sci-fi/fantasy junkie, I'm also a nerd for the classics; I enjoyed seeing a well-written modern take of the journey through the underworld, the loss and restoration of humanity, the crossover of the spiritual and mundane realities, etc. There are times when the story becomes quite graphic, especially during the battle, but the gore is necessary and not overly-theatrical.

I encourage everyone over the age of fifteen who can read sentences, ranging from simple to compound-complex, to read this amazing book."

Bad reviews are a part of this game. They're going to come. The fact that I'm getting mostly 5 star and 1 star reviews says something, I guess. I'll let you decide what. But either way, I think the best thing I can do is try to ignore them. Enjoy the good ones, ponder the bad ones, and then forget them both. Because in the end, what I've got to put my energy into is writing. Focusing on my next novel. Improving my skills, challenging myself, striving to do better.

The reviews will keep coming. I'll keep writing. And so it goes.

What Goes Up...

2011-12-31T06:42:00.000-08:00

...must inevitably at some point come down.

And while THRONE has not yet crashed back down through the ranks to the hundred thousand mark where it once languished, I realized last night that it had stopped selling as breathlessly as it had been doing these past few days. Yesterday I moved only a third of the books that I had sold on each of the previous two days. I slipped from #244 to #492, and it looks like I will soon slip into the 500's. Curious, I began to investigate. What had happened?

I think I now understand, and it's tied to what propelled THRONE on its meteoric rise to begin with. See, people don't come to Amazon for THRONE, intent on buying it from the get-go. I don't have a plethora of good reviews from popular blogs driving traffic, nor am I a famous author. Instead, people discover me while browsing other books they like. I realized this when I first emerged from the 5 day free promotion bliss, blinking and dazed, and saw that THRONE's 'Others Who Bought This Item Also Bought' recommendations included other incredibly popular sellers, most of which were in the top #100 paid Kindle list.

What had happened? My book had been downloaded 27,000, and during that time those same people had also bought a number of the top selling novels on Amazon. As such, my book had become associated with them, and after the promotion ended remained so linked. People then came to Amazon to buy a J.A. Konrath novel, and saw THRONE linked to on his book page. The result? I shot right up into the top ranks too.

So there I was last night, frowning and staring at the screen. I checked my 'Others Who Bought...' list, and saw that the same gang of books that I had become linked to were still there. Amazon's associative algorithm had replaced the spy thrillers and lawyer novels with similar books of wonder and the supernatural, and over the past few days I had been cross-pollinating with a group of similar novels. Books that had all been in the top hundred sellers along with my own.

Digging a little deeper, I checked their book pages, and realized that THRONE was not being linked back to. It had disappeared from all their 'Others Who Bought...' lists. Gone. I sat back. What the hell? Then it dawned on me. All the guys who had been sending traffic my way had just put their books up for free. They were no doubt now enjoying massive amounts of downloads--but were now being associated with other free books that those same customers were downloading in bulk.

Links to my novel had been sending people to my book page in the hundreds, but these new downloads were taking place in the thousands, and THRONE had simply been overwhelmed. I was off the radar and consequently my sales had plummeted. Everybody had put their books up for free, and it was only the small handful that hadn't that were still sending traffic my way.

So what have I learned? That the chances of becoming a best seller on Amazon are dependent on the same factors that govern your chances of becoming an astronaut. A best friend of mine had once seriously considered trying to become one, and had told me that to become an astronaut you need three things: world class skills and talents, political connections, and luck. Two out of three aren't enough. Same goes for best selling novels on Amazon: you need a well written novel, associative links on other best selling book pages, and luck.

So what can I do now? Not much, really, but wait. These free promotions will end soon. The massive downloading for free books will come to a stop. People will go back to that old fashioned practice of buying their novels. At which point I can only hope that those cross-pollinating links will emerge once more, and bring traffic flooding back to my book page.

And in the meantime? Enjoy the fact that THRONE is still in the top #500, which, to be blunt, is absolutely bloody amazing.

Amazon Fever Dream

2011-12-27T22:58:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago Amazon launched their Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. In brief, this allowed authors to make their titles available for free to Kindle Prime users, who could choose to 'borrow' one book a month at no charge. In return, said authors would be compensated for each borrow out of a general fund established by Amazon ($500,000 for December), and also be allowed to make their novel available to all consumers for free for five days.

At first I ignored this new program, despite it being aggressively marketed to all authors on their KDP page. I thought, nah, not worth looking into, plus there was a caveat that the novel had to be available only on Amazon, and nowhere else.

Christmas crept closer. Word was bandied about that over 2,000,000 kindles had been purchased as gifts. That's a big number. That would mean a lot of people looking for books come Christmas day. I thought things over. I ruminated, and then finally thought: why not? After all, I had sold 1 copy of Throne by that point in December. Making it free for five days could hardly hurt sales.

So I set the promotion to run from the morning of the 23rd through to the night of the 27th. Mildly excited, I went to bed that Thursday night, curious to see how things might have changed in the morning.

When I awoke, the first thing I did was check my numbers. I sat up, blinked, and checked again. Cor blimey, I thought, over six hundred copies had been downloaded. And just that morning. I sat back, trying to understand. To extrapolate. At that rate, I could expect... what? A thousand downloads a day, maybe? Maybe five thousand by the time it was done? That was incredible!

I cheerfully checked back in that afternoon. 2,000. That gave me pause. I quickly revised my math. Could I perhaps expect 10,000?

Folks, the next few days went by in a blur. About a couple of thousand downloads happened on the 23rd and 24th. But then the 25th rolled around, and things went crazy. And stayed crazy on the 26th, and got even more insane on the 27th.

By the time the promotion had ended, over 27,000 copies of Throne had been downloaded. It was ranked as the #1 most downloaded free novel in the Contemporary Fantasy category, and was in a bunch of other impressive top 100 lists.

I didn't know what to do with that number. What did it even mean? 27,000 people. That's the size of a small town. Who were these they? How had they found my book? Why did they download it? Had they just downloaded my novel alone, or had they downloaded hundreds of free books at a go?

Most importantly: what would happen next?

So you can imagine how I felt when I woke up this morning. As has become habit, I checked my sales page. Throne had moved from the Free to the Paid categories, and dropped to #6,800. Which was still amazing. It meant that Throne, out of all the hundreds of thousands of novels available on Kindle, was ranked in the top ten thousand.

I went in to work. I was excited, but guardedly so--that ranking could simply reflect the diminishing momentum I had enjoyed while promoting my novel for free. It could jump to 10,000 by the time I got to work, and within a day, things could be back to normal. Instead, when I checked it again at the office, it had improved to #3,500.

I blinked. Checked the number of books purchased. It had gone up. Not by the hundreds or thousands that I had grown used to, but by about 30 books. That's 30 purchases. At full price. A few hours later I checked again. #2,857. It was still going up. I was selling even more books.

I went out to dinner. I had skirt steak and greek salad. I laughed, joked around, and forced myself not to think about Throne. Not to think about the number of books that were being bought. At what it all meant. My girlfriend and I got home around 11:30pm, and I took another look: #890. Now it's two hours later, and it's ranked at #711.

People. This is madness. I can't believe this is happening.

I've sold more books today than I have in the last five months combined.

I feel like I've stepped into an episode of the Twilight Zone. I can't stop checking my rankings. Each time I expect things to have changed, to have started swinging in the other direction. I can't believe that my novel is the seven hundred and eleventh best selling Kindle novel on all of Amazon. And that the ranking is only getting better.

I've spent minutes at a time tonight staring at nothing. Trying to wrap my brain around this. To understand that Throne has gone from being ranked in the hundreds of thousands to the three digits. That even as I type this, people are buying copies. Seeing the cover, reading the description, and clicking on the purchase button.

This doesn't feel real. This is the kind of thing that happens to other authors, successful ones whose blogs I browse looking for clues as to how they did it. What they did right.

Yet here I am. As of 1:53am EST, Throne is still ranking at #711. Where it will be tomorrow is anybody's guess. For I know this bubble could burst and I could drop like a lead balloon back to where I was before this all started.

Or I could sell copies like hotcakes for a second day straight.

I've no idea. But hot damn, this is about as thrilling as life gets. Wish me luck!

My Writing Made Tangible

2011-12-13T19:23:00.000-08:00

A writer's life is marked by milestones. The first time you complete a short story. The first time you give up on a novel, 20,000 words in. The first time you complete something approximating a novel, coming in at about 65,000 words. The first review a friend gives you. The first agent that shoots you down when you ask for representation. The first agent that asks for a partial, and then a full copy of your manuscript. The first time you decide to self-publish. The first book you sell. The tenth, the hundredth.

When I was a kid I dreamed of being a writer. I knew that I was going to be one, there was nothing else I wished to be, so my dreams were not about whether I would succeed but how that success would look like. I would hold my favorite books and wonder if one day my own novels would thrill kids my age. I would squint into the future and try to picture the accolades, my attentive editor, the covers of my novels. There was something magical about such daydreams, as if I were a lowly page dreaming of one day being a knight.

The biggest milestone has always been to hold a printed copy of my own novel. To rifle through the pages, pausing here and there to read a familiar passage. To heft it, to bend it, to hold my dreams made concrete in my own hands.

Which is why receiving my proof copy of THE GRIND SHOW is a bittersweet experience. Yes, it's the milestone I've always dreamed about. Yes, the novel is selling well, and December promises to be my best month by far in terms of sales. Yes, it is a book, filled with my words, with my name on the cover. But somewhere along the way the gloss came off the dream, and I find the reality to be more complex than I had anticipated.

I was incredibly fortunate to have my good friend Amy Rosenthal edit THE GRIND SHOW. She did a truly professional job, drenching the pages in red ink and ferreting out inconsistencies, redundancies and sloppy writing. My friend Paul Guyet has been the best sounding board that an author could wish for, investing himself in the world of THE GRIND SHOW, helping me iron out the setting, the plot, and infusing such enthusiasm and excitement into the act of creation that when my enthusiasm slumped, he renewed my vigor.

And yet.

I worked at Penguin in NYC for a year. I saw how the traditional publishing process goes. The phases. The revisions. The editor's letter. The cover design process, the marketing sessions, everything that takes a novel from a raw manuscript to a professionally produced product on a shelf. Yes I know that system is rapidly becoming antiquated, and I purposefully eschewed it when I chose to go indie. I purposefully said no to waiting 18 months to getting published, to 17.5% royalties on the eBook version, to an advance that would not have been higher than $7,000 and paid out to me over the course of two years, with chunks going to taxes and my agent. I said no to then having to wait a year to publish my next book, and potentially getting dropped if the sales of my first novel disappointed. To getting no marketing support since fledgling authors are supposed to do their own promo work. I said no to that entire system, and instead rolled up my sleeves and got to work, designing my own cover, writing my own back copy, learning how the indie publishing world worked, doing my own marketing and publishing a new novel every three months.

I did all that, and it's been great, but it's not what I envisioned as a kid. It lacks the magical touch of getting that acceptance letter from your agent, the dream of setting off a bidding war between rival publishing houses. Instead, the printed proof that I hold in my hand tonight is a testament to the grit and resolve I'm manifesting each day as I promote and work at becoming a success on my own terms, through my own talents. It's not a perfect proof. I wrote 'COver Art' on the back, the title needs to be enlarged, and something about it still looks vaguely amateurish. But it's my novel. It's my writing in there, each and every word, and it's a testament to how far I've come since I was a kid, dreaming about the big leagues.

Is it the milestone I always envisioned and hoped for? No. And for that I'm sad, strangely nostalgic and a touch melancholy.

But it is my novel. And it is published.

And folks. I'm just getting started.

New Crude Sunlight Cover - Addendum

2011-12-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

After some reflection (and input), I've modified the cover - see what you think:

Click on the image to see a larger version. The font is more legible now when shrunken down to thumbnail size, and the crouching ghost-girl gives the potential reader a clearer indication as to the novel's content.

What do you guys think? Better? Worse?

New Crude Sunlight Cover

2011-12-10T08:11:00.001-08:00

As some of you may know, I've been wrestling with the cover for Crude Sunlight ever since I decided to publish it. On one hand I'm fairly adept at photo manipulation and montage through Photoshop, yet on the other I actually have very little skill in actually creating visual art. Which leaves me able to create striking covers by placing effects on shots, but not actually able to truly create a cover from scratch.

Why has this been a problem? Because Crude Sunlight is a complex, subtle novel. It's a tale of psychological horror set in abandoned buildings in Buffalo, NYC, and thus striking the right tone and creating something that is both visually arresting and conveys the mood of the novel has proved to be a huge headache.My first attempt was the following:

The idea behind this one was a grungy, dismal wall with rays of golden sunlight splashed across it, hinting perhaps at a sewer grate just above and out of sight, with a subtle splash of blood to indicate that all is not as it should be. However, it lacks a true focal point, and thus ends up looking like a vague, excrement splattered wall.

Not what I was going for.

So I thought: let's ramp this up! Let's get a little dramatic, a little intense, and convey the horror aspect a little more forcefully. The result?

A modern, intense take, but one that overshoots the mark. Gone is the subtlety, replaced instead by a modern, movie poster like feel that misrepresents the novel. This cover lasted but a few days before I reverted, unhappily, to the first.

However! Yesterday I discovered a beautiful shot of an abandoned stairwell online, and after a brief but felicitous exchange with the artist, I received permission to use the shot as my cover. Here it is:

I love it. What do you guys think?

Excerpt from Chapter 9 of ONE BY ONE

2011-12-03T19:00:00.001-08:00

Excerpt from Chapter 9 of ONE BY ONE:

They sat still and watched the world outside the window. Watched as the breeze gently stirred the tree tops, watched as clouds endlessly changed, slowly spinning themselves into new shapes or into oblivion. Listened to the bird calls, eyes tracking the occasional form that swooped across their line of sight. There was no sound from the city, no sirens, no cries, no car horns or songs from a distant radio, no laughter from the neighbors or sound of feet treading on the ceiling above, no banging of doors or acceleration of motors. The great city lay still, and they sat there thinking of the libraries, the great stadium, the clothing stores, the dark shopping centers, the police stations and empty jails, the desolate churches and pet stores, the abandoned factories and warehouses, the empty ships floating on the river and the empty cars lining the streets in their hundreds of thousands. They thought of the food spoiling and the encroachment of insects, the weaving of webs and the growth of weeds, thebreaking of pipes and accumulation of dust. Everywhere about them the residences and halls and offices of mankind lay still, silent, their functions sustained by the thoughts of the young couple for only as long as they were there to ascribe them, for after Peter and Sophia vanished they would be nothing at all, devoid of allmeaning to the animals and birds that were destined to inherit the earth.

Cover for ONE BY ONE

2011-12-02T15:46:00.001-08:00

Why Horror Writers Hate Cell Phones

2011-12-02T14:47:00.001-08:00

Picture it. A dark wood. A haunted house. A creepy series of steam tunnels. A remote and scary location, and the hero/heroine is running from a madman/serial killer/vampire/toilet ghoul. Oh no! They're all alone, isolated, in the dark. Scary! Then they pull out their cell phone and call the cops, call their boyfriend, call the SWAT, call their best friend, tell them where they are, and in five minutes the place is crawling with the FEDs and National Guard.

Record scratch!

What? How do you keep your scary levels on maximum high when your hero can at the slightest provocation whip out their cell and call for help? Nothing ruins the mood more than ending a moment of isolation, and that's why we get endless variations on people's cell phones getting no reception or having dead batteries.

But you know what? That's a cheap way out. Anytime that happens now I immediately lose my connection to the story. Are you serious? It's 2011 folks. You can pretty much get reception everywhere. Sure, OK, fine. If you're three basement levels down, in an elevator or the true wilderness it can get dicey. But no urban location these days is without total coverage, and phones these days can go days without a recharge (unless you bought a new iPhone, then you're good for a couple of hours).

So why do authors keep pulling this same trick?

Because they don't know how to handle connectivity. Old school terror depends on isolation. Being alone is the scariest thing. If you're alone, you're automatically seven times more scared. But if you can jump on Facebook or Tweet or dial your buddy, the fear factor plummets. Especially because you can then call for help.

So what's a poor horror author to do? They need to realize that artificially enforcing solitude by arbitrarily killing the cell phone won't cut it. Instead, they need to start asking: how else can I isolate a modern person in today's tech-laden world? There's the man alone in the crowd. I saw one enterprising movie use cell phone networks as conduits for ghosts (it didn't work, but it's a move in the right direction). There's the evil that nobody else can see, so that it doesn't matter whether you can call for help or not. There's Freddy Krueger stalking the cellphone free dreamscapes.

We're becoming so interconnected that we might as well be ants in the same nest. How would you go about scaring just one ant? How would you terrify him (or her!) when they are constantly surrounded by friends and frenemies? I think you either remove said ant from the nest in some plausible way, or you find a way to break their connections with their friends and frenemies so that they are now isolated while still being surrounded. Make it so that their little ant cellphones still function, but they don't want to use them. Make it so that their societal ties themselves have become an isolating source of danger.

Or something! Just don't say their cellphone has gone dead or no longer has reception!

You've Got To Run Run Run

2011-11-29T20:23:00.001-08:00

Just a mental tally here before I go to bed. A round-up of projects both new and old, in need of completion, editing, or being being written. I'm going to try and reach up into the heavens and pull down the flickering stars so that I can order them on my shelf:

ONE BY ONE: This is close to completion. About to finish the second draft, then some copy editing, and it's good to go. Cover is done. Needs back copy. Estim. Pub: Jan '12.
VAMPIRE MIAMI: 2/3rds of the first draft has been written. Needs a rewrite, though the plot and concept is all there. Needs cover, back copy, and then editing. Also, needs a title. Estim. Pub: April '12.
BLOOD FROM THE MOUNTAIN: Needs serious work. The first draft has been written but it needs extensive rewriting. Going to insert another couple of POV's, expand the scope. Also need a cover, back copy, and then copy editing. Estim. Pub: July '12.
MEMORIES FROM THE FUTURE: Concept is there, first 1/4 written. Needs a more definite plot, finished first draft, revision, and then copy edit. Needs cover, back copy, better title. Estim. Pub: Sept '12.
DEPTH CITY: Research about done. Concept is strong, but in need of plot and characters. Needs first draft, rewrite, copy edit. Needs cover, back copy, proper title. Estim. Pub: Feb '13.
UNREAL CITY: 1/3 finished of the first draft has been written. Concept and plot are clear. Needs to be completed, revised, copy edited. Needs cover and back copy. Estim. Pub: June '13.
HUNTING THE HOLY (AKA GRIND SHOW II): Concept & plot are in place. Needs first draft, revision, copy edit. Needs cover, back copy. Estim. Pub: Sept '13.
CRONE: Concept in place, vague outline of plot. Needs first draft, revision, copy edit. Needs cover, back copy. Estim. Pub: Dec '13.

I think that's doable. It reflects how certain novels such as MEMORIES, VAMP, and CRONE are liable to be quick to write and publish, while others such as DEPTH, UNREAL, and BLOOD are going to require much more time due to their greater complexity and potential length.

Note: I'm not including audio book work with the inestimable Paul Guyet, Jr.

My goal is thus to have published 11 novels by the end of 2013. My first novel, GRIND SHOW, went live June '11. Thus if I stick to this schedule I'll publish an average of one novel every 3 months.

I think this is doable. I'm trying to be right on the money with these estimates. Neither overly optimistic nor conservative. If I push myself, however, I may be able to move faster than I anticipate. I theoretically have GRIND SHOW III and the second and third novels in the BLOOD series to write, as well as VAMP II and perhaps even DEPTH II, and I'd like to squeeze at least one of those into 2013 as well.

We'll see.

I'm going to have to improve my time management skills, however. Return to my First Million Words discipline, and farm out the copy editing work straight away instead of spending months trying to ferret out my own elusive mistakes.

Either way, it's a plan. I'm making it public both to make it real to myself and hold myself accountable to it as time passes. I'll check back in a couple of years and see how I did.

2011-11-28T15:38:00.001-08:00

Throne by Philip Tucker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I originally intended for this novel to be entitled MOTHER MAIDEN CRONE (which I still feel is a kick-ass title), and for it to follow three women as they grew entangled with the world of the fae. It started well with the Mother and Maiden (Maribel and Maya) sections flowing easily, but the Crone part limped and straggled along until I finally cut it out altogether. The Crone had discovered the secret to eternal life by sacrificing her relatives to a banshee that haunted her family, but upon hearing its wail in 2010 she realizes that her last living blood relative resides in NYC, and so she crosses the Atlantic to hunt him down.

Which was a great idea and all, but somehow didn't gel with the rest of the novel. So I took an axe to it, and suddenly I was left with MOTHER MAIDEN, which wasn't nearly as cool a title.

I sat back, eyed the manuscript (I had about 30k words at that point), and tried to figure out where it was going to go. Two characters a dichotomy make, and somehow it made sense to have Maribel and Maya fall into opposition. Two characters, two fairy courts, and before I knew it all the pieces had realigned themselves and I had the Seelie and Unseelie Courts struggling to acquire their Queen before the other, and in so doing attain supremacy over the Isle of Apples.

The Isle of Apples? Yes. What first started as a pun on the Big Apple (get it?) quickly grew into something more, as I realized that coincidentally it was also the name of the fabled island where Excalibur was forged and King Arthur taken to heal from his wounds. Said realization led me to examine the myth of Excalibur, and discover Caladbolg/Caladcholg, its Irish predecessor and analog whose own duality further deepened the Seelie/Unseelie theme.

