Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Publishing (Page 2 of 5)

Travel Preparations

December 11, 2024 /

Later this week I am traveling back to England to visit family and friends and to visit Heallreaf 5 at the Morley Gallery in London.

I have all the logistics sorted out – flights, rental car, and hotel, and I have a good idea of the clothes I’m taking. Which leaves the hardest choices of all – what reading material am I taking with me. And how much space do I leave in the bag for items to bring back. For items, read books!

I know there’s at least two books coming back as they are waiting at my sister’s house. There will possibly be more as I have a trip planned to at least one bookstore in London. If that sounds to be a crazy idea ten days before Christmas, I can only agree.

I’ll let you know how the book shopping expedition goes.

First Thoughts on 2025

December 2, 2024 /

Here in the US, the Thanksgiving Holiday is behind us, and Black Friday is gone. All the stores and television channels are now in full Christmas mode. I even received an email over the weekend urging me to buy my Valentines gift now before it’s too late!

I’ve already begun building the 2025 version of the various spreadsheets I use to track finances, investments, and writing. As I’ve done that, naturally my thoughts have turned to the coming year. I’ll leave a review of 2024 until later this month when I’ll have a better idea of how 2024 really turns out.

Some of the 2025 thoughts are very unformed at the moment – like what books to write. I can say the next Jacob and Miriam story and the next books in the Serpent Trilogy, but that’s trying to force my creative voice and as I learned in November, that doesn’t work so well.

Some of the business related goals are easier. The web site where you’re reading this blog, for example hasn’t been updated in over a year, which begs a decision. Spend the time updating the web site, or bite the bullet and move everything to Shopify? My gut feel at the moment is to move everything to Shopify because there I can also manage a mailing list.

Outside of writing, I found a neat investment charting package that looks to do most of what I want for a semi-automated trading system. More on that as I learn more about the software. And let’s not forget the honey-do list :). We’ve been in our current house for nearly seven years and there are a lot of paint jobs coming due.

One blessing is that I don’t have to search for a new contract this year. Leaving that aside, it’s still a long list, and whichever way I look at it, 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year.

Heinlein’s Second Rule

November 25, 2024 /

Robert Heinlein wrote his five rules of writing in an article back in 1947.

  • You must write
  • You must finish what you write
  • Refrain from rewriting
  • Put your story on the market
  • Keep it on the market until it sells

Individually, they sound simple. Following them all and consistently is the challenge. There are many reasons, or excuses, for not finishing a story. The main one is when your own head gets in the way, and that happened to me this past week, although if I’m honest, it’s been building for two or three weeks.

Earlier this month, I published a novella and put a banner on the cover that said Book One of the trilogy. Stupid of me because that made book two Important, and I have struggled with the story ever since. And let’s not even talk about book three!

Except book two isn’t really important. It’s just another story, and if I’m following Heinlein’s Rules, I have to finish the story.

Well yes, but maybe not finish today or this week. I came across a technique I’m setting up that should help with this. The technique is to go on to a new project. Something that’s exciting and I want to write (plenty of those running around my head), and spend maybe eighty percent of my writing time on that new project. The other twenty percent goes to book two.

Maybe it’s only fifty or a hundred words that get written each day on book two. Maybe it’s a thousand. Either way I’m making progress and whether it’s December or next March, I’ve made the commitment to my creative voice that I will finish the story.

Now I can let creative voice go and play and know I’m keeping to Heinlein’s second rule.

A Quiet Week

November 18, 2024 /

If you’re anywhere near Auburn, Alabama you may have heard about the destruction of the eagles nest by a housing developer. The situation is now under official investigation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Apart from that it was a fairly quiet week. I did get The Head of the Serpent published but didn’t make much progress on the sequel. I expect this week to be better.

A Milestone Reached

November 11, 2024 /

This past week, I reached the milestone of having written over a million words of publishable fiction.

I remember when I first began tracking my word count how one manuscript page – about 250 words – seemed a huge hurdle to reach every day. Now I’ve developed the writing muscle, and it doesn’t seem such a challenge.

At first glance, a million words sounds a lot, but I wrote those words over a six year period. I have a long way to go to emulate writers like John D MacDonald or Dean Wesley Smith for whom a million words is the annual target.

Just to help with the math on this, a million words a year is an average of about 2,750 words a day. I don’t think I’ll manage the next million words by the end of 2025. In the same way you don’t leave your doorstep and run a full marathon without preparation and training, making that leap to a million words a year requires similar planning and preparation. Not least in the planning is what to do with those ten to twenty books you write in that year!

As I said, I don’t think 2025 will be a million word year, but I should certainly be able to write the next million words in less than six years.

A Long Time Coming

October 28, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finished the copy edit read through of a novella titled The Head of the Serpent. It will be the first of a trilogy, and the second is already well under way.

Nothing special, you might think, except this one is different. I first had the idea for this story over thirty years ago, before I even moved to the United States. In that first iteration the story was driven by political events at the time.

As with life, there is change. What seemed new and shiny at one time soon became old news. Over the years I’ve put the idea aside, picked it up, made changes and set it down again.

In September, I picked up the idea again, shook my head at some of those early chapters and removed all the “big” world events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan – and tightened it down to the characters in the story. They have always been consistent, although their backgrounds have changed.

After all this time, you’d expect the story to write itself, and in many ways it did, although there were still a few incidents that took me by surprise as the story unfolded.

The goal is to finish putting the copy edits into the manuscript, and publish by the weekend. This one has been a long time in the making, but I’m pleased it’s finally here.

A Production Backlog

October 1, 2024 /

Over the past few years my production cycle – that’s the work I do between finishing the story and pressing the publish button Amazon, Kobo etc. – has been pretty ad-hoc. As I finish a story, I think about editing, covers, and sales copy.
That wasn’t really a problem when I was publishing a novel a year.

This year it’s been two novels, and I have on my desk a novella and a short story collection waiting to finish that production cycle, with another novella planned to finish by the end of October, and a third one by Christmas.

Those two published titles I mentioned last week still aren’t published!

I had an inkling this might be a problem when the manuscript for The Corpse in the Courtyard sat gathering dust for nearly two months before I got to the final read through.

It’s a problem I’m glad to have. It means I’m starting to hit some of the word count and project goals I’m aiming for. It also means my production schedule needs more planning than just an ad-hoc set of activities.

More of the Same

September 23, 2024 /

This last week has been fairly quiet. I wrote most of a Jacob short story with no real idea who the killer was, or how it ended. That was until late last night. I have to make some changes for consistency but nothing too heavy. My expectation is to finish the story tonight or tomorrow.

There’s been a lot of publishing energy going on as well. I’m about a third of the way through the final read on a novella. The cover and sales copy are all done so publishing will be soon after I get the corrections put into the manuscript. In parallel, I found several stories with the same protagonist. I finished the cover and sales copy yesterday.

The introduction is next on my to-do list after the Jacob story. By the end of the month, I should have two more titles available.

Thrill Ride 7 is nearly here

September 3, 2024 /

Make a wildfire your ally. Tread softly with the French Resistance during WWII. Extract an informant from the dangers of the Babylonian streets. Sail the Atlantic, float down a river, or take a fishing boat far out to sea. And you can always fight the Phoenicians with the least lucky Viking ever born.

My short story Making the Way Home is included in this issue of Thrill Ride Magazine.

Thrill Ride 7 arrives on September 21. You can preorder your copy on amazon at:amazon.com/gp/product/B0CWCPJZM5

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