Archive for December, 2009

New tools

“Don’t blame the car­pen­ter. Blame the tool.” –Howie Long in a new Chevy commercial

Am I the only one who thinks he’s call­ing that guy a tool? Any­way, I’m not going to com­plain about my tools today, so much as doc­u­ment one more step in my never-​ending quest to find bet­ter tools for writing.

My grand Google Docs exper­i­ment lasted all of two chap­ters into Cru­sade, the sec­ond book in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that this has noth­ing to do with Google Docs, but when I hit a slump one of my first impulses is to mix up how I do things. As it hap­pens, a major improve­ment to an old friend hap­pened along at just the right time.

Ever­note

Two days before Christ­mas, Ever­note gave us iPhone users an early gift. Ever­note for the iPhone ver­sion 3.2 fixes most of the prob­lems I had with the iPhone ver­sion. Sync­ing is no longer modal, mean­ing you can search and do other things while sync­ing to your data­base, and you can store selected note­books locally on the device, mean­ing you can always access them offline even if you’ve never opened that par­tic­u­lar note on your iPhone before. While Ever­note for the iPhone still doesn’t allow you to edit rich text notes directly, ver­sion 3.2 does allow you to make a plain text copy and edit that rather than just append­ing to the rich text note. This allows for revi­sions I couldn’t do before.

These changes make Ever­note vastly more use­ful to me for writ­ing on the go. And of course it doesn’t hurt that the lat­est build of the 3.5 beta — yes, I know I said I wasn’t upgrad­ing, I have a sick­ness — is pretty solid as well. These changes are so impres­sive, in fact, that I’ve gone back to Ever­note for my actual draft­ing. I keep each chap­ter in a sep­a­rate note, tagged as “draft” and in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles note­book. I really like hav­ing all my stuff in one place again.

BTstack Key­board Driver

Of course, writ­ing on the go with just the on-​screen key­board on my iPhone only works for rel­a­tively short pas­sages. For any kind of speed, I’d still need my net­book, with the addi­tional five pounds — 3 for the net­book, 2 for the AC adap­tor and cables — to lug around that this would entail, right? Not so much. The BTstack Key­board Dri­ver also appeared on Cydia last week. This is part of the over­all BTstack project, intended to pro­vide an alter­na­tive Blue­tooth stack for the iPhone that han­dles pro­files Apple chooses not to sup­port. The key­board dri­ver, as you might expect, allows the iPhone to use exter­nal Blue­tooth key­boards using the Blue­tooth HID (Human Inter­face Devices) profile.

I still have my Think­Out­side Blue­tooth Stow­away from my Win­dows Mobile days, so I paid my five bucks, down­loaded and installed the dri­ver and set about test­ing it. It’s def­i­nitely still a work in progress, but it’s very promis­ing. Not all of the ancil­lary keys work, and some­times I get a string of garbage char­ac­ters, but over­all, it works for get­ting text into the iPhone fast and easy on a full-​size key­board (my Stow­away is actu­ally mar­gin­ally more com­fort­able than my 92% full size key­board on my net­book). So add this to Ever­note and now I don’t have to take my net­book with me to Chipo­tle for lunch. My back and shoul­ders already thank me.

Enso Words

Writ­ing in Ever­note has a few dis­ad­van­tages, chief among them that Ever­note has no word count func­tion. How do I track my progress with­out work count? Enter Enso Words. This is a small util­ity pro­gram that runs all the time in your Win­dows sys­tem tray and waits to be called either by hold­ing down the Cap­slock key like a sec­ond shift key, or as I pre­fer, tap­ping the Cap­slock key and enter­ing a com­mand and enter, or esc to go back to what you were doing. When you have Enso Words acti­vated, you can have it per­form a vari­ety of func­tions on what­ever text you have selected in vir­tu­ally any application.

So to get a word count on my cur­rent note in Ever­note, I:

  1. Hit Ctrl-​A to select all text
  2. Tap Cap­slock to invoke Enso Words
  3. Type “wo” to nar­row down the com­mand selec­tion to “word count”
  4. Hit Enter

Enso words then pops up a lit­tle box on screen with my cur­rent word count, and that box fades away auto­mat­i­cally as soon as I type some­thing or move the mouse. With a lit­tle prac­tice, this becomes sec­ond nature. I could even shave off a key­stroke if I used Enso in “qua­si­modal” mode and just released Cap­slock after typ­ing “wo”, no longer hav­ing to hit enter to send the com­mand. Enso is also great for look­ing up def­i­n­i­tions and syn­onyms, spell check­ing in any appli­ca­tion, chang­ing case, search­ing Google and more. It’s free, and takes up very lit­tle sys­tem resources, even on my netbook.