From there I ran with it, wrote the whole 90k in a torrent, and in the process followed the tale into the lands of the dead as Maribel sought to confront Kubu (a real Sumerian demon whose role in killing babes dovetailed with the Irish myth of changelings) and into the world of the fae. I drew (as most do) a vast amount of inspiration from Brian Froud (look up his picture of a phooka), and from a number of texts on the fae that helped me delve past the gilded depictions of Tinkerbell and into the darker, more troublesome nature of the old school fae (check out the Nuckalevee to get a sense of how awful they used to be).

Much has changed since the first draft. Maya was originally Sita, a refugee from Bombay, and most of the characters have been reworked, deepened and strengthened in some manner. Yet at its heart it's still a story of two women driven by desire, by passion and despair, both fighting to survive in a cruel world as they transition from one stage of their lives to the next. It's a story I'm immensely proud of, and I can only hope that others enjoy reading it as much as I did researching and writing it.

View all my reviews

Excerpt from One by One

2011-11-25T20:32:00.001-08:00

Excerpt from Chapter 7

Theywalked for a while in silence, and then finally stopped and sat on abench in a small square with a dead fountain in its center, a few windows lit inthe buildings that surrounded it but most of them dark. The young man put hisarm around Sophia’s shoulders and they both looked up at the moon where shehung in the sky, distant and cool and serene.

We’ve been looking up at her foras long as we’ve had eyes, said Sophia, The moon, she’s been called so manydifferent things by so many different people, strange to think that she’s stillthere, the same as always, looking down at us with light borrowed from the sun,watching our planet as we disappear, the same as she was ten thousand yearsago, or a hundred thousand, when we’re all gone, when there’s nothing left butthese empty buildings and dust and abandoned dogs, she’ll look down at usstill, will look down at the earth and things will continue to grow and die andlive and evolve as if we had never been.

Why, asked Peter, why is thishappening to us. Sophia didn’t answer, because she sensed that it wasn’t reallya question, not in the same manner that it had been during the beginning, thefirst few months when people had demanded explanations. No, this was anaccusation against the dark, against the sky and the moon, this was angerpresented to the world, to the universe, to God if he was listening. What didwe do, all of us, what did we do to deserve this, this pain, this misery, werewe really so bad, all of us, were so many of us so wicked that even the good onesamongst us deserved to go?

One By One

2011-11-23T06:01:00.001-08:00

Excerpt from Chapter 7:

Citizensof the New Republic, thank you for gathering here today. Over the past month wehave gained much, we have fought hard and won countless victories. Some areeasy to point out: in the middle of the night, at what used to be our darkesthour, we once again have light; select supermarkets are now bursting with food, sothat all may eat and none need starve; water once more flows through the ancient pipes of this city as it has donefor a hundred years; medicine is available, the hospitals are once againoperational, the streets are kept clear of filth, order is upheld and the wickedare punished.

The wicked, my friends, arepunished. For every law abiding citizen there is an anarchist. For every manwho erects an altar to civilization there is another who wishes to tear it down.All that we have done, all that we have accomplished, all that we are today isdue to cooperation, unity and solidarity. Nothing, I repeat nothing, would havetaken place without that, without that single guiding vision, without thatwillingness to sacrifice the small in order to gain the great.

Unfortunately, there are thoseamongst us, even those we once trusted and called friend, brother, sister,citizen—there are those who place their ego over the greater good. There arethose who are willing to tear down what we have built, who are willing toreturn to that state of savagery from which we have but with great effortarisen, if only to placate their furious sense of importance. There are those,my fellow citizens, who would rather cast each and every one of you back intodarkness, take the food from the hungry mouths of your children, deprive you oforder and safety, who would condemn you to a life of barbarity, solely becausethey refuse to put the importance of the many before that of the few.

Now, let us be clear. They arenot simply threatening our source of electricity, our constant food, our sanityand sanitary conditions. While those would be sufficient reasons to condemnthem, they are doing much more! They are holding their knives, serrated andgleaming, at the very throats of our sense of self, they are threatening toundo that which makes us civilized, that which makes us who we are, citizens ofan enlightened society. Do you not sense it, brothers and sisters, the newfeeling of peace and joy that fills the very air? Do you not see how, onceagain, when given purpose, direction, when told that all is well and all will continueto be well, how we have regained our pride, our civilization? We walkstraighter, we look each other in the eye with confidence and pride, we walk asmen and women, not scurrying like beasts. These selfish monsters would tearapart the New Republic, would consign us to a broken world once more, would doso regardless of the consequences, and this, my friends, I simply cannot, willnot, allow.

That iswhy I have gathered you all here today. You are here to witness the birth ofthe true New Republic, for we are about to break free from the chrysalis of thepast and emerge, resplendent, into the freedom of the future. The party of theLeft, of which I am a humble member, has taken fierce and assertive action, andarrested the party of the Right just as they were about to quit the citycouncil and cast all into chaos. Last night, as passions ran high and vitriolwas unchecked, the party of the Right revealed its true priorities, anddeclared that they would march, all of them, to form a separate government, todivide the city, to split the land and ruin all.

They have been taken, they havebeen judged, and today, now, you will witness their sentencing. For threateningto imperil the very fabric of our society, for being willing to fomentdissidence, chaos and anarchy, for attacking the very heart of the New Republicitself, and in so doing attempt to bury a dagger in each of your own hearts,there can be only one verdict: death.

Postulations

2011-11-22T20:50:00.001-08:00

How many cameras do you need on set? How many POV characters in a novel? What is the benefit of having two dozen characters a la George R.R. Martin vs. just one, a la Patrick Rothfus? How wide the angle of the lens, how broad the scope of the tale, should one strive for an epic or settle for quiet meditation?

I've never written a novel with more than two points of view. I tend to possess a character like Captain Howdy and then ride them all the way home to the conclusion. I tried writing a 3 POV novel entitled Mother Maiden Crone, and ended up chopping off the Crone section 20,000 words below the sea because it just wasn't working. The result was 2 POV and a novel entitled THRONE. Which worked.

But now, ah, now, my next novel, my next challenge, a true desafio! How many, my friend, how much is enough? One novel or a series. One main location or several cities. A continent? A world? Do we start small and view the world through a limited eyeglass, or pull back and gaze upon its vastness with a view non parallel?

I could have the rebel priest. I could have the orc silverback. I could have the high caste noble. That's 3. Do I need more? One for the people, one for the enslaved, and one to wear the crown. Each sympathetic if properly drawn. Each...

What if... hmm.

Gene Wolfe gets by just fine with one POV.

3 POV could easily become 6. The rebel priest and the slum lord, the orc silverback and the captain of the guard, the high caste noble and his Machiavellian other. 6 could become 18, 18 could become...

Do I want to write A GAME OF THRONES? Do I want to write THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN? Do I want to write PERDIDO STREET STATION? Why is it so hard to write a novel that is nothing but my own?

2011-11-22T08:51:00.001-08:00

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of One By One:

"Peter stared after the man, his heart pounding in similar cadence to the stranger’s racing steps, and when he sat down he ceased all attempts at reasoned discoursewith himself. He allowed his arguments to fall from his mind, he who had alwaysprided himself on his ability with language, his ability to capture any thoughtor sensation in a string of words, and allowed his pain to become actual fear.For the first time, listening to the man’s crazed calls ringing off thebuildings, he began to suspect that something far more encompassing andterrible was developing, and he listened intently, willing the man to find his son, for his cries of pain to turn to cries of joy and dispel this impossible suspicion, but the change never came, the man's yells fading away into the distance, desperate to the last, so that even though silence returned itwas tainted as if by a miasma of the man’s despair. Shivering, pulling his mind back from the conclusion it was on the verge of adopting, not wanting tofollow such thoughts further, Peter arose and decided to return home, to see ifhis mother had appeared, knowing she had not, but choosing willfully, almostblindly, to attempt to believe one last time that the world was not changing inan irrevocable, unfathomable, and terrifying manner."

Urbanity

2011-11-20T16:24:00.001-08:00

My next novel is centered around a fictional city, and as such, of late, I have grown obsessed with urban planning. How does one build a city? How does a city grow? If a city truly is an organism, as so many people claim, then how might that organism react to extreme changes and impositions? How might a city react to being placed underground? To having no ready supply of fresh air, clean water, nutritious food? Where might people live, how would they live, and what would the making of light into a commodity that only the rich can truly afford do to shape and rhythms of such a place? With the distinction between night and day gone, how might people organize their lives? What methods of transport would prove most popular and how would they change the shape of the city? Would any one government be able to control these forces, or would the populace overcrowd and overrule such strictures as one sees the favelas of Rio do and the rookeries of Victorian London once did?

There's a fantastic essay in the National Geographic that is a must read for anybody interested in urban planning the future of both our planet and our cities.

"And here's one more change since then: Urbanization is now good news. Expert opinion has shifted profoundly in the past decade or two. Though slums as appalling as Victorian London's are now widespread, and the Victorian fear of cities lives on, cancer no longer seems the right metaphor. On the contrary: With Earth's population headed toward nine or ten billion, dense cities are looking more like a cure—the best hope for lifting people out of poverty without wrecking the planet."

The concentration of human capital into small areas reduces the barriers between transportation, communication, and growth. It creates a collective space in which the development of ideas can thrive, a fecund spot where humanity can thrive and grow--if properly managed. Why has Seoul developed into such a wealthy and successful city while Nairobi has not?

So much to learn, so much to absorb, so much to assimilate and process. It's a fascinating time when people are starting to realize that the future of cities is no longer this:

But this:

BOOM Cracka-POW! 3rd Novel THRONE Published

2011-11-12T06:34:00.001-08:00

With talking foxes and golden owls, with paths that lead into the land the dead and others into faerie, with battles raging down Fifth Avenue and impossible labyrinths hidden in the depths of the city, Throne is as much a tale of wonder and dread as it is of the trials of the heart.

Maribel thought she had it all: a professional career in modeling, a burgeoning one in photography, and a world famous diplomat for a husband. Yet it all turns to ashes when her newborn baby is stolen away by an impossible being nobody else can see. Against all reason and advice she pursues it, even though the path leads her perilously close to the realms of madness.

Maya thought she had nothing left to lose: an illegal immigrant, an orphan, and a life of slavery in the sweat shops of New York City, all she had to look forward to was working in strip clubs when she came of age. Then a beguiling stranger kisses her and gifts her with magic, giving her access to a hidden world she had never imagined lurked beneath the grim facade of the City.

For the Fae govern the crossroads of our lives, and Maya and Maribel’s crises attract their attention. Both Seelie and Unseelie Courts seek a human to assume the mantle of Queen, to fulfill a potential that will draw their forces from across the skeins of time to New York, and there continue their ages old battle for dominance.

Each woman will have to make a choice--how far are they willing to pursue their desires before they risk losing themselves to something beyond their comprehension?

Check it out here!

Cool.

2011-10-23T14:29:00.001-07:00

Click on the pic to see it in full. I like the way its size has fucked up my blog.

Well I don't mind stealing bread from the mouth of decadents

2011-10-23T13:18:00.001-07:00

On Trying to Write Better

2011-10-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

I wonder if at some point most professionals stop actively trying to do better and instead begin to count on their daily practice, the simple doing of the thing to improve their skills in the long run.

Sometimes you read a book or a short story that is so well written it hurts, just like how you can get brain freeze from eating too much ice cream too quickly.

One of the distinguishing features of a brilliant piece of writing is the presence of the writer's voice. The clear sense of their personality, their humor, sorrows and quirks of observation. A brilliant piece of writing isn't really about the writing, or at least it doesn't feel that way; it impacts you because you feel as if you have somehow, improbably, connected with another person's soul and understood a little bit more about life.

How does one achieve this in one's own writing? Practice, I suppose, so that the words do what you want them to. And living. You have to live a lot. You have to think about what you lived through. You have to, through reflection, grow deeper, wiser, more compassing. You have to become the kind of person you want to be, and that can't be done by sitting in your chair before your laptop writing novels. You actually have to get up and go outside.

Still, it's nice to sit with a mug of tea with a book or at your laptop and do some writing. It doesn't all have to be Hemingway with a rifle and big game hunting.

I read the first few pages of a novel entitled "The Killing Floor" yesterday, and it literally read like this:

"I sat down at the counter. Inside the bar were three people but they were only civilians and had probably lived here their whole lives. There was a row of bottles lined up against the wall behind the bar. I heard a noise from outside. It was a loud noise. I didn't turn but instead considered my glass. It was half full. I frowned because I knew I had run out of time to finish it. I picked up my glass just as the door smashed open. The other three began to yell. I didn't turn around. I wanted to finish my drink before the pandas arrested me."

Which kind of works? But also feels jarring. I don't know.

Then I read a short story by Ann Patchett called "The Mercies" which I won't try to reproduce here but which brought literal tears to my eyes and at one point made me laugh and sit up and look out the window.

I don't know. Words are funny things. We think it's all about the words, how we wield them, but sometimes forget that it's not the wielding but the wielder, it's the person, the writer, and the words are but a window on the page through which we try to get a glimpse of that strange and rare beast, the author.

Wonderful New Review of Crude Sunlight

2011-10-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

Reviewer Dean Mayes of Dean From Australia blog has just finished reading Crude Sunlight. Here's his review, copied in full because I want to share the love:

Satisfying Shades Of Disturbing

There is something innately satisfying in finding an author who is able to tap into the psyche of their protagonists and antagonists in such a way that you as the reader, find yourself descending into the very realms of those characters minds. You experience their journey in a way that is visceral and satisfyingly so. In such a moodily dark setting as the one that author Philip Tucker has created for his debut novel, it becomes essential to experience rather than simply read.

In Crude Sunlight, Tucker's deliciously disturbing psychological thriller, there is a sense of dread and foreboding that draws you in right away. There is little to comfort you in the complex tableaux that unfolds and this is definitely one of the novels strengths. Tucker succeeds in the horror that he suggests rather than the horror he explicitly portrays. It makes for a much more immersive reading experience because we as the reader will inevitably find our own imaginations fired by what we deduce from the plot points.

Comparisons to the likes of Silent Hill and The Ring have been made and I think Crude Sunlight stands well alongside those works in as much as Tucker has crafted a similar sort of textural foundation in his writing. Crude Sunlight is another one of those visually stimulating novels. There are descriptions of black and white, sound and light and texture that instantly remind one of the imagery inherent in those other works - yet Tuckers voice is resoundingly original and fresh.

Crude Sunlight is also a well crafted mystery using clues and red herrings well in keeping the reader guessing as well as invested. So much of what makes the novel work can be derived from this component. The pacing is tight, drawing upon tension and fear and propelling the story forward without laboring too long.

Tucker's characters too, are well drawn and intriguing. Tucker's protagonist Thomas is a flawed anti hero in the beginning, but he is dogged and as his journey progresses he evolves into a subtle hero who realizes his purpose and becomes increasingly determined as a result. I was reminded a little of Rick Deckard - a similar sort of anti-hero from the movie Bladerunner - while I was reading the novel. Julia, the ex-girlfriend of Thomas' missing brother Henry, is also exceedingly well drawn as a conflicted and ambivalent counterpart who possesses a darkness that is revealed gradually.

Crude Sunlight is a work that is disturbing - satisfyingly so - and Philip Tucker has every reason to be proud of his debut.

Labyrinths

2011-10-18T04:51:00.001-07:00

Writing a novel is akin to seeking the right path through your own internal labyrinth. Each decision brings you to another, whereupon three new options present themselves. None are absolutely correct, nor any one of them truly false. For there is no true path, no one way from beginning to end, but rather a plethora of potential approaches, each taking you from Once Upon a Time to The End in their own manner and style. The question therefor becomes: am I enjoying myself?

Writing the first draft of a novel is akin to running through the labyrinth with little more than a sketched map in hand and your own eyes and heart to steer you. You make choices on impulse, may perhaps hesitate and return to the last fork in the path, but inevitably you need to trust your instincts and just keep moving forward.

Only with your second draft will you be able to soar up and gaze down upon the whole construct from a bird's point of view, tracing your path and noting where you went wrong, reaching down to correct and improve. With your first draft, however, you can only run run run. And hope you don't take so wrong a turn that you end up in the Oubliette, or the Bog of Eternal Stench.

Either way, another couple of thousand words down this morning. At the very least I've lived to survive another day.

Hunting the Holy

2011-10-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

This morning I arose, grumbling and yawning, and made my way to my desk. Outside the palm fronds stirred fitfully in the pre-dawn gloom, and Simon didn't even untuck his muzzle from under his tail, dead to the world. After checking my Amazon sales, emails, and blog entries, I opened up an old draft of Hunting the Holy (my third attempt, and not my last), deleted the last few paragraphs where I had gone astray, and began to write.

It's about an hour and a half later, the sky outside is chalk white and a pale luminescence suffuses my living room. Simon has yet to stir, but my mug of coffee is now four fifths empty and I've written some 1,500 words. Not a vast amount by my standards, but it was a steady flow, a constant drive, and the writing felt good, it felt right, on track.

I've got a good feeling. I'm going to get up again tomorrow and write some more, and the day after, and if all goes well, I should be finished by early November. We'll see.

Here's an excerpt from what I wrote this morning. First draft material, but what the hell.

Father Ximenez’s chapel was ten minutes north along the I15and then another five off it. There was nothing out there but Joshua trees andthe distant mountains of soft purple hemming in the horizon, the sun burning a white holethrough the dome of the sky. The car’s thermometer put it at 112 degreesoutside, and the faded gray road ever shimmered ahead of us as if it dove into a pool. Jeremy passed the drive regaling us an improbable carnal adventure he’d had in L.A. with three Norwegian women who had claimed tobe sisters and oracles to boot.

Finally what looked like a shack materialized up ahead onthe left, a single story building with a small steeple at thefront. Jeremy pulled up next to a dusty baby blue Cadillac, theonly other vehicle in the cleared space before the chapel, and killed theengine.

“Well, how's this for a paradoxically Godforsaken place,” he said, peering through the windows at the desolate desertthat spread out around us. Gleaming metallic dots crawled slowly past along theI15 some three miles behind us, but everything else was otherwise silent and still.

“Actually, connecting with God in the remoteness of the desert is anancient tradition,” said Monty, “A practice that dates back to John the Baptist, if not beyond.Father Ximenez might be cut from a similar cloth.”

“Yeah, alright, but who’d come to his services way the hellout here?” asked Jeremy.

“The Santo Perdido,”I said. “Come on, let’s get moving.”

New Look

2011-10-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

Hey guys.

I'm trying to get a handle on how best to connect to my readers, both existent and potential. I've done a pretty lackluster job thus far, and to remedy that I've re-examined my approach. I've decided to redesign my main site, transientme.com, and see if I can't make that the nexus of my outreach. Toward that end I've begun a complete redesign of the site, such that the top level page is now up. If you click over, you'll see what I've done, but not much more; I'm going to roll out a sub-site for each novel over the next month, which will take you from the neutral top level to a page that will reflect the novel's content and style.

The challenge is that each novel is quite different from the others. How best then to indicate to readers what they may be purchasing? The Grind Show is my Kill Bill, while Crude Sunlight is my The Ring. CoffinCam is something you'd only find as an illegal download off some questionable international site, while the forthcoming Throne is a modern fairy tale set in NYC. How best then to guide potential readers from one to the next without confusing or misleading them?

I've decided to go with sub-sites. Each book will thus have its own layout, design, and aesthetic that will accurately reflect what kind of tale it is. I'm planning to provide excerpts, an essay on the origins of the idea and why I wrote the novel, reviews and whatever else comes to mind.

From there, once my webpage is solid, I'll link to this blog, which I'm going to keep as the hub of my daily musings (as opposed to duplicating it on my main site as I had done till now), as well as providing links to my Facebook page and Twitter page.

So yeah, please head over and take a look--I'd appreciate the feedback. At the moment the only page up is purposefully stark and neutral so as to best offset the forthcoming richness and unique style of each individual sub-site.

What do you guys think? Sound approach?

Second Novel Blues

2011-10-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

The Grind Show was published back in May. It's ostensibly a tale about demon hunting, but in truth it's more than that. It's about how far you're willing to go to do the right thing. It's about personal sacrifice for greater causes, it's about that fine line that divides right from wrong, which somehow remains slippery even in a world polarized by the presence of demons. Since May it's been resonating with readers; it's been selling steadily, and garnered a slew of positive reviews.

Which means I should knock out #2. That's the logical move. I've got the plot figured out. The cast is sitting on the sidelines, ready to go, smoking cigarettes and looking bored, on the phone with their agents. I've got the style figured out, and even an expectant audience asking when oh when is #2 is gonna come out? Clearly I should dedicate a couple of months to writing it--right?

If only it were so easy. Perhaps you guys aren't familiar with the second novel blues. It's that sense of weary lethargy that sinks into you when your consider picking up the plot where it last left off. It's a feeling of detachment from the world you created due to having put the first novel through interminable edits and rewrites until you were nigh sick of it. It's a sense of repeating yourself when all you want to do is something new.

In effect, you need to reinvent the wheel without losing your original audience. You need to deliver what they enjoyed in the first book without repeating yourself. If your series is liable to turn into a trilogy, which Grind Show might, then it's the middle, where things have started but cannot yet end. Second novel blues, and I got it bad.

I've written four false starts. The latest one got to about 20,000 words before I fizzled out. I've plotted and re-plotted. I've tried to diving into it, and tried taking it slow. A great friend of mine invited me out to California to do a research trip around Utah, and I spent a weekend scrabbling around the canyons of Zion with a bum knee taking notes and envisioning scenes that I thought I would scribble down with furious focus. I've searched out photographs of the characters, I've spent hours pouring over Google Maps, and here I sit, with nothing to show for it.

So I published another novel, and then a novella. I've begun to research a new book that's got my mind thinking about mining ventilation, the rise and fall of 4th century Manicheasim, the Industrial age. Yet through it all the Grind Show continues to sell, and people to ask me about book #2.

