The Problems, They Are Not My Own

I receive an entirely unlikely number of hits from the search phrase “fearing my gash”.

Still no joy on getting Power Play available to buy. This is frustrating because I can’t do anything about the problem, just wait and hope Amazon gets its act together (and email them daily, “Hello, I have come to be pesky again”). On the plus side of things it’s really nice that so many people want the book enough to contact me about it. On the negative side of things people can’t buy my book.

Also, I’m finding it difficult to move on from this. The last week or so I’ve been mostly just making notes for future projects. They’re good notes, but I don’t feel productive. I’ve pecked away at some other things but because Power Play isn’t actually properly released I’m at a bit of a loose end. I should try to power (ho ho) through this, sit down with a nice solid outline and get some words out.

Also also, the new Syndicate game is going to be an FPS. I am not particularly happy about this. According to the developers, it’s still Syndicate. Except it’s not, actually, because Syndicate is an isometric squad-control strategy thing. We’ve got hundreds of FPSs already, how many games like Syndicate do we have? Not a lot, let me tell you!

More positively, Power Down continues to do well and I’ve received a couple of really lovely reviews lately. Meanwhile, in Television Land, things are getting all inevitable on Breaking Bad and season two of The Walking Dead is only, like, a month away. There’s a lot of good stuff happening, so actually I’m having trouble getting properly ‘down’ about Power Play. Still, though. Frustrating.

 

Exhausted and near-delirious from weeks of editing, the writer lapses once more into cynicism

Hollywood’s New Twist On Fairy-Tales

I just love this quote from Hardwicke:

“Japanese anime artists show [the red cape] in tatters, with Red Riding Hood holding an axe with blood dripping down it.”

ALL the ‘Japanese anime artists’. ALL OF THEM. “Surely that’s just one artist’s–” EVERY JAPANESE ANIME ARTIST. NO EXCEPTIONS. “But–” IF A JAPANESE ANIME ARTIST DRAWS RED RIDING HOOD THEY DAMN WELL SHOW HER WITH A TATTERED CAPE AND A BLOODY AXE.

My interest in these films is nil bordering on negative (ie active avoidance of the fingers-in-ears and lally-lally-lahing variety). I mean, we all knew it would finally happen, Hollywood has run out of old TV shows and popular contemporary fiction to feast upon, so now they’re heading way on back to fairy tales. Heaven forfend an original idea should surface in Hollywoodland. After the Hollywood Beast has torn its way through all the popular fairy tales I’m afraid all we have to look forward to are remakes of remakes. I wonder if in a hundred years we’ll start seeing new stories just through the process of evolution, as these copies of copies of copies begin to mutate and gain a life of their own, minor changes exaggerated in the next iteration, like a massively expensive and wasteful game of Chinese Whispers, the remade-remade-remade-remake barely recognisable. Different actors each time, different directors and writers each time, different creative input, the Hollywood Beast consumes and excretes but there are individual talents involved, sparks of distinction, and eventually I think you might end up with something new and, perhaps, dare I say it, interesting.

Or else Fart: The Movie, with an all-star cast of CGI Eddie Murphys.

I’m being followed on Twitter by Manny Bianco. Yes, Manny from Black Books. We shared joy at sales over a cup of tea this evening. This is a surreal and wonderful world we share, isn’t it?

Catastrophic Technical Failure (at a U2 gig):

 

Entropy & Optimism, Optimism & Entropy

Optimism and entropy, Neil Gaiman once said, are the twin forces that make the universe go round. And you know something? He was blimmin’ well right. Today, I’m optimistic. I feel good about myself and about the future. Mostly because yesterday I did absolutely nothing in the way of writing. I didn’t so much as look at my current projects–okay, fine, I have to be honest, I did read a little of the Imogen Shroud preview PDF on my Kindle, but that was as much for relaxation as anything. (I can’t be the only one who finds editing-and-proofing relaxing, can I?) (Besides, I wasn’t even P&Eing, just flagging the odd typo and reading for the story.) It’s funny how you never release you’ve been working too hard until you stop. I was working far too hard. Not just on Imogen Shroud, but on everything–I wasn’t just writing 10,000+ words a day, I was outlining and researching and doing covers and writing bjournal entries and basically every single spare second of the day was spent working. I needed a day off, a proper day off.

You know what I dislike about piracy, the modern software-theft kind? It has completely overshadowed proper pirates. The same with these Sommalian buggers, they’ve just taken all the romance out of it, haven’t they? Every single time I see a forum post or a Twitter link with ‘pirate’ in it I get excited, only to be let down when I realise it’s the boring type of pirate. My take on the issue? Who caaaaaaares. I’m happy if someone reads my books, if they also paid for them that’s just a bonus.

