Tuesday, March 22, 2011
First Day
Well folks, The Road to Goodbye is available through both Amazon and Smashwords. Between these two vendors you should be able to purchase a copy of the book for anything with a screen. Yes, whatever device your using to read this post could also serve as an eReader. Head over to either site to find out how.
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Next Movement
Like I said, after two years of shopping I realized I had a decision to make; make the changes BBB wanted me to make, or do something different.
This is the different route.
Beyond the Red Line is a massive book. And it's the first book in a series of four equally massive books. When I was trying to end up in a Big Box Bookstore (BBB) I made a lot of cuts to keep the book at a readable size. These cuts fell into two categories. 1) Good Idea Cuts and 2) Nature of the Beast Cuts.
Good Idea Cuts were ones meant to keep the story moving along. Yknow, the kind of editing that separates good writing from terrible writing. No problem with these at all.
Then there are the Nature Cuts. The cuts where things went away not because they were badly written, but because they went off on tangents that made the novel unreadable in BBB's eyes. My focus group readers didn't have a problem with these tangents as a matter of fact most members of this group loved the tangents. But BBB was convinced that the book would never sell with these tangents in, so I got rid of them.
At some point, it hit me. If I release the book as a quarterly eBook, I could keep more of the tangents in. And then, I could take the tangents that didn't get written, or that really don't fit and release them periodically as bonus chapters for free, or nearly free. So that's what I'm going to do.
Beyond the Red Line started out five years ago as a therapy session designed to help me get through a really rough patch. What took it from two legal pads to the 93,000 novel it is today is the world that I stumbled upon. I fell in love with the alternate universe I created and I want to tell as many stories about this world as possible. Now, I have the option of doing that.
The plan is to release quarterly issues on the following schedule for the next four years.
March 22- Summer Quarterly
June 23- Autumn Quarterly
September 14- Winter Quarterly
December 12- Spring Quarterly/The Annual Print Omnibus
In between, I'll throw out singles that help develop things we already know about Diego and his friends at Willis College. Look for those to start happening after the next quarterly drops in June.
There are other projects in the pipeline, other worlds to explore and we'll get there in time. Right now, let's see how this one works.
This is the different route.
Beyond the Red Line is a massive book. And it's the first book in a series of four equally massive books. When I was trying to end up in a Big Box Bookstore (BBB) I made a lot of cuts to keep the book at a readable size. These cuts fell into two categories. 1) Good Idea Cuts and 2) Nature of the Beast Cuts.
Good Idea Cuts were ones meant to keep the story moving along. Yknow, the kind of editing that separates good writing from terrible writing. No problem with these at all.
Then there are the Nature Cuts. The cuts where things went away not because they were badly written, but because they went off on tangents that made the novel unreadable in BBB's eyes. My focus group readers didn't have a problem with these tangents as a matter of fact most members of this group loved the tangents. But BBB was convinced that the book would never sell with these tangents in, so I got rid of them.
At some point, it hit me. If I release the book as a quarterly eBook, I could keep more of the tangents in. And then, I could take the tangents that didn't get written, or that really don't fit and release them periodically as bonus chapters for free, or nearly free. So that's what I'm going to do.
Beyond the Red Line started out five years ago as a therapy session designed to help me get through a really rough patch. What took it from two legal pads to the 93,000 novel it is today is the world that I stumbled upon. I fell in love with the alternate universe I created and I want to tell as many stories about this world as possible. Now, I have the option of doing that.
The plan is to release quarterly issues on the following schedule for the next four years.
March 22- Summer Quarterly
June 23- Autumn Quarterly
September 14- Winter Quarterly
December 12- Spring Quarterly/The Annual Print Omnibus
In between, I'll throw out singles that help develop things we already know about Diego and his friends at Willis College. Look for those to start happening after the next quarterly drops in June.
There are other projects in the pipeline, other worlds to explore and we'll get there in time. Right now, let's see how this one works.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Origin Story
It feels as though origin stories are only popular in medias res, which for some this may very well be. But for most, this origin is coming at the beginning of the tale. It doesn't matter, we'll get back to real time in a few minutes at which point this whole introduction will seem self-indulgent. But that's not really my problem.
It was late May and my last day of work. My buddy Big C and I woke up that morning, got into a UHaul and drove into the office. There weren't any meetings that day, no paperwork to push, no donuts to eat, just boxes to clear out of my office, keys to turn in and goodbyes to say. By noon we were headed down Iowa St. past 31st and onward to Hwy 59 south. Next stop, New Mexico.
What awaited me at the end of the trip was the unknown. My wife and I had no apartment, I had no job and the longer I looked for either, the slimmer the pickings became. Within a few days I was sitting alone in the un-air conditioned cinderblock studio college dorm room we were temporarily occupying feeling sorry for myself. I'd left my beautiful home, my amazing job and my good friends to follow my wife across the country to her home state to be unemployed and living in a college dorm with college students who were less than pleased to have me, or my wife around.
Needless to say I began to think that I had hit the worst moment of my life.