Hell, I guess I don't give up easy. So I sat down one more time this morning and opened up a new Notepad file. Frowned, and got up to make a coffee. Came back and stared through the computer screen. It was so early in the morning the birds hadn't even started tweeting yet, and my dog refused to do more than blink blearily at me in the gloom before tucking his muzzle back under his paw. What's holding me back? I frowned some more, and then I understood: my lack of excitement derived from a sense of repeating myself. I was going to take the same characters and throw them into a number of fights and car chases, rush them through the plot and be done with it. Which sounds about as exciting to write as it would to read.

So I started to write in my Notepad file. Asking: how have the characters changed since book 1? What's going on in their heads? How have they grown? Where are they now? I began to peel back the layers of the onion, and get to their core. Connect with them.

I've been trying to write the novel that I think people are expecting to read, and not the one I want to write. I've felt pressured to be all Bonnie and Clyde on the run, hysterical laughter punctuated by shotgun blasts as demons fall from the sky as if lined up in a carnival shooting gallery. Filthy hi-fives and whiskey glasses, inane jokes and anime-style sword fights. Instead, I want to go deeper, stir those muddy waters, push the characters to their edge and then push them a little further. A different, darker tone from the first novel.

So here's the opening paragraph I've come up with. It's wordier than book #1's style. It's a change of pace, but hell, at least it's something:

The sheer scope of the Nevada sky outside the window madethe bar feel tiny. A matchbox dropped on the face of the desert, insignificantunder the righteous blue that seemed to not meet the horizon but extend pastit. We’d been waiting for two hours, and I had settled down to watch where halfa mile away Highway 168 disappeared into the darkness under the I15 overpass. Twainsat slouched over the table, cheek resting on the base of her palm, slowlyreworking the lyrics to one of her songs on a napkin. Vanilla ice cream hadmelted into a crescent moon around the dark stains of our second slice ofblueberry pie, and my coffee had run cold, but I waited with implacablepatience, watching for our backup. Six months we’d been huntingholy men, and at long last we’d finally found the real thing.

Money Money eBooks

2011-10-07T15:50:00.000-07:00

How much should I charge for my books?

That's actually a surprisingly complex question. If you check Amazon you'll find that most books fall into one of three categories: somewhere around $9.99, $2.99, and $0.99 cents.

If you're a formally published dude or dudette then you will probably have your eBook for sale at $9.99. Unfortunately for you, you'll only be getting about 15% commission of each sale, so about $1.50. This price is set by your publishing house, and you will have no control over it. Now, an indie author is allowed to charge up to $200 for an eBook, but they usually opt for the other two brackets. Why is that?

Because there's a feeling that readers won't yet spill cash for formally published prices in order to buy an indie published novel. If you're self-published you're not vetted by the professionals, and thus must sidle into the market with low prices and promises of excellent content.

Now, should you go $2.99 or $0.99? You get 70% of the first, about $2, and only 35% of the second, or about $0.34. The obvious choice is to thus go for $2.99. It shows that you have faith in your novel, it allows you to make six times as much for each purchase, and really isn't that much.

However, think on this: John Locke was the first self published author to sell more than a million copies, and none of his books are priced at higher than $0.99.

So what's the logic there? $0.99 is such a low commitment on the part of the reader that they're liable to snap your novel up without even thinking about. You get paid less, but you get more readers. You get more readers, you amplify the word of mouth effect. While one $2.99 sale nets you six times the income of a $0.99 sale, you might be able to attract 12 buyers willing to shell out 99cents in the place of that one $2.99 person.

So how much should I charge for my books?

Thus far I've been charging $2.99, and seen a steady increase in sales each month. But I don't want linear growth, I want exponential growth, which is why I've dropped the prices for THE GRIND SHOW and CRUDE SUNLIGHT to $0.99 cents. I'm going to keep them there for the rest of October, and see what happens.

And there you have one of the true if subtle beauties of being self-published: complete autonomy and the ability to modify and change elements of your novel on the fly to find the sweet spot to maximize sales.

SO. What do you guys think? 99 cents or $2.99? Have you actually purchased an eBook yet, and did the price affect your decision? I'll report back at the end of October to let you know how my experiment goes, but chime in and let me hear your thoughts!

Up At Dawn

2011-10-07T03:51:00.000-07:00

It's just barely gone 6:20am and I'm sitting here in the dark, the computer screen a blinding white rectangle that's making me squint. The kettle's been set to boil and already I can hear it clicking to itself, preparing for its full throated protest in a couple of minutes. Outside my window the palm fronds are a clotted mass of black shadows, with the concrete parking structure a honeycomb of illuminated levels beyond, all strange geometry and fluorescent yellows.

Why am I up this early? To write. Twenty minutes ago when my alarm went off I lay there, face pressed into my pillow, half awake and with my mind tunneling back toward the chthonic land of sleep as a small mammal might tunnel for safety when caught in the open. Just one more hour, I thought. Just a little more sleep. But here I am. Bleary and yawning and waiting for the eternal footman to stop snickering and bring me my coffee.

Ah, there. The first desolate piping's of the kettle. One moment please.

So why am I up this early? Excuse me as I gather my thoughts, being only freshly returned to my desk. Why this extremism? Simple, though my reason has many causes. I want to succeed at writing, and find that this early hour is conducive to putting words on paper. Everything is as still and silent as it gets, the darkness has a particularly velvety and soft quality to it, and I love the gradual incipience of the dawn.

I need a head start on the day. I need uninterrupted time to work. To focus. A potential copy editor edited the first five pages of my THRONE manuscript yesterday (or was it the day before?) and returned it to me so that I might see the quality of his work. What I saw, rather, was the paucity of mine. I write like a runaway horse, racing at full speed but crashing through hedgerows, tramping across gardens, and throwing myself through thickets which I penetrate through sheer bloody momentum and force. The copy editor noted a couple of dropped words, several redundancies (he pulled both of his hands from his pockets), confusing sentences, overwriting, places where the adjectives were so thickly crowded they might have been the peanut gallery of an original performance of one of Shakespeare's more crowd pleasing plays (something like Titus Adronicus, imperfect but with plenty of bloody bits).

I need to write more books. I'm currently working on a novella, and then plan to write GRIND SHOW II. Hopefully I'll find a way to fund the copy editing of THRONE (maybe a Kickstarter project?), and will then work on revising ONE BY ONE. If all goes well, that should put me at 5 novels and 1 novella on the market, with my next project and BLOOD FROM THE MOUNTAIN in the works.

Each novel I write increases the span of the net that I cast into the sea of readers. Since I cannot muster the enthusiasm to market myself, I shall simply conquer the world through sheer number of books.

That's why I'm up this early. Now it's time to get to work.

New Cover for CRUDE SUNLIGHT

2011-09-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Click on the image to see a larger version:

Here's the old cover:

Why the change? Something wasn't clicking for me with the first one. The hues of amber and umber, the archaic text and the streaming rays of sunlight had originally struck me as on message, subtle and mysterious, but the slow sales have proved otherwise. There's no focal object or image, nothing for the potential reader to look at, and as such I think it ends up being diffuse and vague.

The new cover is completely different. I'm not sure I'm going to keep it, but I'm going to try it for a month. Therein lies one of the true joys of self-publishing--the ability to tinker and change things mid-stream. Why the new cover as is? One, I wanted something more striking and dynamic, that calls attention. The red, modern font vertically aligned makes the cover seem just that, with a hint of movie-poster to it, while the screaming girl against the concrete background gives it the industrial feel of darkness, panic, and modernity that I want to associate with the novel. Will it work? Who knows. Will it generate more sales? I sure hope so. In a couple of months I'll revisit the cover, see if it's held its own or is in need of something new.

Either way, I'll keep playing till I get it right.

What do you guys think? Do you prefer the new cover to the old?

Vulcan's Forge

2011-09-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

A morning spent in furious thought and research. Beslippered and with my feet up on a giant burnt sienna cushion, I slipped through the first ten chapters of Gene Wolfe's THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER, frowning and squinting and trying to see how he got the little ball under the third cup when I swore it was under the second. Then, prompted by a thought, I yanked out a behemoth of a tome entitled THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY and reread the section on Manicheasim. Pondered. Mused. Dug out my copy of Wolfe's CASTLE OF DAYS, and reread his essays on the creation of THE SHADOW, trying to dig beneath the surface. Trying to understand. To see.

Mused further. In a moment of idleness I then summoned Byron's DARKNESS from the internet, and reread that. Selected the following as a potential epigraph:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air

Found that to my satisfaction, and saved it in a Notepad file. I have, in the course of such musings, neglected all else. Still, I feel as if I am but glimpsing a distant mountain through wreathes of clouds, catching but hints of slopes and ravines, the peak firmly hidden. How far back should I begin? How much rewriting of world history needs be done? Mythology--what would be highlighted as a result? Swirling thoughts and questions. How does a sun die? White dwarfs, super novas, the slow millennial dwindle.

Looked up concatenate and urticate in the dictionary.

All this background noise and yet there is no central character to hold the stage, no protagonist. What comes first, the tale or the hero? The plot or the character, the sweep of the setting or the drama that unfolds within it?

Oh Mani, you sly dog you.

The Mutability of Creation

2011-09-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

One minute I'm modelling the aristocracy after the Japanese Heian Court of the 10th century, the next I've swept all those nobles with their silk kimonos, poetry contests and religious ceremonies off the table and replaced them with 1930's Stalinist Russia, replete with 5 Year Plans and grim faced revolutionaries.

One minute I'm modeling the structure after a 16 piece television show, the next I've smashed it altogether into a proposed 700 page novel.

I'm dying to get my hands on a $150 Mining Ventilation and Air Conditioning text book. I'm about to start re-reading Gene Wolfe's BOOK OF THE NEW SUN to see how he did it (ha! wish me luck). I'm pondering the nature of Big Brother from 1984, I'm wondering: orcs or trogs? I'm creating Ministries not of Truth and Plenty but Water, Light, and Air.

Nothing is fixed, nothing is yet set in stone. Everything is broiling and roiling and fomenting and gestating. How it's going to look when it all settles down, I've no idea, but here's hoping I don't get lost in the process.

On World Building

2011-09-18T13:20:00.000-07:00

There are conflicting points of view within the field of speculative fantasy as to how one should approach world building when writing a novel. For some, Tolkien's meticulously detailed approach is best; they desire a sense of mystery and implied history, for their glimpse of this world to intimate a vaster reality than the novel can capture. As Andrew Leonard said in a recent Salon article:

Give me... the evocation of a rich, complex and yet ultimately unknowable other world, with a compelling suggestion of intricate history and mythology and lore. Give me mystery amid the grand narrative.

Mr. Leonard proceeds to praise Steven Erikson's GARDENS OF THE MOON series, saying:

Erikson is a master of lost and forgotten epochs, a weaver of ancient epics on a scale that would approach absurdity if it wasn't so much fun. His time span ranges over hundreds of thousands of years. Races (both human and nonhuman), cultures, empires and even gods rise and fall. Vast struggles range across multiple continents and dimensions of time and space. There are so many fragments of myth, so many hints of back-story unending, and so little explained, that it is all the reader can do to comprehend what is going on, to hang on to the narrative as if clinging by one hand to the underbelly of a flying dragon.

One can imagine Erikson filling endless notebooks wherein he details these cultures, empires, and gods. Where he tracks the eons, where he details their mythology, slowly weaving an incredibly complex world that lures readers such as Mr. Leonard ever deeper into its apparent reality.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have writers such as M. John Harrison who wrote his Viriconium series with a completely different approach. In a famous essay, he said of his setting:

You can not learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice. That is because—like Middle-Earth—it is not a place. It is an attempt to animate the bill of goods on offer. Those goods, as in Tolkien or Moorcock, Disney or Kafka, Le Guin or Wolfe, are ideological. “Viriconium” is a theory about the power-structures culture is designed to hide; an allegory of language, how it can only fail; the statement of a philosophical (not to say ethological) despair. At the same time it is an unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which all the values we yearn for most have been swept precisely so that we will try to put them back again (and, in that attempt, look at them afresh).

Another great author, K.J. Bishop, said of her setting for ETCHED CITY:

I tended to use whatever my subconscious came up with, if it seemed to fit. I was usually just trying to create a climate, an impression. I hoped that if I described details now and then, the reader would fill in the rest to his or her own liking.

So should one seek to emulate Tolkien, writing a vast history, creating actual fictional languages, mapping out their world from coast to coast? Tolkien, having been a trained philologist and academic was able to pull this off and create a sense of sublime and wondrous verisimilitude--too many other author have stumbled and created poor imitations, seeking to create that same sense of depth and magic. Or one could take Harrison's approach, disdaining maps, histories, any detailing or explicating of the world beyond that which serves your narrative as allegory or vehicle for greater truth.

I'm trying to decide where I'm going to fall on this spectrum with my new project. The setting plays a decisive role in very nature of the story. As such, I'm tempted to do endless amounts of research on the Heian Court of 10th century Japan, learn all there is to know about the history of gas lighting, the development of the steam engine, the nature of mine shaft ventilation, the world of Victorian London, sexual dimorphism, the plot structure of The Wire, the world as experienced by the blind, and on and on and on, all with an eye toward world creation.

Yet Harrison would scoff at such endeavors if undertaken for their own right, and not harnessed to the purpose of philosophy, language, ideology. It's as if, by seeking to flesh out my world as fully as possible, by seeking to make it as 'real' as possible under impossible circumstances, I am crossing a line and becoming crass, commercial, purblind and missing the point.

And yet. And yet. It is so much fun to follow lines of reasoning toward their logical end, to envision a vast chthonic city in all its improbability. Am I misunderstanding Harrison's critique? Am I dooming myself to join the rank of amateurs who have sought to emulate Tolkien's mastery? I suppose the only way to tell will be to judge my execution of this project.

Meet Simon

2011-09-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

He's been with us for three nights and two days now, and I think it's going to work out just great. Simon is a very serious little dog, shy and timid and absolutely craving affection and love. He pads after me as I go from kitchen to living to bedroom, pausing by my feet whenever I stop to look up at me, eyes wide. Grace and I have discovered that he doesn't care for toys; we bought him a couple of things such as tug-of-war ropes and squeaky balls and he just ignores them as if they don't exist, moving close to where we stand or sit and gazing into our faces.

It's almost heart breaking. Three years of being ignored and chained to a tree have left him parched for love and unable to run for more than five minutes before getting exhausted. I've taken him to the park each day, and after running next to me for a minute or two he starts to drag and then refuses to leave the next puddle of shade. Poor little guy just hasn't had any exercise.

We'd heard horror stories about the first few days with a rescue dog--incessant barking, the chewing on furniture and shoes, separation anxiety, the tendency to urinate and poop everywhere--you have to be ready for a lot in the beginning. Simon, however, has been the soul of discretion and good behavior. He hasn't peed or pooped inside. He goes to his dog bed when it's time to crash, and sleeps through the night (admittedly he always insinuates his snout through the crack in our door to check on us as we go to sleep, but then pads back to his corner and knocks out). He doesn't chew, gnaw, or make a mess, he eats his food without any problem, and when I work on the computer he either sits by the door and gazes outside or goes to his dog bed and crashes.

Anyways, here's a shot of him today at the park. A couple of hours just vanished as we let him off the leash and he snooped around, sniffing and startling at the larger dogs.

Adopting Simon

2011-09-14T14:10:00.000-07:00

Grace and I have been thinking of getting a dog for awhile. I'm at home most of the day with my writing, and we have a wonderful Spanish style courtyard where a fountain stands shaded beneath the canopy of a venerable mango tree. There are bushes aplenty, it's all tightly fenced in, and is the haunt of a geriatric Daschund called Pablito who could use a little company.

So, pretty ideal. With two large parks close by, weather that just begs for you to be outside, and a mutual desire to adopt a shelter dog to bring home and take care of, we've simply been on the lookout, waiting for the right moment start searching--or for a dog to catch our attention.

Which happened last night. Grace decided to check an old email account on a whim, and saw a forward from a friend notifying her of a rescued dog. She opened it up, looked at the photograph, and immediately called me over. His name's Simon, he's around 2 or 3 years old, and is apparently incredibly timid and shy after a life of being chained outside and ignored by his owner.

We've been in touch with the pound, and are going over tonight at 7 to meet him. He's had a long day already visiting the vet and the groomers. We've no idea how things will go, but as you can imagine, we're excited. Here's Simon's photograph--doesn't he look like he has fox blood in his ancestry?

The Story Behind Crude Sunlight & Its Reviews

2011-09-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

I started working on Crude Sunlight way back in 2006. I don't think there were even iPhones back then, and iPads were just a dream in the twinkle of Steve Job's eye. In short, it was a long time ago, and I had just finished my first stab at a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The result was a strange and badly formed little novella called 'Moses', and even though the final product was absolutely unpublishable, the very fact that I had churned out some 50k words gave me the confidence to roll up my sleeves and try something serious.

So I wrote the first 30k of the first draft of Crude Sunlight, and then staggered to a stop. Visions of basements beneath abandoned State Asylums danced through my mind, existential horrors composed of shadows, of a decaying city in the Rust Belt. Not enough, however, to write a novel on. A year later I picked it up again, and finished the first draft, immediately sending it out to friends to review. I quickly discovered that it was chock full of problems, such as my using too light a touch in explaining the mysteries at the heart of the plot--and that the end didn't make sense. Cue the second draft, and then the third.

I moved to NYC. There I labored on the fourth draft, staying late at the Penguin Publishing offices after everybody had gone home to put the finishing touches, and then by pure luck Jeff Vandermeer announced on his blog that he was up for some freelance work, and did anybody have a novel that needed editing? I pounced, and after working out some terms (Jeff, as I'm sure nobody will be surprised to learn, is an incredibly generous man and went out on a limb to help me), sent him my manuscript.

Cue about a month or so of waiting on tenterhooks, and when he finally got back to me it was with both praise and gentle criticism. He said, "A promising first novel from an interesting stylist with a lot of atmosphere and chills", and then went on to list some ten or eleven problems he had with the novel, ranging from the fact that it wasn't 'Urban Fantasy' (it's actually more of a ghost story, or dark fantasy at best), to piercing insights into the characters that needed addressing.

Draft five. Then begins the process of submitting the novel to agents. Let's get published, I decide, and spend a few weeks crafting a query letter. Off I send it to some six agents, and they all turn it down. I think one or two asked for partials, but that was it. The problem, one agent explained to me, was that Crude Sunlight sat astride two different genres, and thus would be hard to market, despite the quality of the writing. Oh well, I thought, dropping it in my drawer, time to start writing something new.

Flash forward a couple of years, and suddenly it's 2011. iPhones are de rigeur, and everybody's sporting a fancy iPad. While I'm not wearing huge shoulder pads and zipping around on a hoverboard, it is most definitely the future, as evinced by the revolution in publishing. Namely, that now any man or woman with ambition can self-publish their novel on Amazon and B&N and a host of other platforms, a brave new world where one can eschew the traditional route and plunge into the deep end of the pool by one's self. Following the success of The Grind Show, I unearth Crude Sunlight, blow the dust off my flash drive and decide, you know what? Just one last draft and I'll see what this baby can do.

Edit six. Or is it seven at this point? It's a nostalgia trip going through it, culling purple prose, removing redundant descriptions ('Thomas raised his eyes and looked up'), further clarifying conflicts and so forth. I shoot it off to my friend Will who reads it while giving lectures on space in Austria (he leads a glamorous life), touch it up once more following his suggestions, design a cover, write new back-copy, format it for the Kindle, and bam! After six years of work it's published.

At which point I heave a huge sigh of relief, sit back, and wait. Silence. Crickets. The ticking of the clock. Nothing really happens for the first week other than a few family members and friends picking up a copy. So I roll up my sleeves once more, don my marketing cap, and do a little leg work. The results? The first few reviews have started to come in from people who are in no way indebted to me.

So: you can read the reviews on my GoodReads page and on my Amazon page, but here are a few choice excerpts:

"Yet it is the three dimensional human protagonists that make this book work. They harbor their own personal torments that we can identify with. This tends to make the supernatural aspects only more frightening. If you like a horror novel that will keep you awake at night but also makes you think and feel, this is worth your time." - Marvin

"... beware, this story is gonna scare the crap out of you. Philip Tucker doesn't create monsters you can kill or control or reason with. The evil that Thomas has to face will make the hair on your arms stand up." - Tammy of NovelOpinion fame.

"Long story short - Philip Tucker is definitely one to watch, and he has the skills to back up his ambitions. Crude Sunlight is absolutely worth checking out." - Brooke

Somebody pinch me. After six long years, Crude Sunlight is finally out there, and you know what? It looks like it's getting a warm response.

How Fantastic is Our Fantasy?

2011-09-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

Lord Dunsay once said (alright fine, he said it over and over again, a favorite line of his at chess tournaments, African game hunting and war) that the land of fantasy existed 'beyond the fields we know'. That to enter the realm of faerie and the impossible we had to leap that final fence at the far edge of the field and wonder into that forest most strange and glamorous, to tread where human feet were not meant to go.

So. How many fantasy novels have you read that have truly strayed off the beaten track? Left the fields of men and gone deep into the mysteries of the impossible, wonderful, bizarre, surreal and strange?

Heck, seems like most 'fantasy' novels are as filled with tropes and stereotypes as anything else. When one thinks fantasy, immediately a number of basic themes and items come to mind. You've got your average idealized Western Medieval setting, replete with castles, knights, swords, knaves, battles, kings, advisers, assassins, honest yeomen, etc, etc. Throw in a dash of rehashed Tolkien (elves, dwarves, dragons, Barbara Streisand, rangers, etc), and you have your basic fantasy novel.

