Checking in

As this is the only social media I do, I figure I should occasionally say 'hi!' Yes, I am still alive, and yes, I still write. :D

 

I've been busy writing this year after a slow period during the depths of Covid, launching two new pen names. I can't write the same book topic over and over again, so I need to switch it up to stay creatively fresh and happy. WWII thriller, fantasy, crime, some romance, historical YA, short horror and SF, adventure, time travel, post-apocalyptic, natural disaster thrillers... I've written a few different genres, haven't I? I have some literary short fiction out on submission to magazines that I wrote last year and this. 

From 2015-2021 I made a living as a full-time writer. I also saved my pennies because I knew that was unlikely to last. It doesn't for most writers, and I was never deluded that I'd be the exception. Or, rather, most writers never get a year of full-time income, so I've been either fortunate, or my decades (more than three of 'em) of hard work earned that for me, depending on if you squint and tilt your head and look at it one way or the other. Unless one of my new pen names takes off, I probably won't earn enough to say I'm full-time this year...but then because of said penny-pinching, I can still eat and have electricity, and I find myself rather fond of air conditioning, heat, and food!

I still want to write a Lou Cadle hurricane book, but the last two natural disaster thrillers sold so poorly, I may not do so until I'm thinking of retiring. While I love the act of writing, if there's a chance I can make a bit of money with some other book in some other genre, I have to do that instead. It's like choosing paid work over volunteer work, and I'll bet most of my readers must choose the former over the latter. So must I.

If I ever get an idea for a post-apocalyptic series that doesn't feel like I'm my repeating myself (or redundantly repeating myself again, haha!), I'll write it and Lou Cadle may be more active again. If I don't, know how much I appreciate the readers I've had over these past eight years. What a fun ride it has been for me. And I hope you've had some days of immersion in imaginary worlds, where for a moment you believe those characters really existed.

1000 story ideas in a week?

I once claimed online to other writers that I could come up with 1000 ideas for stories or novels in a week.

 

I know, pretty big brag, right? But ideas are the easy part. And it doesn't take me much to get ideas. Chance remarks, a headline, a photograph, a sound, a memory, a general topic that I can brainstorm from and get 20 or 30 connected ideas, jumping off that central concept (a mind map, basically, for those who know the term).

So tomorrow, I'll spend a day writing ideas at that rate. (edit--I was going to do it for a week, but I'll just get bored in a week, I can see after one day. One day should be proof of concept.) Will they be brilliant? No. Quality comes in the execution, not in the idea. Will they be a complete plot? No. I'm talking only about ideas, kernels, enough to get me started outlining and writing. A logline or an elevator pitch in length. Not a two-page outline.

Will I post every thought that crosses my mind? No. If I get a really appealing idea that I may want to write, I may put it in my "ideas" folder (which is stuffed, and which I'm unlikely to get to any time soon) and not post it here. I'll count how many I do this with (it'll be fewer than 10, I imagine).

Do I care if you "steal my ideas?" and write your own story? Not one little bit. Ideas, as I say, are the easy part. Have at it. If I came up with "a family loses a child and is torn apart by it," you and I would write two vastly different stories from the prompts. So you see how "stealing ideas" isn't a big deal.

Do I care if you steal this list and publish it as a book of prompts and make money from it? Yes, I do care about that. It's for free to everyone, should anyone notice and want to spin off one of my idea kernels.

Let's see how close I can come to that rate. 142 ideas per day.

Review of 2018 + plan for 2019

It was a busy December of catching up with tasks I'd wanted to do for some time or should have done years ago, but I caught up and am proud of what that means. Soon there will be an omnibus edition of Books 1-2-3 in both the Oil Apocalypse series and the Dawn of Mammals series. (I'd do a five-book collection, but Amazon's rules about pricing makes that impossible.) They'll be out within a few weeks.

My newest novel is a World War II Spy thrilled, called Code Name Beatriz. It too will be out within a few weeks.

Because I have an older relative with vision problems, I know about the need for more large print books, so I've had Storm reformatted and made into a large print paperback. As soon as the cover is re-done for that, it'll be out too.

And finally, I revised and found a cover for a novel based on the life of my great-grandmother as a child. Her mother was so poor, she had to give her to an orphanage around the year 1900. I just released that under the pen name Rosellyn Sparks. Its name is The Long Road to Home. I drafted this in 2011, and my relatives have wanted to read it for some time, so this falls under "it's about time!" from their perspective. :D

That's a lot that came to fruition and was caught up on all at once.

I moved 1500 miles in 2018, and I bought a house for the first time in years, so the fact I got four books published last year is something of a miracle. Two were Lou Cadle novels, and one was a fantasy under the pen name LC Bard.

And now I'm in the middle of writing the 31st book I've written (I've not published all of them) in a new post-apocalyptic series. It should be out in May if all goes well.

Simple tech ain't so simple

My new series is going to be set long after the apocalypse, and the world (or at least continent) as we know it will have fallen back to a 17th or 16th century world. Wheels, for instance, will be carved, wooden, and "tires" will be of salvaged metal strips. Someone has to do the salvage work. Someone has to carve the wheels.

