An Advent Calendar of Stories

As of today, we have only twenty days until Christmas. Shopping will definitely look different this year. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been ordering many if not most gifts online. Some of the mad rush as we count down the days until the 25th will shift.

In our entryway, we have an Advent calendar. Ours is a homemade one where each day, we get to place an ornament on the tree. There are a myriad of other Advent calendars: Legos, chocolate, wine, you name it.

One of the most unique focuses on stories. Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith have, for the second year in a row, created an Advent calendar type project. Truth is, it started on Thanksgiving day and extends to New Year’s Day, but all that means is extra stories. Rusch and Smith curated lots of stories, sifting out the best ones.

After you sign up via Kickstarter at the level of your choice, you’ll get an email every day. In the email, Rusch writes an introduction and then gives you a BookFunnel link. From there, you can download the story onto the device of your choice. I use my Kobo reader and it works seamlessly.

So, if you are in the mood to get a story a day this Christmas season, head on over to the webpage and sign up. It’ll make each day of this month fly by.

Year of an Indie Writer: Week 30

Prolific writer Dean Wesley Smith calls summer the Time of the Great Forgetting. It’s that part of the year in which all those New Year’s Resolutions authors made to write more content slowly fades away. Come Labor Day, they’ll wake up, realize they blew a 97-day time to progress on their work, and likely feel depressed. Smith has a cure for that here.

For me, it’s not so much a great forgetting as a dividing of focus. There’s a project I’m working on—the same one I mentioned last week, the one about a filmmaker’s work—that’ll go live the first full week of August. It’s grown more than a bit, but it’s a blast to do. Looking forward, the bulk of the work on this project will be done by mid August, and from then on, it’ll just be rolling out on a weekly basis.

And there might be a video component. Stay tuned.

But said filmmaker’s body of work has also inspired to write a novel that is completely different than anything I’ve ever written. I’m making slow but steady progress on it, with an aim for publication this fall. I’m not forgetting.  Are you?

One Name to Rule Them All

Back in 2015 when I started publishing my mystery novels, I used my full name. When I came around and started publishing Westerns, I kept full name. Over time, as I listened and learned how other writers conducted their businesses, I decided to segment my books with a separate pen name for the Westerns, S. D. Parker. The idea was Also-Boughts and the algorithms churning underneath the facades of all the various online bookstores. Made sense at the time.

But over time, my thinking has evolved. When I ask veteran writers the question about pen names, almost all of them suggest using a single name, no matter then genre. As long as the covers are genre-specific with genre-specific SEO and blurbs, it’ll ultimately be better to have a single name and put everything under it.

I was leaning that direction, but over the summer, I have decided to bring the Westerns under the Scott Dennis Parker name. It’s not a big deal, really. All it means is that I’ll have to de-list the S. D. Parker books, slightly change the covers and internal front matter, and then republish.

If someone finds my work via Westerns and they like mysteries, they’ll have an easy transition. The reverse is also true.

More importantly, however, is the idea that a business can change as trends and new ideas emerge. Nothing wrong with that.

Having everything under one name will make all grunt work of file management much more streamlined.  I’m even contemplating bringing all my stories under the Draft2Digital universe. I’ve got most of them there now and they truly make it a no-brainer. just this week, I’ve been sending them questions about the procedures for changing my author name. They get back to me with personalized answers within a day. Customer service goes a long way.

Anyone else use Draft2Digital? If not, I certainly recommend them.

Interview of the Week: Paul Levitz

Dan Greenfield, over at the wonderful 13th Dimension website, re-posted his 2015 interviews with Levitz in honor of the longtime editor/writer’s induction into the Eisner Hall of Fame at Comicon this year.

They talk about his tenure as the sole Batman editor starting in 1978. Great behind-the-scenes stuff.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Year of an Indie Writer: Week 18

One of the ideas we had when we created Do Some Damage ten years ago was to talk about the writing process. We've done that, and continue to do so, but sometimes there's some advice so good, you just walk away from your keyboard.

Advice from a Veteran Writer

The Monday post on Dean Wesley Smith's blog was a fantastic way to kick-off the week. With permission, Dean shared writing advice from Joe Lansdale. A fellow Texan who lives in Nacogdoches, Lansdale lays out his philosophy of writing in a multi-page post from Facebook. I know it's multiple pages because I printed the thing out to have near at hand when I'm feeling low about writing.

