Humpday Optimism

It's been a week and it's only Wednesday.  Nothing really to point at, but there it is.  :shrug:

I've been spending a lot of time reading the news and, for the first time in 5 years, I'm feeling optimistic about the present.  (I write dystopian, so it's hard for me to get optimistic about the future.  So many things can go wrong between here and there.)  

It seems like people have finally gotten a clue.  Maybe that's one thing the whole Kung Flu thing did for us - it taught people that not everything you hear or see from the supposed experts is right or true.  Especially those that point at things as being dire.  People are learning to laugh at it rather than take any of it seriously.  At least I hope that's what I'm seeing.  

Oh, I'm still seeing crap.  Yesterday, Turner Classic Movies did a whole run of Nazi movies.  I don't think January 21st was a day of note regarding WWII or the Holocaust, so I couldn't see a reason there until my conspiracy senses started tingling and I wondered if it was some kind of backhanded stab at our newly inaugurated president.  Or Elon.  (He wasn't giving a Nazi salute, by the way.  Watch the video.  He was throwing his heart to the people.)

Anyway, like I said, I'm feeling optimistic.  The big T is already doing awesome things with more to come.  If he can push a majority of the crap into the dump truck and hold the line for the next 4 years, AND JDV is the man I think he is, which will make him worthy of the 8 years after that, then we might avoid living the dystopian nightmares I have written about.  

Speaking of which, UNEQUAL is free until Friday.  I wish I could say I planned to make this book free because of the above, but it was just a happy coincidence.  I'm not that smart a planner.

Read that one.  Then read BLINK OF AN I.  Then let out a sigh of relief that we no longer appear to be headed in those directions.  Jus' sayin'.  

Marketing Monday - UNEQUAL

 Okay, so I'm up late again and totally uninspired about marketing.  Stuff happens, eh?  

Today begins a five-day freebie for UNEQUAL.  I didn't make any graphics for it.  Luckily, I have a previous one that was made by a friend of mine.

I'll post that today.

And I have this one I made...

which I'll post tomorrow.

We'll see how it goes.  The freebie thing for Ugly and the Beast went pretty well last week, considering I only posted 3 out of the 5 days.  I moved 119 copies of that and sold 4.  Fingers crossed for KU page reads in the near future.

Anyway, I'm running late, so I'll let y'all go.  Have a great day and stay warm out there.

Thursday This n That

 A while back Amazon decided that when they send you a confirmation email after you order a book, it would make the subject some kind of code - which matches neither the ISBN or the ASIN - instead of the book title.  And to see the actual title, you have to click a link in the email.  And then it asks you for your password.  Like this is some kind of state secret.  Blerg.  Are there people out there for whom having the title in the email subject is a real problem?  Are they all like 'OMG, I couldn't bear it if someone saw I'd ordered The Duchess and the Rapacious Rake.'?  Not having the title in the subject, as you might've guessed, is exceptionally irritating to me, since I use those emails to track where I'm at reading the books I've ordered.  Just now, I implemented a new step that fixes it.  I forward the email back to myself and change the subject to the damn book title.  It's an extra step, but it stops messing with my system.  Last year, I ordered 113 books from Amazon.  Try juggling those.  (And yes, I have a spreadsheet with the titles, but that's not the point.)

Why can't people just leave things alone?  Newer isn't always better.  And change isn't always necessary.  Sheesh.

Guess what?  2022 is the year DOOM happens.  (It's a videogame and a movie.  Love the movie, never played the game.)  Since we haven't discovered the gateway thingie yet, I think we're safe from that.  SOYLENT GREEN is also set in 2022.  Not sure we're in a place where we'll be turning the elderly into food, but what do I know?  For the record, I haven't seen this movie, but it's enough of a cultural icon, I pretty much know what's going on.

I heard today that our feckless leader doesn't even know what year it is.  I am unsurprised.  Remember when they hammered Reagan for making small mistakes like that?  Pepperidge Farms remembers.  But Creepy Joe gets a pass.  Feh.

I also read a newstory from the 3rd about New Hampshire and Vermont law enforcement getting called to a report of a dog running loose on a bridge.  They get there and the German Shepherd leads them to where a truck had gone through the guardrail and rolled down an embankment, throwing both occupants out into the snow.  They were seriously injured and hypothermic, but alive.  One of them was the dog's owner.  The dog was unharmed.  Dog saves man.  Again.  Yay.

My new coffee maker has a 'strong' setting.  Hallelujah.  I'm playing with the idea of being able to use less coffee grounds by making it on 'strong'.  We'll see.

I'm running one day off this week.  Yesterday, I thought it was Thursday.  I thought Tuesday was Wednesday.  You get the gist.  Thankfully, I've stopped myself before doing anything stupid.  Part of this is probably my check arriving a day late.  Throws everything off.  Derp.