Not that there will be gasoline engines to pull the contraptions the wheels are on, mind you. Horses or people! Or people just drag the plow or ard themselves, roped into it, rather than like this guy who apparently has some deer-dalmation hybrid pulling his. (Egypt. interesting place. 😏)

My book is partly set in a wooden windmill, where grain is ground for the community. I've been educating myself on the history of windmills, and how complex they grew with people adapting them using nothing but quite simple tools. Lubricated by bee's wax, these machines sawed wood, ground grain, made Holland habitable, made paint, and all sorts of other items for use or trade. I enjoyed musing about the innovations, who came up with them, how long it took to get it "right," and the sort of person who could innovate. Honestly, it took me a week of studying them to figure out the basics!

Consider the design of a millstone, carved by a stone carver or millwright by hand. They must have started with just two stones, millennia ago, and came to this point.The more you think about the design--and read up a little on it--you see what an astonishing bit of technology the design is. It grind the grain, it pushes the grain out, and it doesn't pulverize the grain. The stones are further apart near the center and closer at the edge. The design controls the movement of the grain (eventually down into a hopper.) Most rotate about 2 times per second. Here's one design, but most look something like this.

I'm reading widely, not quite knowing what will be of use. And some of this is based on TV shows I watched years ago, like "Life After People," where they explained how the buildings, bridges, and monuments of our culture will fall apart quickly in the absence of our keeping them up (and having the petroleum to do so). Articles I've been bookmarking for over a year might apply--like the "fruit walls of the 16th century" article I found that shows how to grow fruit by using the heat-storing capacity of southern-facing clay or brick walls to create a warmer microclimate that ripens the fruit sooner and allows you to grow figs in Montreal. (I may not need this, but it's the sort of thing I bookmark and may or may not use.)

My writing process is, as I do this research, it starts to come together for me, characters begin to pop into my mind (Who does the windsmith interact with most often? What is her role in the community? What kind of person could carve millstones for a living?) I simultaneously gain the knowledge I need to make details correct and (I hope) vivid and get to know my cast of characters. When it feels ripe I begin to outline a series or book, though I also have self-imposed deadlines, so it darned well better ripen up on time! :D

Jan 1, I plan to type the words "Chapter 1" and get going on the new series. It's a little unusual for indie post-apocalyptic, as the apocalypse will be rather far in the past, but there are similarities in how it's a survival adventure, and new sort of apocalyptic events will spring up for the characters to deal with. As a minor point, climate change may have been nasty for the Oil Apocalypse characters, but when it changes back for their descendants to a colder world, a new kind of climate change will be just as difficult to adapt to. There are other problems they'll face, but I won't spoil it for you. It's coming in 2019.

Trying to imagine it's 1902

Before my family kills me for being so slow about this, I'm currently working on the finishing touches to a family history novel I wrote originally in 1911, based on the life of my great-grandmother Nellie. I've been promising it to my family for a while, and this holiday season, they will finally get it.

SPOILERS BELOW. If you want to read this book, don't read the blog post.

Nellie was born a bastard, as they said back when, of a 17-year-old girl and the farm worker 18-year-old boy, son of a merchant, who was working the farm kitty-cornered on the plat map to my great-great-grandfather's farm. This boy went on to be a merchant himself, owning a clothing store in Chicago until he died. His last name had come down through oral history, and only a bizarre bit of luck in my genealogical research let me know who his family was: he was recorded twice in a single census, in town and on the farm. (Anyone who does genealogical research will know what an incredible stroke of luck this was!)

not the orphanage...but built at a similar time.

Nellie's mom, Clara, went on to move to Indiana, where an older man married her despite the out-of-wedlock child, and she had two more girls by him, and he died. Her poverty grew dire, and quickly. It was a time of transition for America, when the good farming land was mostly claimed by oldest brothers, when steam engines were harvesting the crops and fewer farm workers were needed, when city factories were calling to displaced children of farms with their hard, filthy, and dangerous jobs, and when the working class was trying to find its place.

With women having no rights, really--not the right to own property in some states or to vote or to ask for equal pay or to divorce a man who beat them--Clara was in a deteriorating situation. While some of her brothers had money, none of them stepped up to help her or her other sisters with money problems. One of them, possibly ill with tuberculosis, visited with her daughter Florence and left her with Clara. I have no idea what their arrangement was--did Clara agree to take on this extra mouth to feed? Or did the sister sneak off in the night? No idea.

But it was the straw that broke Clara. She drove all four of the girls to the local orphanage and signed over her parental rights. It was their only shot at surviving.

Carrie Nation in Ann Arbor 1902. Wikimedia Commons

As always, I researched for this book extensively, and the story on orphanages of the turn of the 19th-20th century is fascinating. Fully half of the children there were like Nellie--not orphaned at all, but arriving on the edge of starvation. Their living parents, fighting for jobs in the shifting economy (from agrarian to industrial) felt they had no other choice. They were lucky there was any social service system, I suppose, for there was no food stamps or governmental assistance. All this fell on the private sector, on benefactors, on good orphanage administration finding ways to get merchant-class citizens to donate.

There were terrible orphanages, ruled by child gangs. There were terrible orphanages, where the children continued to starve and were beaten. And there was the one in Indianapolis (which still survives as a child-aid organization!) which was by all accounts, pretty well done.

Nellie was a pretty girl, with dark hair and strong eyebrows, and she was snatched up by a farm couple from a neighboring county and taken away, as an indentured servant. Again, the experience of orphan indentured servants varied around the turn of the century. Most of them were worked half to death.