But come on, it goes beyond similar settings. Even the plots tend to be the same. Young kid with a nothing background discovers that he has inherited magic power/weapon of doom/strange destiny/whatever and now he has to gather a small band of intrepid friends about him as he journeys to save the world from the Dark Lord against all odds, yada yada.

I mean, this isn't exactly 'beyond the fields we know'. This is some old retrodden ground here.

It's rare that you come across an actual fantastic setting. Few break the mold. Because there's a fine balance between titillating the reader and losing him. Go too far into faerie and your reader won't follow. They'll linger back by the gate, hand on the post, uncertain and finally annoyed that you're not speaking intelligibly. So you have to strike that balance. You need to lure the reader in with certain familiarity, but then take them as far as you can go.

What novels have you read that really went out there? That did something new? Why is our fantasy so predictable, so constrained by what has gone before? China Mieville is excellent at forging new ground. Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis forged some new ground with their Death Gate series. Gene Wolfe hit it out of the park with his New Sun series (after a serious nod of respect to ol' Man Vance). People love Neil Gaiman for what he did with his Sandman books. But what else?

Imagine me speaking in Tyler Durden's voice here:

"I say, fuck dragons and castles. I say, leave the Middle Ages behind. I say, forget Tolkien and the Quest. I say, make some shit up. Unfetter your imagination, and do something new. Quit looking over your shoulder at what has gone before and mix them up, cross this with that and invert that part over there. Play with gravity, the law of physics, the basics of biology. Make up new monsters, new fears. Find new heroes, new foes. Imagine new moralities, new cultures, new needs and desires. The next time you sit down to write fantasy, god damn it, write something that's actually fantastic."

First Step

2011-08-29T19:01:00.000-07:00

People, my mind has been a whirring, churning, clunking and clacking mess of ideas, research, excitement and doubt these past few days. While I may have been silent here on my blog, my 'Thoughts' file has been exploding with ideas, questions, suppositions and world building. I've got that white hot fever that has always meant one thing and one thing only: it's time to start creating again.

This time is going to be wholly unlike any other writing project I've ever essayed before. Where I usually hate outlines, finding them stifling and limiting, this time round I'm going to outline everything first. Where I usually focus on only a handful of characters, this time I'm going to have a cast of dozens. Where I usually write furiously, spewing out thousands upon thousands of words a day as soon as I get started, this time I am going to proceed cautiously, step by step, shuffling like a man in a dark room.

Why? Because I'm going to write a series. Thirteen episodes, each about... 30,000 words? I'm not sure how long they'll come out to yet, but they're going to be tightly written, tightly interwoven, continuous and intense. I'm going to try world building on a grand scale, pushing fantasy as far as I ever have before. I'm going to try complex plotting, where outlining all the episodes first will allow me to play with foreshadowing, the introduction of themes, the use of symbols, all that fancy stuff.

And what's the subject matter? What's it all about? I'm not going to go into much detail just yet. Suffice to say that I'm blending the Victorian Age in all its glory and horror with traditional fantasy, and then attempting to imbue the tale with the verisimilitude and pacing of The Wire. The horrors of the Belgian Congo, the aristocratic madness of 10th century Japan, and Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath are all influences.

Where will this go? How will it turn out? I've got high hopes, and I'll keep you guys updated as I go!

What Hooks You?

2011-08-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

Have you ever started reading a book, excited by the premise, and then slowly ran out of steam? Around page 50 or so you realize that you don't particularly care what happens next, the characters haven't grabbed you, the plot, as convoluted and intricate as it might be doesn't interest you, and so, with a shrug, you set the book down and pick up another?

And yet with other novels you can be grabbed from page 1, instantly riveted so that you read the whole novel in one night, unable to put the book down, turning the pages as fast as you can till you hit the end and look up blinking to see that it's past three in the morning?

What is it that makes the second book so compelling and the second as flat as a week-old Coke?

It's not plot. It's not the amount of explosions or chase scenes. It's not pacing, though that can amp up the compelling factor. I think it's a combination of authorial voice and caring about the characters. Whether they're SEAL commandos or high school vampires, whether they're professors in the twilight of their careers or blue skinned aliens, you have to really care about them. About their fates. About what is going to happen to them, whether they will be hurt and crushed or find a way to win through against the odds. Once you have a reader invested in your character, well, you've got them.

So this leads us to the million dollar question: how do you get your readers to care about your characters?

Before I take a stab at answering that question, I want to hear from you guys. What have the characters you've cared the most about shared in common? What was it about them that made you care about their fates, that made you turn the page?

New Book Release: CRUDE SUNLIGHT

2011-08-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It's been about three months since I released THE GRIND SHOW and I'm happy to report that it's still doing great--so thanks to all of you for your support. While the sequel is still in the works, it's with great pleasure that I write to inform you that I have just published my second novel, CRUDE SUNLIGHT. I started writing this book way back in 2007, and it's been through about six or seven major drafts since then. It's been tightened, edited and refined into the lean, mean, scary machine that it is today, and I think you're going to love it.

Here's the premise:

Down in the depths below Buffalo's abandoned State Insane Asylum the shadows writhe and wait, hungry for a new cycle of revenge and despair. Into their web of madness disapears Henry, forcing his older brother to begin a search that will lead Thomas into the darkest corners of his soul. For the dangers that lurk in the interstices of Buffalo's haunted heart care not for flesh but for the substance of the spirit, the resilience of the mind and the strength of one's will to survive--and Thomas, fleeing as he is his own troubled life, soon finds his very sense of self under attack.

Accompanied by Julia, his younger brother's tormented ex-girlfriend, Thomas forces himself to walk the same downward spiral that claimed Henry. But the hunger that Henry awoke has broken stronger men than Thomas, shattered their minds and consumed them whole in the darkness. What hope does Thomas have in the face of such ravening despair?

If you have a penchant for psychological horror, if you enjoyed the spine-tingling style of SILENT HILL and THE RING, or are a huge fan of such authors as Shirley Jackson or Caitlin R. Kiernan, I think this will be right up your alley. Even if tales of the macabre aren't your style, I just wanted to share that my second book is now officially out, and that things are a-humming and a-rattling right along on my end. In fact, in a couple of weeks I'll be releasing THRONE, a modern fairy-tale set in NYC, as dark as anything penned by the original Brothers Grimm.

So yes! If you're curious, head on over to Amazon to take a look at CRUDE SUNLIGHT, of which famed author and Publisher's Weekly reviewer Jeff Vandermeer wrote:

"A promising first novel from an interesting stylist with a lot of atmosphere and chills."

Thanks and I would love to hear what you think!

Happy reading,

Phil Tucker

Frustration

2011-08-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

I've been really focused of late on my writing. I'm getting up at 6 to edit my two soon-to-be-published novels, putting in a couple of hours of revision in each. With any luck I'll soon be releasing CRUDE SUNLIGHT and THRONE on Amazon. I've been doing extensive research and prep for my new project, which involves watching THE WIRE and dissecting each episode, learning how a series is paced and written. I'm reading THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF JAPAN, VOL II, a 750 page behemoth that goes into detail about the Heain Period of Japanese civilization, the time when THE TALE OF GENJI was written, the apex of classical Japan, learning about court life, the nobility, how the government was run, the rise of the warrior class, the problems with agrarian taxation and on and on. I'm tinkering and redesigning their covers, I'm perfecting the back copy, I'm debating pricing strategies, I'm doing all these things at once, and still feeling really unproductive.

Why?

Because I feel like the dude who really dreads cleaning the shower box, and so instead spends hours industriously sweeping, mopping, dusting, doing the dishes, the laundry, cleaning out the cat litter, mowing the lawn, fixing the roof, dropping shirts off at the laundromat, hitting the gym, buying groceries, cooking dinner, finally writing the 'thank you' cards, making the bed, defragging his hard drive, responding to old emails, etc, etc, while all the while that dirty shower box looms over all his work, making it a hollow effort.

What's my shower box? THE GRIND SHOW II. I went on a fantastic research trip for it a few months back. I have the plot all worked out. The first GS is selling well on Amazon, and everything I know about business and marketing tells me that I should be releasing #2 next. But. Something inside is blocked up. I've tried writing it some five times, getting about five chapters into it each time before throwing up my hands. I'm not enjoying the process. I have no enthusiasm for the plot. I feel like I'm not doing the character's justice.

Second novel blues, I suppose.

So yes. Editing, editing, researching, planning, preparing, everything humming along like a finely oiled locomotive, but over there, behind that grimy shower curtain, a source of frustration that robs my other work of pleasure so that when I'm done, I feel guilt instead of satisfaction.

Dawn Writing

2011-08-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

These past few days I've awoken at 6 A.M. to slouch fitfully over to my desk and edit THRONE. There's something about the silence, the stillness, the soft quality of the shadows that layer over everything, how the fronds of the palm tree outside my window slowly grow more distinct with each passing minute that makes it a wonderful time to work. I fix myself a huge mug of tea, squint at the screen, and start untangling bad prose, culling excessive metaphors and descriptions, sweeping away unnecessary scenes and clarifying emotions and motivations.

It's a great start to the morning. I think I'm going to keep at it. Unfortunately I tend to crash around ten, falling back in bed with research material which then fails to keep me awake. Surprising, that.

Still, for those first two hours or so, right up until the sun's risen at just before eight, I feel like I'm operating on the knife edge of the possible. Works for me.

DVD Extras for eBooks

2011-08-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

Following my recent train of thought, it seems increasingly obvious that the world of ebook writing lends itself to the inclusion of DVD-style 'Extras'. Whereas before you purchased a novel and that is what you got, perhaps with an Introduction by a famous somebody telling you how they originally met the author at a cocktail party and what an awful drunk he was, you don't get more than the text of the novel. Tolkien took it a step further with his Appendixes, and sometimes you might get a Cast of Characters or rather presumptuous Glossary, but really, that's as far as it goes.

But with an ebook, why not take it a step further? What's to stop an author from creating a dedicated website that the narrative hyperlinks to? You could have maps, histories, character profiles, character journals, alternative scenes, the author's thought process, short stories set in the world, anything and everything that a dedicated fan might enjoy.

This works especially well with Fantasy/Science Fiction novels, because after all, one of the pleasures/onuses of writing in that genre is world creation, the details of which all aspiring authors are then warned to not insert into the novel in 1940's style info-dumps. Instead, you are supposed to allow this richness of excessive creation to infuse the actual narrative though incidental details that hint at a greater and logical whole. When done right, this gives the reader a sense of a real world beyond the scope of the novel. Still, eager fans might enjoy having the author lay out this richness on a website, providing them with a buffet of content from which they can pick and choose as they savor the author's world a little further.

Think about it: The Lord of the Rings DVD collection featured some 423 hours of Extras. I know people who have watched all of it several times, thoroughly smitten with everything LoTR, from Weta's creation of weaponry to the camaraderie that sprang up between the actors. If you're going to create an epic, or a series, then a smart author should invest some time in seriously considering some DVD extras.

The Difference Between Writing a Novel and Writing a Series

2011-08-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

Two different animals. One's golf, the other's a game of pool. I've never written anything but straight-up novels. Haven't even managed to write a decent short story. Novels however, I can do. You start at the beginning, grab a handful of characters, throw them into trouble and then just keep the camera on them as they race toward the end. Give them some authentic motivation/personality and they will take the plot where it needs to go, surprising you in the process. There will be some bad guys. There will be a subplot or two. A couple of fight scenes, some downtime where they talk about their families and hobbies and become real people, and then a rousing finale that wraps the whole thing up. 90,000 words, say three or four weeks of writing, and you're done.

Now, a series. Hootenanny. How do you write one of those? I'm not talking a trilogy, or series of novels or nothing. I'm talking an actual series, like what you get on TV, like what Charles Dickens used to do. A written tale that's delivered in installments.

I've been trying to figure it out. First, you have to widen the scope of the narrative. Wide angle lens, no tunnel vision. You need to have an ensemble cast. Say five important characters that the audience cares about, and then a good dozen or so supporting dudes that flesh out the world, each with their own mini-subplot and character. You need the plot to be a slow burning one, that develops in subtle steps as threads are interwoven. You need it to be character driven, because nobody will stick around for a plot that complex alone.

So. Create a world, a setting. Come up with two or three groups that are in conflict. Find the moment where that conflict comes to a head, and start there. Then trace the repercussion of that instigating moment wherever it may go. Each group reacts to it differently, and you interlace scenes with each group so that we constantly shift from one to the other. There needs to be a balance between plot development and character development, which need not be mutually exclusive. The characters should reveal themselves through pursuit of the plot, but may also benefit from carefully chosen personal scenes that are solely about them and don't touch on the plot itself, so that a ratio of say 80% plot scenes and 20% character development scenes can be hit.

Now, you can't just have people reacting to that one instigating moment of original conflict, powerful as it may be. You need to reflect how random life is by introducing new plot elements that force new reactions.

So, for example:

Say we're creating a science fiction series. You have three groups:

Mercenary bounty hunter crew
World government agency that hires them
Criminal underworld

Now, the three of them are in conflict. The bounty hunters deride the bureaucratic government that hires them and scorns the criminals. The gov resents their need for the bounty hunters and hates the criminals. The criminals fear the bounty hunters and feel contempt for the government. So where do we start? What's the instigating incident?

We could say that the bounty hunters take the initiative and arrest a head criminal that is secretly in league with some top dogs in the government. All of a sudden the shit hits the fan, as the hunters find themselves being lambasted for their initiative, the government becomes divided as lower rung people with integrity start suspecting their bosses, and the criminal underworld enters crisis as several power players move to replace the leader. Switch from one group to the next as they all react.

Say, two or three episodes later the criminal boss is released. The hunters swear revenge and start going after him and the top government dogs who freed him. The gov group begins to implode as people turn against each other, while the underworld suddenly has two bosses fighting each other down.

Another three episodes, and everything is getting crazy when we introduce a completely new factor: say aliens arrive and begin to invade. Or the citizens, upset and furious, begin to stage a revolt against the government. The three groups have to find their own ways to survive this crisis, as different members of each reach out to the others, alliances are formed only to be followed by betrayals, all of it driving toward the climax by episode 16 or whatever.

Throughout this series you develop the main five characters, the 20 supporting characters, give each moments to develop their own personal problems and desires, and have a number of them be killed, become traitors, become heroes.

Finally, you pay attention to key themes that you develop throughout the series such as: 'organizations stifle progress and lead to corruption', or 'there is no good or evil, only selfish individuals trying to come out on top' or whatever.

This all takes some planning. You need to flesh out your groups, your main characters, and have an outline of where the series goes. Then you need to plot sixteen beats or whatever that will comprise each episode, schedule the scenes so that each group gets its fair amount of air time, and balance the focus of plot vs character development.

At least, that's how I think it would work. Think about your favorite TV shows. Sopranos. Battlestar Gallactica. The Wire. Does my model hold true? Am I missing anything huge?

Musing on 21st Century Writing

2011-08-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

Just some pre-coffee thoughts here. When I think about what it is I do as an author I think: novels. Roughly about 80,000 words or so, hammered out every few months, with long arcs, a core of important characters and a distinct beginning and end.

Is that perhaps not too old-school? Am I stuck, anachronistically, in the 19th & 20th centuries? After all, with self-publishing the very paradigm is changing. People are reading novels on their phones, one can publish one's material immediately (no longer waiting 18 months for the publisher), accepted prices range from $0.99 to $2.99, and attention spans are dropping.

It puts me in mind of Charles Dickens. He'd have loved serializing his stuff on Amazon. Put out a chapter or installment every month for $0.99 and had at it. Is that not perhaps the way to go? Rather than sell a whole novel for $0.99, should we as authors not be putting out 15,000 installments for the same price? Enough bang to justify the admittedly small buck, but with enough room to ramble and grow?

For example, consider The Wire. Probably one of the best shows ever made, with a vast cast, various complex main arcs, a whole ton of subplots, and a verisimilitude that was impossible to beat. What if one were to essay a fantasy version of The Wire? Release an episode every month of about 15k words, focusing on the same kind of structure and multiple plots? Would people be willing to pay $0.99 for each one? Pack in a bunch of DVD extras in each one by hyper-linking a la Cortazar Rayuela to content in the back. Hmm...

Now, a little number crunching. For ever $0.99 book you sell, you make about $0.30 cents (roughly). For every $2.99 book you sell, you make $2.00. So I'd have to sell six $0.99 books to make the some amount I get for the sale of one $2.99. So if I wrote 6 installments at 15k each, it would be the equivalent in both words and income of a 95k novel sold for $2.99. The goal therefore would be to write more than six installments, and hope that the model would lend itself to greater popularity amongst readers. almost doubly so.

What do you guys think? Would you be willing to pay $0.99 for a serialized fantasy novel written in the style of something like The Wire?

Little Secrets by Passion Pit

2011-08-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

Just heard this on Pandora. Pretty cool.

Help me pick a cover

2011-08-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be releasing CRUDE SUNLIGHT soon, and am in the final throes of cover design. Which of the two below do you prefer? To help you decide, the novel is a Silent Hill/The Ring/Shirley Jackson tale of psychological horror.

How To Start Writing a Novel

2011-08-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

First, you need to open up a writing program like Word. If you're hardcore, Notepad will do, but be aware that it doesn't have an auto-save feature. People trying to be cool can go with Google Docs, but the layout is still kind of lame.

That first step done, you need to center your text, bold it, and write a title. The title doesn't matter, since it is easy to change down the road, but try for something slightly distinctive so that you feel encouraged to keep going and write the rest. For example, off the top of my head:

Combating Tuesdays
Empty Box Heroes
What is That Inside My Cat
Penelope Zane & The Mad Weather Vane
Under the Light House

You get the idea. Then hit Enter a couple of times, left align your text and type out 'Chapter 1'. Hit Enter twice more, and BAM, you are good to go. You have now officially begun your novel. All you now need to do is come up with characters, a setting, a plot, and write about 90,000 words and you are pretty much done.

Reflection

2011-07-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

Thundering Items of Note

2011-06-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

Today has been tumultuous, events in flux as the tides of luck ebb and flow. One moment I'm flying high, the next I'm brought crashing to ground, jaw skidding across the blacktop as I come to a stop, turning and looking up, one hand shielding my eyes as I gaze at the heights from which I have fallen.

First off: great news! I'm flying out this Thursday to California, where I shall meet up with two of my best friends to leap Batman style into a car and drive across the desert, laughing and whooping as we tear across California, Arizona and Utah in search of atmospheric locations for my second novel.

That's right people: this is a freakin' research trip I'm crossing the continent for. I'm going to take a notepad, a #2 pencil, my Kindle, and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers and laughers. Maybe a quart of rum? Definitely my Hunter S. Thompson tinted shades and green plastic visor. Watch out folks, I think we might be hitting a gun range in Las Vegas.

Then bang! Paul Guyet Jr. shoots some new chapters of The Grind Show audio book into my Dropbox, daring me, imploring me, demanding that I pay tribute to his brilliance and silken, honeyed tongue. Well, you listen up Mr. Guyet: this is me paying homage! You hear this? This is it, baby, accolades galore in a public forum, consider your vastness saluted!

Just as I'm riding high my car gets towed. Right out from under my nose, on the street where I live. I ask you people, the humanity! I speed dialed my buddy who's a lawyer, who immediately recommended that I first do a hit from my emergency stash of adrenochrome and then put on a pair of shades. That done, I began a three hour battle with the management of the condo building, the cops, these sketchy looking tow truckers, and it almost ended up in a gun fight in the back of their towing lot, everybody running around with finger guns and going 'Pow pow pow!', but nobody seemed inclined to join in. I shelled out $65 and wrote a letter to my Congress Man. Or woman. I hope they don't mind the indeterminate nature of my salutation.

THEN, as if the day couldn't get any more hectic, I come home to find out that my new speakers have arrived. I plug them in, find When The Levee Breaks by Led Zepplin and boom, full volume, max bass, and I'm sitting here grinning like an idiot as my brain flatlines, my heart flattens, my bones vibrate and my landlord calls from West Palm to ask me to lower the volume.

Which I have since done, but man, quality music from quality speakers at a solid volume = on the up and up once more.

And oh - my editor, Amy, has agreed to cast her gaze over another manuscript of mine so that I may eventually publish it too. Anybody here read my Dark Fae novel? What was once a working title might very well now serve as the actual title. I mean, 'Dark Fae'. Says it all! ...Though I have just discovered that another novel was released in May called 'The Dark Fae'. Freakin' rip off. So back to the drawing board.

...Chasm of Dreams?
Or... The Flutter of Dark Wings? No, that's awful.
Or... Music from the Abyss? A Thousand Ages In Your Sight? Nights of Strong Wine, Music From Your Thorns...

The Shadow of Your Throne? Hey, I really like that. Actually works with the content of the novel. Thanks, Psalm of David!

And oh oh oh - want to see the mock up of my new cover? Here it is:

What do you guys think? It's a first stab at it, and if I go with it I'll build it from scratch again but with attention to detail/lighting/etc.

The Grind Show, Two Weeks Out

2011-06-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

The dust had settled, the results are in, and I am delighted to call the launch of The Grind Show a huge success. The initial spike in sales that resulted from my promotional marketing strategy propelled the novel into the Amazon stratosphere; for three days it ranked in the top 100 of three distinct categories, and for three days I thus danced and war-whooped with glee and abandon.

Things have slowed down since then, but the sales, they have continued. The rate is slower, but what impresses me is that it is steady. Which means, dear readers, that complete strangers are now reading it. People with no allegiance or personal regard for me are buying the book, and even more crucially, they're not returning it! Success!

I've not been idle, however. I've already petitioned some twenty book review blogs to review The Grind Show, and am thrilled to report that four have agreed to do so. That means that hopefully positive reviews should be hitting their blogs, Amazon, and Goodreads in a couple of months, further boosting sales and helping me reach that tipping point where word of mouth truly begins to have an effect.

