Is Summer Over Yet?

Took me a while to find the time to update my blog, but better late than never, I guess. My vacation went well even though it was way too short for me to feel the benefits, but this I can easily say, though: I miss the Sierras. I love the mountains so much, it's depressing as hell to be back in civilization. The Bay Area will always have a special place in my heart, of course, but I didn't realize just how much I need the silence of Nature until I went back to my favorite haunts.

Next year will, hopefully, be better planned (and a longer break).

In the meantime, I'm currently working to finish my side project, which is looking more and more like a short novel in the low 50K-word range. I hope to have something pretty solid to share here in the next couple or so weeks since it's a book I also would like to release before Valérian. 

I haven't updated my Book News page with the tweaked release dates for my upcoming books, but I hope to sort all that out eventually. At this point I know better than to make promises because I almost always go back on them (because life happens). 

Another thing I'd like to add is the very, very real possibility of me again going back to either five-month release calendars or even six-month releases. Having aged another year and having recently lost my mother (heart failure brought on by her age) just before my birthday, I'm really feeling time weighing down on me. I talk a good game when it comes to self-care, but I never really follow through since I've been hard-wired to just keep going, no matter what, as long as I'm able. 

Is that a Virgo thing? I think it's a Virgo thing. 

Anyway, mortality (aging, at least, if you don't want to see me get all morbid on you) is a fact I have to make room for now, and I'm not superhuman. I'll be making my final decision before I update my Book News page, and then we can go from there. 

 

A Slight Tweak

I'll be going away next week for my vacation, which means things'll be on hold for a bit. As usual, once I make public the status of my WiP, the more I risk it, and it's the same with Valérian now.

I had to pull back and delete a couple of chapters (I expected to hack off more than those) and revise a couple of others (again, I expected to overhaul more) because this baby is growing more tentacles than I can manage. I'm trying to wrestle it back into the story I had planned for it, but its need to sprout new appendages is out of control. 

So! 

I need to set it aside and let it simmer for a bit while I go back to my notes and rework stuff. If this book ends up longer than 50K words, I'd rather have it be so at a minimum. Again, I settled down happily in the long novella corner of fiction-writing for a reason: no more sprawling novels or series, just tightly told stories that are also complex enough to justify their existence. 

So I'm opening up the release date to encompass Dec. 1. That allows me enough wiggle room with the vacation thing and the simmering thing, and I'll give you all (hopefully) a good book in the end. 

I'm thinking of taking a month-long break from Valérian to clear my head of the clutter. In the meantime, I can distract myself with the mystery side project I have going, which I can complete within a month (it's almost there!), and then I'll be talking about it here. 

I haven't updated my Book News page yet with the tentative calendar, but I will this weekend. It does need a bit of an update, regardless.  

Birthday Sale at Smashwords

image from Pinterest

Awright! My birthday is Aug. 26, and since we're about midway through the month (plus we just had a solar eclipse on the 12th), I figured I should jump right in and do this. 

This is strictly over at Smashwords, where all of my books that aren't novellas (priced at 99 cents) are now 50% off the list price through the end of September. 

And we have a coupon: CJ6KR

Use that code when purchasing any of my novels and omnibuses over there. There are also no limits as to how many books you can purchase with the coupon, so have at it! 

For my author page over there, go to this link. And as always, thank you for your support, and I hope you enjoy your book(s)!  

Some Updates: 'Valérian' and a Side Project

So Valérian is more than halfway done, but at the same time, it isn't. And it's making me tear my hair out. I didn't anticipate the story to be this complex, and I think it's because the titular character is actually a side character, which leaves Roland (the book's MC) learning about Valérian's movements in a far-off place at the same time as the readers. 

The book, as I mentioned before, was partly inspired by du Maurier's Rebecca in approach. The difference is that the Rebecca character in my story is still alive, and he's physically separated from his younger brother. But! That's where all the gothic elements also get worked in.

The result is that the book takes longer than usual to sort itself out, and when my usual target chapter count for my long novellas is 26 chapters, the maximum I can give myself is 28. That said, at this rate, I might be looking at 30 chapters, which will bring the total word count to over 50K words. That also defeats my purpose of sticking to the long novella format, which is to sharpen my skills in telling a complete and relatively complex story in a shorter format (also, in terms of pricing, anything over 50K will be given a $2.99 price tag). 