Write­Mon­key

When I want to get hard­core, though, I break out the mon­key. Write­Mon­key. This is a text proces­sor for Win­dows inspired by the pop­u­lar Write­Room on the Mac. While it works win­dowed — and that’s how I use it at the office — it’s really intended to run full screen. In full screen mode, Write­Mon­key takes up your entire mon­i­tor, hid­ing even your Win­dows taskbar and shows you just what you need to see to write. It’s small, fast, portable and keeps a run­ning word count at the top or bot­tom of the screen so you can see how you’re doing. The idea here is to remove all the dis­trac­tions and just write.

Write­Mon­key doesn’t inte­grate auto­mat­i­cally with Ever­note, but it’s not all that hard to get them to play together. I select all the text in a note like I would with Enso, but then copy it, fire up Write­Mon­key, paste and start writ­ing. When I’m done, I select all and copy from Write­Mon­key and then paste back into the note in Ever­note. Pretty simple.

Google Docs

I still use Google Docs for one thing: spread­sheets. I keep my word counts there in a sim­ple sheet that holds the word count for each chap­ter and then sums them to tell me the word count for the over­all novel. And hey, I can even update Google Docs spread­sheets on my iPhone! (Now I just need Enso Words for the iPhone.)

So that’s it, my new sys­tem, designed to be the sim­plest I’ve come up with yet (since it can’t really han­dle for­mat­ting, there’s no temp­ta­tion to spend time mak­ing it pretty). How do you take your writ­ing on the go?

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December 28, 2009 · Filed under Technology, Writing

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-​12-​28

  • UC Blog: No, appar­ently he can’t be taught http://bit.ly/7EG8FA #
  • RT @FakeAPStylebook: zero-​base bud­get­ing — A method of writ­ing a state bud­get so that zzzzzZZZZZ… #
  • RT @JhonenV: if you’re my kinda nerd, you were dis­tracted by James Horner’s inces­sant self-​cannibalizing of his pre­vi­ous themes in Avatar. #
  • @crimsonsky76 WTF? I mean really, WTF? How can they stop sell­ing Word? in reply to crimsonsky76 #
  • ProSwitcher is the MFing bomb. Worth jail­break­ing just for this. #iphone #late­tothep­arty #
  • @aslap­inthe­face <whisper>sometimes they don’t even know they’re stupid…</whisper> in reply to aslap­inthe­face #
  • Just got done lis­ten­ing to George Carlin’s “Last Words” on Audi­ble, and now @mikecane’s tweets sounds like Patrick Car­lin to me. #
  • RT @Ali_Davis: OK, teabag­gers, FINE. BUSTED. There are death pan­els. What wussy anti-​war lib­er­als want MORE THAN ANYTHING is to kill peo­ple. #
  • @aslap­inthe­face I try real hard not to think about that. in reply to aslap­inthe­face #
  • Oh, look, another Black­berry out­age #havin­gonly­onedatacen­teris­stu­pid #
  • @aslap­inthe­face I have never seen any such peo­ple. Just lonely copies sit­ting untouched at the super­mar­ket. in reply to aslap­inthe­face #
  • @Philip­pa­Jane And yet, a whole herd of cat­tle will fol­low a llama… in reply to Philip­pa­Jane #
  • RT @OTOOLEFAN: When are they gonna repos­sess Car­rie Prejean’s tits? #
  • RT @stinginthetail: i see Palin’s book’s called “going rogue” — funny, i thought that was to do with ele­phants tram­pling the poor ppl — oh wait… #
  • Good morn­ing, tweeple. In case you were won­der­ing, it’s snow­ing in Den­ver. Again. At least it’s tech­ni­cally win­ter this time. #
  • I have com­pleted my Christ­mas tra­di­tion of read­ing “The Stu­pid­est Angel” by @TheAu­thorGuy Christo­pher Moore. #
  • I should prob­a­bly start my Xmas shop­ping at some point soon… #
  • UC Blog: Miss­ing some­thing http://bit.ly/6PNYkv #
  • @rcartwright Way ahead of you. Will com­plete my shop­ping EXTRAVAGANZA with a sin­gle trip to the gro­cery store for gift cards&greeting cards. in reply to rcartwright #
  • @mau­reen­john­son is giv­ing away FREE copies of her book Suite Scar­lett for the hol­i­days! CHEER! http://tinyurl.com/mjmysterygift in reply to mau­reen­john­son #
  • Out­line for UC book 2 is shap­ing up nicely! http://bit.ly/6PNYkv #
  • ATTN Sub­way, some advice: http://bit.ly/7keFWA #
  • @rcartwright But why even have isosce­les cheese if you’re not going to take advan­tage of it? in reply to rcartwright #
  • @rcartwright Also, “Isosce­les Cheese” would be a great name for a rock band. in reply to rcartwright #
  • @nlow­ell @seth­har­wood eInk devices will be a curi­ous tran­si­tional device in ten years. I already read every­thing on my iPhone. in reply to nlow­ell #
  • I’m pretty sure Howie Long just called that guy a tool… #
  • Got one page today after a hol­i­day dry spell. It’s a start… #amwrit­ing #
  • RT @vg_​ford Break­ing news: glar­ing at word doc does not, in fact, pro­duce words in said doc­u­ment. Damn. #amwrit­ing #
  • RT @Bron­cosStable Show of hands… who has Gaffney in the fan­tasy lineup today for the play­offs? (crick­ets… crick­ets… Bueller) #Den­ver #
  • #Bron­cos have a chance, but they’ve got to get stronger on the o-​line #
  • And for the sec­ond game in a row, the Bron­cos watch help­lessly in the final minute as the oppos­ing team scores the win­ning points. #