Latest review from BethR, written on June 16th:

This was my first e-book and my introduction to Kindle (can you believe it?). I read The Grind Show on my mobile with the Kindle app and couldn't put it down; reading on the bus, walking down the street, and sneaking in a chapter or two before bed. It was gripping from the start and continued until the last word. I'd definitely recommend this book, to fantasy fans and those just looking for a little escape as well. And the price can be beat!

I am most definitely contented with the way things have gone. I'm going to continue asking different book review blogs to take a look, and meanwhile am brainstorming Book 2. It looks like I might be flying out to the South West for a book review road trip, during which I plan to burn a savage trail across Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. If all goes well, Book 2 should be out by the end of July. Fingers crossed!

So thanks to everybody who has helped by either buying a copy, writing a review or telling their friends about it. You guys are amazing.

PS: If you have read the book and have something to say, I absolutely wouldn't mind your writing a review on Amazon. Seriously!

No Country For Old Men

2011-06-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

Cormac McCarthy makes me want to give up on writing. There's brilliant and then there's McCarthy, who writes a mean taut lean prose that makes you sweat from the bleeding tension that suffuses every page. If I were a writing professor I'd give my class the passage where Chigurh walks into a gas station and subtly menaces its proprietor and dare them to find a single word to cut. There's no fat marbling these pages. There's nothing that doesn't directly contribute to the whole. Poe said that each word in a short story should directly promote the atmosphere (see: House of Usher), and McCarthy has gone and taken this axiom and applied it wholesale across his novel.

I'm not going to bother with the plot, because the plot is almost incidental to what I love about this book. In short, a man named Moss comes across a drug deal gone band, absconds with the money, and is then hunted down by the interested parties across a series of motels.

What sticks in my craw however is McCarthy's ability to take simple words and wreck holy vengeance across the page. His descriptions of the land are bone achingly piercing, terse as they are, and imbue everything with an Old Testament level of grimness and harsh beauty. It's the perfect backdrop against which to smear a series of violent and poetic encounters.

Then take the action itself. He writes with a methodical and unsparing style. He doesn't glory in the violence, does not indulge in torture porn. His violence is sudden, absolute, and final. It is in the very finality of his short descriptions of people being shot that we find ourselves shocked, startled. One moment a character is living and breathing on the page, and then they are stopped cold and gone.

But what is it? What is it about his writing that gets under my skin, makes me stare at the wall with hooded eyes and curse under my breath? It's that relentless power. That sense of mastery. You never doubt what he's saying. You never second guess him, and instead read with a breathless anticipation, fully expecting him to show you how the world works, the true motivations of men. It's as if he's simply recounting a series of events that he witnessed, so honest and bleak is his narrative.

McCarthy is preoccupied with the vortex of violence that exists in the world, that exists in every man's heart, and that will drag us all down through our desire for power and dominance. Chigurh, Judge Holden, these are all avatars, angels of violence, inhuman figures that we watch stride across the page with fear and wonder. Those around them are human in the manner we understand, but all succumb to the frailties of human flesh. There are no heroes in No Country For Old Men. Even Moss, the protagonist, is spurred on by a fatal greed that undoes his life and that of those around him. There is no reprieve from the human condition, and McCarthy makes it clear that we are all as a species forged of the same primordial matter as the rest of the animal animal kingdom. We are not apart from nature, but living tooth and claw in jungles of our own creation. Read McCarthy and prepare for the death of idealism.

Call It

2011-06-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

The dust settles, and 6/4 recedes into history. Book launch accomplished. Nearly 60 copies sold. For a moment, a span of perhaps six hours, The Grind Show ranked in the top 3000 paid Kindle books. Now it's at 67,000 and slowly sinking, like Phlebas into the briny gloom.

For now, at any rate. I've got plans to resurrect it, do old Dr. Galvani proud.

A key part of said plan is writing Book II. But what is the logic behind the second book in a series? It's got to be bigger, better, faster. More depth, greater width, encompass more while hewing to the same core values that the reader enjoyed to begin with. Or something.

Book II. It's percolating. I've got an outline, though it's but a paragraph long. I'm bringing back the old cast, and mixing in some new. There will be shotguns. There will, it seems, be more of the South West.

I'm reading No Country for Old Men for inspiration. For an idea as to what can be done. Unfortunately, doing so is akin to snorting a line of TNT. I can enjoy the book as a reader to no end. As a writer, it's awful. McCarthy writes with raw, sustained intensity. There is nothing there but the absolutely essential. The tension does not let up. It's like staring at the third rail. I've got me a case of the Cormac McCarthy blues.

Still, it's invigorating. Like a dip in a denki furo. If I can tap 1/100th of what McCarthy is mainlining, I'll die a happy man.

So here's the plan. I'm going to start writing Book II this week. First draft. Not going to worry about fleshing out the whole cast. Not going to worry about whether it's sufficiently complex, whether it's broader in scope, more profound, whatever. I'm going to start, and then send it out to some kind souls and see if it resonates at the right frequency. See if it makes them sit up and go God Damn.

Book II, people. Going to start writing Hunting the Holy this week.

Take a Chance on Me

2011-06-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

So there I was, trapped in a doctor's waiting room, pacing like a caged tiger. We'd been waiting for two hours and were the last ones left, and if I had a tail it would have been lashing. The nurse, sensing how dangerous the scene was becoming, put on a movie. I sat down, irate, but was soon distracted by the fact that Denzel Washington was on.

Something about a train. I intuited this from the huge freight train that Denzel was riding in along with Captain Kirk. The camera seemed to be loose on its gulley or fligswitch or whatever it's called because every single shot was a rapid pan. Rotating dynamically around Denzel as he yells something into a mike. Pan flash past Captain Kirk as he stares grittily out the window. Then we're in some HQ, and Rosario Dawson is trying not to cry, biting her lips, and then yelling as the camera dives around her in wild swoops. Within two minutes I was feeling nauseous.

Turns out this is Speed with trains. Denzel's trying to catch up with a runaway train on his own train and stop it. Rosario Dawson is being brave and yelling support, and somewhere a guy who looks like the Mayor of NYC from Ghostbusters is yelling abuse and telling everybody they're fired for being big goddamn heroes.

I turn and stare at Grace. This movie is ridiculous.

"You're fired!" screams the Mayor from NYC.
"You already fired me," whispers Denzel.
"What?"
Denzel stares bleakly out the window, "I got my 3 months notice 76 days ago. Half benefits."
Everybody winces, stunned at this horrid news. Denzel looks even more heroic as the camera tears around him at ridiculous speeds.
"And... you're risking your life for a job you're only on for another week? Why are you doing this for me?"
Denzel turns and stares right at the camera. A tear runs down his cheek. "I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it for the starving children in Africa."

Or something.

I mean, over the top! There are like a million cop cars following both trains, helicopters swooping around like gnats, and still Denzel and Captain Kirk manage to have these soulful moments where they murmur deep dark truths about their own lives, bonding in this super macho way. Denzel's wife died of cancer. He misses her when he wakes up, the smell gone from her pillow. Captain Kirk shot a cop who texted his wife or something, I missed the details. I mean, between yelling into the mike about how they had no choice but to go faster, safety precautions be damned, they practically enact Kabuki plays.

So the whole world is watching this on Fox news in the movie. They cue to crowd shots. I nearly choked on my metaphorical popcorn. One of the key crowds watching the train drama was a gaggle of Hooters waitresses, who would slowly shake their heads, eyes tearing up, silently mouthing 'no' in complete despair. I mean, utterly heart wrenching!

There's a great moment where two cop cars flip over for no reason other than bad driving. Completely gratuitous.

Later, after a bunch of shenanigans, Captain Kirk leaps off the train onto the bed of a flatbed truck, which races to the front of the runaway train. He then leaps onto the engine, mangled foot and all, and stops the train by pulling on the brake.

Now people. Hold up. This train has been barreling along for like three hours. Filled with nuclear mutants or something, so that when it wrecks all of Pennsylvania will disappear. And nobody thought to drive up a competent SWAT officer to the front and load him on board? The thing was only going like 60mph. Why all the freaking drama? I stared at the screen in disbelief as Captain Kirk made as big a deal of his mangled foot as he could limping into the engine cabin, as if even at this point it could ruin his ability to press the big 'STOP' button.

Ridiculous. And the whole time the camera was savaging back and forth like a dog trying to pull a chew toy from your hand.

OK, I just googled this thing. It's called Unstoppable, and got 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, who driving? Bear driving! How can that be?!?

28 hours later

2011-06-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

So, it's Monday night, and the full effects of the big Sunday sale are now apparent. What a rush. I spent most of Sunday driving around Miami so as to toast the publication of The Grind Show with different family members. Brunch at Grace's, where pink champagne and arrepas were served, followed by a visit to my aunt and grandma so that we could toast on their balcony once more. Finally got home around 7pm, and so as to avoid simply watching the clock Grace and I engaged in a furious burst of living room re-arrangement, which has resulted in a much more awesome and dynamic space. Go us, and pre-sale jitters.

8pm rolled around. All my browser tabs were open. Grace began to play a ferocious drum song by Rusted Root, and when the clock silently ticked over to mark the hour, we began to leap around and dance. Ah, how to express the exhilaration? My book was being sold across the globe. People were paying money to buy what I had written. Everywhere, The Grind Show was being purchased. It was a strange, surreal, delirious moment, an instance of pure potential. Perhaps only five copies were being bought, or fifty, or five hundred. Who knew? In that moment, it didn't matter. Just that I had finally taken that step.

Half an hour later the business of refreshing my sales report page began in earnest. Nothing changed until about ten, when suddenly an avalanche (OK, a landslide) of sales rushed in. Over the next hour the number continued to creep up, till the rate dropped to about one sale every ten minutes around eleven. A choice was before me: to stay up and continue to watch, or just go to bed and get all the news at once come the morning.

I opted to hit the sack. My Amazon rank hadn't changed, holding fast at around 30,000 or so. I lay down, tried to sleep, but around five in the morning was awoke by a mosquito. I have never leaped from bed so joyously. I killed it in less than a minute, and then stumbled over to my laptop to check the news:

#2,919 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#33 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Magic & Wizards
#55 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Fantasy > Contemporary
#71 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Contemporary

Incredible! My sales hadn't shot up much since I'd last checked, but apparently my novel was in the top 3,000 all of all Kindle sales! Looking at Facebook I saw that it had actually ranked higher a few hours before, but had begun its slow and inexorable slide once the spate of purchases had abated.

In the morning, I checked in again. Five hours had passed, and now I was ranking:

#3,601 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#42 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Magic & Wizards
#69 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Fantasy > Contemporary
#94 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Contemporary

And so it went over the rest of the day, my ranks slowly ebbing as more sales trickled in. Being so listed didn't translate into huge sales from strangers as I had hoped, but rather generated a constant rate of sales that have kept me afloat all day long. As of now, I'm ranked:

#4,648 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#54 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Magic & Wizards
#99 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Fantasy > Contemporary

Come tomorrow morning, I imagine I'll have slipped off both sub-categories altogether, and be ranking around #9,000 in the Paid in Kindle Store list.

So did my promotional plan work? Did concentrating the purchases of friends and family result in a huge burst in sales whose momentum became self-sustaining? Not quite. Sales today have been steady but very slow. However, a number of them seem to have gone to strangers--or friends of friends--such that I hope the new visibility has had some effect, and that word of mouth might have already begun. Here are two reviews whose authors I do not recognize:

W.T. Funady (5 stars):

Tucker is a rising star. I downloaded it last night and read it straight through. It has been years since a book has gripped me so hard that I skipped a night of sleep rather than wait to find out what happen next. You must read this book!

PjM (4 stars):

I purchased this book less than 12 hours ago and have consumed it entirely. It's that good of a read. Read it on the commute to work, during lunch, on the commute home and through dinner.
I put it down only to teach several periods today.
Tucker creates an energetic, fast-paced world that draws the reader in and doesn't let up until the final chapter. Clever writing filled with abundant metaphors help to bring the characters to life. More than a few nods to current pop culture make the world feel real as an alternate reality - or one hidden beneath our own.
Any fan of fantasy, fiction or action - hell anyone who enjoys a good piece of fiction will want to read this book.
I look forward to another installment in this compelling world.

So did it work? Hell yes. I had a deliriously fun night, I saw friends and family come forward like I couldn't believe to support my work, sold a large number of books and for a moment was ranked higher than I would have thought possible. What an incredible experience. Now of course comes the work: spreading the word, garnering book reviews, ensuring that this momentum doesn't flag, and beginning work on book #2.

But for now, ah. Absolutely delightful. So to each and every one of you that came through and purchased a novel, I can only tender my most heartfelt thanks, and sincerely hope that you enjoy the hell out of my book.

Just 3 hours left to go!

2011-06-05T14:02:00.001-07:00

Dear friends,

It's been a gorgeous day here in Miami, and I've been peregrinating around town celebrating tonight's imminent release with different members of my family. Mimosas have been had, toasts have been made, and now there's only three hours left to go. Already positive reviews are rolling in, and somehow, despite my incredulity, this really seems to be happening.

So thank you in advance, thank you for your support, patience, and encouragement, and come 8pm EST, I hope you log onto my Amazon page and order yourself a copy.

I know that this is but the beginning of a long journey for me, but I'm glad that you were here from the start.

Salut!

Phil

Tomorrow's the Day

2011-06-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

17 hours till it begins. Come 8pm EST, theoretically friends, family, and those friends and family have convinced to participate will log into Amazon or B&N and buy a copy of The Grind Show. I'll be sitting at my computer, and come that fated hour I'll probably start refreshing my Amazon Sales page every few minutes, though I know results take an hour or so to show. Still.

What a strange week it's been. My emails out have resulted in a deluge of wonderful emails back in, with old friends reaching out to encourage me, to offer support and promise to partake come 8pm. I've heard from a friend I made for a day in Florence, from friends I made for a summer in Sydney, from high school friends, from middle school friends, from family in England, from family in New York, from best friends from college to people I met but a few times so many years ago. All of a sudden my network of friends is so palpably real, and the fact that all of these people might be reading my book in a day is both exhilarating and nerve wrecking.

Ah! I feel like I've climbed to the top of a high diving board, and now stand, toes curled over the far edge, looking down the dizzying drop to the hard water below. Any moment now I'm going to leap, I'm going to throw myself forward into that stomach curdling drop, and then it's that long slow swan dive fall that is over before it begins and SMASH you're in it, the book is being sold, reviews are coming in, people are telling me what they think and I'm in the thick of it.

What a wonderful time to be alive. What a thrilling experience to be in the thick of! I'm publishing my novel. I'm already thinking about the second one, piecing together the plot. Driving today to the supermarket, listening to Led Zeppelin, the first line of the second book came to me, as definite as if incised in a headstone: 'We'd been hunting holy men for six months now.' That might be but the first part of a longer sentence, I don't know, but images have been coming to me, flashes of scenes, ideas, twists in the plots, the sense and weft of a novel. It's coalescing in my mind, and soon I'll start writing it, the second in the series.

First though, there's tomorrow night. I hope you'll join me in giving The Grind Show a royal launch, and that if you've a mind, come 8pm EST this Sunday you'll log into Amazon and buy it for $2.99.

I'm almost too excited to sleep. Going to put some thoughts on book 2 down on paper, and force myself to turn in. The sooner I do, the sooner 8pm will be upon me. Salut!

You Got Me Burning Up

2011-05-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

Just sent an email blast to all my friends and family. Ah, people! You have no idea how nervous I was to send that blast out, how carefully I worked on the text, how much I agonized over the consequences of telling every single person I know about The Grind Show. But I did it, emailed out, and the outpouring of support that has immediately come rushing back into my inbox has been exhilarating beyond my dreams!

Friends from New York, from Boston, from Denver and West Palm. People I haven't spoken to in years, old college buddies, friends I connected with but briefly while living abroad. Writing friends, everybody and anybody, all of them writing in with their support and encouragement.

One week now till the book goes on sale. 6/5 is the magic date, and then I hope people will click over to Amazon to purchase a copy and help my title skyrocket into the firmament that is the best seller list. Who knows? Anything is possible!

All I know at the moment is that my stomach is tied up in knots, I want to jump up and dance around, and that I've finally and truly and irrevocably put myself out there.

Here. We. Go!

PS: Read the first three chapters at http://www.transientme.com !

Armed With Tea and Cookies

2011-05-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

"So," you ask me, "What's it like to self-publish? And don't scant on the gritty details. Make it vivid, put us in your shoes."

Well, alright.

First off, the greatest distinction between an indie writer and a traditionally published one is that, as an indie, you spend oodles of time not writing while still working at being a writer. Take your traditionally published dude. He writes a novel: hurray! After much labor, he acquires an agent: hurray! The agent then goes to work, acquires an editor, who then enlists the help of their marketing team, their cover design folks, their layout people, etc. The author spends this time at home wondering what's going on, and eventually receives an edited manuscript for them to work on, after which they will receive a galley to approve, and they're done. Book published!

Now, there are downsides to this approach. The first being that this is an 18 month process. The second being the gnawing curiosity as to what is going on at any time, and fear that their cover and book title will be awful, and that the publishing house will put no money into marketing.

The plus side is that, these worries aside, the author can spend the whole time simply worrying about the writing, and any self-promotion they wish to undertake.

Now, let us move to your average indie writer who is coming fresh to the market. He writes a novel: hurray! Now, he skips trying to find an agent, and instead needs to edit the manuscript himself, or find somebody to do it for him. Much work later, countless rereads and revisions, he pronounces it truly finished. Then he must design the cover, or hire somebody to do it for him. The title, mercifully, he gets to control. That done, it is time to upload the book to Amazon, B&N, Sony, iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords, Diesel, etc. Which means converting everything into ePub format, Kindle format, etc. Which means learning the rudiments of HTML, spending endless hours learning about what is required from each format via message boards and forums, eventually discovering such programs as Calibre and MobiCreator to help him with the process, and so creating the final files. Oof! That takes a lot of work.

From there, it's time to upload the book. Uploaded! Now publish it, and tell all your friends and family. Maybe have a small celebration, and then it's really time to get to work, because nobody is going to promote your book except yourself. So what do you do? That's the big question. You ask friends to write reviews and tell their friends. You tell everybody on your Facebook and Twitter about the book, until people start getting annoyed at you and tune you out. You email authors and baldly ask for blurbs. You start researching dozens of book review blows and emailing their owners in the hopes that they'll review your novel, joining a long line of supplicants literally hundreds in number. You hope, desperately hope, that your novel will sell itself through word of mouth.

During all this time, you're not writing. You're playing editor, graphic designer, layout dude, marketer, etc. This takes enormous amounts of time, especially the first time round, and your job is never truly done. Is having three book review blogs write about your novel enough? Twelve? Twenty? Are your sales ever good enough that you can say you've finished your marketing?

So, it's a trade off. What you gain in control while indie publishing you lose in time. The traditional author has his fair share of woes (awful cover! what a stupid title! the editor left the publishing house and now nobody is promoting my novel! the book's not going to be published for another year! they've put zero dollars into promoting its release!) but in turn they get to spend that time writing their next novel, and their book gets to be validated for being old-school published and placed on shelves everywhere from B&N to Costco.

The indie writer however gets a ton more money if their book sells (70% royalties instead of what, like 16%, though no advance), complete control over every aspect of their novel which they can change any time they like until they hit the sweet sales spot (new cover two months in! new description! new price! new edits to the text!), and get to track their sales and receive their payments in real time (go Amazon!). And, of course, they now spend half if not more of their time being an author, and not a writer.

So what's it like being an indie author? Awesome. Exciting! Frustrating, tiresome. You learn a lot about the business. I totally understand why indie luminary Amanda Hawking went traditional--it's a tone of work. I also don't think it's a huge deal for an established author to go indie, especially when they're wealthy enough to pass up on a $500,000 advance and still hire a team of professionals to do all the work for them. For the true indie author though, starting fresh and with big dreams, it's a hell of a leap of faith.

An 80's Kind of Morning

2011-05-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

Lime in the Coconut. Free Nelson Mandela. Take on Me. 4 Non Blondes. It's that kind of morning, the sky lowering and sullen, the mangoes fading into the branches, the cottage dark and gloomy. I hold it back with a mug of coffee and good music, that brash sensibility from the 80's that was so delightfully pre-self conscious hipster irony. There's such a delicious earnestness to 80's music that it washes away the moody patina of the morning and makes me yearn for a good black leather jacket.

It's Wednesday morning here in Miami, and the day yawns before me, a vast tableaux of hours in which anything may happen. In Libya today people will continue to shoot at each other. In Japan, radiation will continue to spill out silently like the world's most lethal invisible confetti. Ash will plume over Iceland, Barack Obama will address the British House of Lords, people in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas shake their heads in bewilderment and anguish at the destruction wrought on their homes.

The world! 7 billion lives, 7 billion dreams and nightmares, hopes and struggles, elation and despair. From Bangladeshi's turning their rice paddies into crab and shrimp farms as the ocean rises to hermits in the southern reaches of Tierra del Fuego working with chapped hands on timber processing plants. Research vessels shadowing the calving coast of the Antarctic to crowds climbing onto the Trans Siberian railroad to cross the vastness that is Russia.

Think on it: Amsterdam, Recife, Baghdad, Kyoto, Austin, Quito, Abuja, Istanbul, Bristol, Apia, Buenos Aires, Beijing. Billions waking and going to sleep, eating, squatting patiently over their toilets, reading newspapers, scraping the dirt, thinking amorous thoughts, thoughts of vengeance, consumed by avarice, boredom, despair, hope.