And that's it for me.  Anything on your this-n-that radar today?

It's Raining Again.

It's raining again.  It has rained every day since the 16th.  Not all day every day, mind you, but enough each day that I'm pretty much over it.  It wasn't supposed to rain yesterday, but I was sitting here when I heard the sky open up and I had to run outside to shift my garden so the still-small plants wouldn't get flatten by the drops.  We fished in the rain on Friday.  Soaking wet, drops falling from the brims of our baseball caps, standing in mud fishing.  Which was fun... but enough already.  Geez.

It reminds me of that part of Men in Black 2 where the gal is all like 'Lots of people get sad when it rains' and K says 'it rains because you're sad'.  I wish that chick would go elsewhere for a while or cheer the hell up.

These days, though, cheering up ain't so easy.  I mean, have you looked at the world lately?  It should be laughable, but it's hard to muster a chuckle when the things you know to be wrong as the same things other people are embracing as right.   And you're watching the country you love swirl the drain while being told there was nothing to love about the country anyway.  :shakes like a dog:

Up is down and right is left and the sun rises in the west.  And we're living an Orwellian nightmare.  Umm... no.  

On Facebook, you get to select the emotion you're feeling for each post - like, love, care, haha, wow, sad, and angry.  I'm often torn between haha and angry.  I like MeWe, where you get to choose like 4 out of a ton for each post.  (Although when the four have already been chosen, you have only those to pick from.)  So, you can laugh and cry and be angry at the same post.  Because that's the world we're living in currently.  Sort of a "Wow, that makes me so angry I have to laugh at it because it's absurd."

We should laugh at the absurd.  And it should also make us angry.  So, yeah, I'm torn.  If, ten years ago, someone told me this is where America would be now, I would've laughed at them.  Yah, sure, ri-ight.  But here we are.  Senile pedophile in the White House with a Ho next in line for the leadership of the free world and a hag in charge of the House.  Openly racist mayor of Chicago.  Pogroms being conducted against Jews in NY and LA.  Millions giving away their freedoms so that maybe, if they're good boys and girls, they'll be allowed to be free again someday down the road.  Umm... no.

Like I said, it should be laughable.  If it wasn't so sad and super scary.

And you wonder why I occasionally write dystopian.  I guess it's my way of saying 'Look, folks, this is where you're headed if you don't stop what you're doing now'.  Railing against the worst.  In a totally Quixotic way, doncha know.  Maybe that's what all writers of dystopian books are/were doing.  We see a future we DO NOT WANT and try, in our own ways, to stop it through fiction.  Orwell is spinning in his grave.  So's Rand.  And Bradbury.  And Huxley.  

UNEQUAL is near future.  This could happen soon.  BLINK OF AN I is distant future.  That could happen down the road a ways.  They don't have to happen.  We have the ability to shift the course.  

So, yeah, it's raining.  Again.  In more ways than one.  

The Soft Launch and Other Blinky Things

Well, Blink went live yesterday.  (Read more and find buy links here.)  And it was what they call a 'soft launch'.  So soft, I don't think I could've disturbed crickets out there.  Launched amidst a boatload of distractions (you don't want to know and I don't want to talk about it), it was just set adrift on the currents yesterday and floated into the sea of other books for sale at Amazon.

This morning, I'm trying to catch up.  Do a little advertising on FB, etc.  Post some stuff to groups and junk.  Find new groups to post to because Blink isn't like anything I've already published.  I mean, it is in a way.  I wrote it, so it's got suspense and mystery and a little romance in there.  I can't not write stuff with those elements.  But it's also got... :drops to a whisper:... ideas.

I was reading the book description to Hubs this morning and gave myself shivers.  Idea shivers, not scary shivers.  Hooked Hubs, too, so it's all good. 

Trust me, though, I've tried really hard to weave the ideas in and not beat you over the head with them.  I hate message-y books that club readers to death with their message.  I aimed for creating an interesting and enthralling story that might also make readers think a little.  If it makes them think a lot, awesome.  If it doesn't make them think at all, but they just enjoy the story, that's great, too.

It's a pretty large book.  It topped out at 101K words pre-formatting.  Amazon is saying the KU page count is 478.  I think it moves along at a pretty good pace, though, so it shouldn't take forever to read.  Time will tell what readers think.

Anyway, like I said, I haven't done much to promote this book yet, so I'm not expecting gangbuster sales any time soon.  As always, though, there's hope. 

Now, I can take a break.  Not a huge one, since Early Grave is supposed to back from the editor next week, but a break nonetheless.  Maybe I'll finally finish reading a book this year. 

