Year of an Indie Writer: Week 23

Sometimes it's the smallest things that can have a big impact.

Fiction Writing Stalled

Over the past month, the new fiction writing has been in a bit of a holding pattern. While I'm still proofing and re-reading the next Calvin Carter novel, BRIDES OF DEATH, there's no new stories flowing from my keyboard. And I've pretty much zeroed in on the culprit.

Blogging. I kind of fell into a blog-per-day schedule by accident. When I finally realized it, however, I wanted to keep the streak going. Why? Because it's a streak. Yes, I was enjoying it, but lots of my writing energy was focused on getting out the next day's blog vs. new fiction. My recent trip to Corpus Christ corresponded to 1 June and I made the decision not to force myself to write something every day. I will develop a schedule--likely Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday--but I want to make it memorable and consistent. If something jumps to mind or there's an anniversary, I'll write more. But my main focus should be writing new stories, not always new blog entries.

Planning the To Be Read Pile for Vacations

A key part of planning for any travel is to decide what I'm going to read on the trip. The family and I went to Corpus Christi, Texas, this past week. We frolicked in the Gulf of Mexico, fished, toured the city, and ate seafood every night. T'was a great week.

Leading up to the vacation, I had meticulously planned out the items I would bring. I brought my Kobo ereader, my iPad for some comics, a small pile of actual comics anchored by the newest Star Wars comics #108 (a continuation of the original Marvel Comics run), the latest issue of Men's Journal, the latest issue of Back Issue focusing on the 30th anniversary of the first Tim Burton/Michael Keaton Batman movie, and a Time Magazine anniversary issue on D-Day.

I was going to be gone for six days.

What did I actually read? Half of Men's Journal (night one), about 75% of the D-Day magazine (every morning), and that was it. Everything else didn't even leave my bag.

Because I bought a few paperbacks: The Scam by Linda Evanovich and Lee Goldberg, First Counsel by Brad Meltzer, two Longarm novels by James Reasoner, and a Shell Scott sampler by Richard Prather. I read four chapters of The Scam and that was it.

Funny how meticulous planning can go off course for the best of reasons: spending time with the family.  Look, I love reading and read something every morning, but after days of touristy things, I was pretty tired.

Oh, and I wrote zero words of new fiction despite bringing the Chromebook. It was truly a reset time.

Happenstance TV Watching

What we did each night was watch some TV. During the regular TV season, the wife and I have a few staple shows we watch together and a few we watch separately. Down in Corpus, we watched together every night while the boy entertained himself with YouTube and other streaming shows.

Now, we subscribe to Netflix and Amazon and the streaming-compatible DVD player in the rented condo likely could have been programmed with our passwords, but each night, we opted to "just see what's on." One night was a DVD my wife bought from Half Price for $2. It was for a show called "Maggie," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It wasn't great. One night was a 1983 Charles Bronson film "10 to Midnight," a markedly better movie but by no means great. We both chuckled about 80s action movies/police movies, especially considering the abrupt ending. The other nights were unmemorable except for the bulk of Lethal Weapon 2.

As I've written before, as nice as it is to have so much content available at our fingertips on demand, it's kinda neat to just channel surf and land on something.

That One Little Thing

So how does all this non-writing relate to writing? Well, it happened on Thursday morning on our way out of town. I specifically brought some old proof copies of a few of my books to leave in the condo. Instead, I delivered them to one of those free-standing neighborhood library pop-ups. Seeing as how these were proofs copies, all my marks-ups were scattered through the pages. So I penned a note inside each book letting future readers know what these books were, why they were marked up, but hoping they'd enjoy the story.

And I signed them.

That one little thing sparked the proverbial pilot light in my writing soul that had been too long at a low flame. Why? If I hazard a guess, it's because I was ultimately sharing those stories with others. As much as I enjoy spinning these yarns, I really enjoy sharing them. Yeah, I know ALL writers enjoy sharing their stories, but that doesn't make it untrue.

Moreover, the writing portion of the equation is the one thing over which we writers have 100% control, as JA Konrath so brilliantly pointed out this week.

Controllables

I've written here about controlling the controllables. Well, earlier this week, prolific author JA Konrath discussed marketing plans by writers. He has a sobering verdict: most are bad.

However, he offered a ray of light to all writers (or all creatives) in the form of a message he'd send to his younger self:

"One brand, one genre, stop experimenting, stop being a perfectionist, and just write five good books a year in the same series. Make sure they are professionally edited and formatted, have great covers and descriptions, keep length under 75k words, and make sure they have updated, clickable bibliographies in the back matter, pre-order pages for the next release, and newsletter sign-up forms."

Head on over to the main post for his in-depth pathway that led him to this conclusion. It is chock full of details.


That's it for this week. A non-writing week full of barely reading. But that's not bad right?

RTX/SGC 2016 Convention in Austin

I’m used to comic book and SF conventions. The people who attend are, by and large, my people. I’m one of them. But an internet/gaming/YouTube convention? I’m more of a bystander, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a blast at the RTX/SGC convention in Austin over the weekend.

According to the website, “RTX is a three day gaming and internet culture event hosted by Rooster Teeth!” The con was held at the Austin Convention Center (ACC), one block north of Town Lake. I graduated from The University of Texas at Austin but I never had cause—or knew about—the ACC. Man, is it huge. And packed with a lot of people. The percentage of cosplayers was not as high as Comicpalooza in Houston, but they were still there. Most of the attendees were folks with ages ranging from teenagers to upper twenties. I saw a decent number of younger kids with parents in two and some folks more my age without a young chaperon, but, by and large, this seemed to be a young person’s con.