And here I am, in my little cottage in Miami, mug of coffee in hand, listening to 80's music and putting off my freelance work. Soon I'll get back to it, roll up my proverbial sleeves and put all fancies and daydreams aside. But for now, I look out the window at where the palm fronds shiver and marvel.

Solitude

2011-05-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

Solitude threatens stillness. I have the entirety of Saturday to myself, from waking to slumber, and need not see or interact with anybody if I do not wish it. Grace is departed for the weekend, and thus today I can toil at whichever tasks I wish to direct my energy, distracted only by such pastimes as I wish to engage in, such as the reading of novels or the creating of meals.

However, such solitude is a strange thing. Where I place objects they remain, unmoving, unless I pick them back up once more. I could subside and do nothing for hours on end, and nothing will move about me, only the wind stirring the palm fronds outside my window hinting at life. A white hand towel that lies crumpled on my desk is organic in its folds and curvature; it could have been dropped but a moment ago, but will sit still and as solid as if carved from rock for years if not disturbed.

Still, I plan on being an engine of industry today. There is much work to be done! Toward that end I have begun my day with a strong mug of hazelnut coffee, and plan to now tackle the remaining chapters of The Grind Show. Strangely, the second half of the novel required much greater editing from Amy, such that I have slowed down as I wade through the bog of red marks, marveling at how loose and redundant my language can be. Only twenty chapters to go, however, and then I can declare The Grind Show finally and truly complete.

And just in time! Tomorrow I send the largest email I have ever sent. Before, my record topped out at some twenty or thirty individuals, but tomorrow I shall address some five hundred, names scoured from my contact list and representing friends, family, acquaintances, and a host of others whom I had marginal dealings with in the past. All shall be alerted as to the imminent publishing of The Grind Show, and directed to visit my novel's webpage where they may read the first few chapters.

That email sent, I shall spend next week working my way through the Byzantine travails of uploading my text to Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, Kobo, Smashwords, etc. The plan is to have everything ready to roll by next weekend, upon which my fellow five hundred will receive a second email alerting them to the availability of my novel, and bidding them in most courteous terms to avail themselves of a copy. Ah, marketing!

I also plan on sending out dozens of copies of TGS to book review blogs, and begin a light campaign on Facebook and here on my blog. The switch from author to marketer must prove seamless, but I find myself at a loss: what more can one do to encourage the sales of one's book? I shall brainstorm, offer prizes, and hope that its own quality will encourage others to refer their friends to my webpage.

But that is not all! After I have done with The Grind Show, I proceed! There are other novels to be written and revised. The Grind Show II must be written, and toward that end I began brainstorming last night, making suitable advances and refinements of theorems propounded years before between my good friend Paul and I. I hope to have it down in a couple of months, during which, should Amy my editor find the cake that I am baking and planning to mail to her to her liking, I shall ask her to review Dark Fae, another novel of mine, and put that up as well.

Grind Show, Dark Fae, Grind Show II. Those will be the first three of my novels available online. Followed, I hope, in short order by Blood From the Mountain, which I hope to revise, expand and improve on thereafter.

That done, I plan to rewrite completely my Miami Vampire novel, and perhaps after a thorough edit release Crude Sunlight as well. Perhaps then the sequel to Blood from the Mountain, followed by an edited One by One. In all, by year's end, I hope the following to be available for purchase:

1) The Grind Show
2) Dark Fae
3) The Grind Show II
4) Blood from the Mountain
5) Miami Vampire
6) Blood from the Mountain II
7) Grind Show III
8) Crude Sunlight
9) One by One

Ambitious, but fully five of those are already written. Either way, it is something to strive for. And today, in the midst of all this solitude, I have twelve hours in which to commence that striving.

Wish me luck!

Picaresque

2011-05-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

Words are funny things. You think you understand what one means, and then it squiggles in your grasp, zigs when you expected it to zag, and a world of permutations reveals itself. Compact and impact. I understand these words to mean small, tightly compressed, and to collide, to hit. Yet where in those definitions is their obvious relation to each other? Obloquy. Axiom. Pullulate. Motile vs. mobile. So many words, one wishes that their learning could be more exact, that there were courses that put you through your paces, that a discipline could be formed wherein this ocean could be tamed, and a deeper and more penetrating insight cultured.

Alas, there is not, or if there was when I was growing, I missed the opportunity to take advantage of it.

Worse yet, certain words continue to defy my ability to use them, despite a techinical understanding of their meaning. Palimpsest being a prime example.

Ah, the paucity of the mind!

I see the doorway to a thousand churches

2011-05-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

A strange and irresolute day. The light outside is soft and grey, temperate and still. It invites stillness, contemplation, time spent in bed looking at the wall and musing on efforts half accomplished. The hum of the laptop, my landlord calling after his dog down the street, the occasional deep throated whir as the air conditioning unit outside my window stirs itself to life. Sounds that serve to emphasize the stillness, light that only penetrates half of the living room and then seems to give up, leaving the far reaches in shadow.

Still no writing of any note. At least, nothing of a creative bent, though I am churning out freelance stuff like an autonomous machine. For the most part I stay on track, writing about the benefits of wearing this kind of shoe while playing tennis, or the most crucial piece of advice to keep in mind while squatting, or which workout is guaranteed to make you sweat. Sometimes, however, the absurdity of it all creeps over me, and I'll churn out blog posts like the following:

There's no need to cry, we can't always be beautiful and tender and loved by the world, but sometimes, if you want it badly enough, if you're willing to part your hair and look up at the sun, tears running down your cheeks, you can realize that yes, opportunities abound, the world is not circumscribed by madness but rather your own limitations, and that if you too want a shredded ripped core of deadly six packs then all you have to do is get physical.

Stop the yearning, the secret burning that consumes your heart, disgard the ultimate passions that play you false and leave you all alone at the midnight hour, and rather pick up a copy of the PX90 workout, which will help you burst your boundaries and leave the others alone and gaping in shock and dismay before you.

Or if you wish you could try a Shakeology beverage, fine and dandy, skip the brandy and add some blueberries because you know those are a superfruit. Adding something so nutritious to your diet will ensure that you too are in control, rolling smooth, laughing as the wind tosses your fine, lustrous hair.

Or give High Intensity Interval Training a try, that ultimate in ultimates, the ne plus ultra in cardio programs. It truly is delicious, and will leave you a regular Adonis, an Achilles of love and pleasure that the whole world will delight in and coo at your approach, for now and evermore! So what are you waiting for, get physical, physical!

When I start submitting such work I realize that I have to take a break, step back from the keyboard, go pour myself a lonesome jar of water and sit back in the shadows of the far reaches of my living room and listen to my landlord's echoing cry of despair as his dog continues to ignore him. The minutes tick by, the hours hover like hummingbirds and then you blink and three have passed in quick succession. Outside the light grows dim, Cinco de Mayo passing in all its transient glory, and somewhere little Mexican girls in brightly colored dresses are on stage, smiling shyly at the cameras as they dance steps they have never danced before, instructed to them for this very occasion, Cinco de Mayo, Cinco de Mayo.

I've begun working on a book page, a webpage, a place to present my new novel. It's half complete, crude in form and function but hinting and intimating with sly sidelong glances at what it will one day look like. Some day soon. It's another attempt at promoting Le Spectacle Mouture, as they call it in French. Though, a friend of mine finished reading it yesterday, and told me over Gchat that he loved it. None stop excitement throughout, he said. Which sounds pretty good?

The Iron Game

2011-05-02T20:58:00.003-07:00

I hit the gym today. I packed a white shirt and a pair of gray shorts and my scruffed tennis shoes but forgot my socks. Went into a local gym, which claimed to be hidden behind a strip mall on Google Maps but was actually ensconced at the back of a trendy garden patio assemblage over which spilled out expensive chairs and tables for a trendy restaurant. The gym goers were encouraged to walk through the restaurant's parking lot, along the alley behind the kitchen and then cross out into the bright lights and matinee boozers for only five seconds before plunging through a side door and into Idol's Gym.

Think big space, metal surfaces painted firetruck red, a projector playing a movie in huge dimensions above our heads. Something akin to an FBI procedural starring that guy from Memento. This German lady behind the desk effusively allowed me to wander around and take a look, so I drifted about, peering at massively tattooed massive men as they benched and squatted and crunched and curled. They all seemed very serious, very intense. I came back and said I was sold, and handed over my credit card.

A few minutes later I realized I hadn't packed my socks. I hate wearing tennis shoes without socks, that slick feeling you get under your soles, slippery and damp. But hell, I was in a real gym with real men. I felt like I should embrace going sockless, should proclaim it casually to the other guys as we lounged by the leg press or something. Instead I forced myself not to grimace as I padded out like a footsore cat burglar and found myself a lonesome squat rack.

Now I love me a good squat rack. I spent a month or two eying interesting possibilities on Craig's List and eBay. Ah, my kingdom for a squat rack, a barbell and about 200 lbs in plates. Forget isometric machines, gimme the open range and a slighty rusted barbell, the knurl worn down almost smooth, a slight curve to the bar where it's bowed before the inevitability of gravity over the years, that iron tang, the clumsily piled mass of weights that nobody can seem to bother to rack.

My first day in the gym, the first of many, and I've learned enough to go slow. The urge, the tendency, is to do as much as you can, a gusty show of exuberance and hubris that will inevitably bring you low the next day as your hamstrings seize up and you walk around as if you dropped something of dubious value in your pants. So I gripped the barbell, pushed and pulled myself back and forth on it as if testing how firmly it was resting, and then nodding in a show of profession satisfaction I ducked under it, allowed it to rest on my bunched traps, and straightened.

Ah, me. How the years have gone by. Gone are the days I could bust out three sets of five reps with five or ten pounds on either end, boasting after at the local tapas bar that I squatted some sixty five or seventy pounds. Having swum this morning my legs were already protesting, demanding that I lie down and pick up a novel, and so placing more weight on my shoulders was a no-no.

Especially as much weight as an unloaded bar. With a crack that I felt more than heard my left ankle gave way, and I collapsed with a clattering clang that drew every eye even as blood began to fountain from my nose. I must have ruptured something, I said to myself in a cold and analytical voice even as the massively tattooed dude to my right began to scream, smothering his face and mouth with his hands.

OK, no, nothing cracked. Nothing broke, ruptured or gave way. I did my sets and walked away to do some shoulder presses followed by a little light benching, and then covered with a fine sheen of perspiration skipped out of the gym.

However, get this, there was this personal trainer there, a regular dude with a shock of styled hair and an uneasy look on his face like a drunken wildebeest slowly becoming aware of the presence of a lion in his midst. He was training this older guy, maybe late forties, the kind of dude with paper thin skin and googly eyes, hair thinning and cottage cheese legs. You know the type. Everything seemed relatively normal until the googly eyed guy spoke, and I swear he sounded just like Shirley Valentine. No wonder the trainer was spooked! I nearly dropped my unloaded barbell, which would no doubt have caused something to crack, a sound I would have felt more than heard, even as blood--

OK. Anyways, the trainer would say something casual, like, "Dude, awesome lat power, you're maxillating like a seal, no blubber no hitter no batter," and then the googly eyed older dude would pipe up in the weirdest falsetto, "I always told my mother I was born for the iron game. I always knew I had a soft potential. Tell me more about my lats."

I almost walked over and asked him what was up. Was he born that way? Can you imagine how hard it must be to have cottage cheese legs and a voice like a sweet eight year old? Props to him to coming out and putting so much TLC into his lats.

Anyways, I did my thing and went home. I'm going back on Wednesday. Sure I am. Maybe I'll even take a pair of socks.

Swimming

2011-05-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

I'm going to go swimming tomorrow. I wandered the aisles of my local Target today, and studied the different goggles. Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced. I chose a rather flashy pair of red Intermediates. They look very serious to me, and may signal to others that I am a serious swimmer. Especially since I already own a pair of shark skin formulated swimming trunks that my brother Mark gave me for Christmas two years ago. Between the electric blue shockingly smooth trunks and my emergency red goggles, people might take me quite seriously when I walk to the pool.

But in truth I am a poor swimmer. I have little to no stamina, and tend to lapse into breast stroke after only a few laps of doing crawl. I get a sick feeling in the base of my stomach if I swim for more than ten minutes, and I have a tendency to weave drunkenly from side to side as I blindly seek the distant end of the pool.

Still, I'm getting up tomorrow at seven thirty in the morning, and hope to be in the water by eight. I'll most likely swim for about fifteen minutes, and then towel off, go upstairs to have a mug of tea with my aunt and grandma whose building's swimming pool I'll be using, and then back home to begin my day.

Deep pelagic blues lie in my future. The soundless rush and roar of blood in my ears as I push and pull my way forward, water slicking my face and blowing out as I gasp for air with every rising turn of my head. The taste of chlorine, that shuddery feeling in my stomach. The cool, impersonal gray of dawn as I knife through the water like a determined spoon.

Maybe if I swim, I'll come home and write. You never know. They're both strangely lonesome pursuits.

How Easy it is To Stop Writing

2011-04-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

I haven't written one word of fiction in almost a month. Something like that, at any rate, though I've written tons for work and written up the adventures of my role playing group. Still, nothing for First Million Words. Nothing here in the blog. No tweets, no edits on The Grind Show, nothing, nada, zero, zilch.

Just work, a little reading, endless editing and refining of my ecommerce site, lots of time spent with my girlfriend, family and friends.

But no writing.

We're creatures of habit. Break your habit, and the weeks slip through your fingers like sand at the beach. You blink, and it's the end of April, and the last time you wrote something was mid-March. You blink again, it's June, you've been doing work, traveling, having dinner with friends, spending time at the park, reading on the couch, cooking new recipes, volunteering your time, and somehow, just like that, you're no longer writing.

I had my reasons, or so I thought. Some personal stuff happened in March, and I never quite got my stride back. Instead, I simply expected the urge to write to creep up on me again, and decided to do other things while I waited. Only it hasn't, and I'm realizing now, thanks to some advice from friends and my girlfriend, that I've got to take an active role in this and not simply wait. Passivity is one step from death, and not writing is not being whom I envision myself to be.

So, I'm going to try editing The Grind Show today, even if just a little. I'm going to write something, even if I then go ahead and delete it. It's like sitting down at an old typewriter and blowing dust of it, peering around at its sides to see if all the machinery is still in place. I bet it is. The question is, does it still have an ink ribbon?

Something Different

2011-04-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I taught elementary school. I was issued a temporary teacher's certificate and found a position as a full time substitute teacher for a lady who was out with an injury, all within a week of deciding to give teaching a go. With no teaching experience, no preparation, I was thrust before 30 eight graders and told to prepare them for their FCATs.

I had a blast. The kids were a handful, to be sure, but man, kids are just fun. Not that I wasn't worn out each evening when I got home, not that I wasn't a walking zombie for the first couple of months, or that there weren't times when I wanted to not teach the same material for seven straight classes. Equal parts exhausting and exhilarating, I truly enjoyed it.

Unfortunately the economy caused the school to cut teachers, and as the most recent arrival I was let go. I was touched when the kids collected hundreds of signatures to keep me, but the principal didn't care. No money = no Phil.

Since then I've done a lot of freelance writing, different things, but I've always remembered how rewarding teaching could be. So today I went in to a family shelter up the street to volunteer some time as an after-school tutor.

Strange how different worlds can be tucked out of sight just around the corner. I'd driven one block over from where the shelter is located a thousand times, and never guessed that it was there. The head administrator was a grave, precise but quietly passionate lady, and we spoke for a couple of hours about the shelter, its mission and philosophy, the fifteen families that are in residence and what my role there could be.

They have a room that was once the computer room but which they want to convert into a study area. If I become involved, I might be able to lead the kids in painting and designing it in their own way.

I'm suddenly reluctant to speak about it. To go into details. Suffice to say that after my background check tomorrow, I might become involved with this wonderful shelter up the street, and might soon begin helping some eighteen kids who have had it rough. Some are refugees from Haiti. Others simple come from tough backgrounds. All of them need some attention, some help, some encouragement, and I'm thrilled to be able to offer a few hours a week to give them just that.

This mad, wheeling, catastrophic, euphoric, bloody minded and endlessly fecund tapestry

2011-04-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

Do you ever feel dizzy, succumb to a sense of vertigo when you attempt to consider the world in its entirety, the span and compass of human experience both across the globe today and reaching into the mists of history? Small boys and girls in face paint and bowl haircuts dancing in glades in the Amazon, naked and tattooed, eyes large and alien and impossible to relate to if you're from a city like New York. Hassidic Jews bowing before the Wailing Wall, dressed in funereal black, curls falling to their lapels, broad rimmed hats, chanting before God. Old women washing out their dentures in the river Ganges as the sun beats all to hammered copper, their crimson sari's the color of dusty blood, the water before them Nesquik brown, cows wandering along the great stone steps, men soaping themselves down, others bowing and preying, filling up teakettles of gold which they then pour back out, chanting and chanting and chanting. The pyramids of Giza, eroded to roughness and crudity, the towering pillars of Ankor Wat, trellised by tree roots and backdropped by irrepressible jungle. The Chinese Terracotta Army, buried with the first Emperor over two thousand years ago, standing for all eternity gathering dust. The Dead Sea scrolls. Masai warriors leaping as they dance, surging up into the sky with an agility and bounce to put NBA players to shame. Aging Japanese yakuza sitting in baths charged with electric currents, their skin no less electric with full body washes of ink depicting fearsome warriors, koi, dragons and lotuses. The endless surge of traffic through New York City, the thousands laboring in massive warehouses in India, Bangladesh, anywhere, making everything from keyboards to belts, repeating the same simple, soul crushing task for twelve hours a day. Machu Pichu. Ephesus. Auschwitz. Nagasaki and Hiroshima. 9/11, the Fukushima Daiichi Plant, the Black Hole of Calcutta, Vlad Dracul littering the road before Mehmed the II with tens of thousands of impaled bodies, all of them his own villagers and towns people.

What a world. From the soaring, endless forest of skyscrapers of Sao Paulo to the slums of Mumbai. From the quiet towns of Ohio to the huts of isolated villages in Kenya. Inuits and Mongolians, Austalian Aborigines to Peruvian descendants of the Incas. Revolutions, wars, monks, nuns, temples, churches, mosques, synagogues. Yahweh, Ganesha, Coatzacotl, Thor, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mithras. Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London.

And you? Where in this mad, wheeling, catastrophic, euphoric, bloody minded and endlessly fecund tapestry do you fit in? Can you encompass this world we live in, the highs and lows, the treachery and redemptions, the small lives and the large, the millions living in favelas and the few thousands in penthouses?

We have perhaps 80 years on this planet.

If you haven't, watch the film Baraka.

This Doesn't Look Real

2011-04-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Via The Cool Hunter I just watched this video of The Tempest Freerunning Academy, a place designed to help you improve your freerunning and parkour skills. If you ask me, it looks more like a moonbase for brightly colored adult children--the gravity clearly works differently in there.

Tempest Freerunning Academy from The Cool Hunter

I Get By With a Little Help

2011-04-11T07:45:00.000-07:00

I've always heard it bemoaned that writing is a solitary pursuit. That one must sit alone at one's computer and spend untold hours hammering out a novel, taking weeks or months or even years to craft an object of perfection.

Well, it's not been like that for me. True, when I'm writing I'm by myself, but for better or worse I find that my characters keep me company (not quite voices in my head, but close...). Few people complain about watching a great film by themselves, so absorbed do they become in the plot and characters, and I'm lucky enough to sufficiently love what I write that the same is true for me.

However, it goes beyond that. I'm incredibly lucky to be surrounded by all kinds of talented and resourceful friends that have made being a writer a far from lonely job.Whether it's my wonderful, supportive and loving girlfriend Grace that accompanies me throughout the writing process, or my key first readers who are willing to take a bedraggled first draft and give it a look such as Dan, Jess, Paul, Kaitlyn or Will, I've had company that has made the act of writing damn near convivial.

But recently the cast of supportive types has grown, flourished, boomed into all kinds of directions. Paul has been of invaluable help with The Grind Show, reading it twice now, and promising to read it again when he records the audio book, giving me tons of excellent thematic feedback and helping me elevate the novel to the next level. His girlfriend Chris, a talented artist of so many skills its impossible to pigeon hole her has been helping me work on story boards for the book trailer, which the inestimable and ridiculously accomplished Ray will then film in the near future.

Beyond that, my friend Amy has agreed to go over the manuscript with a red pen, which she quickly set aside for a machete which she wields with surgical skill, and I can't say enough about the quiet, solid and unwavering support that my friend Will has given me throughout, the kind of bedrock encouragement that helps me keep going when things are looking grim.

Writing may be a solitary endeavor, but I'm lucky enough to be blessed with a whole cohort, a cadre, a camarilla of amazing, talented, energetic and incredibly generous people whom have helped me not only improve the quality of my writing, but make the process incredibly fun and uplifting.

So to all you beautiful people out there, thanks more than I can say.

What about you guys? Whom has been instrumental in keeping your going in your solitary pursuits?

My Day Today / Where I Live

2011-04-09T15:08:00.000-07:00

I spent my day at the beach, and it was absolutely beautiful. Water so clear that when I was chest deep I could see my feet with crystal clarity, and a sun that was as total and righteous as it was scorching and delicious. Ah, Miami.

Lost

2011-04-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

Averil Dean has a post up that got me thinking. Analyzing my own state of mind. These days it feels like I've become a mad juggler, endeavoring a variety of writing projects all at once, moving forward with such momentum that surely something's going to stick. My path is clear. I need to write my third novel of the year. I need to upload the finished copy of The Grind Show to Amazon, help Paul nail down the voices for the audio book, and launch the Kickstarter project to fund the book trailer. Not to mention cobbling together a marketing campaign to give it visibility I've got queries out for One by One, waiting to see if any agents are interested in representing it. I've got a couple of books to edit and release on Amazon as soon as The Grind Show is off and running (Dark Fae, Blood From the Mountain, I'm looking at you both here).