Nellie was incredibly fortunate. The couple who picked her out was a lovely pair, with three teenage sons, a well-run farm, and only lacking a girl to help out Ma in keeping everyone fed and clothed. Nellie filled that roll. She was not raped or beaten or starved or forced to sleep in the barn, as many of the indentured orphans may have been. She did not have any need to run away from her indentured life, as many of them did.

an indoor bike track, 1902. Whoda thunk?

But she was under contract, not a slave but still very much controlled under the law. And that's all I tell you (except you can guess she survived, because here I am, writing about her!) The book takes us through her time in the orphanage only, right up to when the farm couple took her out the front door and into an unknown future.

In editing this, I'm appreciative of people who write historical fiction for a living. It's not easy! Just one example: I was editing the book and saw the word "toothbrush." Luckily, I thought to question it. Did people own toothbrushes in 1900, the year this is set?

As it ends up, no. Toothbrushes were not commercially available until the 1930s. People might have used a twig, or they might have used baking soda and a square of cloth to clean their teeth. And it would be said 'clean the teeth,' not 'brush the teeth.'

Heavens knows how many similar errors I've missed! I knew not to have a lot of cars driving around. I've been to historic museums of the Midwest to look at household items like kitchen items, pocketbooks, and clothing. I researched extensively Indianapolis's street car system, fares, and how people bought food. I've read dozens of newspapers from Nellie's childhood years at a historical archive in Indiana. Studying the ads helped put me in mind of what life had been like then. But even though I do all this careful work, it's the little details, like a toothbrush (or not) that are sure to trip me up.

I know a few of my regular readers will like this book, but mostly, it's for my family, my fictional account of what Nellie must have felt like and experienced after her mother dropped her off at the orphanage that spring day. She was 11, the eldest. Children were different then, with more responsibilities in a home or farm. What might she have felt? What comforts would she have clung to? Would she love or hate her mother, or both?

I can't know, but I guessed, as novelists do. The book should be out approximately the end of the year.

novel status, life status

Greetings! I'm nearly done with drafting my new novel, the World War II thriller. I'll be revising it in September, and then I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing with it. My stand-alone books don't sell all that well on Amazon (and hardly ever on other platforms), so I might try marketing it directly to publishers instead. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

After that, I'm not sure what I'll be writing. I have a lot of ideas, so whatever appeals to me at that moment.

Otherwise, I'm busy being a new homeowner. The lawn (which, by the way, I hate with the force of a thousand suns!) takes up about four hours a week. My vegetable garden is a much happier endeavor, and I enjoy the bit of self-reliance it provides. I have enough yard that I could be quite self-reliant. I live in a country-ish area that still has regulations but allows five hens per home with sufficient space. I also have 1/3 of an acre, and you can grow a lot of fruit and vegetables on that. Were I to convert the lawn to all vegetable and fruit garden, I could survive for at least nine months of the year.

Although, with the fight I had with cabbage beetles on my bok choi, I'd have to quit eating foods in that family, for sure.

Some cheap phone/ too blurry pictures of the state of my veggie garden a week ago. Potatoes (planted late), cherry tomatoes (coming in well now), regular tomatoes (barely approaching orange), bell peppers, squash. That poor pepper plant was transplanted three times, uprooted by a raccoon and dragged 20 feet across my sister's deck, and then a big tomato plant in a cage fell over on it in a bad storm, smashing it flat to the ground, and somehow it still is making peppers.

I promise to try and be more like that pepper plant!

Almost done with Oil Apocalypse #4

I wanted to update you on what I'm up to these days. I'm proofreading Oil Apocalypse #4, Parched, and I'll turn it over to the pro proofreader on March 1. I think I should be able to get it out around March 20 with a three-week pre-order period.

I'm not 100% sure where to go from there in the tale. I had outlined a book 5, but it was going to be a terribly bleak story, and I'm not in the mood to do that at this moment. (It gets harder to kill characters the longer I live with them!) So now I'm dithering. (You can stop at book 3, or you can stop at book 4, and it should feel like a complete series, no matter what I end up saying in book 5.)

I have a related series planned for longer after the end of oil, hundreds of years later, with a distant descendant of Sierra in the lead role. Have you ever seen the TV shows about Life After Humans? (there are two or three.) This fascinates me, how humans might be rebuilding while around them, there is rusting steel from collapsed bridges, crumbled skyscrapers, and other old tech that still exists, doesn't work, and creates something of a puzzle for the survivors. I've done quite a bit of reading about simple tech--building a wooden windmill to grind grain, blacksmithing, and so on. I plan to write that three-book series in 2019...unless some new, shiny idea jumps up, raises its hand, and demands to be noticed.

Ideas, by the way, are never my problem. I have files stuffed with ideas for novels, stories, and probably a dozen first chapters that wouldn't make half-bad books were I to continue them. I woke up a month ago with two great ideas for books I'll probably never have time to write. I'm an idea factory! The difficulty is in choosing between them, finding something I believe my fans will like but that won't bore me by being too similar to what I've already written.

In personal news, I'm moving halfway across the country in March, with the dates not yet set in stone (partly because of weather). What this means is that I might not be able to blog every single Sunday in March and April, but I'll get some articles up on some Sundays.

For those of you looking forward to spring, enjoy the weather, and for those of you entering autumn soon, enjoy the end of the awful heat you probably have had. 

My pen-name fantasy is out!

Emperor of Eyes, my first fantasy book, published under the name LC Bard, is out at Amazon and on Kindle Unlimited.

CLICK HERE

Thanks for giving it a chance. I think you'll like it.