Being a man of a particular age and pop cultural persuasion I was led to compile a list of the all-time worst days of my life. I figured, if my current existence was so miserable, I might as well put my misery into some kind of perspective. When I was done going over the previous 27 years I was left with a few incredible facts. 1) That day, and the days since I got into that UHaul weren't even in the Top 5 of worst days of my life and 2) All five of the worst days of my life were within ~18 months of each other.
I was amazed. Really? That day, which felt so terrible and empty wasn't remotely as bad as the worst day of my life? Really?
Then something strange happened, I started to think back to that worst day. To the confluence of factors that had made that day so overwhelmingly terrible that it ended with me passed out on my best friend's floor. And I realized that my memory of that day was beginning to decay, almost 9 years after the fact.
So I started to write it down, the story of the worst day of my life. Then, I started writing down the story of how I'd arrived at the worst day of my life and somewhere along the way the story changed and it wasn't about me and my friends anymore. It was about this other universe and these other people that I'd never met but who seemed vaguely familiar. I'd found a portal into an alternate universe.
Three years after that first day I had a book called "Beyond the Red Line."
It was a coming of age tale about a kid not unlike me, but nothing like me.
I began to shop it around the publishing industry, talking to different agents and editors for nearly two years. In this time, I left my job in middle management at Borders Books because I saw the writing on the wall. Big Box Books (BBB) are dying. People liked what they'd seen of my book, but they didn't see a place for it in BBB. Everyone I talked to couldn't figure out what table to put it on, or shelf to hide away in unless I made "changes."
Listen, I'm not an artist. I'm not better than the people who made great suggestions about how to make my book more marketable. And I'll probably write the book those really incredible people asked me to write for them. But RedLine is not that book.
I'm going out on my own. Things have changed since Benny Russell said that self-published books might as well be written in chalk on a sidewalk. eBooks have democratized the playing field, so I might as well get in the game.
This brings me to this blog.
This is the official blog for both me as an author, and my publisher, Hill 203 Press. This is where we'll document the ride we're about to go on...cuz it's gonna be a helluva ride.
It was late May and my last day of work. My buddy Big C and I woke up that morning, got into a UHaul and drove into the office. There weren't any meetings that day, no paperwork to push, no donuts to eat, just boxes to clear out of my office, keys to turn in and goodbyes to say. By noon we were headed down Iowa St. past 31st and onward to Hwy 59 south. Next stop, New Mexico.
What awaited me at the end of the trip was the unknown. My wife and I had no apartment, I had no job and the longer I looked for either, the slimmer the pickings became. Within a few days I was sitting alone in the un-air conditioned cinderblock studio college dorm room we were temporarily occupying feeling sorry for myself. I'd left my beautiful home, my amazing job and my good friends to follow my wife across the country to her home state to be unemployed and living in a college dorm with college students who were less than pleased to have me, or my wife around.
Needless to say I began to think that I had hit the worst moment of my life.
Being a man of a particular age and pop cultural persuasion I was led to compile a list of the all-time worst days of my life. I figured, if my current existence was so miserable, I might as well put my misery into some kind of perspective. When I was done going over the previous 27 years I was left with a few incredible facts. 1) That day, and the days since I got into that UHaul weren't even in the Top 5 of worst days of my life and 2) All five of the worst days of my life were within ~18 months of each other.
I was amazed. Really? That day, which felt so terrible and empty wasn't remotely as bad as the worst day of my life? Really?
Then something strange happened, I started to think back to that worst day. To the confluence of factors that had made that day so overwhelmingly terrible that it ended with me passed out on my best friend's floor. And I realized that my memory of that day was beginning to decay, almost 9 years after the fact.
So I started to write it down, the story of the worst day of my life. Then, I started writing down the story of how I'd arrived at the worst day of my life and somewhere along the way the story changed and it wasn't about me and my friends anymore. It was about this other universe and these other people that I'd never met but who seemed vaguely familiar. I'd found a portal into an alternate universe.
Three years after that first day I had a book called "Beyond the Red Line."
It was a coming of age tale about a kid not unlike me, but nothing like me.
I began to shop it around the publishing industry, talking to different agents and editors for nearly two years. In this time, I left my job in middle management at Borders Books because I saw the writing on the wall. Big Box Books (BBB) are dying. People liked what they'd seen of my book, but they didn't see a place for it in BBB. Everyone I talked to couldn't figure out what table to put it on, or shelf to hide away in unless I made "changes."
Listen, I'm not an artist. I'm not better than the people who made great suggestions about how to make my book more marketable. And I'll probably write the book those really incredible people asked me to write for them. But RedLine is not that book.
I'm going out on my own. Things have changed since Benny Russell said that self-published books might as well be written in chalk on a sidewalk. eBooks have democratized the playing field, so I might as well get in the game.
This brings me to this blog.
This is the official blog for both me as an author, and my publisher, Hill 203 Press. This is where we'll document the ride we're about to go on...cuz it's gonna be a helluva ride.
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