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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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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!

The Blog Tour Continues, Part Nexter

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Continuing from the previous blog tour link farm

1. Like every writer, I sometimes I have to write a synopsis. It will surprise no one to learn that I have a system.

2. Here’s a post about genres, protagonists and exposition at SFF World.

3. Advice you won’t hear from sensible authors: Always Blame Yourself.

4. The way that studying screenwriting helped me as a novelist, and the way it didn’t.

5. Self-publishing vs traditional publishing, with an agenda to push one over the other.

6. He Always Runs While Others Walk: Pacing in Fiction. My ideas about pacing aren’t what I hear from so many other writers.

7. God is All Loving (Some Exemptions Apply) Religious Magic in Horror and Fantasy. I talk about vampires, crosses, and dehumanized enemies.

8. King Queen and this Three Seasons: ARROW and the Challenges of Long Term Narrative.

9. SF Signal Mind Meld: which series got better after the first book?

10. I Search the Body: What Role-Playing Games Taught Me About Writing Fiction.

11. Helpless in the Face of Your Enemy: Writers and Attack Novels.

— 11a. That Black Gate post was linked at io9. Comments are interesting.

12. The Loneliest Student: Writing as a Subject of Study. Applying education research to the process of learning to write.

And that’s it for my blog tour. It’s Dee Oh En Ee, done. I hope you find these interesting; please share if you do.

Sometimes it helps to clarify your goals

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When I’m writing, sometimes my goal is as simple as “Finish this day’s work so I can have finished this day’s work.” Sometimes it’s as complex as “I don’t know how to solve this problem.”

Then there are times like right now, when I have a list of odd tasks that accumulate around a writing career, and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do, except cross off everything on this list. And then I have to wonder why I’m doing any of this.

It’s not money, despite what some “fans” might say. If I wanted money I wouldn’t have become a writer. It’s certainly not awards; that’s someone else’s concern. And if I wanted writing-style fame, I’d probably do readings or conventions or whatever. So, what do I want, then?

It was this article that reminded me: How Terry Brooks Saved Epic Fantasy.

Regarding the article itself, I don’t think Brooks gets a bad rap. He wrote accessible, commercial fantasy fiction, and was lucky enough to hit the NYTimes bestseller list when other fantasy writers couldn’t. Even now, 35+ years later, his books are gateway fantasy to bring middle-graders into the genre, and as comfort reads for older fans. And if you think I have something against comfort, you haven’t seen my Goodreads page or my waist line.

However, the article itself reminded me of What I Want: I want people to be still talking about my work, decades after it was published.

That’s not to say I want people to think I “saved [genre]”. I don’t really think about genre as a unified thing that could be/needs to be saved. Fantasy is certainly doing better now than it has in a long while.

But I want to have an impact. I want people to look back at my work and believe that it mattered in some way. I want to be remembered.

Which is not nearly the same as winning awards or hitting bestseller lists. There are plenty of award-winning novels that nobody reads, and the thrift store shelves are packed with forgotten bestsellers from “#1 New York Times” authors that few remember.

I mean, awards would be nice, and money would make things easier for my wife and kid. I’m not saying those things don’t matter at all. But the number one thing is to be remembered because things are different because of what I’ve done. I’m not even sure it’s possible, but it’s what I want.

The Blog Tour Continues, Part Next

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Continuing from the first post.

Over at the Skiffy and Fanty blog, I wrote an entry for their “My Superpower” series. My superpower is an unusual kind of invulnerability.

“It’s Dangerous to Go Alone” is a post about figuring out why most people didn’t like my old series, and what if anything I should change for The Great Way, hosted by David B Coe.

“Let’s Fail On Our Own Terms” is about making ridiculous creative choices and standing by them, no matter what.

On Nick Kaufmann’s blog, I wrote about The Scariest Part of the trilogy, which is also the longest chapter in the trilogy.

Also, author Joshua Palmatier interviewed me about the series. I talk here about the hardest part of the trilogy to write, among other things.

An amusing review posted over at reddit.

And not to bury the lede, but once again here’s that starred review in Publishers Weekly.

More links in part nexter.

If you found any of that interesting, please share.