A scam warning

Just a quick post this week to note something about myself.

I don't have a PayPal "donate" button, and I don't have a Go Fund Me, and I don't have a Patreon account. If you see one of those, or of any other such scheme pretending to be me, that would be a lie and a scam. Don't donate to it.

I'm old fashioned. (Also, simply old!) I think the way a writer gets paid is by writing books that people like enough to pay for, and earning some percentage of that as royalty. Any other form of payment makes me uncomfortable.

If you see any other authors that you'd like to support in those ways looking for money, always find their real website and see if they ask for donations there. Don't click via Facebook or anywhere else. Go directly to the source. Their website's URL is probably printed on their books and in the end-matter of their ebooks. If they don't have books out, they may never actually write one (loads of people "want to be a writer one day" but never get down to it). Look for writers who have proven they can write books you like to read, and support their careers.

And I believe the very best way to support writers' careers is not through Patreon but by buying their books. Already have the ebook and want to support them even more? Buy the audio or paperback or graphic novel version as well. It's pretty simple to do, and it's difficult to set up a scam for that, and it helps keep their book higher in the charts and so it might be found by a new reader more easily. To my mind, that's always a better choice than clicking "donate via PayPal."

Caveat emptor: buyer beware. And that goes double for giving away your money, even out of an urge toward kindness.

Back, next week, to your regularly scheduled blog.

I'm launching a pen name

Perhaps because I was burned out on writing novels that killed billions of people, or perhaps because I felt the real world was drifting far too close to Armageddon by the autumn of 2017, I took a break in November and wrote fantasy stories where billions do not die. I'll be publishing a book of that fiction under a pen name, L.C. Bard (ha! get it?) in a little over a week.

I have a website for it: www.lcbard.com. I doubt I'll put much on that site any time soon, but I wanted to give you a head's-up that it will exist. I'm making no secret of the fact that L.C. is also me.

This upcoming book has a short novel, The Gift, a Novella, "Presence," and the title short story "The Emperor of Eyes." All are set in the same world and are about people with what we might call a psychic gift, the ability to read spirits. It has no other fantasy elements, no elves or kobolds or demons or singing swords or what-have-you, just that one magical ability. Set in a world of outdoor markets, sailing ships, horse-drawn carts, and craft guilds, it should be easy to read even if you don't typically read fantasy.

The two longer stories could become series, for I know and like the characters I created. But I'll only do that if it finds readers. Otherwise, I'm over halfway through Oil Apocalypse 4 and planning on continuing to write that series this year.

See you soon with more news! And thanks for reading my books.

2017 Year in Review

I'm back!

Today I'm reviewing what I hoped to accomplish in 2017 and what I did accomplish.

My goals were:

• Publish Dawn of Mammals 5, Mammoth -- I did that (but forgot the paperback for months! Oops!)
• Write two Oil Apocalypse novels -- I wrote three, so A+ on this item
• Finish and publish Crow Vector -- I did that
• Revise my pen name historical novel about my great-grandmother’s childhood and get it out there. Oops again. I didn’t so much as read it.
• But I also wrote a short fantasy novel, which I’m finishing revising right now, and a half-dozen short stories in various genres. 

In terms of work load, I did more than I set out to do, so I'll give myself a passing grade.

Also, two audio book companies approached me and so two of my series are out in audio now--though I can't really pat myself on the back much for that, for all I did was sign some papers!

This next year, my goals are:

• Revise and publish all those short stories and the short novel in two volumes (one fantasy, one mixed genres, including tie-ins to Gray and Dawn of Mammals and the world of what will be Oil Apocalypse 6 or 7)
• Write two more Oil Apocalypse books
• Write more short stories during times I'll be busy with non-writing work
• At least read my poor, neglected great-grandmother novel, which I've had drafted for seven years.If I can revise it great, but I'll lower my expectation and merely ask myself to read it.
• Exercise more because I’ve been tied to my computer now for two years (11 novels written, edited, and published) and need to take care of myself, no matter what Amazon’s algorithms are demanding of me.

That's it! I hope you accomplished all your goals in 2017, saw a dream come true, and are enthused about life in 2018.

Happy New Year to everyone. I'll be back on Sundays with non-fiction articles again, these next two posts about some aspect of disaster recovery I've not yet addressed.

What is success to you as a writer?

Someone on Twitter asked this question several weeks ago, and I couldn’t answer it because my answer, I believed, was too complex for 140 characters.

The thing is, when you’ve been a writer as long as I have, you have had many goals over the years, but some of them fell away as you realized they were naive or unlikely to ever be achieved, and others fell away because you met them, and yet others fell away because you grew or changed and old goals bore you now.

So, to cite one example, a newer writer, reading the book pages in a newspaper or magazine, might think “I want to get a good review in X paper!” and much later, when he’s a professional and has access to daily sales figures and see those reviews don’t help sales one bit, and he needs sales to pay his bills because he quit his day job, he really doesn’t care one way or the other about newspaper reviews.

I once thought, I want a trade publishing deal for a novel with a big house. When I thought that at first, there was no Kindle or ebooks, there were 20 big houses, and you could contact the editors directly. Boy, those were the good old days in tradpub! I like editors. But as the industry changed, and as I had every other form of traditional/gatekeeper success a person could want, and I realized I hated the agent system, I cared less and less about this goal. It no longer was the box to check off. It was a box. It kept slipping lower and lower on my list.