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December 28, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

Focusing on what’s important

It would seem I’m des­tined to do this writ­ing thing in bursts over time. I don’t know how much I’ll be post­ing here and on the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles blog in the near future, nor how much fic­tion I’ll actu­ally get writ­ten. But unfor­tu­nately, I have other pri­or­i­ties that usurp writing.

Last week, my mom had her thy­roid taken out because the doc­tors couldn’t tell whether or not it was can­cer­ous by biop­sies alone and fig­ured it was safer to remove it. We now know that it was can­cer, and that the can­cer had spread to the lymph nodes nearby. We don’t know if the lym­phoma has pro­gressed any far­ther, which of the 35 kinds of lym­phoma it is, or which of the four stages it pro­gressed to. They’re still test­ing to deter­mine those things. My mom could be cancer-​free because they already removed all the can­cer­ous tis­sue, or it could be much, much worse.

So for a while, my top pri­or­ity is to be there for my fam­ily, to sup­port them and help out as much as I can. I’ll try to find time for writ­ing, will have to find at least some time to pre­vent going crazy. But my grand scheme to write seven books in ten months has been thor­oughly derailed by real life.

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December 22, 2009 · Filed under Personal, Writing

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-​12-​21

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December 21, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

What writers can learn from Avatar

I saw Avatar over the week­end, and loved it. I’m nat­u­rally inclined to like James Cameron movies. I think he’s one of the best sto­ry­tellers work­ing today. Not the most inno­v­a­tive writer, but the best sto­ry­teller. It’s an impor­tant distinction.

A lot of talk around this movie cen­ters around the spe­cial effects, espe­cially in 3D. Yes, they’re amaz­ing. Yes, the 3D is used sub­tly, almost never throw­ing things “at” the audi­ence, and pro­vides an addi­tional solid­ity to the CGI that you’ve never seen before. You feel like like you’re there, on the moon Pan­dora with the char­ac­ters. And as Chuck Wendig points out, the 3D and CGI com­pen­sate for each other’s weak­nesses, mak­ing every­thing seem just, well, real.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

A lot of the reviews and even snide com­ments on Twit­ter about the film men­tion is that the story isn’t any­thing new. They mis­un­der­stand some­thing fun­da­men­tal about sto­ry­telling and assume that this means Cameron is just “mail­ing it in,” using new visual effects to dress up a tired story that we’ve all seen before.

They don’t under­stand that the very best sto­ries, by def­i­n­i­tion, are sto­ries we’ve all seen before. That the very rea­son why cer­tain sto­ries have been told over and over and over for thou­sands of years is that they work. They res­onate with us, down to an uncon­scious level. Was the plot of Avatar pre­dictable? Sure. It’s basi­cally “Dances With Smurfs.” But think for a sec­ond. How many times have you seen a story about a bro­ken sol­dier who finds first com­pan­ion­ship, then pur­pose, in the com­pany of his enemy? Dances With Wolves? Poc­a­hon­tas? Enemy Mine? How far back can you go?