What To Do

Okay, so I got that rewrite knocked out.  It's done.  And I'm at loose ends.  I have so many books I need to work on that I'm like a cat who has too many toys thrown at it at once.  (Ever take a handful of cat toys and throw them in the air.  When they land, the cat doesn't know which one to chase.)  Of course, there's also the risk that with too many toys, the cat will get bored with them all.  So, following the analogy, I need to pick one toy to bat at, chew on, and kick.

If you've been following along over at my writerly blog A Pound of B.S., you'll see the beginnings of almost every book I've ever written or started writing.  I think the only ones we're missing over there (that I could still work on) at this point at Djinn 2 and Sleeping Ugly.

I'm leaning toward either rewriting Blink of an I again, or finally editing Unequal.  The only problem there is the little voice in my head that says 'dystopian is out'.  Since those are both 'speculative fiction', I could be shooting myself in the ass by spending too much time on them.

I do have two suspenses (Nanotechnology and Fertile Ground) and a mystery (Cut and Dried) I could be working on. 

Or I could go back, take all the mad writer skills I've acquired in the past 9 years and fix an early work like Nature of Fear.

I also have a YA Fantasy I never really got under way, and so many new ideas...

See?  Cat + Toys = Brain Implosion

So, I'm letting you all have a say. 

What do you think I should work on next?  Input would be greatly appreciated.

Dystopian Fiction

Hey All!

I wanted to do a little informal poll - not the blogger-type polls because they're too constrictive, but a little question and answer thingie-ma-bob.

So, in the comments, if you would be so kind, tell me:

Do you read dystopian fiction?  And by that I mean, anything futuristic (but not hard science SF) that shows the world's culture in some negative light.  Classic examples would be - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Anthem by Ayn Rand, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell.

Which leads me to another part of the question - since the majority of the most recently published and popular dystopian fiction is for the Young Adult market, how would you feel about seeing adult dystopian start hitting the shelves? 

I know the great majority of my followers here are over 18 - in fact, I'd venture a guess that most of you are over 30.  So, I'll put a little poll over there in the sidebar - totally anonymous - where you could tell me what age range you fall into, so I get a better idea of who's visiting. I had to take the poll down, since it wasn't working.

The reason I'm asking this is that I have several manuscripts that are adult dystopian.  I'd really like to see them sell, but I think the industry is under the assumption that adult dystopian won't sell - and YA dystopian is on the decline.  Not that the information here will stop me from trying to sell my work one way or the other, but I'd like to know (if only in this totally non-scientific way), if they're right.

So, chime in.  I'd sure appreciate it.

Oh, and if you're in the neighborhood tomorrow, stop by The Unpublished Writers' Guide to Survival.  Debra Webb is guest posting.  SQUEE!

Disturbing Dreams...or Story Ideas?

You know the instant you wake up that what your dreaming mind just created disturbed you.  You can't stop shaking, you can't get it out of your head, and you feel totally creeped out.  And then the creative part of you wonders if perhaps this might not make a good story. 

If you're like me, you leap from your bed (okay, maybe leap is too strong a word - stumble, perhaps) to write it all down.  I might get some of it out, but I never seem to get all of it.  And sometimes when I go back to read through it, I wonder why I ever thought it might make a good story.  :shrug:

This morning, I woke up from a very disturbing dream that would make a good story.  But I can't remember the key points.  All my brain keeps focusing on is the maggots.  (I hate maggots.)

Let me back up a bit...

Something horrible had happened - that much I remember - and it seems like mankind was infected (or infested) with some kind of thing that turned killed them and then went on to infect/infest everyone around them.  And while they were dying, they became cannibalistic (I think... that part's unclear).  Anyway, in the dream, I had just joined a group of survivors and I knew them.  Several of us were sitting around discussing the situation when this guy - the one I loved, who looked like a young Mel Gibson (Mad Max young but with Thunderdome longish hair) - gets up to walk away and the kid sitting next to him screams.  Where he was sitting has maggots and he has maggots all over the back of him.  And everyone wants to kill him before he goes insane and kills everyone.  But I'm trying to figure out if the maggots are coming from inside him or if he just sat in them (yeah, it was pretty gross), and also trying to stop everyone from attacking this man I love... who may or may not be about to eat me. 

And then I woke up.  I know I've got the potential for a post-apocalyptic story there but all I can remember in vivid detail are the maggots.  (Not fly maggots, per se, thinner and more translucent...  :shudder:  Did I mention how much I hate maggots?)

Anyway, I hope writing it down here will jog something and make it bloom when I'm ready to write a story like that again.  (And yeah, I'm saving it to my ideas file, too.)

Ever happen to you?  How much do you remember after you wake up?  How do you keep it from fading into nothingness?

Breaking the Rules

Yeah, yeah.  I know you're not supposed to post rejection letters.  I also know you're not supposed to reply back to the agent who sent it.  I just couldn't help myself.

Because it made my day.