And when I heard about how well people were doing in indie publishing--well, honestly, at first I couldn’t believe it, and then I did, and then I started wondering, and it began to appeal more and more. I did a lot of research about doing this in 2012 and didn’t begin until 2013. At that point, I thought, “Any stranger buying my book is a great thing.” And it happened and it was a great thing! Long term, I thought, “Okay, my eventual goal is, in three years, have six books out and be selling a hundred books per week over all titles in Year Four.”

As it turned out--and with little effort from me beyond writing--I blew that goal out of the water within a year. I had many days that I sold more than a hundred books in a day, which stunned me. I knew I was extremely fortunate. So…goal achieved, right?

And then came a strange turn, one I never expected of myself, because I’m a pretty Zen sort of person most days, and about most things, and particularly about money and possessions. In a flash, X amount of money wasn’t success enough. I wanted 2X. 3X. 5X. I met people making a million as indies! If they could, why not me? Me-me-me-me-me! Even though I couldn’t figure out how to spend 1X, to tell you the truth, I saw these magical numbers out there and suddenly lusted for them. And that was weird, to be caught up in that acquisitive “it’s never enough!” mindset. I was only caught for four or five months, but caught I was. For people who get this disease, I can’t help notice, the goal keeps receding, the goal number becomes bigger, and they drive themselves harder and yet it is never hard enough! Relationships and health suffer as they chase after that goal that, like the line of the horizon, is unreachable.

Sad. Nerve-wracking. Self-defeating. I snapped myself out of it.

But in the wake of that temporary insanity, I was left with no definition of “success” in writing that seemed meaningful to me.

I suppose my gauge of success could be graphed as a double curve, like a two-humped camel. When I was young and naïve, I dreamed of awards and recognition. Those thoughts were knocked out of me by the reality of both how hard writing is to do well and how competitive a field it is and, worst of all, that to get some awards you have to kiss a lot of butt, which is not my talent at all. For a long time after that phase had passed, I had smaller goals that I met, one after the other.

I quit dreaming. I started seeing dreaming as useless. Work is good. Work is useful. Realistic goals that you set for yourself (not the marketplace or anything outside yourself) can be worked diligently for and met. That's not success exactly; it's how I live my writing life.

Today, I suppose my definition of success is in being able to answer this question in the affirmative.

Am I Happy when I’m writing?

So maybe that would have fit in 140 characters at Twitter after all. But it has taken a lifetime to simplify my definition of success to the one-word answer to that one question.

How one full-time writer was made

I’ve been a writer for thirty years, and a full-time writer earning my living from novels for three years.

When I began writing for publication, I was already friends with a number of mid-list genre writers, so from the beginning I understood that becoming the next Stephen King in fame or income was unlikely in the extreme, and I understood what the life of the typical paperback writer was: another day job, income from writing under $10,000/year, and needing to write evenings and weekends when you were tired from a normal job. Somehow you had to do so without making your spouse or children hate you for ignoring them several hours per week when you should have been with them instead or doing your share of the household chores. You really had to want to do it to accept those terms!

I did want it that much. I wrote, studied hard on my own, took a few courses, and in very short time was placing poetry in magazines. Not long after that, I began selling stories to national magazines. I drifted from F/SF into literary writing for a time, had several stories published of that sort, won an fellowship to an MFA program (an experience which I hated, quite frankly. MFA programs in writing definitely aren’t for a person who was raised working class, prefers reading thrillers, and thinks Salem’s Lot and Lord of the Rings are good books!)

I realized lit-fic was not my true interest, retreated from that world, gave up what position I had earned there, and went back to my genre roots as a writer, where I felt much more at home. I wrote Gray back in 2003 or 2004, when post-apocalyptic wasn’t a big genre, and several agents rejected it. Digging through the stacks of used ten cent novels at a tag sale, I found Airport and The Glass Inferno and Jaws and a few other books of that time period and fell in love with them. Why doesn’t anyone write books like that any more? I wondered.

It wasn’t a huge leap from that thought to writing my own novels in that genre, mine being about natural disasters. I’m a sucker for a disaster movie. Even the worst TV disaster flicks make me happy. Show me a farm family in a tornado shelter or hurricane winds whipping the palm trees while dramatic music plays, and I want to settle in, munch popcorn, and watch until the end. I wrote the first disaster novel and started the second but again could not get most agents to even glance my way.

As no agent wanted to represent either Gray in 2004 or those books in 2012 or another book I wrote in between, indie was clearly the way to go if I wanted readers, and I did. I began the self-publishing journey in 2014, a bit late to the game, but at least I showed up! Admittedly, I made errors at first (you would not believe how difficult it is to find an excellent proofreader and a cover artist who “gets you,” and you waste a whole lot of money and patience kissing some frogs before your prince arrives), but in less than a year I had the basics down and Gray was gaining a following. (This has since swelled to over 40,000 readers for that series alone, and I am grateful for each one.)

I continued to write as I learned the ropes of indie as a business, and I’ve published most of what I’d written before and eight new novels I’ve written since entering self-publishing, including the Dawn of Mammals series, which has its own fans. I’ve unpublished a couple of pen name novels since.

I signed with an audio book publisher, and lately with a second audio book publisher, but otherwise I’m very happy with indie publishing my ebooks. I’ve been given a chance to reach the readers who agree with me about what constitutes a good story.