If you really think about it, thou­sands of years. This story is one of the time­less tales you’ve heard before and will hear again. It comes from myth. Just like “com­ing of age”, or “the hero’s jour­ney” or “pride goeth before a fall”, or any of the other fun­da­men­tal struc­tures hard­wired into our pri­mate brains. The story of Avatar was told around cook­ing fires in cen­tral Europe 10,000 years ago. The details change, but the story is eternal.

And that’s why the movie works. Because while the CGi gives you a sense of awe and won­der, and helps in the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief, it’s the story, and the char­ac­ters of Jake, Neytiri, Gail and the rest that make you care. I was welling up sev­eral times dur­ing the film, a dif­fi­cult thing when wear­ing essen­tially two pairs of Ray-​Bans, and it wasn’t because of the CGI. It’s because I was caught up in the story, totally engaged and root­ing for the characters.

Don’t mis­take the sim­ple for the infe­rior. All too often the best sto­ries are those we know by heart.

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December 19, 2009 · Filed under Writing

Having written

“I hate writ­ing, I love hav­ing written.”

—Dorothy Parker

I fin­ished writ­ing the first novel in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series today. This is the first time I’ve actu­ally fin­ished a full-​length novel since the spring of 1997, when I fin­ished Between Heaven and Hell. Sounds like a big accom­plish­ment, right? So why don’t I care more?

I used to com­pletely iden­tify with the Dorothy Parker quote above. (Hardly sur­pris­ing, as she’s one of the godesses of snark.) I was all about the des­ti­na­tion, in a hurry to get the jour­ney out of the way. But in the last dozen years, a funny thing happened.

I became a writer.

Yes, tech­ni­cally, I was a writer in those early years, in that I wrote things. But I was always more con­cerned with what I was going to do after the book was writ­ten than actu­ally writ­ing it. In no small way, this is why it took me a dozen years to fin­ish writ­ing another book (even if that book itself only took six weeks to write). Because my focus wasn’t really on the writ­ing. It was on other stuff. On what my life would be like as a best sell­ing nov­el­ist, on quit­ting my day job, on get­ting to hang out in cof­fee shops all day.

Now, things are dif­fer­ent. I’m older, and I’ve spent the last fif­teen years writ­ing con­sis­tently. Mostly non­fic­tion, but writ­ing. Putting words together. In that time, I’ve devel­oped a feel for the Eng­lish lan­guage, taken a tal­ent for writ­ing and turned it into a skill. I still have a lot to learn, as evi­denced by my already grow­ing lists of things I need to fix when it comes time to revise the book, but that’s okay. The journey’s okay.

The fact that I’m not more excited about fin­ish­ing my first novel in a dozen years could be best thing I could ask for in my writ­ing career. Because the biggest rea­son I’m not more excited about fin­ish­ing the first book in the series is that I’m already work­ing on the sec­ond book. And the fact that I now derive more plea­sure sense of accom­plish­ment from writ­ing every day than fin­ish­ing a novel means I’ve learned to love the jour­ney. I’ve become a writer.

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December 14, 2009 · Filed under Writing

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-​12-​13

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December 13, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

On making ebook piracy inevitable

Simon & Schus­ter have announced that they will be delay­ing the ebook releases of at least 35 of their big name releases in 2010. Doyce Tester­man has said pretty much what I have to say on the mat­ter, so why don’t you go see what he has to say.

This deci­sion, which I fully believe is grounded in noth­ing less than a toddler-​like desire to cling to the once-​profitable but entirely out­dated pub­lish­ing struc­tures of the past, actu­ally cre­ates an envi­ron­ment where, from a ebook-pirate’s per­spec­tive, it is a good idea to steal from them, because there is no legit­i­mate com­pe­ti­tion in that space.

via The Future, the Past, Will­ful Igno­rance, and Simon and Schus­ter – doyce tester­man.

Basi­cally, Simon & Schus­ter (Stephen King) and Hatch­ette (Stephanie Meyer) are forc­ing users who want – or need – to read books via ebook for­mat to either do with­out or turn to P2P net­works and down­load pirate scans. For me per­son­ally, this means noth­ing. I haven’t bought a paper book in a decade. If it’s not avail­able from Ama­zon or eReader.com, I sim­ply don’t buy it. I have hun­dreds of books that I can read instead. But the author won’t get my money, either, and that’s a shame.

I think it’s worth not­ing that I just bought a copy of Earth by David Brin on eReader, even though I’ve had a pirate scan of it for years. Why? Because the scan sucks as a read­ing expe­ri­ence. It’s badly OCRed, mean­ing the line and para­graph breaks are in the wrong places and it’s rife with typos. Even though I could get the story for free, it was worth $8 for a pro­fes­sional pre­sen­ta­tion, and clean­ing up the scan would have taken up far, far more than $8 worth of my time.