That being said, the first area you see right inside the main doors was the retro arcade games! Asteroids! Tron (very glitchy)! Donkey Kong! Pole Position II! Star Wars! <—this was the original Star Wars vector graphics game which I still know how to play and win. That made my day.

Two YouTubers were the big draw for me and my boy. Jirard the Completionist is a dude who, as his name implies, completes a game every week.

ProJared is another reviewer/game player who is highly thought of here at my house.

Both are funny guys. We attended both panels on Saturday. Now, what that means is that we sat in line at 1pm, attended the Completionist panel at 2pm, got back in line at 3pm, and then saw ProJared at 4pm. That may sound…interesting…but being in line at a con like this can actually be fun. You start up conversations with folks and share stories. The Completionist picked 8 audience members to come up and play a Super Smash Bros. tournament. ProJared’s experience doing stand-up comedy was on full display. Both panels were a lot of fun.

The weekend was not without its challenges. As soon as we got to Austin, the transmission in my dad’s van decided to stop working. Enter: tow truck. Enter: Toyota dealership. Enter: Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Enter: being 4 hours late to the start of the convention. Ugh! But…that delay enabled us to be at the exact right spot for us to meet the Completionist and ProJared just walking around the convention floor! So we got our photos without having to wait in any lines! So it all worked out.

Conventions. Love’em. Love the people and the vibes.

Oh, and I found myself on TV.

The Simplicity of Travel

In an ironic bit of serendipity, my fellow author, Joelle Charbonneau, wrote about the increasing difficultly in unplugging when traveling on vacation. I, too, had that topic in the hopper as a topic worthy of discussion, but hadn't got around to it until now.

A little over a week ago, my family and I took a little vacation to Camp Wood, Texas, a small (768!) town about 2 hours west of San Antonio along the Neuces River canyon. We wanted to cap off the summer and get us ready for the new school year. As a reader, one of my favorite things to do is decide what reading material I'll bring. In the past, in order to have on hand any book that I *might* want to read given the destination--I'm one of those weird folk who tailors his reading to the vacation location--I'd be hamstrung with bringing a backpack full of things. I'm not kidding here. We'd have the suitcases, the carry on bags, and then there'd be the "book bag." The wife was puzzled. I'd shrug my shoulders.

With my Nook and the iPad, that bag full of books now became two slim electronic devices. Couple my composition book (the marbled-looking kind) and my bluetooth keyboard (to link with the iPad), my reading and writing material was wonderfully self-contained. I could have packed them in the suitcase, but opted for a backpack that was basically not needed. And, because I simply cannot go on a vacation without at least one physical book of some sort, literally on the way out the door, I grabbed my copy of Merle Miller's Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry Truman.

While my wife and I have cell phones, they are not smart phones. Yes, I'd love to have an iPhone, but, as of now, I don't have one. The only place in Camp Wood that has wifi was the public library, but, since I had no reason to go there, and since the hours were not a regular 8-5, I knew going in that I would not have internet access. The little house in which we stayed had DirectTV but we were blessedly away for the evening national news most days. We would glance at the local 10pm news out of San Antonio so we knew basically what was going on, but we weren't real worried about stuff. It was a vacation, after all.

Now, Joelle is a published author while I am, to date, not, so, understandably, she has many more deadlines that I have. The ones I have are all internal, on my own clock. It's a tad easier for me to just unplug. Going into past vacations pre-iPad, I never took my laptop, even as I was writing my first book. I'd always take the comp book and "unplug" from the electronic devices, too. I gave in with the iPad/keyboard combo and it wasn't bad at all.

What was great about the trip, what was simple, was that "my stack" of stuff consisted of the iPad, the Nook, the keyboard that I keep in its original box, and the Truman biography. Stacked together, they measured less than six inches tall. Everything that I brought occupied a nice, small, compact space. I didn't have my shelves of books I have here at the house with their spines staring down at me, calling me like sirens. I didn't have the other long boxes of comics doing the same thing. I didn't have the internet to use to chase some odd tidbit down a rabbit hole (still my biggest time waster). I had only that which I wanted to read and two modes of creating text.

And that's all I really needed. It was such a simple few days. I rose early like I always do, put on the coffee, and read the Truman biography for about an hour. Miller's book is basically a bunch of transcripts of his interviews with President Truman and his associates conducted in 1962 for a television show that was never made. If you've always heard about Truman's outlook on the world and his particular way of saying things, you should give this book a read. In our digital age, I'd love for those actual tapes to be digitized and made available. After an hour or so with Truman, I'd fire up the iPad/keyboard and bust out an hour's worth of whatever before the rest of the family began to stir. It was so simple.

Then we returned home, with all the shelves, the comic boxes, the internet, all of them begging to slice away just a little of our day. I'm not saying that I want to rid myself of my stuff, but there's a nice simplicity when you travel and you end up taking that which you need. When I pared down my actual reading needs for those few days, all the clutter here at the house seems, well, too much. I've still spent my mornings with Truman and I've finished the novel (the three novella Derek Storm story by "Richard Castle") I started in Camp Wood, but I still see all the things I *could* be reading when I sit in my library and read something. I do tune them out, but they still stare at me.

That's why I like vacations and the simplicity of travel. It's a chance to par things down to the essentials and, upon returning home, gives you a chance to reevaluate some of the things that might be cluttering up your life, be they digital or physical.