The only thing I don’t like about indie publishing is the self-promotion. I’d rather write, and I don’t like putting myself forward (or revealing much about myself). Because I don’t like promoting myself, I do almost none of it. People tell me I could sell four times as many books if I ran ads all the time and hired a savvy assistant to “be” me on Facebook and really work on PR over there, if I handed over the identity of my fans to Facebook as most authors do and let them pinpoint market and spam them and others who demographically match them, and pushed myself forward to be on podcasts and so on. This all sounds perfectly horrid to me, so all I do for promoting my books is this: about twice a year I run a few inexpensive ads, and I don’t even like doing that much. I’m a writer, and that’s the part I love to do. So that’s where I focus, and I trust that the rest will somehow take care of itself.

To be clear, I don’t repudiate my traditional publishing years (despite having abandoned that pen name and not being interested in going back to that world) nor do I dislike editors in the least. I always got along with editors well. There was a good deal of value to me in having to reach a certain standard of writing skill with short stories before being accepted for publication, and there was a value to competing for awards anonymously and seeing where I stacked up. It made me work harder, study harder, and up my game in order to be published in better and better magazines, and I’m glad I began my career that way.

I characterize my novels like this: I write science-based novels starring ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, people with flaws and surprising resilience both. I aim to write page-turners, and when I get fan mail or reviews that say I’ve succeeded at that, I smile in contentment. If I made you stay up until the wee hours needing to know what happened next to my characters, I’ve done what I set out to do.

On being a full-time writer

During November, National Novel Writing Month, I blog about writing. In past years, I’ve focused on craft or business. This year, I’ll be more autobiographical.

I have worked very hard to become a full-time novelist. For thirty years I’ve been working at writing, writing for years only in the mornings or nights in addition to a day job, and now I'm full-time as a writer.

And so it seems that after all that work, I should be 100% thrilled with having finally won my way through to success. (No, not Janet Evanovich/Hugh Howey levels of success, but I pay the bills with writing, which not a lot of novelists can say). And yet, here is what this looks like to me:

Is that image of a well-dressed lady from the back? Or of an old hag’s face? Youth? Or age? How you read the drawing depends on your perspective. And how I view my full-time writing status depends on my mood, what I still have to get done that day, what pressures I’m feeling, and how hard they press upon me.

If I simply detail my day for you, it sounds no worse than any work day at an office:

• Check email, respond to fans (who are the most important people other than me in the whole deal!)
• Do the heart of the work (about three hours): writing or revising or outlining the next
• Deal with non-fan and complicated emails
• Do other administrative tasks--uploading the books, dealing with covers, proofreading, and formatting, updating the web page, learning something new about the business, checking sales, accounting, advertising, and so on
• Interact on social media or IRL with other writers
• Read/research for future novels
• Check emails again, clear inbox one last time, and done

I often work from 6:30 a.m. until 11 a.m., take a break, and then finish up by 2:00. That’s seven days a week, not five days. I try to take weekends between phases of a project (as between finishing a draft and starting revision) and an “easy week” while my proofreader has a book. But I can’t always relax because there are always administrative tasks piling up, so sometimes my “weekend off” is more like an afternoon off.

In a sense, the work is never done. When you run your own business, you can’t just shut off your brain and relax. If a good idea--or an item to add to the to-do list--pops to mind, you need to go deal with that, at least to write it down. If a crucial email comes in, you have to answer it. And writers are always thinking about books and characters, even in our “off” hours. We don’t watch a movie but that we take notes on how it did a dramatic thing well, noting a technique we might be able to adapt. We go to a picnic and while other people are having fun, we take mental notes on gestures, arguments overheard, what a tree limb looks like in the breeze, the games the kids are playing, and all sorts of things that might go into our novels.

A confession about my to-do list. I used to have a huge one. Produce audio books, get started on translations, transfer author site to wordpress with a snazzier design, figure out how to do X kind of advertising, and so on. But that list really started weighing on me. I added to it often but seldom crossed a line out. I finally gave up on it except for a post-it note sized to-do list, which usually is only of things to do this week.  I would not have done audio books ever had audio book companies not contacted me, for it was far too much work to do myself.

I know that if you’re not a pro writer, and you think you want to be one, that you’ll doubt this: but it’s harder work once you’re full-time than it ever was before. It’s hard work to stay where you are once you’ve arrived at a certain level of success. You must run as fast as you can up the down escalator, or it will dump you ignominiously on the ground while other, hungrier, harder-working writers pass you by.

Some days, you think, “I’m going to quit. This is too much work. Too much pressure.” Some days you look at yourself in the mirror and say “What the hell was I thinking?!?”

The only thing that saves me at such times, that keeps me marching forward, is the writing itself.

I love to write. I love to invent characters who seem as real to me as the people walking down the street outside my window. That’s the thing that makes me keep doing it, that the work is its own reward.

I also love to make readers feel something--especially to feel nervous and worried about my characters’ safety.

Still, back to my original thesis from last week: Being a full-time writer is not easy. It’s a real job, with a lot of dull and tedious chores. It isn’t much like your earliest, most naïve dreams of it. For me, it takes up about 330 days a year. You never really “arrive” at a destination. You just keep working harder and harder.

To my readers, thank you so much for reading.

To my fellow writers, I'm betting that one day (even if you doubt me now), you'll know what I'm saying. There's a whole lot of boring work to being a full-time writer.