Peo­ple will buy ebooks if they’re priced to pro­vide a good value for the con­tent, but you have to give them the chance in the first place.

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December 10, 2009 · Filed under Publishing

Something for nothing

Nuance released Dragon Dic­ta­tion for the iPhone yes­ter­day, and they made it free. By all accounts, it works pretty well, and should make using an iPhone much more intu­itive for lots of people.

So it should come as no sur­prise that peo­ple are already whining.

See, Dragon uploads your con­tacts to their servers the first time you run it. It does this because all the recog­ni­tion is done in the cloud — you didn’t think it could really do nearly flaw­less voice recog­ni­tion with the iPhone’s RAM and CPU, did you? — and Nuance fig­ures that if they pre-​recognize all your con­tacts, it will save time when you, like, use them. You’re prob­a­bly going to be men­tion­ing at least a few of your con­tacts a lot.

So what’s wrong with this? It’s an inva­sion of pri­vacy, of course! How dare Nuance upload your dic­ta­tion to their servers, tak­ing it lit­er­ally out of your hands, just so that they process it via a free ser­vice you opted into by down­load­ing and installing the gor­ram app in the first place? The nerve! And they keep the record­ings — so that they can con­tin­u­ally refine their recog­ni­tion, the same way Google keeps all your search queries — mean­ing that if you were to use their free ser­vice to dic­tate your plans to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, and if they didn’t anonymize the results — they do — and if said gov­ern­ment went sniff­ing around in those record­ings because the NSA clearly doesn’t already have enough data to sift through, well, that would be pretty bad, wouldn’t it?

Get over it, people.

Look, cloud com­put­ing isn’t the devil, and it isn’t here to take all your pre­cious bod­ily flu­ids. But a cer­tain degree of trust/​sphincter-​loosening is required if you’re going to join us here in the brave new world. Peo­ple need to get over this idea that they even have pri­vacy in the dig­i­tal age. Hey, you, in the shack up in Mon­tana. Yeah, I’m talk­ing to you. If you pos­sess any­thing in dig­i­tal form, guess what? You ain’t the only one with access to it. Deal. Or go back to keep­ing your man­i­festo scrawled in pen­cil on toi­let paper.

Relax, peo­ple, it’s okay. Just lie back, close your eyes and think of Eng­land. Or bet­ter yet, here’s a rad­i­cal idea. If you don’t agree with the terms of ser­vice, DON’T USE THE GORRAM SERVICE! Vote with your dol­lars, all zero of them! Nuance is giv­ing you some­thing valu­able for FREE. If you don’t like the fact that, hey, they’re going to use your anonymized data to improve said ser­vice, set your boots a-​walkin’, mis­ter. It’s the price of admis­sion, and guess what? You’re not enti­tled to any­thing. Keep bang­ing those rocks together, you’ll make fire some­day. But if you want to sit at the grownups table, act like you’ve been there.

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December 8, 2009 · Filed under Technology

The plan

A big part of this blog, and Writ­ing On Your Palm before it, has always been to doc­u­ment my jour­ney as a writer and serve as either a cau­tion­ary exam­ple or inspi­ra­tion to oth­ers. It occurred to me recently that I have a unique oppor­tu­nity to do so much more.

When I was writ­ing my first novel, one of my idols was Joe Straczyn­ski, the cre­ator and writer of nearly every episode of Baby­lon 5. I read every word Joe pub­lished on the inter­net dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of the show, and I learned a lot about both writ­ing in gen­eral and how tele­vi­sion is made. But there was always more I wanted to know. I wanted to see the scripts. I wanted to sit in on the break­out meet­ings. I wanted to see the back­ground of the story the way Joe saw it. I never got those things, because Joe is sane and had a busi­ness to run.

But now, I have the oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide just what I wanted. I can do some­thing no one else has been nuts enough to do. Here’s the plan.

Step 1: Write and edit Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles simultaneously

Reg­u­lar read­ers know I’ve com­mit­ted to writ­ing all seven books of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series in ten months, to be fin­ished by Labor Day week­end, 2010. But now that I’ve fig­ured out how to write 2,000 words a day and still have time for my nor­mal life, I’ve decided to aim still higher. I’m also going to edit the books in nearly the same span of time. Basi­cally, while I’m writ­ing 2,000 words a day of Book 2, I’ll be edit­ing 5 – 10 pages of Book 1. This is pos­si­ble because the 2k-​per-​day rough draft I’ve been turn­ing out is sur­pris­ingly read­able, not at all the unread­able crap I was expect­ing. Turns out you can write well and write fast at the same time (Mike Cane, I’m look­ing at you).

