Steve Karmazenuk: From the Mouths of My Cannons

Category: Writing Advice

  • WRITING LESSON: A Starving Artist is ALWAYS Hungry

    WRITING LESSON: A Starving Artist is ALWAYS Hungry

    Hello, Acolytes and welcome back to another one of our irregular classes on How to Get an Indie Book Published (We’ve finally gotten a course title workshopped – goes in for market testing next week!)

    This week I teach you what I learned, this week, about cover art. Without further Ado, let’s jump in:

    The above block was written over two weeks ago. That’s just how hungry starving artists are. Allow me now to explain:

    If you are thinking about self-publishing (or Indie Publishing as it’s called now – and a better name it is,) which is probably the best way to go unless you have a nepotism entry into publishing.

    If you do have a nepo entry into publishing, fuck off; this guide on How to get an Indie Book Published (It cleared market testing and drop-testing before I got back to writing this post) is for Indie Writers: the anonymous many, who don’t use a journalism major as a slow-track into ghostwriting for Simon and Schuster’s author stable.

    Now, where was I? Oh yes: You know how I keep saying it’s about having a holistic presence on social media, and that it’s all who you know? Nepos already know who they need to; the rest of us have to try and get over our crippling social anxiety and go out and interact with human people.

    Well a couple of weeks back, over on BlueSky, I posted to #BookSky that I was looking for a cover illustrator. I had interested parties DM me with their emails, then sent out my query: I showed them the old cover art, as well as the Generative AI “mock-up” I made to give the cover artist to give them an idea of what I wanted.

    I wanted to give the artist I hired an idea of what I envisioned (An updated/alternate version of the original cover, more in line with what I’d pictured) I used the mock up concept cover art I’d made for my own motivation and told them that was what I was looking for, in terms of art.

    ALERT! INCOMING TANGENTIAL TIRADE ALERT!

    Wait; why didn’t I just use a Gen AI cover? Because I’m opposed to plagiarism, and the way LLMs connected to creative tools work is that it copies from other artists, specifically by reproducing images according to scores given to the words you used to describe your project. Gen AI sucks, Gen AI is painfully obvious, and Gen AI is plagiarism.

    The ONLY proper use of Generative AI in the creation of a cover for your book is to use it to create a concept mock-up for an artist YOU FUCKING PAY MONEY TO CREATE. Indie Artists support Indie Artists; we’re all partners, not competitors.

    Now, as to writing, the only use Generative AI has in the writing process is if everyone you know is dead and you need someone to spitball your ideas to – not to SUGGEST ideas to you, but to help you clarify your thoughts. REMEMBER: EVERYONE YOU KNOW AND LOVE MUST BE DEAD BEFORE RESORTING TO THIS OPTION.

    Likewise, using LLM/GenAI to “write” your book is not only lazy, it is an irrefutable demonstration that you lack talent and imagination. All you have is an idea, and, honestly, ideas are a dime a fucking dozen. If you don’t have the talent to turn that idea into a story, either learn the fuck to write, or get the fuck outta the way of those of us who know how.

    TANGENTIAL RANT ENDS! TANGENTIAL RANT ENDS!

    So, what happened?

    I got a shit-ton of offers. All of them were great, and a couple of them had the kind of style I wanted for the cover, and ultimately I went with the person whose art style I preferred most. But I had to reply to a fuckton of emails, look at a metric fuckton of artistic portfolios, and sift through all of it to find the artist who was right for me.

    It was Administrative Hell, because it took several hours over several days to get through, and no matter how awesome pictures are, spend the day looking at them eventually you get bored. But one artist’s portfolio stuck out, and I decided to hire them.

    I had a price range in mind, based on my budget. Astonishingly, what I thought would be too little money wound up being the average asking price.

    So if you can only scrape together $150-$200 you can get an amazing artist to do fantastic work.

