moi?

It only gets harder once you’re published (mostly)

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Some days ago, Chuck Wendig wrote a blog post about how writing books gets harder after you get published, not easier as some people seem to think. Yesterday, Clarke Award winner Tricia Sullivan wrote about breaking in and then fighting to stay in.

I used to say all the time that it’s easier to break in than to stay in, and Wendig and Sullivan have different paths. Wendig has been growing his readership and having success. Sullivan’s experience is closer to mine: struggling to find a substantial readership and to get her work out there, although she’s been doing it longer and has that award on her mantel.

I have ten books out, and on Tuesday I passed 30K words on book 11. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a NY publishing contract for this one, so the backlist bump will hit my self-published work.

And Chuck’s right: I still have all the same insecurities and doubts about the work I’m doing. Worse, actually, is that I sometimes feel that I’ve lost a certain attitude I had when I wrote Child of Fire. I was pretty frustrated when I wrote that book, and I attacked it with an attitude of Fuck it. I’m going to do what I want.

I’m still doing what I want, but the fuck it doesn’t have the same bite. Why? Because that publishing contract was a tremendous relief. I didn’t celebrate it by jumping around and cheering; I flopped into a chair and sighed. I haven’t wasted my life after all.

It’s easy to forget that feeling as the years go by. Even if I never make the midlist and die in obscurity, at least one professional in the field thought my work was worthwhile. Before I was published, I really wanted that. Afterwards, I learned that it’s not enough. It’s something–something good–but it’s just the start.

Temptation

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You know how you can tell that I like a video game?

I don’t play it any more.

I bought the iPad version of Sentinels of the Multiverse last year, and I loved it so much I pre-purchased all the expansion packs. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s good, obsessive fun.

Too much so, in fact, because it was interfering with my life. I found it difficult to resist sitting down to play a quick game, especially when I was tired at the end of the day. One game would turn into two, then three, then it was the ass end of the morning and I knew I’d ruined work for the next day. I knew it was claiming too much of my time, so I deleted it.

But the newest expansion pack has come out: Infernal Relics, the “magic” superheroes characters, and here I am downloading it again. I’ll give it a few weeks, learn some of the tweaks of the new characters, then delete it again. I’m sure I won’t get too obsessed this time. Right?

In which I have an honest to god hallucination

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My back pain is still ongoing, and the usual steps I take to manage things have not been terribly effective. That sort of pain is draining, and I’ve been falling asleep at odd times.

Like yesterday afternoon, when I fell into bed and lay there like a stone in a riverbed.

But when I woke up, I was astonished to see the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in my life (and Seattle has some bigass spiders) crawling along a horizontal thread over my bed. With it’s legs curled around it as it moved, it was about the size of a tennis ball. It was so big I shouted “WOW!”

My wife heard from the other room and rushed to find out what had happened. By the time she got there, the spider had become indistinct and then disappeared. It was a hypnopompic hallucination, something I’ve never had before.

That was hard to explain to her, in part because she was standing beside the bed asking me what was wrong before I understood how to answer. It was only later that I thought I might be afraid of the spider, that it might have dropped down a web line toward me, but then I think spiders are cool.

Rats, on the other hand…

Not fair

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I return to the rallying cry of my son, from several years ago. Because guess what: shit is not going my way right now.

The continuing heat wave we’ve been suffering has been triggering my allergies. I take my anti-histamines, but I still itch down my back and along my arms.

Yeah, I know that our temps aren’t nearly as high as the temps in other parts of the country (low 90’s), but other parts of the country have air conditioning, or at least buildings that are meant to pass a breeze through them. Seattle, not so much. Bad enough that we have to run baseboard electric heat in the winter (with no insulation in the walls at all, and no storm door) but in the summer there’s nothing but to set a fan beside me and keep still.

On top of that, last weekend I had a sudden recurrence of my back spasms. It’s been years since my back gave me any trouble, but I confess that I’ve let my stretching and exercises lapse over the last few months while I wrap up the Kickstarter, and now I’m paying the price. Exercise is slowly making things better, but the sudden jab of pain when I turn my body the wrong way is not conducive to careful thought.

And I just burned my hand on the oven door.

Which is pretty fucking annoying, because I’ve finally begun work on the first book of a new series, but almost everything about my life is conspiring against me actually getting anything done. I have to work out details of the plot and the world-building, but between itchy hives and sudden jabs of/lingering pain, I can’t fucking concentrate.

Still I have an interesting book to read, and homeschooling to manage. Something will get done, if not as much as I’d hoped. I just wish I could finish the prep for this book so I could start it.

My Birthday, redux

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Today, I’m celebrating my birthday.

I had to postpone it a bit for the best of reasons, but still: YAY! I get to take the day off. No homeschooling. No cleaning. No working on the new book (although I’ll have a notepad handy for unexpected ideas).

Instead, I’ll be kicking back to watch all three extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies, along with delivery Indian food for dinner, along with a not-birthday cake for my not-birthday (I don’t much like cake, so I’ll be having fruit salad with no nasty cantalopes), along with fancy beer. The movies are about eleven and a half hours, not including various bathroom, meal, and birthday song breaks, so I’m planning to start early.

I’m also planning to be offline most of the day.

Last year, I celebrated my birthday this same way, and I found it incredibly rejuvenating. And I don’t just mean emotionally. It refilled the well creatively in a way I hadn’t expected, and I spent weeks and weeks aching to binge on the movies again. With luck, I can satisfy that ache with the Tom Shippey Tolkien book I’m reading, and an upcoming re-read of the trilogy.