Thanks for sending me your query.  I like your premise and your opening pages are certainly exciting and get the story off to a strong start, but as you know, urban fantasy is a crowded genre, and I'm only taking on projects that completely blow me away.  Yours is very good, but when I came to the end of this sample I didn't feel like I just had to know what would happen next.  I'm sure other agents will feel differently, but I'm going to pass.

Best of luck with your agent search,

Cameron

Yup, that was from Cameron McClure.   I wrote her back and thanked her for this.  Because, really, when the shit is flying thick and deep, it's the little things that keep me afloat.  Nice and encouraging rejection letters, nifty notes from my blog pals, a sweet comment from my niece about my last book.  

So, I hope you'll all forgive me for breaking the rules.  It just gave me a little hope and I wanted to spread it around.

Speaking of hope, I just finished Discord's Apple by Carrie Vaughn.  Awesome book that meshes old myths with edgy dystopian fiction.  If you read it, you'll see how it connects.  After all, hope was the last thing left in Pandora's box and it's the one thing we all need when the world's going to hell around us.  (And damn you, Carrie.  You made me cry.  =op )

Got any good news to share?  Any hope to spread?  Come on, share the love.

Done dun dun done DONE

In case you missed it last night on Facebook.  I finished UEQ's first draft.  UEQ, btw, is code for Unequal.  It's a dystopian novel set against the backdrop of a world where everyone is equal - and it's against the law to be different.  So, of course, the heroine has to fight to be herself in a society where being who she wants to be could get her killed.

=o)

I love this book.  It's still pretty ugly.  I had to hack my way through the plot-jungle several times and the path isn't always the clearest thing.  But that's okay.  I can trim it up and make it pretty during the edits.  The point is that it is DONE.

Editing will start next month.  The rest of February will be devoted to working on getting DLN out there and to seeing what else I have that someone might be interested in.  Look for my 'Agent Sites' post to be updated in the near future. 

In other news, we're in the midst of yet another winter storm.  It's ZERO degrees right now.  Perfect day for working, reading and crocheting.  I'll also be shoveling.  I'm telling you, if I see that friggin; groundhog, he's a dead man.  Early Spring my ass.

How are things with you?  Anything exciting to share?  How's the weather out your way? 

Hope in a Hopeless World

As you may know, I'm a fan of dystopian - or speculative - fiction.  One thing all of these types of stories have one thing in common.  Somehow somewhere along the way, something went horribly wrong.  Either in mankind's thinking or in its actions, we as a species fucked up our current semi-happy existence.

At least that's the idea.

So, the road ahead is bad.  People have died, or been disfigured, or been oppressed.  Technology may or may not be gone.  The world may be covered in zombies, each of them lusting after your yummy brains.

But in my opinion, there should still be hope somewhere in even those hopeless worlds.  Look at Anthem by Ayn Rand.  Technology is gone, men are oppressed, and the hero is shunted off to the job of street sweeper because... well, because he tested too smart to be anything else.  He's in danger of being burned at the stake, for petesakes.  And then he gets away.  He takes his ladyfriend and escapes.  They live their lives - however hard - in happiness.

For me, speculative novels should all have an element of hope in them.  Not just hope for one, but hope that someday, their little bit of hope will build and expand to fill an entire culture.

To use another example, look at Fahrenheit 451.  The culture is at an all time low, there's the impending threat of war, and the one person Montag feels any kind of connection with mysteriously disappears.  He's hunted like a friggin' animal, but he escapes.  He finds other people hiding in the woods who are like him and who want to preserve whatever small amount of knowledge they can, so they can hold onto the hope of a better future.

Hope in a hopeless world.  I don't really care how bad things get.  Take everything away from your characters, but for petesakes, leave them hope.

Conflict is what novels are built on.  Without it, books would be happy lala things that no one would want to read.  Conversely, a book that is all conflict without even a glimmer of a chance of a happy ending are stories I don't want to read.  No matter how rough life gets, how crappy the economy is, how violent or depraved society gets, I hold onto the hope that someday, somehow it will get better.

That's what I need from my dystopian fiction, too.  A little hope, however vague and elusive its object might be.  This is why - regardless of how well written they may be - I can't recommend 1984 or Brave New World.  Those worlds are hopeless and they will continue to be hopeless into eternity.  Most dystopian books - at least the ones I've read - aren't like that.  Every once in a while one will be published that kills hope along with a lot of characters (well, if not their bodies, at least their characters' spirits).  I don't understand why they sell so well or why anyone would make them into movies - even movies that aren't so close to the story in the first place.

But then again, I may be a little naive.  What do you think?  Got any good titles of dystopian fiction with hope in it?  (Let's leave out the negative titles - unless you want to email the titles to me so I can avoid them.)

(And for as silly as the topmost picture is, I'm serious about this.  If I wasn't, I wouldn't write what I do.)