    And the bigger your budget, the more Indie Artists become available to you: I had offers asking $300, $500, someone even wanted $800, and their work was great, but way outside my price range – I didn’t waste their time other than to tell them they were out of my price range and they’re best sticking with the clientele they were making bank on.

    Why the cost? Because you’re paying them for all the YEARS they have invested, both learning and doing, to hone their craft to the point that they make work WORTH that money. That is not to besmirch lower-costing artists; I was fucking relieved to find such talent in my price range. Some Indie Artists are still in school, others, this IS their only gig; they charge based on their rep, so lift them up and they will lift you up in return.

    Indie Artists jump at tenders; remember the title of this Blog Post/Online Class Session, dear Acolytes.

    Now that you’ve scrolled up and back down, note that while I’ve touched on my plans for a fundraising campaign, I am not fundraising to pay the artist; I’m paying them out of pocket. Their work will be the first thing people see, when they see any visuals for the Author’s Edition of They Came in Peace. It’s literally the book’s ambassador. And the cover is probably the most important investment in your book you make, because people DO judge books by the cover, no matter the aphorism.

    The cover will be front and center of the fundraising campaign, and, if the campaign is successful, it will be front and center of the marketing campaign, launch, etc. It’s very important to carefully pick the cover artist – and for the love of your book, DO NOT DO IT YOURSELF NO MATTER HOW GOOD YOU THINK YOU ARE.

    Unless you are a professional, leave it to the pros.

    And having a trusting relationship, an honest relationship even if it’s only over email/text/chat/videoconference. The more you can tell your artist, the better.

    Okay; keep an eye for new posts; they’re announced on my BlueSky whenever they infrequently go up, but they are here.

  • WRITING LESSON: Executive Dysfunction

    WRITING LESSON: Executive Dysfunction

    Okay; so here I am, galley finally put together and done…I wanna make a final pass before I get it printed, but in the meantime, I am coming up with a fundraising campaign, prior to the book’s launch.

    I’ve already got stretch goals set up; well, written down on a list…and I’ve even got targets and an ultimate goal; but now, dear Acolytes, you accompany me into my first foray into the unknown territory of crowdsourcing and fundraising.

    This is one that I didn’t expect to be on the lesson plan; because the first thing I have, is a bunch of fucking questions I don’t know how to answer. Well, more precisely, questions whose answers I will have to research.

    QUESTION ONE: Okay…how do I create buzz around this book?

    Doesn’t that look all fancy and official?

    Okay; so driving buzz does require having some form of social media presence; like I said, I’ve migrated to BlueSky, and I cannot endorse such flaming piles of shit like the Website Formerly Known as Twitter, or the Facebook. However, I can’t recommend Tumblr enough for aspiring writers and artists. I used to be on there, but there was drama and well…you young’uns probably know more social media sites than I’ve listed; like Discord, Reddit, Threads, Oingo-Boingo, Talking Heads…oh wait; those last two are bands from the 1980s New Wave era.

    So if you have an established SM presence, you simply join the groups/chats/whatever about writing, or creativity in general, and then you post there and to your own followers about your work. That’s the first stage.

    Second stage buzz-creating: Drive them from your Social Media to your weblog, by having a link in your bio, and dropping the occasional post to your followers and mutuals to get them to go have a look.

    It also helps if you play with the #WritingPrompts hashtag on those sites, to create quick and clever microstories (Character-Limit long.)

    Put some content on your social media; put the same content on your blog. Now you’re cooking. You should, once you’ve made friends with readers, writers and other creatives start seeing more aggregation of like-minded people following you; follow back! Initiate follows.

    Don’t go looking for free advice from big authors like Stephen King or…you know, I don’t know of any other big authors on social media that I follow. I mean, they MUST be out there…but anyway, they’ve been exhausted by advice-seekers their whole career. At best, you’ll get ignored. The best people to talk to are your fellow indies; we, like you, have had to do the whole thing ourselves – and now you can benefit by avoiding the mistakes WE made and make entirely new and original mistakes all your own! As you well know, there’s nothing a writer loves more than talking about their work and themselves. Writing is a very narcissistic process, and indies are hungry for coverage and sales. We’ll talk your ear off, blog your eyes dry, etc.