But if the story refuses to stay within my strict parameters, I know I shouldn't fight it. Of course, the revision stage will tell me if reducing the length is possible, and I've hacked longer books down significantly to fit the publisher's length requirements (Icarus in Flight and Arabesque). I suppose, at the end of the day, it's easier for me to cut things out than to add material, so we'll see how things work out. 

At any rate, Valérian is still on track for a Nov. 1 release. 

Now for the side project...

I started working on something last year, and I ended up trunking it after 25K words because it wasn't going anywhere. In late May of this year, though, I decided to resurrect the idea and write a completely new version of it, and it's been a good process for me. In fact, the book's about 2/3 done. Unlike my usual releases, this one doesn't have a target length even if I'd love for it to be no longer than 50K words. If it goes beyond that, it's okay. This book is experimental for me.

And what I mean by that is it's not only a side project, but it's a story that's completely off the beaten track that I decided to tackle because I needed to take myself out of my comfort zone and attempt something I've been curious about but never tried before. 

Now whether or not the book will find an audience is another matter entirely, and I'm not worried about that. Since it's a side project, there's no guarantee that I'll write more books in the same vein. However, if I do, I'll have to work it in my main calendar, which will mean a wider spread of release dates for my Grotesqueries collection. What's now a three-book calendar will have to be a two-book one, and the side project will find its spot somewhere in there.

I'll also be publishing these books (or this current WIP if that's all I'll manage) under a new pen name because of just how far off the beaten track the genre is for me. I'll be posting about it when the time comes, though, so at least visitors to my site will know what's up, and it'll be up to them to decide if they really want to take a chance on that. 

Some trivia, by the way...

A House of Profane Gods was a title I initially gave what I'd first planned for the second book in this side project thing. But when I trunked the first unfinished draft of my WIP, I decided to give the title to my upcoming Grotesqueries book instead. So now I'll have to come up with a new title for that side project if things end up working to my satisfaction. 

So complicated, this writing business. 

August Arrives, Experimentation Ends

This marks the longest break I've had over here, but that had nothing to do with rest and relaxation. On the contrary! 

I put this site on private mode, redirected (hopefully) visitors to my Payhip site as my new home base, but that ended up as well as I'd expected, which was badly. That store, in its second incarnation (I had it up once a couple or so years ago and deleted it), sold nothing. No amount of marketing site-specific sales did anything other than attract bot traffic to it with zero conversions. And that store has been up since the start of the year.

I count that as my second strike, and I'm not going to attempt a third. I know when I'm beaten, and there's no help for it.

So I deleted that site and have sworn off direct sales at this point unless I somehow stumble across the secret to successfully attracting a massive audience of readers to my (extremely niche) books. For a writer who barely sells over at bigger, more established and popular online stores, selling direct is just not going to work. 

Also things have gotten even busier at the day job, believe it or not, and I just don't have any gas in the tank by the end of the day. I can't maintain a store and be creative in my marketing. I've tried just about every sale method and combination Payhip offers creators, and I still failed. So! No more direct sales. I just can't anymore. 

One final attempt at experimentation was setting up a really stripped down single-page site over at Carrd.co (a platform I highly recommend, by the way), but I found I do miss blogging, regardless of consistency. I mean, I'd love to be more consistent and post at least once a week over here, but that remains to be seen, doesn't it, with my day job being the way it is? 

(Not that I'm complaining about the day job, of course -- I'd rather be run off my feet than fruitlessly looking for a job in this economy)

At any rate, after a brief stint away from this dinosaur of a platform, I'm back, and I've once again updated all of the links all over this site and reverted back to my old Books2Read links. 

I did add a new moodboard to my main Book Gallery page, and it contains a mix of images highlighting the kinds of subjects I gravitate toward in my writing (i.e., ghosts, the occult, gay romance, liminal spaces, etc.). I'll also be updating around half of the moodboards in the individual gallery pages as well. 

In fact, I already have the moodboard I plan to use for Valérian's gallery page, but all good things to those who wait. Anyway, there it is. I do have a few writing updates to post this weekend, so stay tuned for that.