Have a great day, you guys. That’s what I’m planning to do.

Rest in Peace, Chris Squire

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From my Twitter feed:

To clarify, there’s nothing wrong with listening to the music you loved when you were young, but if that’s the only music you listen to, that’s sort of sad.

Deleting Games

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I don’t play a lot of video games for one reason: it’s bad for me when I find a good one.

Frankly, that’s rare. With most games, it’s pretty at first, with some fun puzzles and an interesting setup. Maybe there will be a couple of easy fights (I don’t have a lot of patience with frantic, complicated fights) and the suggestion of a fun story.

Then shit starts to turn into a grind and I lose interest.

An exception was FREEDOM FORCE, and old squad-level superhero game, which had a sense of humor about it and let you pause the action to give the characters instructions. You fought giant ants, dinosaurs, alien invaders, minotaurs, the whole deal. I really enjoyed that game, and my poor wife saw nothing but the back of my head for two weeks. Not much writing got done, either. I finally had to delete the thing and put it away for good.

But I still own games and occasionally buy new ones. I keep hoping I’ll find a big name game that will really hook me, even though they all seem to grind.

Anyway, as a reward for finishing The Great Way, I bought myself the video game version of Sentinels of the Multiverse. We own the card game but never play it because a) it’s hard to read the text on those cards and b) the game has a simple structure but can become really complex. The video game version solved all that, because the cards were huge on the screen and the program kept track of all the little bullshit: how many plusses to damage, now many negatives, how many cards to play, etc.

When I say the structure is simple, I mean it. It’s a cooperative superhero-themed game, and each hero, villain, and environment has its own deck. The villain goes first, then each hero in turn, then the environment, then back to the villain again.

When playing a hero, you play a card from your hand, then use that hero’s power, then draw a new card. The villain and environment, in their turn, just play a card. That’s it. That’s how complicated it is.

However, some cards have an effect and go away, some stay around. Some take damage. Some let you play more cards, or draw more, or use extra powers.

In that sense, like M:TG, the cards are about breaking the games rules.

And I really, really liked playing it. It was absorbing as hell, with a lot of interesting complexity. The video game version turned a cooperative game into a solo one, but whatever, my wife and son didn’t like the game anyway.

When I played, I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t in pain. I just had flow. It was so great that I bought a year-long season pass to get all the new heroes, villains, and environments.

On Tuesday, I played one more game against Lex Luthor Baron Blade, and took him out with The Flash Tachyon, then deleted the game from my wife’s iPad. I lose all the characters and all the variants I’d unlocked, but the truth is I was becoming obsessive about it. I was falling behind on things (not writing this time, but other stuff) and even though each game was not very long–mainly because I know the cards so well I don’t have to think about strategy too much–I kept returning to them again and again. Yeah, it made me forget my numerous discomforts for a short while, but it was also drawing me in in a way I could no longer allow.

So, it’s gone. For now. When the next update is released, I’ll probably download it again to try out the new characters and face the villains, but until then it’ll feel good to recapture some of that time. The older I get, the more precious it is.

It’s a great game, though. If Steam would toss it into the Summer Sale, I’d recommend it to everyone.

N Things Make a Post

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1) I just dropped the fully signed contracts for a German edition of The Great Way (read the first few chapters starting here). The money won’t be coming to me for a while, but it’s much, much better than what I was paid for the German rights to Child of Fire, and CoF was published by the largest English language publisher in the world. Epic fantasy seems to do much better than urban fantasy.

2) Monday was my wife’s birthday. She got a Pencil by Fifty-Three, along with their art program, so she can try yet again to make art on her iPad. After so many years, I’m doubtful this will work, but we never stop trying.

3) Those of you who’ve known me for a long time will know that, while we celebrate my wife’s birthday on June 1, it’s also my birthday. However, we don’t do presents and stuff for me until July 1. (Sharing your birthday with your spouse sort of sucks.) I just turned 50.

4) You can tell that I put a lot of importance on that number by the way I’m burying it in this post. It’s a perfectly arbitrary number, but it does help me realize that I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be at this point in my life.

5) If you’ve been following my #15in2015 posts, you’ll see that I’m almost certainly going to make it. That’s partly because I’ve chosen a bunch of shorter books, have mostly stopped reading graphic novels (and mostly don’t miss them), and I’m reading bestsellers in the hopes of understanding them better. My current novel is also on the short end, but I think the next one should be meatier, just for variety’s sake.

6) Have I mentioned that the Fate Core game supplements I’ve been working on are in revisions? Well, they are. Someday soon I hope to return to novels. SOON.

7) Finally, my to-do list has grown so large that I’m tempted to just chuck huge portions of it just to clear my schedule. I’m supposed to organize a Goodreads giveaway for The Way Into Chaos, which means research into best practices. I’m supposed to work out a Bookbub promotion, but the promotional price can be a pain in the ass to arrange. The Great Way has been offered a slot in a Kickstarter Humble Bundle, which is no small thing and not to be ditched. Plus there are tax headaches around foreign sales, and I don’t have an accountant. Also, Goodreads supposedly allows discussion threads on author home pages (rather than the pages for books) but I’ll be damned if I can see the link I’m supposed to click. At least I’ve found someone willing to help with the creative commons licensing issues with the game supplements.

You know how John Scalzi talks about working with a publisher because he doesn’t want to be bothered with doing all this extraneous crap? Well, I’m living the life he doesn’t want. I’m his cautionary tale. All I want to do is write and watch dvds of mopey British detectives. Instead, I deal with all this stuff. Ugh.