    But yeah, indie writers? We’re a dime a dozen, yeah, but the Indie Publishing industry is actually fairly solid, and hungry; as long as your books are properly edited (don’t do it yourself) and formatted (Submission guidelines are HOLY SCRIPTURE,) you’re bound to make connections. Don’t half-ass it by trying to edit and design your cover yourself; I’ve done that, and it ends up making something you love into an embarrassment.

    Places like Fiverr and other Gig Posters are a great place to find people who are studying editing and writing to work on your book – and there are countless illustrators online; even if it means you have to wait and put money aside to pay for proper editing and a proper book cover, you want to use their help, and give them credit in your book’s acknowledgements and make sure to include “Cover Art copyright [NAME] used with permission” line, because it IS their work and you paid for permission to use it, and, they want to make money off their work so if you give them credit, somebody else might use them for their book jacket. Same thing goes for reviews, but you DON’T EVER NOT EVEN ONCE pay for a review: there are people who will review your work – FOR FREE – because they can actually MAKE A LIVING reviewing indie books for their webpages or something.

    But, I’m getting ahead of myself; you’re not looking for reviews – yet – your book isn’t even ready to roll.

    You’ve got the galley edited and ready, cover art is commissioned (Best let them design it, although you can have input; the cover of They Came in Peace was inspired by a view of the occultation line between night and day taken from the International Space Station, and the artist liked my idea and ran with it) you already know that Draft to Digital is the best game in town for self-publishing, and you’re nearly ready to roll. You’ve got your followers, mutuals, and you’ve got people who will occasionally see your posts in your feed. Okay. Level One-A accomplished.

    Thing is, if you publish your book now? Chances are good it’s gonna fail. Pimping a book out requires a minimum amount of marketing money. Oh, fuck; you’re broke as hell and it already hurt to save up and take time to pay for editing and a cover! Now you have to pay for MARKETING?

    Yup!

    And THAT’S why you don’t want to publish, yet. I mean yes, it’s always a good idea to have the .epub ready to go, but you can generate a book on D2D without “launching” it right away.

    QUESTION TWO: So how the fuck do I pay for marketing?

    You don’t: You get other people to pay for it, for you.

    Wait; what?

    Did I stutter? Your first marketing campaign is to FUNDRAISE for your book launch. There’s Kickstarter, Gofundme, Co-fee or something…there are many available options. All you need to do is come up with some reasonable push-goals; for example, a digitally signed copy of the ebook, early edition or pr eorders, or if they donate enough an autographed physical copy of the book, online meet and greets, etc. The goal of each goal of your fundraising campaign is to pay for the NEXT goal, and the next, and then, when you’ve hit your final target, you have the money to pay for marketing.

    Okay, so where do I go to pay for marketing?

    Wow; you want everything on a silver platter, don’t you?

    Hey, this post was your idea, not mine; you took my nickel, I paid for the ride.

    You realize you’re just talking to yourself right now, right?

    Do you?

    Okay, so there are myriad online publicity agencies. An ad run or marketing run could cost you a few hundred or a few thousand dollars; how much money you raise will determine how big your campaign will be.

    So you start looking at marketing before you start fundraising. You’ll want to check out as many online marketing agencies as you can. You’ll want to filter out anyone who isn’t specialized in books or other creative endeavors. You’ll want to talk to people who will know where your ads are going to be the most effective. You’ll want to avoid being put in a pop-up, and you’ll want your ad to be tailored to a specific client, namely, people who would be interested in reading your book.

    Next you gotta check and see if these agencies are actually worth the money, who’s used them, what they’re known for…and you might want to filter it down to the genre or even subgenre if they specialize in that sort of thing. You want the ad campaign to be tailored to you as much as possible; a preplanned package might not be what you’re looking for, so don’t be afraid to express that; right now you’re just trying to test the waters, so you can answer my questions three:

    1-How much money do you think you can reasonably fundraise?