Having far too much fun with “B.J.K. Write with B.J.K. White”–I’m getting a lot of responses for it, too. A surprising number, to be honest. I thought I might get one or two, but I already have seven with a couple more possibly coming. Hopefully I’ll get enough that I can roll the whole thing over into a ‘second season’–change up the questions and maybe the format, I don’t know, I just like that kind of thing. That way I could also have people who’ve been on once before come back, it’d be fun.

Also, it’s funny, I wasn’t thinking of it as a promotional activity at all, just a bit of fun and maybe a way to help out my fellow indies, but it’s pretty much tripled the traffic to this bjournal already. I should have known, this is always what happens, isn’t it? You give up searching and you sit down and your gaze just happens to fall on the exact right spot.

In any case, I’m having a blast with it and I can already see that people are going and looking at the featured book, hopefully it’ll lead to some new connections, author to reader, it makes me feel good to think I could be helping other indie authors so directly. I can’t take any credit, though–at the most, all I’m doing is helping expose their work. But I’m glad to do that. And in such a fun way, too.

 

Electronic vs Paper, why can’t we all get along? “That’s right … ELECTRONIC PAPER!” *zap* “Ouch!”

Thinking about electronic books versus paper books, specifically my decision to focus on the Kindle. Hardly anyone in New Zealand has one, which means my ‘local’ market basically doesn’t exist, it’s only through iPhones and such that people around me can buy my books. I’ve read a lot of people saying how they’ve encountered a kind of pity, when they tell people that they publish electronically, but I have to say I haven’t encountered anything like that at all. What I’ve gotten has been curiosity, about the process and how it all works, and quite often disappointment–that they can’t easily buy my books, as they don’t have a Kindle or similar device. But never the kind of “Oh, so you couldn’t get traditionally published” reaction that other people have reported.

I actually never tried to get traditionally published. For a start, I live in a small city in a small country, and our publishing industry is not the largest. Most New Zealand writers get agents based in New York, but to me that seemed like a huge amount of hassle. Also, I was always so worried about losing control, I’d heard so many horror stories from people who’d actually managed to get a publishing contract but felt they’d ‘lost’ their book, that they had no control over the cover, that they were required to make changes–I literally had nightmares about this, in one of them Miya Black got picked up but the cover was a photograph of a pretty blonde girl with an eye patch, “Oh, we’ve changed Miya to be blonde and pretty and tall and now she actually looks like a pirate” “NOOOOOOO~” etc.

I did investigate agents, way back when, but none of them seemed right for me. Maybe if I had been able to meet with them, to talk with them–but, again, small city fellow here, no agents nearby. I’d have to go to Auckland or somewhere even to meet with them, not an easy (or cheap) trip. For a while I went through Createspace, and my books are still available from there, and I may publish more through them in the future, but I never felt quite comfortable–for a start, ordering my books cost me so much in shipping that I couldn’t bear to sell them for anything resembling a profit. Putting them in local shops was out of the question, nobody would make any money at all. Since then there has arisen a new printer in Nelson, Copypress, and the books they produce are of comparable quality to Createspace’s–but they’re still very expensive, over ten dollars a book with no discount for bulk.

Electronic publishing is … it’s great. I love it. I love the concept, I love the execution, I love the Kindle. I love that it allows me to potentially reach millions of people without leaving my office. (Well, couch.) I love that there are no overheads and that I can sell books for 99 cents each and still make a profit–that’s mental, don’t you think? I still can’t get over how amazing that is, I feel like running into the street and grabbing people and saying, “Have you HEARD about this?”. I love that I can see this becoming a career, that this could actually lead to my having some freedom, that I could even maybe sometime in the future have the opportunity to move my family to Japan for a while–impossible right now, because of our financial situation, but I know my wife would love it, and I would too, and it’d be great for our daughters to properly experience that side of their heritage. My wife has a huge extended family too, the opposite of what I have here (which is a close, tight family), and every time I’ve been over there I’ve loved that feeling of belonging to such a wide, lovely group of people. So I guess that’s part of it, too, I’d like to be successful enough to have the financial freedom to go wherever I wanted, to live wherever I wanted … and that I could do this from anywhere, I could write and publish from anywhere.

Maybe there is still prejudice against electronic publishing, even if I haven’t personally seen it. But I think that’s going to change, and soon, and drastically. The big publishers are already running damage control. The old models and systems are collapsing. I see the future as one of individuals–freelance editors, designers, writers, marketers, all of us working together to create great things. We’re riding the wave, and the future is bright. Things are just going to get better.