moi?

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.

Yesterday

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Was pretty great. Thank you for the well wishes.

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.

Progress, I has it

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Ugh.

So, the Fate Core game supplement I promised to create for my Kickstarter is finished in the first draft.

Originally, I’d intended to write about six thousand words to cover the whole of The Great Way. I added a supplement for Key/Egg as a stretch goal, and figured that would be another 2K words, tops.

Just a few notes. Nothing fancy.

In truth, the first draft is over 45,000 words long. It’s half a novel.

Worse, the sort of writing that games require is very dense; finishing a thousand words in a day was the best I could hope for, and many days I couldn’t manage even that.

Fuck, man. Writing for games is hard.

Now I have to go through again. Not only will I need to revise the text, I’ll have to make sure I’ve got the rules basically correct. After that, I pass it to my GM for his notes.

In the end, it will all be fine, I hope. Fate Core operates on an open license, so I should be able to sell them for a nominal fee. Even better, I hope they’ll be effective promo for the books.

But Kee-rist, this has taken a sizable chunk of my lifetime productivity. I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.

A personal followup to John Scalzi’s big deal

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If you missed my post about it last night, John Scalzi just landed a major deal: $3.4 million for 13 books over ten years. He doesn’t even have to accept basket accounting.

Shortly after, I tweeted this:

And look at all those RTs and Favorites! It hasn’t translated into new sales, though.

But because contrast is fun, I’m going to take a moment to update you guys on where things stand for me. Spoiler: I don’t have a contract with any publisher for any dollar figure.

So the Kickstarter was successful, and it paid for the five books I’ve released, plus. However, that was the fall of 2013. All of 2014 was a struggle. The StoryBundle I did last year helped a little but money, shall we say, was tight. In fact, I stopped taking deductions on my taxes because it was too much. That’s the problem when you earn in one year and spend in the next.

However, the Kickstarter is almost over. Just today I sent the second-to-last update, giving backers access to one of the last stretch goals.

Also, the last of the books came out in the beginning of March, and sales have been fading for weeks. To be clear, the books are selling better than most self-published authors’ works ever will (So far I’ve made about $40K from all my indie work), but I’m paying bills with this money, and putting some aside for Uncle Sam. What’s more, judging by the way things are going, the last 8 months of the year won’t be as good as the first four.

And that’s all fine, except this income has to hold me until my next book sells, and I haven’t even started writing it yet.

What’s the holdup? I have one more Kickstarter reward to fulfill. I thought I’d been super careful when I planned this whole thing out, but it turns out that I underestimated the amount of work I would be putting into the Fate Core supplements. What was supposed to be a few thousand words has turned into 45,000, and I still have to edit it. None of this is wasted effort, because it will be useful promotion for the trilogy, but yikes, I did not expect the worldbuilding to take up so much page space. I really, really need to cut this shit back.

Then, finally, I get to start my new project. After self-publishing six books, I’m aiming this next one at New York. I could use the marketing bump.

Anyway, the books are doing well enough that my wife hasn’t asked me to get a day job; we’re still homeschooling our son and I’m still hopeful about this dumb career. But I haven’t replaced my lens prescriptions from 2007 and I haven’t gotten my teeth fixed. We’re still in the crappy apartment. We still don’t have a car, or cell phone, or cable TV.

In short, I’m still aspiring to the midlist.