    2-How much money do you want to spend on advertising?

    3-How much do money you want to keep for yourself, up-front?

    The first two questions are simple arithmetic. The third one depends on how much you think your time is worth given everything you’ve done up to this point, from coming up with the idea, to writing, rewriting, beta-reading, editing, etc. The Rule of Thirds works well: Two thirds of what you raise should be for your campaign. The last third is yours.

    A lot to take in, right? Because now we have to talk about SCHEDULING. Because, you don’t want to make your book available until it’s been hyped and buzzed, right?

    Timetables are going to be based on how long it takes you to fundraise, how much you fundraise, and how big your campaign is.

    Patience is the key; your book’s ready. It’s not going anywhere. There’s no expiry date on when it can launch.

    And, guess what else:

    You’re going to want to research book launch dates.

    You guessed! Yep; you’re going to want to have a look at what books released when, going back a couple of years, just to see what time the tide comes in for your genre.

    Yeah, you might have wanted to launch sooner rather than later – believe me, I know the feeling. Had my book been launched six months to a year earlier, it would have had a better chance, given I was at the time with a small press. But right after it launched, we went into lockdown. COViD killed They Came in Peace.

    So, I’ve taken the intervening time to rest, recuperate, and try writing other things. But, I’ve kept getting drawn back here, to this book; and honestly, given the times we’re currently living through? I’d rather put it out there yesterday.

    But without the right hype, it won’t have the legs to run.

    Tune in next time for an exciting new episode!

  • Halfway Mark

    Halfway Mark

    So I came up for air, and realized I have made it to the halfway mark in my back-to-front edit/galley assembly, and it’s gone by so fast I didn’t have any real time to contemplate a post.

    So today, until I get this post done, I’m not working on They Came in Peace, Author’s Edition, only on this post. Which is annoying because honestly I hate the WordPress UI; it’s been a few years since I had this page active, and, frankly, the way it’s all set up now just annoys the SHIT out of me.

    Like having to hit [shift]+[enter] to start a new paragraph instead of just [enter] like a normal User Interface.

    Okay, enough stream-of-consciousness raving; I try to save that for social media. Well, a social medium.

    So, at the halfway mark of building my galley, we start with the first lesson from my So You’re Self-Destructive Enough to Want to be a Writer* quasi university class.

    Okay; you wanna be a writer when you grow up. Cool. So did I, so do a lot of people. When we’re young, when we’re kids, everybody dreams of Making It Big. The most ordinary thing in the world is to want to be extraordinary. I stole that line from some movie, honestly can’t remember which – that line was literally the best part.

    Here’s the thing: If you’ve ever so much as STARTED a poem, a story, a fucking BOOK REPORT, you’re already WRITING. The only question is, are you ready to go HARD?

    Because writing is a VERY solitary practice, and it WILL eat into your social life, and even sneak around your professional life, too. You have to let it become your obsession, your compulsion. I won’t try to teach you How To Write Good, because you either CAN or you CAN’T, and all the learned technical skills, books-to-read-to-sound-literate, books-to-read-to-be-literate, creative writing skills, parts of a god-damn sentence (this one is a run-on,) is all shit you have to learn ON YOUR OWN, from the guidance of teachers you trust, both in high school and college. Your friends and family can’t critique you, and you need to find someone who will legitimately tell you your writing sucks shit, and then tell you both how and why.

    The crisis you will be in immediately after is a state known as “Ego Death,” and believe me, it is very necessary. Everything you wrote in high school and grade school may be based on great ideas, fantastic concepts, but I promise you unless you are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart-level exceptional, which you might be, I don’t know, your creative execution will most probably be utter shit.

