Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 5)

This week I started a new story in my Babylon series. It’s a little different from most of the others because the main character in this story is the priest Arioch. The beginning is in the Esagila temple complex, Babylon’s main religious center, and I was on a roll, pounding the keys as the words flowed.

About three or four hundred words later, I paused, went back to tidy up what I’d written, and stopped at one word.

Bedlam.

I’d used the word to describe Arioch’s thoughts about the noise coming from outside. For some reason it didn’t feel right, but I wasn’t sure why. On an impulse, I reached behind my desk for the dictionary in the book case and flicked to the “B’s”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, bedlam is a corruption of Bethlehem, first used in England in the 1400’s and 1500’s in relation to the London mental hospital St. Mary of Bethlehem.

Over time, the word bedlam came to mean uproar and confusion. More importantly, it isn’t a word Arioch would have known or used.

There was a part of me that argued to leave the wording as it was. After all, how many of my readers would pick up on Arioch using a word that didn’t exist until nearly a thousand years after he lived? The thing is, I’d know, and every time I read that paragraph it would kick me out of the story, which means some of you are likely to have the same reaction.

I changed the paragraph, but Arioch’s still in trouble. Now, I just have to work out how he fixes it

So, I looked at the calendar yesterday, and realized the plan to post my February update in early March was so late, it makes more sense to do a double update. Well, it did to me.

Starting with the updates, the story I mentioned in the last post was accepted by WMG Publishing for their anthology Promise in the Gold, which will be published later this year. Additionally, the paperback version of Thieves in the Temple is available on Amazon, and I published the Portals collection under the title Tales From the Puzzle Store in early March. No paperback version as yet, but stay tuned.

One of the learning items from putting together Tales From the Puzzle Store has been Books2Read. They are part of Draft2Digital, and provide you with a single link that references all the online stores where your books are available. You’ll see some changes on the other pages of this site in the next few weeks as I implement those links, and a page about the other collections planned for this year. I’m also looking at working with Payhip and Book Funnel so you can buy directly from this site without going through any of the big retailers. 

I’ve continued using the beta for Aeon Timeline 3, including using it to map out a longer term series project that could easily run to six or more books, although it will probably be later this year, or early 2022 before I get to start on those.  

I’ve done quite a bit of research and thinking about the Thieves in the Temple and its successors, and how they should be branded. Going forward, the plan is to use a sub-title A Jacob and Miriam Novel. Of course that may change by the time Death at a Wedding comes out. Needless to say, those dates have slid a little, so more when there’s news to share on that front.

This past week I nearly screwed up.

I wrote a short story for an anthology with a deadline of February 14^th – and no, it wasn’t a romance :).

I had a couple of other projects with deadlines on the 14^th, and for once focused on one at a time. My usual approach has been to work on everything at once, and we all know how that tends to work out.

By Saturday evening I had the story under control, and estimated I needed another five hundred words or so to finish it. Gauging the number of words to the end is something that just happened when I did the story a week challenge last year. I’ve been within a couple of hundred words in those estimates and a quick burst of writing on Sunday morning got me over the finish line and on the upper side of the estimate.

I read through the story, sorted out spelling and punctuation and ended up with just over 2,500 words. I transferred it into proper manuscript format, checked the submission guidelines. 

And crap!

The minimum submission length was 3,000 words. Somewhere in my head I recalled the minimum as 2,000.

I’d kicked around two or three other ideas for this anthology none of which had enough structure in my mind to pull three thousand words together in a few hours.

Did I mention I’d also promised to grill steaks for a Valentine’s dinner?

There was no point in submitting the story as it was – automatic rejection, so, I printed a hard copy of the story, sat down with the dogs on either side, ready to offer advice, and looked at what I’d written. As I read through I didn’t try to edit and restructure the story or replace word order. I tried to really put myself in the head of my main character, think about what she would see, smell, hear, feel, and touch. The five senses that add depth and and richness to the descriptions of where she is and what’s happening.