Lot's going on, yet there's a strange sense of listlessness striking at the heart of it all. Perhaps it's a fatalistic sense that nothing will work out? My queries will be turned down. The Grind Show will fail to sell. My future uploaded novels will also just sit there, and I will be left at square one, despondent, writing more novels, shoveling shit as I make yet another and then another bid for a career as a fiction writer.

My only hope is that the quality of my writing will prove me wrong. That despite my low hopes something will indeed work out. Either way, I'm going to keep at it. There's just one road to follow, and being lost when all you want to do is write means being tempted to stand still. Since that's not an option, on I go.

Memories From the Future!

2011-04-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

Man, First Million Words is down but it's not out for the count. Today it struggled back up as I hammered out another 2,700 words. The current Work In Progress is at 12,000 words. Hip hip!

So what's MFtF about? Well, the hero is a girl called Susan who for as long as she can remember has had an imaginary friend called Peter. Except with the manifestation of Sam Patrick, a man from the year 2133 who appears to inform the world that all children from ages 10-14 are to be abducted and brought to the future to repopulate the world, Susan realizes that Peter has been a time traveler all along, a mysterious man with whom she has had some sort of friendship in his past and her future.

Also, it must be said, there is a little brother of a friend called Ralphie. Thus far Ralphie has demonstrated a proclivity for killing bears with his teeth, for wearing the same red hoodie at all times, and for being a nigh unstoppable force that in this writing session forced his way into the same group of children that has been taken into the future despite not being in the right age group.

I think Ralphie is going to cause trouble. After all, he likes blod.*

Here's an excerpt!

Yelling.
“They’re not going to make us go,” said Amanda, eyes bright.
More yelling, and then a gun shot. The kids around Susan began to stir, hopeful. “Dad!” yelled one.
“What’s going on?” asked Susan nervously. She checked her watch. There were thirty seconds left. The kids were all gathered by the church's front door even though it was locked. More yells, screams now, another gun shot.
Fifteen seconds. The front door began to shake violently. Rattling in its frame.
Ten seconds. The door stopped. More gunshots, yells, a scream of pain. “Help!” The kids began to scream, “Help us, help!”
Five seconds. The window to their left smashed, exploded inwards as somebody threw themselves through it. A small person, another child, bright red and blue, rolling on the ground. Susan gaped. A feral face, massive bushy eyebrows, teeth too huge and powerful, little devil eyes. Red hoodie, blue jeans. It was only then that she recognized Ralphie, and then that she realized that there was no time left, no seconds at all, and everything went sideways and disappeared.

*Blod is what the cool murder kids called 'blood'.

Kickstarter Project

2011-03-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

So I have a novel called The Grind Show that is set to hit the white-hot Amazon self-publishing presses for the Kindle platform. Actually, there aren't any presses there, presses being anachronistic in a world of super sleek digital publishing, but regardless, The Grind Show is virtually and veritably and verifiably ready to go-go.

This is how I envision it go-going: I click on the huge PRINT NOW button on the Amazon self-publishing page, and voila, The Grind Show appears for mass public consumption on their webpage. I sit back, grinning like a fool, and wait, watching my sales figures. Someone buys. Ah! That must have been my brother. Another six copies go all at once. My best friends! A five minute break, I begin to grow anxious, and then: boom! Another three copies. My aunt and uncle, a distant cousin.

And so it goes for another hour, till I've sold a grand total of 27 copies, and then, nothing. Silence. A vast and echoing emptiness as the book refuses to budge from rank #352,934 on the Amazon sales list.

Me? Shocked and devastated. Or, as you can perhaps glean, not so shocked, or even that surprised.

Because it is incumbent upon me as a self-publishing author to create a marketing scheme of fiendish brilliance and Machiavellian subtlety. For me to spread the word far and wide across the bloggerscape, to trumpet to the heavens and sound the depths of hell and let each and ever angel and devil know that my book is about to hit the scene. And upon doing so: voila! Interminable sales of catastrophic proportions!

So. I need to come up with a marketing plan. And have begun to do so! All sorts of nasty little tricks and stratagems are percolating through my feverish mind, and one of them, the best plan, the most exciting one, is a BOOK TRAILER!

Fortunately I have a friend in NYC is a top-flight director, who works for Google and makes music videos for rock bands and even award winning short films. Here are a few samples of his work embedded below--the first video is his ten minute short Binding Silence that was the Official Selection of (cue drum roll):

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2006
New York Horror Film Festival 2006
Parsons School of Design Film and Animation Festival 2006
The New York Short Film Festival for the Strange and Unusual 2006
The Las Vegas Festival of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and the Supernatural 2006
Winner of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival "Brown Jenkins Award."

Binding Silence from Ray Zablocki on Vimeo.

Transport Phenomena from Ray Zablocki on Vimeo.

Ray Zablocki Editorial Reel 2010 from Ray Zablocki on Vimeo.

So. Ray Zablocki has agreed to direct and shoot a book trailer for The Grind Show, and he liked the novel so much (and my inimitable sense of style) that he's agreed to do so gratis, without expecting monetary remuneration. Hip hip! But. Making a pro-grade book trailer still costs moolah, so I've decided to start a Kickstarter project to raise funds. Funds for location rental, for prop acquisition, for hiring light and sound guys, for making sure we have excellent recording equipment, to pay the actors a small amount for their work, etc.

What does this mean? This means I am creating an incredibly blow your face-off-the-front-of-your-skull Kickstarter project. Kickstarter is a crowd-sourcing means of raising funds for creative projects, in which people pledge to donate cash and only get charged if the funding goal is reached. I'm going to be going live with my KS page soon, and then hopefully I will generate such wonderful monies that Ray will be able to afford gold plated peacocks as extras and shoot scenes from the Marianna Trench with the Weta Workshop from New Zealand creating the props.

I've put together a list of rewards for people who contribute funds, ranging from the $5 to the $500 (hey, a guy can dream), but I was wondering: what do you guys think would be good rewards? Interesting, fun things that I can offer to incentivate people to participate, and have a little fun while doing so? Feedback is most earnestly wanted, because thus far this is what I have:

$5 pdf or kindle copy of the novel
$10 Printed copy of novel
$20 All of the above plus your name in the credits of the Movie Trailer
$50 All of the above plus your name in a Grind Show related short story
$100 All of the above plus your name in the credits of The Grind Show
$250 All of the above plus your name in the Grind Show sequel
$500 All of the above plus a personal Grind Show related short story with you as a central character

Please suggest new ideas, as I truly want to make this as interesting and rewarding as possible. All feedback is appreciated!

3-28-11

2011-03-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

Got up at 6am this morning to write today's installment of MEMORIES FROM THE FUTURE. It was completely dark outside, and as I sat down yawning and bleary eyed at my laptop, I thought: this is the gloaming hour.

In the distance I could hear the disconsolate beeping of a garbage truck reversing down an alley. A few streets over, a dog was barking mindlessly, a hollow and echoing sound that seemed automated. These sounds served only to emphasize how quiet and still it was, no sound of traffic, of cars, no birds yet, just the pre-dawn dark and the white glow of my computer screen.

I made a mug of tea, opened up Word, and got to work. It's now two hours later and I've written the end of Chapter 3 and a large part of Chapter 4. Ralphie killed a bear with his teeth. The President has confirmed that there is no way to prevent the kidnapping of every boy and girl between the ages of ten and fourteen by the time traveling citizens of the year 2311. Here's a brief excerpt for your reading pleasure:

I walked behind the pair of them all the way. It was slow going, but Ralphie didn't seem to mind, and in a way it was sweet, watching them walk like that together, hand in hand. I don't think they've ever been that close to each other for so long. Amanda kept chiding Ralphie for disappearing, and he had the good grace of lowering his head and pretending to be abashed. Every once in awhile he would grunt in answer to a question, but otherwise he didn't speak. Amanda swore that he could, but I had never heard him say a word of English.

It was only when we were getting very close back to town that we discovered that he had stuffed the pouch of his hoodie with the torn of claws of the bear, and Amanda made him throw them all away before she agreed to move any further. I stood and watched as he petulantly dug them out and tossed them into the bushes, and shook my head. Ah, Ralphie.

How to Write 1,000,000 Words in 1 year

2011-03-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

In mid-December of last year I set myself a goal: to write a ridiculous amount of words in 12 months by breaking it into manageable chunks. If I wrote 2,740 words every day, I would hit my million word mark without a problem. It sounded simple, easy, and delightfully dramatic.

Now it's the end of March. I've written two novels, some 170,000 words, but I've fallen over 60,000 words into the red. I hadn't foreseen visiting England for a week to see my ailing grandmother, nor spending a week at the hospital as my girlfriend's father underwent a quadruple bypass surgery and recovery.

But I'm back in the saddle, and about to finish Chapter 3 of my new YA novel entitled MEMORIES FROM THE FUTURE. With a deep breath, I'll pick up speed and over the next month or two whittle down that word debt so that I'm back where I should be.

So how am I doing this? How am I writing that many words? What have I learned thus far that might be of benefit to others?

The first thing that has become obvious is that ideas are not that important. The more I write, the more ideas come bubbling up from the depths of my mind.

Second, I've come to trust in my ability to sit down without knowing what to write that day and simply pull something out of the box. Justine Musk in an excellent post describes how we all have a box into which we can reach with faith that we'll be able to draw something out when in need. That we have to trust our ability to be creative, to invent on the fly, and you know what? She's right. I don't know how many times I've sat down without a clue as to where the plot was going to go, started typing ,and then realized within a few paragraphs that yes, of course, that's what should happen. Like that it hits you, and you're off, linking disparate elements or complicating things in exactly the right way.

No, it's not the creative part that's hard. Ideas and plot twists, new characters and complications are easy to devise on the fly. Instead, I've discovered that the real challenge to consistent writing is being willing to go beyond your comfort zone.

What I mean by that is that all writer's have a style of writing that they prefer. Some like to write a couple of paragraphs a day. Others like to write only on weekends. Some like to write a novel over the course of five months, and then take the rest of the year off. Either way, we all have our rhythms. Writing every day requires breaking those 'natural' rhythms and forcing ourselves to write even when we don't want to. When we feel tired. When we feel burned out. When we'd rather go outside, or revise our last novel, or the last ten pages we wrote.

The trick to writing every day is that you need the same mind frame as a marathon runner. You have to be able to tell the difference between saying 'I can't' because you're out of your comfort zone, or saying 'I can't' because your body is really failing you. The first is what you can push through, the second is a true obstacle. Most of us, however, stop at the first. We reach a point where we run out of mental toughness, and we quit.

I've come close to that already. March has been rough. I almost decided to quit in order to work on releasing THE GRIND SHOW for the Kindle and editing ONE BY ONE for traditional publishing. But instead, I took a deep breath, and sat down and began my next novel.

And you know what? It's going well.

I didn't think I could keep going, write three novels back to back, but I'm doing it.

The creativity was the easy part. It's simply keeping the desire alive that's hard.

Query letter for ONE BY ONE

2011-03-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

Dear XX,

The apocalypse has been envisioned in many forms, but one morning Peter discovers that it has quietly begun with the disappearance of his mother. At the police station he learns that thousands more have gone missing from their city, and he soon realizes that tens of millions are vanishing daily across the globe. Without explanation or cause, humanity finds itself facing its final year on the planet, and it is only then that Peter falls in love.

Her name is Sophia, and as nation states go to war and then collapse, as electricity fails and their city becomes cut off from the rest of the world, they fight to create a space within which to explore their love. The rise of a Robespierrean demagogue intent on ushering in a new Reign of Terror however threatens all that they hold dear, forcing them to ask: in a world bereft of meaning, what principles are you willing to die for?

I would like to submit ONE BY ONE for your consideration, an 80,000 word novel of magical realism in the style of Jose Saramago.

Thank you for your time and consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Phil Tucker

(What do you guys think?)

On Morbid Curiousity

2011-03-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

Trying to recollect Emily Dickenson's name, I googled 'amherst poet' and stumbled upon an article entitled Poet from Amherst commits suicide. I clicked over, curious, and read the sad account of Deborah Digges apparent suicide in 2009. She seems to have been a singularly talented woman, being 'the recipient of the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Award, the largest prize given nationally for a single piece of work, for her collection "Rough Music."'

She's quoted for having said about painting, a medium she was passionate about until she discovered poetry, "you have to learn how to see. There has to be a cold eye as a painter. And you have to have a cold eye to write. Some part of you has to stand away . . . what you see is not always beautiful."

Chilling and thought provoking when taken in this current context. I found myself searching for a photograph of her, scanning the article for some image of her face, and when I didn't find one I realized that I was dissatisfied. Some part of me wanted an image to go with this thin outline of her life, to see some photograph in which I could read that nascent urge for suicide that was to bloom years after the photograph was taken. To bring her to life even as I then understand her more deeply to be dead.

Deborah Digges. A wealth of passion, desires, imagery and thoughts, a love for language and need for expression all implicit in that name. But nothing to me. No face, no story beyond that reported in the paper.

I'm going to purchase Rough Music on Amazon, and refrain from searching for a picture of her on Google. Allow her words and voice to deepen my sense of her, and not seek some vicarious thrill in gazing upon the face of one who ended her life so suddenly.

A little fireside chat with myself

2011-03-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

OK, hello, so let's have a little chat. Pull a chair up to the fire, that's right, nice and cosy, keep it secret keep it safe. Blanket? Alright. Now, here we are, nice and comfy. Nobody but the two of us, us and the crackling fire, of course, but don't mind him, he's too busy consuming himself to care what we say. And what do we have to say? That's the crux of the matter, isn't it. What are we going to be writing about in our 'March' novel, ha, now ain't that a laff. More like our April novel at this point, we being almost 60k words in the whole, it's like a whole YA novel went missing around here. Under your cushion? It's not under mine.

So, we need an idea that drives and inspires us, that gets our juices flowing and our engines running, our wheels turning and our fingers blurring. What do we want to write about? What kind of novel? Don't just sit there scratching your nogging, lad, do some heavy lifting, use that brain of yours for something. What have you got?

Alright, a mystery thriller, something contemporary like Mystic River, something violent and passionate and whatever, good good, lovely bubbly. What else? Some sort of mad stream of consciousness thing? Well, interesting, and fun if you're hyped up on coffee, but could you keep it up for thirty days, as the actress said to the parson?

Mind you, you need to be investing more time in The Grind Show. That old tart's been languishing, what with his cover finished and people lined up to do more. Whatever happened to that kickstarter project? Whatever happened to the audiobook? Get your act together, sonny jim, or nothing much will be happening at all.

Oh, look at the time. How it does pass. Throw another log onto the fire, will you? Now. Back to the practice of writing a monthly novel. What about something different. A YA novel. Ah, yes, but we don't know how to write those, do we now? We don't really quite remember what it was like to be a self obsessed teenager. Still, it could prove simpler to mess up than a murder mystery. Let's give it a little thought. What's the supernatural in it? No, not vampires, no werewolves, no zombies or fallen angels. No, something nice. A novel idea. Not just a drop of the super in the setting, but a whole setting shift. What about rewriting my vampire city novel? That could be interesting, but you run smack into the same problems that plagued you the first time round.

Still, maybe, maybe. Despite my earlier warnings against vampires. Still, that idea seems lodged in your chest. So think on. What about a YA novel where the world starts to break down? I've done people disappearing. What about something else? A world where people stop liking you? Where chunks of the earth begin to crumble and crack? Dinosaurs emerge from the depths of the earth? Where people start appearing from the future and kidnapping us, taking us forward in time to repopulate the ruined planet? That sounds fun, I'll run with that.

Wish We Could Have Been Friends

2011-03-22T05:57:00.000-07:00

I had this idea for a novel once. It was set underground, in a world where the only life giving light came from vast oceans of magma. The ceilings of these great caverns would be covered by inverted jungles, and an empire of orcs resided about the ocean's shores, their homes quarried into the rock, their food derived by brave aeronaughts who hunted the inverted jungles above the magma. They were going to be divided into two societies, one an elevated, Heian Japanese style court, while the other was a sprawling rough and tumble world like that that choked Five Points NYC.

I had it all figured out. A hero, a plot, a story, a novel. But I couldn't write it.

I don't know why, exactly. I felt constricted by the weight of the vision. It felt like trying to put on a suit of armor--too heavy, too cumbersome, too rigid. There was no room to breath in there, I felt stifled from the sheer level of detail I had created, so I abandoned it after a week of research and wrote something else, eventually writing about orcs in my Blood From The Mountain novel.

Same thing is happening now with Samsara Bastard. I have a cosmology, a world, main characters, a plot. But I've put too much icing on the cake and now I can't find the nougat. That and I think I'm tired of angels and demons--that's what The Grind Show deals with, what I'm actively editing, so perhaps I need a break. It's me, not you, I need a little time.

So what else can I write? I'll shelve that idea and turn to something else. This feels like Speed Dating with novel ideas. Which is why, incidentally, all authors end up believing that it's not the ideas that count, it's the execution, the actual writing, your damn voice, your flair and style. Anybody can come up with a great idea. Almost nobody can then put it down in about 90,000 words.

SO. What next? What's the score here? Another novel, quick! March, it is a-wasting, and my Word Deficit is racking up into fearsome numbers. Quick quick, another idea, go go go!

A unicorn that leads a revolution against gothic a space empire. The adventures of a groundhog that achieves sentience while running through an holographic maze. A scientist who realizes that the patterns that certain new palm trees that grow in Sumatra spell messages from outer space. A western where the cowboys ride velociraptors and pilgrims lead long lines of triceratops across the desert instead of caravans.

OK. What I want to write is... a murder mystery. A thriller. Something Clint Eastwood would direct, like Mystic River. Something based on Shakespearean family politics that is rife with tension. Where the murder isn't even the focus, but rather how the people react to it.

Never written one of those before. How does one do it? Multiple points of view. A mystery. A cast of characters, a setting. Alright, going to get to brainstorming. Adieu!

Brown Girl in the Ring

2011-03-21T04:11:00.000-07:00

Got up at 6.30am today to once again renew my attack on my first million words. As such, this is going to be a brief post as I have to get to writing. I've really fallen behind, but in the grand scheme of things, some fifty thousand words isn't that much out of a million.

Thanks to Christina for my breakfast idea this morning. Cold red quinoa mixed with almonds, cashews, sliced strawberries and dried cranberries with cinnamon and a little honey on top. Breakfast of champions! Now I'm brewing freshly ground coffee, and it's time to get to work.

As always, wish me luck. Here I go.

Go until you reach the end, then stop.

2011-03-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

Sad news bears: my laptop's harddrive crashed last night, and now my brand new Sony VAIO will only boot up for about three minutes before turning itself off.

This is, as you can imagine, frustrating.

Luckily I've backed up the important stuff, but it's now going to be seven to ten business days before they send a technician out to replace my harddrive. That means the rest of March without my laptop.

By the way, what is up with all these crappy new harddrives? I got a new Dell laptop at the end of last year for work and the harddrive crashed. My boss got a new Dell laptop and his harddrive crashed too. My Sony one just died. Are they seriously skimping on quality here in order to lower the prices or something?

Squirrel Piss Keeps Falling on My Head

2011-03-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

Picture it: gorgeous spring day, the sunlight pouring down through the palm tree fronds and bamboo. Grace and I cook up lunch, consisting of asparagus fried with cranberries, a bowl of fresh spring greens, a sauteed veggie burger and a dash of Natural Goddess dressing (yum!) and out we go to sit in the garden and enjoy her brief lunch break. Idyllic.

Toward the end of the meal a spray of rain falls on my plate, left arm and shoulder. I shoot a surprised glance up at the sky, for it is a peerless blue, only to see a squirrel perched on a bamboo branch unleash another splatter of clear piss into the air directly above my head.

Luckily I am graced with the reflexes of any human being wishing to avoid being pissed on, so I leaped up and aside with an oath. More clear liquid across the remnants of my lunch and plate.

I stared up, incredulous, as the squirrel turned to check it's aim. Grace was cracking up, and soon I was too. Ridiculously cheeky, that squirrel was! So I yelled up an oath at it, and then marched inside to shower.

Ah, nature.

Start at the beginning

2011-03-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

Just wrote the first 1,400 words of Samara Bastard. Feels like fumbling in the dark, trying to set the table for tea with glove mitts on, pretending to speak a language you don't know.

Frustrating to say the least.

But whereas before FMW I might have stopped, stalled out, gone back to the drawing board, hemmed and hawed and deleted and gone back to do more research, maybe eventually trying it again or perhaps losing momentum and turning to something else, now I know to continue. To trust that as I go, things will come together. To make room for my creativity on the fly, to not need to have a fixed idea where things will go and how.

Sure the end result will be inconsistent, a mish mash of different ideas and takes, with characters slowly growing more realized and defined as the novel progresses, but it's just a first draft. There's no need to produce a polished, complete manuscript right from the get go. Rather, this is simply the first attempt. Always time to go back and revise and revise once I'm done.

Here's a brief excerpt of what I wrote today:

One block, two, a third. Stopped. Stared. Down an alley candles glowed, arrayed in concentric circles around what looked to be two rotting legs emerging from the asphalt of the street as if their owner were buried head down below. A murmuring sound, and he made out three figures hunched in black clothing to one side, deep in the shadows, old women praying and rocking where they knelt, eyes closed and their tone fervent. The man tried to make sense of what he saw. Began to walk closer. The legs emerged from the ground at about knee level, the flesh flyblown and bloated, the soles of the feet pecked away by the attention of birds. The asphalt flowed up and around each leg without crack or sign of being freshly poured or otherwise disturbed.