    I’m not here to teach you a fucking creative writing class; those are available everywhere, and, frankly, other than technical skills, are completely fucking useless to waste money on outside of college/university. Even IN college or uni it’s questionable.

    Because the truth is, you don’t just want to be a writer and know how to write good, do you? No, the hours, days, months and years of accumulated solitude, self-doubt, lost sleep, ecstatic bursts of creative inspiration and long hours powered by imaginative disassociation alone, alienation, crippling self-doubt, the intellectually constipative misery of writer’s block, and ultimately fucking Making a Thing, you want to be READ, too, don’t you?

    Now, this is probably not an original thought, but I have believed since I was a kid just starting to write that there are only two kinds of writers: Those who want to see their work published and read, and fucking liars.

    So, what I’m trying to show you, in this lesson, is how to get published. And believe me, it’s a LOT more fucking complicated than you might think.

    Peruse the bestsellers and you’ll see that talent and literary creativity are not requirements to be at the front of the bookstore. The whole fucking thing really is nepotism; it’s about WHO YOU KNOW, and more importantly, WHO THEY KNOW.

    You have to network with other writers, socially both online and in skinspace; you have to make some kind of casual friendship with one or two of them; you should go to school with someone who has a parent in the trade and chum up to them. It is ALWAYS about Who You Know.

    You want to know how I got They Came in Peace published? Because of people I met on what is now recreational duck-rapist Mark Zuckerberg’s** Fascist Hellsite formerly known as Facebook.

    Back in the day before the Yeehadi Vanilla ISIS MAGA mungos shit all over the site like pigeons with irritable bowel syndrome, you could actually join groups of people interested in the same things as you without constantly being bombarded with lunatic intrusions from the politically insane who dare call other people deranged.

    Among the people I connected with were a few old greybeards I knew from the Revolutionsf.com website, and friends of theirs, and friends of THEIRS, including author Gary Mitchell (No relation to the fictional man-into-god Gary Mitchell of Star Trek fame,) and my future publisher, Sean Demory.

    I’d already at the time published the first two volumes of That Space Opera I Won’t Talk About (But whose copyright is available for licensing) and had a surprisingly existent fanbase of my own. And, as it turns out, among them were editors and graphic artists, and mainly people who stumbled over my work, and for some reason enjoyed it. (I’m sorry, I really am embarrassed by that pretentious bullshit I was writing. I needed to get the fuck over myself and just go for simple high-concept sci-fi and classic adventures like from seasons one and two, whatever the fuck that means…)

    So I had a built-in Beta Reader Rogue’s Gallery of volunteers, but I thought I’d ask Sean and Gary and a few other folks from the RevSF community if they’d like to dip their eyeballs in the ink.

    …except I thought Gary and Sean were Just Fellow Nerds/Geeks; unlike most creepoids, I don’t deep-dive internet search every name of every person that I interact with online. So, when I started turning the horrible alcohol-fueled nightmares that I’d been having into the narrative thread behind They Came in Peace, I thought to myself, “Well, who better to ask to beta-read my work, than my online nerd buddies?”

    A Beta-Read later, and I’ve got Sean telling me the story has legs, and he gives me his notes; as did everyone else I’d asked to beta-read, and with everybody’s notes/suggestions/comments/questions in hand, I wrote another draft of They Came in Peace, and sent it to the second-round volunteers for reading (Most of the same first-rounders, but fewer – TCiP gets a little heavy and hard-to-read in some places: It was literally the stuff of nightmares, so…yeah.)

    Sean comes back and tells me he’d like to be my agent, and try and sell They Came in Peace. But first, I needed to work with an editor. Then, I had to take out 20 000 words. Then work with the editor, again.

    And he pushed that book everywhere he could; see, he knew people; I didn’t know people, I knew a person; Sean. The problem was, despite “having legs” as Sean put it, nobody wanted to take a risk on a first-time author who isn’t writing the same safe formulaic crap they’re already churning out. I have the rejection slips to prove it. (At least I did until I moved and lost the hard copies to a coffee-in-a-drawer.) I still have the rejections-by-email I got from a LOT of small, medium and big publishers too cheap to reject you on stationary, like it should properly be done.