I think it was less than an hour later that I took the notes I’d scribbled over the margins and between lines, updated the manuscript and realized I now had over 3,000 words.

Yes, you can overthink the editing process, but in this case, editing wasn’t changing the way the story was written. It was adding depth to hopefully help my reader stay connected to the story. 

If you’d asked me two weeks ago if I could do that, I would have said no. 

Now I know I can do that with a story

I’ll let you know what happens.

Technical issues on this site prevented updates during the remainder of January. I spent some time with the iPower support team and they tell me the issue is resolved, although I’m still seeing some odd behavior on the site.

As a result of the technical issues the updates I had planned for January are now pushed to February which is already pretty crowded.

There was no progress on the paperback version of Thieves in the Temple. It requires a block of dedicated time in Affinity Photo and to be honest I’ve had more fun with Death at a Wedding and writing three of the five short stories for the Portals Collection which will be published either later in February or early March. I wrote just over 20,000 words in January, the most in a month since April 2020, so I’m quite pleased with that progress and just need to keep it up for the rest of 2021!

I also laid out my 2021 publishing plan in January. At the moment it’s in an Excel spreadsheet but I will be moving it to the new version of Aeon Timeline as part of my version 3 beta testing. The new mind map option in Aeon 3 looks to be very powerful. I have some ideas on some non-standard uses for it, and will let you know how it works out.

About a month ago, Dean Wesley Smith announced on his blog that he was starting a publishing challenge: publish 70 pieces of his own works – written and edited in the next year to coincide with his 70^th birthday. A couple of weeks after that, he issued a challenge to the rest of us: publish 52 pieces of our own works in 2021. As a partial rebuttal to the potential naysayers, Dean asked the rhetorical question for those who completed the short story challenge – how many of those 52 stories have you published?

I completed the challenge: 52 stories in 52 weeks, and I’ve been reasonably diligent in getting them out to magazine editors. Not so diligent at getting them up online. Dean’s question could have been directed right at me.

So.

Challenge accepted!

Of course there’s more to putting a story online than just converting to ePub or mobi. There’s covers, copy, categories, and pricing!

The timing is excellent because with Thieves in the Temple so close, these are all areas where I need to become more proficient. Although trying to find cover art is nearly as much a time-sink as doom-scrolling through the news.

I’ll keep everyone updated on progress in the monthly recaps, and yes, I know I owe you the November recap. 

Stay tuned.

This past weekend there was a Bookbub promotion for the Jack Higgins book The Violent Enemy. I’ve been reading Jack Higgins since before the wrote The Eagle had landed, and while in recent years I haven’t followed his new books as faithfully as I used to, there’s always a comfortable feeling when I start one of his books. That same feeling you get when you sit down with an old friend after a long time since seeing them.

The Violent Enemy isn’t a recent book. If I recall, it was written in the late 1960’s, and the references to the life experiences of the characters set it in the timeline. It’s not a long novel, maybe 45,000 to 50,000 words, but I read it during the course of Sunday afternoon and evening.

Dean Wesley Smith recommends studying Stage 4 writers – those who’ve been writing for several decades, and who are still publishing best sellers today – writers like Nora Roberts, Stephen King, and John Grisham. 

I was close to the end of The Violent Enemy when the scene shifted to a coastal marsh for the final chapter. Jack Higgins used, I think two sentences to set the stage for the action to come, and in those two sentences, I was there in the damp and mist. It bears mentioning that when the coastal marsh was introduced earlier in the book, there was a more detailed description, but it took just those two sentences to pull me right back in.

Jack Higgins is right there with the other Stage 4 writers, and along with Robert Ludlum, was one of the early influencers in making me want to write.

If I’d known then, what I know now . . . But isn’t that a refrain we all have at some point in our lives.

This past week my tickler file reminded me of the submission windows opening for a couple of magazines. For those who don’t follow these dates, there are several magazines that have very specific reading periods throughout the year, and I have a couple of stories that looked a good fit for these publications.