Read it. Just read it.

A couple of days later, Dean excerpted a paragraph from Joe's piece. Pay attention to the last sentence.

“Write like everyone you know is dead. To hell with everyone else’s opinion when you write. Write for yourself. I don’t have a perfect reader in mind. That works for some, but it makes me write for them which means I might not be writing for me. I have no idea what anyone else will like. I only know what I like, so I write for me. It’s a wonderfully selfish moment. When I’m done, and the book or story is out there, then I hope a lot of folks like it. But face it, you can’t be universally admired, so don’t try to be.”

Yet More Writerly Advice

On the most recent episode of Fatman Beyond, writers Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin took questions from the audience. Usually, it's about the movies and comics and such. This time, we had a guy ask about writing advice. Paraphrased, here is what I captured from each of them.

Kevin: Your voice is your currency.

It's my voice. Like it or not, but it's me. Tell your story at all costs. That's what you've got. Live and die by your voice. You can't guarantee success, but you can make it perfect for you. So if no one else comes to the show, it's still you.

Nothing bad ever came from you doing you.

Marc: Always be making something. You'll get better at it. You'll keep making mistakes, but you'll learn, and then make new ones and then learn from those.

Iteration is what it's all about. Because someone may not buy your first or second or whatever thing, but when they finally sit up and take notice, you'll have a "barnful" of stuff that you've been making all the while.

You can't get better by reading or listening, but by making the thing. Make that thing true to who you are.

Encourage Others Because It Comes Back Around

How often do you talk to other about your writing career? For me, not often, but when those moments occur, I try to make it worthwhile.

I've got a new co-worker at the day job. Yesterday, she mentioned she wanted to write a book. I asked her what held her back. She came back with the same kinds of barriers you frequently hear, but it boils down to this: the critical voice keeps getting in the way and the idea of writing an entire book is so daunting, one just doesn't begin.

I chatted with her, giving her the pep talk I give to other writers--and sometimes myself--about writing with abandon and joy, track your daily word count as a default cheerleader, and keep that pesky critical voice out of your head.

I also told her that writing "The End" on drafts never gets old, but the first time is a Cloud 9 experience.

I also mentioned she out to set a start and end date (Memorial Day to Labor Day) and let that be her bookends.

She got excited. I did, too, because talking about writing and encouraging others is a thrill.

Peter Mayhew

Hats off to Peter Mayhew, arguably one of the greatest cinematic sidekicks/partners in all of moviedom. Met him once here in Houston, late on one of the days, might have even been a Sunday. He was tired. My boy and I were, too. I'm not a huge autograph guy, but I wanted to meet Mayhew and be the millionth person to tell him how much I enjoyed his work. He was nice and gracious. Based on what I've been reading, that was how he was all the time.



That about wraps things up for another week. Hope y'all have a good weekend, and tune in next week when I'm going to review five of my favorite podcasts starting on Monday.

May the Fourth be with y'all. And go get some comics today!

A Writer and the "Right" Way

In his Monday post, Dean Wesley Smith talks about the wrong direction for a writer. Like many of his posts, this one hit home.

Dean sees the Critical Voice as one with the sole objective of stopping the Creative Voice from having fun. The Creative Voice is the little child in each writer who only wants to tell stories. Critical Voice is the adult who keeps trying to say what the child is writing isn't good or isn't up to some vague notion of what will sell. Worse, we might write ourselves into a corner and, not knowing how to get out of it, might trash thousands of words as we rewrite ourselves back onto the "right" road. Or, most recently for me, wondering whether or not to publish a story that doesn't quite match what I've published to date.

Boy have I used that excuse more than once. And it has worked more than once. But like Dean wrote in his piece, how do we writers know we've gone in a wrong direction?

We don't. We have no clue what or how a reader will react to anything we've written. I recently had an experience like that.

When I posted the first chapter of a short story titled "Amber Alert" to my newsletter, I got some feedback. It was a different type of story, a modern crime story with a completely different vibe than the westerns or historical mysteries I usually write. I was actually a tad worried it wouldn't be greeted well. Granted, it wasn't going to stop me from publishing it, but I figured it might be a story that doesn't resonate.

Yet some folks really dug it. And they took the time to send me an email telling me so.

Looks like I was wrong. Why? Because a writer's job is to write stories. Promote those stories and get them out to readers. After that, it's out of a writer's hands. Then, and most crucially, write the next story.