    Anyway, after two rounds of being put through the wringer of rejection like the shit I’d gone through when I was trying to date in high school and college, I’d had enough and was ready to just leave They Came in Peace in permanent storage.

    Sean insisted he’d publish it; he said he wanted it to see the light of day, and that it had the legs to sell. So, I promoted him from my agent to my publisher.

    The process was glacial – scheduling it for publication, trade galley reviews (more editing), the Cover Art Follies, but by September 2017 it was ready to roll, just had to wait for the opening on the roster.

    Waiting for your slot on the roster, if you’re fortunate enough to get published, will be the longest, most tedious experience of your writing career. Yes, worse than those six months you spent blocked and questioning if you were better off just geting some Joe Job.

    Spots on rosters are decided years in advance; my spot? April 2020.

    …anybody remember what happened in 2019?

    …anybody else notice that since 2020, it’s still been 2020?

    Three things happened to me in April 2020: 1) My firstborn son turned 10. 2) My mother died. 3) My book was published just as the economy collapsed.

    My mother did not pass from COVID, thankfully, but none of us got to be by her side when she died; that is going to live with me forever. Along with a lot of other unfair shit my mom had to deal with because of all the bastards in our family.

    I’d like to add that not one of my surviving uncles, nor any of my aunts (Not even her own sister,) cousins, or nieces offered my sister and I any condolences after our mother, who had spent her life giving to others in the family, even those far more well off than her, died. Not. A. Single. One.

    They couldn’t even be bothered to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to extend their regrets. The Forlinis, Gamboas, Williams, Gluteneys and Townsend families are all fucking garbage shitbirds, as far as I’m concerned. You bastards took advantage of my mom.

    Anyway…I can’t let that shit go, but I want to focus.

    Long story short, while the world went to shit the first time around in the ’20s, my the first edition of They Came in Peace died on the vine, after 14 sales.

    It got overlooked and withered. Once my contract with Sean was up, I asked him to take it down. He told me to get it back out there, and do good things with it.

    I’ve spent the last 5 years trying to write other stories; I have at least two per year that are in various stages of being abandoned during construction.

    Because, my mind kept turning to They Came in Peace; the work wasn’t done, and it might just be the one actual good novel I ever write. It’s become an albatross around my neck, constantly reminding me of the frustration of failure that about nine out of ten writers have to face, perpetually.

    Finally, I decided if it was the Last Good Thing I’d written, then I’d whittle away at it, carve it, polish it, and get it back out to market.

    While I’m halfway done working the trade galley ready to self-publish (In the age of print-on-demand and ebooks, the true democratization of literature) once I’m happy with it.

    After the trade galley is reassembled, I’m going to take another shot at removing 10 000 words from it; finish streamlining it.

    Now, self-publishing is going to be a WHOLE OTHER LESSON, so, stay tuned.

    But long story short, cultivate relationships with other people in “our field.”

    No matter how fucking good you are, if you don’t know the right people you won’t get published. Herman Mellville wouldn’t have gotten Moby Dick past the screener readers if he were publishing today. He’d have had to schmooze with the right people long before he wrote it.

    Honestly, of all the American literary giants of the 20th century and earlier, the only one I think would have an honest hope in hell of getting published today would be Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens, and even then he’d likely be a Blogger.

    Okay; I don’t know what else to tell you in this lesson, so fuck off and get back to your writing. Or something else that needs doing; I don’t care. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.

    I’ll be updating the blog again, soon. Adjacent.

    *Course title still has not been written in stone.
    **There is no evidence to suggest which specific kind of waterfowl Mark Zuckerberg is sexually abusing.