Just to confirm my thinking, I jumped onto the web site of one of the publications and got hit with a large font editorial headline making an extreme political statement. The headline was triggered, I assume by some of the events going on in the world at the moment. Rather than immediately dismiss it, I clicked in and read the full article which reinforced the statement but didn’t offer any solutions, either in the body of the article, or in the recommended links.

It’s easy to condemn and lobby to tear something down, not so easy to come up with a considered solution. The solution might not be perfect, no solution ever is, but the article would, in my mind, have carried more weight had it offered a way forward.

I went on to the submission guidelines page with a small nag of disquiet. One of the first guideline bullet points was authors should not submit stories with any political bias or agenda.

Wait! What?

So the editor can make these statements, but as a writer, I can’t submit a story that makes the same points, or perhaps expresses a different viewpoint?

I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past few days. I still think my story is a good fit for that magazine, and the magazine pays above average rates, but I won’t be sending it to them.

By making the statements on the site, the editor has already politicized the magazine, and telling writers they can’t submit stories with a similar message is, to my mind, just another form of censorship.

On which note, I’ll step down from the soap box and let the next person have their say.

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Not that nothing has been happening, and while it would be easy to blame COVID, there seem to have been so many things going on, that putting a few paragraphs here has continued to slide down the list.

I watched the launch and splashdown of the SpaceX mission, and openly confess to a lump in my throat at both ends of the mission. I’ll definitely be watching when the next mission launches in September. Another event that didn’t get as much media coverage was comet Neowise, that completed its slingshot around the Sun and is now heading back toward the outer Solar System. As I write this in mid-August, you may still be able to see it in the western sky. I went out a couple of weeks ago and managed to find Neowise through binoculars. It wasn’t as spectacular SpaceX, but impressive all the same.

On the writing front, it’s been a mixed bag. Written words have been much lower than I planned, or wanted, and the Babylon novel is making steady progress, although slower than I’d like. I have a planned publication date, and will let everyone know when it firms up.

Finally, my Babylon short story “Family Harmony” is in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, available now.

The end of May saw some of the pandemic restrictions lifted here, and a gradual reopening of businesses. It has been interesting to see how different stores have approached precautions and distancing. Some are requiring masks and gloves, while others, notably the big home improvement stores, seem to have a more blase approach.

I had thought myself sheltered from the challenges of creativity I’ve seen many others writers write about during the lock down, but it all came to a head in May when the words just dried up. It wasn’t a block of any form. I knew what I wanted to write but it felt more comfortable to drift from one distraction to another. My daughter talks about having the attention span of a broken stapler, and that’s how May felt.

Some of that feeling has drifted over into June as well, but I think I see light at the end of the tunnel, and not just from the pandemic. We’ll see how it all looks when I write the June recap in a few weeks time.

When I first published Angels Without Faces onto Amazon, Apple, and Kobo, I confess it was very much a click and close my eyes exercise. As I’ve learned more over the past few months, and built a backlog of stories to publish, I decided to have a look at the pricing I have in place.

Each of the major sites above takes the US dollar price and converts to local currency. For some locations, this is acceptable. For others, such as India, the converted price is substantially out of line with the norms in that market place.

So, I engaged in an exercise to adjust prices as necessary, and align across the Amazon, Apple, and Kobo platforms. Easy, right? As long as you keep a note by currency or territory it should be.

Except . . .

Amazon has a set of minimum prices by currency, and won’t allow you adjust below that. Apple and Kobo change the royalty as you change the price, and have different mininums. An hour into it, despite the note taking and multiple screens, I was totally confused and exited out of it all. Amazon defines the price by the Amazon store, Apple by country, and Kobo by currency.

Time for a rethink, and then jump in again. It would be nice if I could set a template for each price point – $2.99, $4.99 etc., and apply that to the book I’m publishing. If it’s there, I haven’t found it yet!