Update on Oil Apocalypse 3

My wonderful cover designers have moved up my appointment for designing the cover of Oil Apocalypse 3 (Bled Dry) to November 1. When they give me a final version of the cover, I'll put up the book for pre-order, and it should drop onto your Kindle by November 20 or so.

It will complete this part of the tale, but I will return to the neighborhood with more Oil Apocalypse books in 2018. Nine or ten years later, the gas they had stored will have gone bad, their battery banks will be failing, and the challenges for survival will be new ones.

Right now, I'm indulging myself by writing some short stories, and I plan to put out a collection of them in 2018. It will be a variety of genres, including a crime story, a fable, a fantasy tale or two, and tie-in stories to each of my three series. I'm enjoying letting my creativity soar with different genres.

A reminder: as always in November, I talk about the business and craft of writing in my blog. In December, I'll go back to talking about disasters and other science topics.

Apologies. Too busy to write an article

While my blog is, most Sundays, a researched non-fiction article, this week, I'm too busy to write another. My apologies. The good news is, I'm putting the finishing touches on Oil Apocalypse 3. I have only to proofread it and, depending on when my cover artist is free, it should be up for pre-order in mid to late November. Oil Apocalypse 2 is up for pre-order now. So I'm well ahead of my original schedule, and you'll have a complete story in hand by the end of the year.

However, the series won't be entirely done at that point. While books 1-2-3 will complete a tale, I'll return to the neighborhood nine years later (in their time) to take up the story again in a book 4 with whoever has survived the first nine years of the end of oil. New problems, new enemies, and new opportunities will abound. I hope to complete the rest of the series over the course of 2018.

Oil Apocalypse 2: Bleeding is on pre-order

Bleeding, the second installment in the Oil Apocalypse series is available at Amazon now for pre-order.

HERE.

I'm working hard on Book 3, and it should be out in November.

I have good news about Oil Apocalypse!

Because my imagination and fingers have been working overtime the past six weeks, the third book will be ready much sooner than I'd planned. I still must coordinate with cover artist and proofreader for this surprise change, but if Book 2 drops into your Kindle on October 6, it's quite possible Book 3 will appear in late November, which is fully six weeks earlier than I had originally thought I could do it. Yay for all of us!

And those three books will comprise a sort of sub-series, a complete tale that comes to a resting point. After that, there will be a time gap (for the characters, not for me and you) and we'll come back to them in Book 4 several years later, when relationships, resources, and troubles will have changed.

I originally thought this first section would be one book, but that wasn't so. And then I thought it would be two books, but I got so many interesting ideas, I realized I couldn't fit them into a single volume. So three books it is for this sub-series.

There is every possibility that there will be six or seven books in the series. I know the final scenes of the series as clearly as if I witnessed them happening in real life, and I can tell that they aren't coming up in any book soon. So if you like the Oil Apocalypse series, this is good news indeed. It won't be a short series!

Next Sunday I'll return to my posts on the end of oil, the collapse of civilizations, and related matters.

Mid-year report

No, it isn't yet the middle of the year yet, I know! I'm a rebel like that.

I'm a full-time novelist, earning a living that way, paying all my bills and maxing out my retirement contribution via novel sales. I know many, many writers out there would like to be this. Because I actually track my hours and tasks each day (I once worked for a management consulting firm, so tracking "billable" hours is like falling off a log for me), I thought I'd tell you what I've done so far this year, so you can see what one full-time writer's life looks like.

• new words of fiction written: 186,000
• words revised and proofread: 384,000
• research: 169 hours 
• administrative tasks: 215 hours
• social media: 30 hours
• socializing with other writers: a lot! But sometimes I learn something, so it is business time as much as social time
• volunteerism: didn't track my hours, but I do help other writers
• days off: 11 
• blog posts written: 29 (I have some queued up for after the next novel release)

Not that the days off were usually off, exactly. That's when I run around and catch up on major-hassle errands, do repair projects, wrestle with government agencies, and so on.

My work days usually last 5.5 hours, and I work seven days per week, though there are moments outside those hours when I'm probably thinking about if this or that plot twist would work. ETA in response to an email: I'm a morning person, so I'm usually up before 5:00 a.m. and often done by noon.

I expect the second half of the year to be pretty much a duplication of the first half. (350K words, 300 hours of research, and so on.)

As you can see, I don't get as much as a one-day weekend most weeks (I tend to take time off in 3-4 day chunks). The time I work is close to that of any full-time job, 40 hours per week, and while a lot of what I do is fun, it certainly isn't all fun. Other benefits to this work: I get to write in the oldest, most comfortable clothes I own and not commute and not put up with horrible coworkers. So I'm not complaining, you see. But it is a job, aspiring novelists should know, not some endless happy dance in the land of frou-frou bunnies where ice cream drips from the trees. (which would be a real mess, come to think of it.) It's hard work.

I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to live this life. It was a long-held dream and Amazon, the Kindle, and my fans have made it come true. To all of them, many thanks.

Guppy Must Die short story

The crew would suffice. Selma Eubanks was the lockman, Ed Flynn the muscle, and Harv Gupton the utility infielder, a bland-faced man you’d never remember well enough to pick out of a lineup. He could put on a tie and look like a copier salesman or carry a lunch bucket like a factory worker.

Fer Newmark was the planner. Once a utility infielder himself, he had grown into a planner more by his attention to detail than any particular smarts. Right now, Newmark was worried about the detail of Harv Gupton, whose hand shook--not a lot, but enough to tell a tale.