Step 2: Blog everything

Yes, every­thing. I’d like to announce The Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles Blog, where I’ll be pub­lish­ing every sin­gle thing I use in writ­ing these books, doc­u­ment­ing every step in the process. There you will find notes, research, plot out­lines, even drafts posted as I write them, and before I revise them. I want aspir­ing writ­ers to see the whole pack­age. To be able to com­pare out­lines to drafts to the fin­ished prod­uct, and see how it all changes. I’ve set up a wiki for most of the struc­tured infor­ma­tion that doesn’t work as well on a blog.

Step 3: Sell the fin­ished prod­uct cheap or free

Once I’m done with each book, each chap­ter will be avail­able as a free PDF file or a free pod­cast (nar­rated by yours truly, and a straight read, none of this voice cast busi­ness). Each book will also be avail­able on eReader.com, Fictionwise.com and Amazon.com as a 99 cent ebook. At the end of the series I’ll also make a 7-​book omnibus edi­tion avail­able for $5.

For those that want some­thing to put on a shelf — or don’t take my advice about how to read ebooks com­fort­ably—I’ll also be pub­lish­ing each book via either Lulu or Cre­ate­Space—haven’t decided which yet — for just a lit­tle bit more than it costs to print. I’m not try­ing to get rich here. But I want to make sure that any­one who wants a printed copy can get one. I likely won’t be doing a printed omnibus edi­tion, how­ever, as it would sim­ply be too expensive.

Step 4: Embrace the Chaos

One of the rea­sons I’m doing this is to estab­lish a cer­tain set­ting I plan to come back to again and again through­out my career. This is the Chaos. After the events in Book 5, I basi­cally have kicked over all the anthills and set the galaxy on fire. Every­one is at war with every­one else, human­ity is in pretty dire straits, and every­thing has gone to hell. Book 6 actu­ally takes place dur­ing the Chaos, but it’s far from the only thing going on. It will take years, maybe decades of this to get to Book 7, Uni­fi­ca­tion, where the heroes that sur­vived Book 5 get back together and unify the galaxy. In those years are an infin­ity of tales.

But I’m not going to be the only one writ­ing Tales of the Chaos. At least I hope not. I’m going to open up that set­ting under Cre­ative Com­mons so that any­one can write sto­ries set there. There will be a few lim­i­ta­tions, like not using actual char­ac­ters from my books, so the new sto­ries don’t end up con­tra­dict­ing Uni­fi­ca­tion—and even that will be nego­tiable, I expect to approve a few canon­i­cal sto­ries I don’t write — but over­all, it’s an open sand­box. Most of the sto­ries will even be hosted on the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles site.

Step 5: The Audition

Once I’m done with Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles — aside from Tales of the Chaos — I’ll keep writ­ing, of course. Home­world (my NaNoW­riMo 2006 project) and Titanus (which I devel­oped for Script Frenzy 2009 but decided I’d rather write as a novel) still need to be fin­ished. As does Ghost Ronin, the first in a new adven­ture series. These, and the works that fol­low them, will in all like­li­hood be writ­ten with the door closed. I will seek an agent and get these and future works pub­lished tra­di­tion­ally. But here, the work I’ve done for Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles will give me an advan­tage. Agents and edi­tors con­sid­er­ing my work will be able to see that I can write to a spe­cific length, fin­ish what I start, and tell a good story. They’ll have half a mil­lion words of my fic­tion as a work sam­ple, and they’ll be able to see exactly how I research and write a book. And hope­fully, they’ll see you, dear read­ers, and see that I can build a fan base and get peo­ple excited about my work. That’s why I’m giv­ing Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles away for free — or as cheap as I’m allowed to make it. Because if I pull it off, and do every­thing right, then I get to…

Step 6: Quit my day job and write full time

I want to make my liv­ing as a nov­el­ist. I want my only require­ment in life to be con­tin­u­ing to tell the sto­ries that make my life worth liv­ing. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been really good at, and with your help, I think I have a way to make this hap­pen. I expect this to take time, but hope­fully I’ll be a full time work­ing nov­el­ist by the time I’m 45 (I’m 38 now).

Let’s get started.

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December 7, 2009 · Filed under Meta, Organization, Personal, Writing

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