N Things Make a Post

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

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

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:

If there’s one thing @scalzi’s multi-million dollar deal teaches us, it’s that writers should never discuss controversial subjects online.

— Imperator Draper (@byharryconnolly) May 25, 2015

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.

Three posts about health, part three: I’m allergic to my own sweat

Not a joke. If you google the phrase “I’m allergic to my own sweat” you come to a bunch of results that point you to what I have: cholinergic urticaria. “Cholinergic” referring to acetacholine, and “urticaria” which just means “hives.” What that means is that I break out in horrible red itchy hives whenever my body gets warm. Continue reading

Three posts about health, part two: food and skin

Yesterday, I talked about food and anxiety. Today I’ll talk about food and my face.

Ugh. Seriously, I hate this, but many years ago I started getting red patches on my face. My skin would get rough and slightly puffy, and no amount of washing or moisturizing would make it better. The best I could hope for was to scrub my face so hard it all turned red. My wife had it, too. The best our doctors could manage was “You should wash your face,” which… yeah.

Eventually, things would get so bad that those red patches would start to peel. Yeah, I had face dandruff. Sorry, ladies, I’m taken. Continue reading

Three posts about health, part one: food and anxiety

This space is where I talk about my weird bullshit, but for whatever reason, I’ve avoided talking about health issues here. Today I’ll talk about the most negligible of them: my fucked-up anxieties and the foods that made them worse. Continue reading

In which I break my website and throw away 24 hours of my life

Me: “I need to fix my front page to it’s friendly to mobile devices.”

Wife: “Are you going to hire someone to take care of that for you?”

Me: “Nah. Whatever I do, I want to be able to take care of my site myself.”

::immediately collapses website, renders blog posts invisible, and breaks all internal links, including the ones between the book posts and the sample chapters::

So, yeah. It takes a surprisingly long time for my ftp program to download a backup copy of my blog, especially when the download inexplicably stops and restarts several times. I went to couch at 1 am last night and was back up and at my site by 5 am. As of right now, the site is largely fixed.

Special thanks go out to @PandiesSpleen who pointed me to a Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress. It works! But it’s slow. It’s also looking at six years worth of old Randomness articles and coming up with a lot of failed connections.

Chaff. My life is full of chaff lately. Every time I try to focus on something, I get a whole of of random shit flying at me.

The worst thing, really, is that at the same time I broke all the internal links to my site, I also broke all the external links that other people have made to my individual posts. I didn’t get a lot of traffic from other blogs, but I don’t get a lot of traffic from any source.

Anyway, the work is mostly done, and I’m tired and stressed and irritable and married. My wife doesn’t deserve this crabby mood (my kid, absolutely, my wife not at all) so I’m going to read something fun or I don’t know what.

I’m taking a short internet fast, sort of.

Posting this today, on 3/31, because if it goes up tomorrow people might think it’s a dumb prank: I’m going to get offline as much as possible for the remainder of the week.

This has always been a tough time of year for me. Spring in Seattle is the winding down of impossibly long nights and dim, gray days, and it’s always made me feel out of sorts and unhappy. Combine that with traditional post-book blues (x4), burnout from writing 30K words of blog posts, and general life/health stress, I find I’m not engaging very much online.

And what’s the point of spending that time on Twitter (or whatever) if I’m not going to respond to people?

Is it wise to be offline so soon after releasing a bunch of books? Maybe not. Maybe I should still be out in the mix, trying to soft shoe on my blog about… something I care about, I guess. Trouble is, at the moment I don’t have the energy to care, not about Clean Reader, not about Hugo Puppies, not about tv shows or their hosts.

Probably, I will check my emails and social media notifications once a day and otherwise avoid the web until Sunday. That will give me more time for writing (still working on that Great Way supplement for Fate Core), reading, walking, and generally interacting in the real world[1]. By Sunday, I should feel better. Besides, that’s when my next G+ hangout rpg session will be.

Wish me… Huh. I don’t know. Wish me productivity.

[1]Interacting with the real world not guaranteed.

In which I am interviewed in Publishers Weekly

Right here.

If you ever thought “What does Harry Connolly think about the future of self-publishing?” well, there’s your chance. Space was limited so I didn’t have the chance to gas on the way I usually would, but it was nice to have one small opinion and express it in a small way. And, obviously, I talk about crowdfunding, too.

Also, I’m about to drop a note to the interviewer about the term “grimdark.”

Check it out!