The man stared, and then turned to the three women. “What are you doing?” he asked, voice a rasp in his own ears.

Writhing in the Fires of Creation

2011-03-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

Two futile hours seeking sleep when all I can think of is writing and world creation. It's 2am and I'm up, haunted by images of a world afire, seeking exorcism by disgorging these visions onto the screen.

Samsara Bastard. Posit the following: the world we live in is an evil place, created by a deluded god that is not God but rather a draconian malefactor, a jealous, spiteful, cruel god that treats his creation as a bully does a playground, exacting obedience and terrified worship through torture and violence on a biblical scale.

Imagine such a world, as portrayed by Dore when he illustrated Dante's Inferno:

Now blend this madness with the style and urbanscapes of Sin City:

This demiurge, this Ialdabaoth is served by the fallen halves of the majestic Aeons; the thirty angels that serve the true God, but whose shadows have succumbed to temptation and now enforce the demiurge's will upon the earth. Envision them as such, courtesy of One Vox:

Into this world falls our hero, Theletos, one of the prime Aeons from up on high, voluntarily casting himself down into Iadabaoth's nightmare in order to rescue his partner, Sofia, mother of the demiurge but lost within his creation. In order to avoid the attention of the fallen Aeons, he divests himself of his power, his gnosis, and as a mortal haunted by total amnesia walks these hellish streets, seeking his love, seeking to save her, but learning as he goes that to do so will require his facing not only the fallen Aeons, but ultimately Ialdabaoth himself.

Audiobook Excerpt from The Grind Show, Chapter 1!

2011-03-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

Mr. Guyet and I have been working on the audio book of The Grind Show, and man, let me tell you what a surreal and brilliant experience it's been. He's sent me the entire fire chapter, and sitting in the hospital lobby, I had to do my best to refrain from grinning like a fool as people walked by speaking in grave and hushed voices. How to describe the experience of hearing your characters and story come to life in such manner? Deliriously exciting, is what.

Since then we've been going back and forth on what each character should sound like. Mr. Guyet sent me a file with snippets of each character's dialog, and we're now going to have a follow-up meeting which should consist of such exchanges as, "I think Josh's voice, well, I'm going to be changing his age to mid-forties, so can we make it more gravely? No, not that gravely, that's too Rooster Cockburn from True Grit. Less like that, more just - weary? Yes. Perfect. Ok - now with Mr. Kline..." You get the idea.

This stuff is like catnip for us authors. Utterly fun.

So here's a quick snippet of Chapter 1, edited by Paul for public consumption. It's only about a minute and a half long, but that should give you a taste of what we're cooking together. Hope you enjoy!

(Disclaimer: this audio was a quick and dirty rough draft that Paul put together for me, and is not meant to reflect the awesomeness of the final product's quality level. Just a quick preview for you guys, not a real excerpt from a finished product.)

Surprising Correlations between Hinduism and Christian Gnosticism

2011-03-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

Fascinating. Researching Hinduism and Christian Gnosticism (especially the kind espoused by Valentinus) is revealing incredible parallels between the two, which in turn suggests some exciting possibilities for Samsara Bastard.

For example. Both Hinduism and Gnosticism preach a universal Godhead, an absolute Divine that is unknowable but toward which we must all strive to rejoin, called Brahman by the Hindu's and the Pleroma by the Gnostics.

A demiurge created the world we live in which is false, illusory, and this demiurge is the god Maya in Hinduism, which is also the name of the world of illusion in which we live, and Ialdabaoth by the Gnositics, the imperfect God of the First Testament. Brahman/the Pleroma both exist beyond the veils of this false word.

Further, Maya/Ialdabaoth hold us to this world of illusion through our own desires and karma, trapping the specks of that which is divine in us (our Atman) to the world. There is some difference here; the Hindu's believe that karma dictates our passage through our many lives, a process of reincarnation known as samsara, while the Gnostics believed we had only this one shot, and only some of us would ascend while the vast majority would fall into darkness upon death and disappear. These enlightened beings were called the pneumatikoi, and were destined for salvation (being privy to the secrets of Gnosticism), while a larger group were the unenlightened Christians called the psychikoi who were capable of receiving knowledge. The vast majority of humanity however were the hylikoi and the were destined for oblivion and death.

Fascinating. And I'm only scratching the very tip of the iceberg here. Perhaps I can find connections between the Ogdoad and the principle Hindu devas. Saklas as Hanuman? Either way, it looks like my own personal cosmology is coming together.

Samsāra Bastard

2011-03-13T18:01:00.000-07:00

So I'm your only friend but I'm not your only friend but really -

So I've decided upon a course of action. Waffling is for pigs, grunting their way through countless apple orchards in search of the most delectable of black truffles. I shall await a month to write Grind Show II, given that I need to finish editing the first novel. I'll hold off on the second novel in the Blood from the Mountain series, and instead write something completely new.

Back in 2008 I worked at Penguin USA in NYC. I was friends with a couple of editors who worked for Roc/Ace, and they complained in a desultory manner each evening over beers as to the awful nature of the slush pile. I cunningly decided to submit something bizarre, outre and fantastic under a pseudonym, a tale of a fallen angel who goes into hiding in Camden, NJ, where he falls in love with a waitress with a literal heart of nails who's malediction befell her as a result of becoming addicted to a drug distributed by Baba Yaga. There was going to be a brothel run by a medusa, a protection racket run by 17 Wandering Jews, and an utterly barking mad Saint on the loose.

So, I was considering that idea, and then it hit me. I can take it, switch it up, invert it, convert it. Set it in a world that follows the dictums and truths of Gnosticism, such that the world is indeed an evil place, the creation of Ialdabaoth the demiurge, son of Sofia (Wisdom), who fashioned him in a vain attempt at creation separate from the true Divine Being who rules in the Pleroma. I'll take a cue from the secret Apocryphon of John as discovered in the Nag Hammadi scrolls.

I'm going to call it Samsāra Bastard, and it will feature a fallen angel that's part John Constantine, part Wolverine, and he'll eventually have to go up against the Hebdomad of fallen Archons in order to fight his way back into the Pleroma (this being of course the beginning of an eight part series), fending off the forces of Satan and other angelic hitman who are trying to collect on his bounty.

Sound awesome? If you're confused, just think of Caballeros Del Zodiaco, and you should be set straight!

Iron Clad Sunday

2011-03-13T14:16:00.000-07:00

Today I'm groaning, body aching, having tried to snatch a few hours sleep wedged between two chairs facing each other over a small wooden table. A bizarre amalgam of hard and soft surfaces over which I tossed and turned in the hospital waiting area, having eventually been evicted from my solitary cell. Must have caught some three hours all told, composed in fifteen minute intervals as I would awake to shift and rearrange and sink once more into tenuous slumber.

The one thing about hospitals in Miami is that as soon as you step out of their chemical halls you're bathed and shocked by riotous sunlight. So after a three hour nap at home we're going to the park to run and toss a frisbee around, make the most of the remains of the day.

Then it's back to this here desk to pound out the future of March. I'm still in the throes of editing Grind Show, so how can I write the second book? I think I'm going to write a throw away novel instead. I've got an idea for something about a fallen angel that goes into hiding in a ghetto in NJ, only to discover the town is under the iron thumb of Baba Yaga who's dealing a magical dope that steals people's hearts.

Anyways. Life might soon slip back into its normal routines and rhythms.

(To those people whose blog's I've been neglecting: I plan to come round sometime soon and catch up with you guys.)

Rolling in the deep

2011-03-12T21:16:00.000-08:00

ADELE - Rolling In The Deep - In Studio from DUKOFF on Vimeo.

Rolling down hospital hallways, drunk on tequila and beer, laptop bag clutched in hand like some suitcase filled with contraband diamonds. The light glaring off mica floors and hand sanitizers. Nurses in pastel colors, the moans of the solitary damned. The night outside ever window, the orange street lights by the thousands, the distant sky scrapers, the blank expanses of ocean and inter-coastal.

I pause by every open doorway. Stare inside. Emaciated figures wrapped in hospital linens. Mouths open, eyes staring in desperation. Hollow moans and the stale hiss of bodies giving up the ghost. Moving on. Walking as if I have a place to go. Taking random turns. Moving on. Room 438. Room 423. Room 431.

A door ajar. Pause and peer inside. Two hospital beds, articulated, and stretched starched sheets. Empty otherwise, a haven, a place to find respite. I slip inside, close the door till it's but ajar, and find a seat in the corner. Walled in by bed and window. I sit and pull out my laptop. Pause at the pass of every body past the cracked door, expecting eviction at any moment. But I'm allowed to stay, respite found in this empty cell.

How many people have lain in this empty room, agonized and still, bodies yawning in pain, empty pits filling with the desolation of encroaching entropy. I'm a witness to this vacuous solitude, but who knows what scenes these walls might have witnessed but the night before last.

It's just barely past midnight. Down random hallways Grace stays with her father, watching over him. I'm here in case she needs me, hidden and ensconced, safe from the brittle and difficult chairs of the waiting room. A phone call away in case of an emergency, a mad dash away down the hall.

I'm here, sitting in the dark. Hidden. Surrounded by the soundless echoes of other's pain. Now what. What comes next. Here to wait. To pass the night. Alone but for thought and memory. Me and my glowing, luminescent laptop screen. Who knows what the night shall bring. I'm here, awaiting, alone and as ready as I can get. Tequila and beer burning in my veins. Here comes the night. Bring it on.

State of the Phil

2011-03-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a long week. There were times that the hospital began to feel eerily familiar. I knew the twisting path through the Emergency Room halls to get to the main building by heart, and would walk faster than the security escort to make my way through it. I discovered a secret place to park on the hospital grounds that's free. I've grown to appreciate the extensive salad bar in the cafeteria, and have spent god knows how many hours hunched in chairs in different waiting rooms passing the long hours as the days crawled by.

These periods were broken by my three hour stints at my part time job, where suddenly things seemed made distant and unimportant by recent events and my own fatigue.

Last night Grace and I got home late, and too tired to do anything else and needing the boost we both ordered two flank steaks to be delivered to our home. We sat on the couch and gorged on beef and man if red meat doesn't ground you and make you feel more solid and real.

Today has been the first day I don't spend at the hospital. I've had the morning to myself, Grace having returned to school, and I'm glad to say that this is made possible by her dad's continual recovery and the presence of other family members at the hospital. With my time I have made a delicious butternut squash soup, have spent some few hours playing with Cacoo.com and editing The Grind Show, and though I got a full night's sleep, I am yet tired and worn out.

Writing 2,740 words per day seems an impossible task right now. Despite having fallen a week or so behind, and amassing some 25,000 words worth of debt, I can simply recalculate my daily average. Were I to being writing solidly tomorrow, I would need to only write 2,860 words per day to still reach my goal. So FMW isn't over; it's merely in need of an adjustment.

So that's where I stand. Tomorrow I think I should be sufficiently rested to resume my regular activities. Finish BftM, finish editing The Grind Show (only a quarter left to go), and then ePub it.

I've also been working with my friends to begin an online video conferencing roleplaying game. We used to play together in high school, but geographic challenges have prevented us from playing regularly ever since. Technology, however, may soon resolve those difficulties. We'll be playing twice a month via Tinychat.com and I'll be running the game. I've created a webpage for our campaign here, and planning for all this has been a welcome distraction from the daily grind of the week.

In exciting news, my friend Paul has been sending me samples of The Grind Show as it will sound as an audio book, and it's hard to describe the strange and surreal pleasure I experienced listening to my work so smoothly and professionally read. Made it sound just like a real audio book, which is the whole point of going to a professional, I suppose.

So yes. I am alive, if worn out, and about ready to get back on track. I am not going to quit FMW, but for now I am gazing no further than finishing Blood from the Mountain.

Why I Have Not Been Writing

2011-03-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

I've fallen massively behind my required word count. The days have been ticking by and the words are not getting written. I've not had time to blog, to work on Blood from the Mountain, to even edit the Grind Show. So here's a quick explanation why, because it's not been due to a lack of desire.

First, the trip to England. Eight days to see my ailing grandmother, traveling and doing my best to write each dawn. That set me back some 15k. I then returned to the US, and put in a few good days work before leaving again for the weekend for a friend's 30th birthday. Lost another couple of days there on the road. Then, just when things seemed about to settle down, my girlfriend's father was rushed to the hospital for a quadruple bypass, and everything has been placed on hold since then.

I'm in the waiting room outside the ICU right now. Trying to keep up with my freelance work. I've had a night or two of editing the Grind Show, but there's not been the time, focus or energy to do much else.

Luckily Grace's dad is doing great, or as well as anybody can after having their chest split open. We're going to be spending the rest of the week here at the hospital with him, and I'll probably only be leaving to head into the office for my part time job. What time I do have here in the waiting room will be split between work and editing for the most part, since I'm too distracted and interrupted to do much writing.

So. While the word production may have dropped, the desire is still there. As a famous Carpathian once said, time is but a window, death is but a door, I'll be back.

Hello, hello, nothing is real

2011-03-07T14:46:00.001-08:00

It's late afternoon. I've been away all weekend, but am returned today, and find that my word bank debt has continued to grow without me. I've got a book to finish editing (grind show), a book to finish writing (blood from the mountain), and a book to begin writing (march novel, which is rapidly becoming the march/april bridge novel).

Somewhere, somehow, I have to also fit in work, sleep, eating and gambling in the wade.

One constructive step forward however was my buying an ergonomic keyboard. It's black and glints dangerously and has a lush leather wrist rest and is curved like an incipient tsunami, a few miles out yet from shore. Let's see if it gives my writing appendages a break.

I've been receiving wonderful feedback on The Grind Show. A nephew of mine in the UK couldn't put it down, and at the end of the evening as his family stood by the front door, ready to go, he kept asking to be allowed to read one more page, and when that wasn't allowed, at least to finish the sentence. Which apparently wrapped around to the next page, and then half way down it before his dad stepped in to take my Kindle away.

A best friend of mine up in New York is seriously interested in recording the audio book version for me. He's an incredibly talented voice actor that has been featured on numerous high level commercials (got flown out to Italy for a Bacardi commercial once), short movie features (he starred in a film that won the HP Lovecraft festival award), and too many voice overs to count, and who is infamously the voice of the Kermit the Doll that was banned from European markets and of which now hundreds of thousands now languish in warehouses across Eastern Europe. So, to say that I am excited by the prospect of his recording the novel on studio quality equipment is an understatement.

I'm reaching out to another friend who creates commercials for Google, high fashion moguls and strange and benighted entities to see if he's interested in creating a book preview.

Another best friend of mine just wrote in cursing me for ruining her productivity levels for having handed her a copy of the book. Which is always a good thing, even if they don't think so.

This is the novel whose cover I featured a few blog posts ago, and which was almost a smash hit with my dream agents. A number of them requested the full manuscript, including my dream agent Merilee Heifetz (Neil Gaiman's agent), but which was ultimately declined for one reason or another.

I'm going to self publish it, and with luck, people will like it. I will then write the sequel for my March/April novel.

Things, things are in the works. Wheels they are a turning.

But more words need to be written, so here I go.

The third of the third month

2011-03-03T06:05:00.000-08:00

I awoke today at 6.30 am to write once more. This marks the third day that I have done so, and I am finding the dawn hour a magical time in which to write. I sit at my desk beside my window and before the french doors that lead out into the courtyard, and by the pale and washed out luminescence of the sky I begin to work, the room dark but for the faint nacreous glow that coats the raised surface of things.

Today I wrote another 3,500 words. That is the third day in a row that I have written as much, and each day that I do so I am whittling down my word debt by another 700.

The third day of March. I had thought to be in the process of writing my third novel by now, but instead I yet work upon my second. It is at 75,000 words or so, and I believe it shall hit 90k before I am done. It shall hit 90k, and not yet be truly finished, merely the first installment after all.

This writing is a strange and grand and terrible thing. Writing in such manner, plunging heedlessly forward each morning before dawn, surging onward without premeditation or forethought has brought to light ideas and images that I had not thought myself capable of envisioning before. That no amount of planning or plotting could have conjured, that are instead summoned forth by the exigency of the moment. I feel Promethean, stealing fire from my very dreams by the dawn-light, weaving these moments into my prose such that I wonder at my very creations.

Always I have written at night, deep into the long and hollow hours past when all others have fallen asleep. But now I find myself a dawn writer, hunting down images and passages and characters as others lighten in their sleep and rise toward waking like divers floating up toward the surface of the sea. It is an auspicious time, and I am profiting greatly by it.

Enough. The day begins. I must leave my desk and turn my thoughts to the quotidian.

My neighbors

2011-03-01T18:58:00.000-08:00

Are into some weird shit.

Through the walls we can hear them making noises. There's two of them, a gay couple, and right now one of them is making these strange howling puking sounds interspersed with dry heaving. Earlier they were racing around their house making turkey gobbling noises at the top of their lungs. Before that one of them was making ebullient 'ow' sounds over and over again in a tone of delightful surprise.

I'd be worried about the dry heaving desperate puking sounds could I not hear the other guy slowly stomping around the house like a zombie adrift.

Now it sounds like an asthma attack, the heaving sounds having become strangled. They're coming about twice a minute.

I can see what you're thinking. Call the cops, call the neighbors, make sure everything is OK. But I've been living here eight months now and each morning they're both outside, smiling widely as they do the gardening, happy and cheerful and right as rain. The perfect picture of a healthy couple.

The gasping has stopped. At least, it's been silent now for over a couple of minutes. I'm going to ask them tomorrow if they need any help mucking out the fountain.

Bad Bromance

2011-03-01T13:06:00.000-08:00

Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening, me! So there I was, in the shower, and WHAM, it hit me like a baseball knocked into the desolate corner of the outfield where I was busy picking at my glove, no eye for the action or the impending idea. BAM! I staggered, nearly fell, clutched a handful of shower curtain, one foot kicked out, soap in my eyes. BAM! It hit me again, nearly knocked me into the wall, broke tiles and tore the curtain rod clear from where it was screwed into the walls. Man, what an idea! A notion, even, realization of vast and pelagic proportions.

See, what hit me, right, what smacked me upside the head like a Nintendo Tyson in Punch Out! was that I didn't need to wrap up everything in the non-eponymously named Blood From the Mountain. If there was too much to squeeze into that novel, then by heck and high water I could end it on a cliff hanger and write a second book! More Blood From the Mountain! Mountain Blood Part Deux! The Mountain, It Gets Bloodier!

And this, this my friends, severs the Gordion knot in twain, it splits my dilemma down the middle and liberates me to go dancing in night clubs when I would otherwise be constrained and forced to crush some thirty, forty, fifty thousand words worth of 'narrativo' into a mere 10k. Which, while possible, would have read like the Cliffs Note of Orc World Domination, and who would want to do that after slogging painfully through the first 70k of the book? Not this author, dear and gentle reader, not this one!

So I am going to throw Tharok into some final situation, bring the pot to a boil and then mercilessly draw the curtains closed just as the action is getting good. "INTERMIZZIONE!" I will yell as I dance out on stage, top coat and tails, bending over to give the booing crowd a sight of my rear end. "Go to the loo and get a glass of bad wine! The tale recommences in two months! Ha!"

Which means which means I get to wrap this whole think up in the next 10k (read: two days), and get stuck into GRIND SHOW II. Which will no doubt have a snazzier title, something along the lines of RETURN OF THE GRIND SHOW, or CATS & KITTENS INTO THE GRINDER GO! The exclamation is there by merit of artistic license.

Also: that means I have to come up with a plot for the second book. But that's what Tuesday nights are for, innit? I mean, honestly.

OK, so yep, that's what I had to say. Massive developments of a purely theoretical nature on the ever rolling and processional storm front that is FMW.

As Lady Gaga said, "Rah rah ah ah ah, roma roma, ma, Gaga, oh la la!"

Monday night meanderings on BftM

2011-02-28T18:17:00.000-08:00

Back home. Some 11,000 words behind my goal due to travel. Still, I can make that up in the next few days. Need to figure out the ending of Blood from the Mountain. Going to think out loud here, so feel free to skip if you don't want spoilers.

OK, so Tharok has fled the orc camp. Nakrok and Wokra sought to work treachery, and only by using the circlet did Tharok prevail and flee. Toad is dead (will need to work him in more if there is ever a second draft), Maur and Back Watcher left behind (though Back Watcher might follow Tharok into the peaks), Nakrok yet living to lick his wounds.

Thoughts: Tharok wanders for a few days, his call for a Grand Convocation being usurped by Nakrok. He encounters a medusa and convinces her to serve him. Gathers an army of stone trolls, finds and dominates a dragon of his own to mount. So armed by the monsters of the mountains he descends upon the Grand Convocation and takes over the highland tribes.

He then stands poised to sweep down from the heights and take the Tragon, the Orlokor and others before him. But he doesn't. Why not? Some attack of conscious. Or... something about his becoming a charwolf himself.

Ok, so in taking control of all these monsters he--oh, what if meets a charwolf? Is recognized by it as a brother? Interesting, that.

Ok, but yeah, so in taking control of all these monsters, he becomes a monster himself. And when he is poised to sweep down and destroy civilization, something triggers him so that he repents, and flies away to join Ogri in the valley of death. The end? Perhaps. Need more oomph, there. OK, so he is joined by a charwolf who encourages him on.

Or, ok, here we go: to whom does the circlet really belong? To whom is he connected by using it? What power might seek to use him, usurp his being? Hollow him out like it did Ogri, and seek to come forth into the world? What demonic being? What monster? It is when this thing is poised to come forth, worse yet that any charwolf, that Tharok is able to kill himself and in so doing save the world.

Ok, bedtime for now. Too sleepy to go on.