  • WRITING LESSON: From the End to the Beginning

    WRITING LESSON: From the End to the Beginning

    Okay, I need to take a break from editing/assembling the galley for They Came in Peace…If it weren’t for writer’s block, days of crippling self-doubt, the frustrated rage of having to start a chapter/project over from scratch because It Just Wasn’t Working, or eliminating a beloved character because They Are Superfluous, I’d say editing is the worst part of writing.

    So, thematically I should be putting this under “Writing Advice,” but the Acolytes aren’t there, yet; they’re still waiting on the first lesson. You see, I really want to talk today about a strange experience I’ve had today, while editing.

    The best way to describe it, is I was reading a book backwards, but knowing both what has happened and what will happen…and several times this morning I found myself unable to distinguish the book’s past from its future, because I knew both.

    So, clarification and context. My editor taught me that one of the best ways to edit a book (when not working with an editor) is to work with an editor. Failing that, edit the book in a series of passes: Front-to-Back, Asynchronously, and finally Back-to-Front as you assemble your final draft. Work chapter by chapter each time, keeping the chapter completely in its own context and not in the context of the overall story.

    In other words, do everything you can to detach yourself from the story.

    Now, I have TWO different edges when it comes to putting together the re-edited author’s edition: I already put in all the hard work for the first edition of They Came in Peace. First and foremost: Most of what I have to do now is just polishing up a few rough edges, and adding a few necessary details to give the story a little more cohesion.

    The second edge I have is this: I have, in one form or another, lived and breathed this story for more than a decade. The initial launch failed because it got killed by the COVID crisis; it never had the chance to get any traction and get read. Ever since, until I decided to relaunch it a couple of years back (the re-editing has taken a hot minute) I’ve been unable to write, unable to invest creative energy into anything. I even read and reread the complete book on my Kindle app…and don’t get me wrong, I’ve been told by my editor, my publisher, the few people who bought it and got back to me after reading, they all tell me what a great, thought-provoking story it is. The thing is, I am SICK of it.

    Ten years is a long time to go over a book that started with passionate inspiration and creative urgency which gradually turned into the cubicle-farm like feeling of rote that comes from making pass after pass after pass of the story to ensure that it is fully polished, as absolutely perfect and readable as possible. So after all that time, do I feel that what I wrote is as fantastic as everyone who’s read They Came in Peace say it is?

    Maybe; probably. I am fed up of the damn thing. I’m tired of it. I’ve turned it into a career project, and at this point honestly, I feel like I want to be done, put it out there, and finally, hopefully, see some return on all the work I’ve done. I’ve done a lot to create the best possible work I could; at this point I feel like I’ve been cooking, tasting, cooking, tasting, cooking, tasting all day and no longer want to have the big meal I’ve spent the day preparing.

    All that to say, while I did the Front-to-Back edit of the book, I skipped the “shuffle chapter” edit. I just took time off (several months) before assailing the Back-to-Front edit.

    This is the Ready-to-Publish edit; the second Ready-to-Publish edit, technically. Before that, back in 2017 all I had was a Ready-to-Sell edit. Yes, the Ready-to-Sell edit of a story is not the same animal as the Ready-to-Publish edit. In many ways with the Ready-to-Publish edit, you feel the loss of what was cut away, but in most ways you marvel at how streamlined your story has become.

    And, I’m digressing.

    I’m having this weird deja-vu feeling, as I work on the book, backwards. I know how it ends, I know how it begins, and here I have the characters in the middle of this, aware of their future but not their past, in spite of knowing both; as I edit backwards, what I read as already having happened has yet to occur for the characters.

    The closest feeling I’ve had would have been while watching Christopher Nolan’s Memento for the first time: You know what WILL happen, but not the steps that led to it. Until you step through them, backwards.

    It makes me want to take up the challenge of asynchronous storytelling: like Nolan, telling a story from back-to-front.

    Anyway, that’s all I wanted to share; just the weird feeling of deja vu all over again that I’ve been experiencing.

    Writing tip: A blog post is a great procrastinatory justification.



  • WRITING LESSON: The Writing Process, or: Advice to an Aspiring Sci-Fi Writer; this is PROBABLY gonna be the First in a Series.

    WRITING LESSON: The Writing Process, or: Advice to an Aspiring Sci-Fi Writer; this is PROBABLY gonna be the First in a Series.



    A while back, before the Return of the Dark Times, I was asked on Facebook, before the world’s first successful rat penis transplant recipient, Mark Fuckerberg** decided that facts didn’t matter and neither did Queer lives made me elect to delete my Facebook account, by the mother of a young science-fiction writer if I had any advice for their child.

    As I’ve been writing – or attempting to, I don’t think one can ever claim to successfully write anything – since the tender age of thirteen, some forty-one years ago, I have learned a WEALTH of information. As a father myself, and as someone whose experience might help others succeed where I really didn’t leave my mark, I’m going to share that advice. Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. Those who cannot teach, become literary critics.

    But, since I CAN teach (though not legally in any institution, public or private, in any Province or Territory in Canada under Penalty of Law,) and love to talk about myself, and my writing, and telling a good story, I would like to welcome you, new Acolytes, to the University-level course, How To Write Good And Get Maybe Published or Something or: Fuck Them All And Go Self-Published Because Draft 2 Digital is Also a Thing, only do it the right way so you get some return for your investment. Okay, I admit the title is a work in progress, but…hey. I have tenure at the University of Lackluster Writing Careers, so they can all kiss my ass.

    I won’t ONLY be posting writing advice in this space; I’ll only be doing that when I’m not here to mull over the construction of the galley for, or sharing stories about, details about the technique behind, things I learned while writing, things I learned while working with an editor on the previous edition for-publication galley, things that kept me up at night and thoughts about the forthcoming Author’s Edition of They Came in Peace. Consider it the cynical, shameless self-promotion behind the veneer of altruism.

    Lesson One, free in this also not-paywalled Writing Advice category/course: Look for ANY opportunity to self-promote your finished and ready-to-go work – just know how to read the fucking room. Cynical, I know. But, trust me, dear Acolytes, when I say that there are only TWO kinds of writers in the world: Those who want to see their work published, and fucking liars.

    HOWEVER,

    THIS post is just the INTRODUCTION to the completely-unaccredited University-Level class on How to Write A Science-Fiction Novel, How to Write it Well, and How to Avoid Stupid Mistakes Everybody Makes When Trying To Get Published. (Recommended for writers aged 10 and up)

    Yes; ages 10 and up; if you’re writing and on the internet and you’re in your first set of double-digits, you’ve probably already heard worse than Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

    As I said: The course title is still a work in progress; the schedule for the classes is whenever I post/whenever you read, and if you read to the very end and send me the decrypted secret passphrase found in the final post in this series, whenever that will be, written with a cypher to be discussed in a previous-to-last blog entry, you get 100% passing grade, full credits. Homework might be to try some shit, listen to some music, or do something out of your comfort zone. You will not be graded on homework. There will be no exams. The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask, and because of bots, you’ll notice my comments section is closed. If you’re clever, you already know from visiting this website where to reach me and how.

    I’m going to talk truthfully, honestly, and without bullshit, and I reserve the right to use foul, vulgar, and perhaps even vile language while professoring to you (Huh; I did NOT know that professoring was an actual word.), because I have been fucked over by too many bullshit artists, scammers AND friends to not give you the straight dope and, somewhere along the way, a lesson on how to avoid all of the above.

    I will NOT be summarizing the Syllabus for this course in this introduction, as I am neither a Doctor of Writing nor a University Professor, and this is also, likewise, not an Accredited University course. And, there’s not really a Syllabus, anyway.

    So, to conclude…assuming I didn’t forget something…fuck it; I have a DAY, tomorrow, and it’s already technically tomorrow morning.

    **My Lawyer Made Me Add Context: There is no evidence to suggest the rat penis transplant was actually successful.