“Just off the sauce?” he asked Gupton when Selma was in the john powdering her nose.

“A few weeks.”

“Still got the shakes.”

Gupton looked down at his right hand as if it belonged to another man. He tucked the fingers between his leg and the motel bed. “I’ll be good for the job. Honest I will.”

“A few weeks, you say?”

“More than one,” Gupton said.

Newmark figured that to mean three days. Gupton was what you might call a functioning alcoholic, able to stay off for the length it took to plan and execute a job. This job was Tuesday, five days off. Maybe the shakes would go away by then. “Not a drop until after the job,” Newmark said.

“Not a drop. I swear.” Gupton crossed his heart clumsily with his left hand. It shook too.

A knock came at the motel room door. Newmark did not use the peephole. People get shot through peepholes. He cracked open the door with the chain still hooked on. “Flynn,” said a smooth voice over the state road traffic noise.

Newmark let Flynn in. His voice might cultured and his suit this year’s model, but he was good with a gun and his fists. And his eyes, flat steel gray, could intimidate people so that he didn’t often have to resort to a gun. 

“We all here?” he said.

“Yeah. You know Harv Gupton?”

They nodded at each other. Selma came out of the bathroom, the wrinkles of travel smoothed out. A beautiful black woman with an island accent, she never smiled. Newmark suspected it was to undercut her beauty, to keep guys from feeling invited in.

“What do you have?” Flynn said, taking a seat on the dresser, leaving the chair for Selma.

Newmark remained standing. “A bank.”

“A bank.”

“One by a grocery store.”

Flynn narrowed his eyes. “I know you’re smarter than that.”

“The store is about to close. They’ll be moving out the goods. But the bank will stay open while they do. Milk and eggs and shit, that gets sold to the last day. Canned beets, that gets hauled away.”

“Non-perishables,” Selma suggested.

“Right,” Newmark said. “For two days, those go out, and the bank is open.”

“There won’t be many customers, you figure?” Gupton said.

“You guys have cell phones?”

“Burner only,” Flynn said.

“I have a burner smart phone right here. When you Google a store, it shows you customer flow, how many are there at what hours.” He had it called up on his phone already and passed it around. “Figure half or third that many for the last two days.”

Flynn glanced at it and passed it on. “So we move at nine, when the bank opens?”

“Out before nine forty-five, when the last armored car comes to haul off the cash.”

“Also non-perishable,” Selma said.

Gupton giggled.

Newmark laid out the basics of the plan.

“What do I do now?” Selma said.

He looked at her. “Staffing details. How many, where are they?” He turned to Gupton. “We need a cell phone jammer set up outside. Find one.”

Flynn didn’t need to ask his job. He’d take care of the bank clerk and manager. “Can’t be much money,” he said.

“Over a hundred, according to my source. Twenty five per man.”

“What if your source is wrong?”

Newmark thought he wasn’t, and he knew the others would trust his sources. “Then we work cheaper. You still in?”

“Yup,” Flynn said.

Selma nodded.

Gupton said, “Okay, Fer, anything you want.” When Newmark held his gaze, he licked his lips, nervous. “I’m the--whatchacall it--man Friday.”

“Factotum,” Flynn suggested.

“Sure,” Gupton said, confused but agreeable. “I do whatever I’m told.” He said, “Maybe I’ll look like a homeless guy. You see them sometimes, sitting outside the grocery.”

That's match the shakes, at least. The phone had come back to Newmark and now he pulled up the photo collection for this job. It included a blueprint he’d drawn himself. He passed the phone around again.

He watched Flynn flip through the shots. “Rear exit?”

“To the store? It’s in there. Loading dock off a storage room.”

Flynn nodded as he kept flipping, and then he passed the phone to Selma.

Newmark watched Gupton from the corner of his eye. The man was twitching. Not just the shakes, but shifting from butt cheek to cheek, scratching his ribs. DTs? Or something worse? “Hey, Guppy,” Newmark said, knowing the man hated the nickname. “Take a walk with me.”

“Okay, Fer. I just gotta use the can first.”

That set off an alarm, one wired deep into Newmark’s criminal soul. That alarm had kept him from ever going down for a job. One arrest that didn’t stick when he was only twenty-three, but nothing worse in the twelve years since. He intended to keep it that way. “I’ll help,” he said to Gupton.

Both the others froze and glanced up.

“Ha-ha,” said Gupton, without humor.

“Stand up,” Newmark said. “And lift your shirt. Very slowly.”

Flynn came off the dresser, his knees flexed, ready to move.

“What?” Gupton said. “You turning gay on us?” He tried to force a laugh but failed.

“Shirt,” Newmark said, pointing at it and flicking his finger up to demonstrate.

Selma went to the front door, cracked it, and looked out. “Don’t see anything,” she said.

“Shirt,” Newmark repeated, staring at Gupton.

His hands were shaking badly as he lifted the tail of his shirt. When they all saw no sign of a wire, the tension ratcheted down a notch. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Fer,” Gupton said.

“Drop trou,” he said, backing off a step.

Gupton did without comment.

“And kick them to Flynn.” Without taking his eyes off Gupton, standing there in briefs and shirt, he said to Flynn, “Take out the phone, and look for any other device.”

“Yup,” Flynn said. As he emptied the pockets, he lined up everything on the dresser. The crack as he smashed the phone made Gupton jump.

Selma said, “Still nothing out here.”

“Check the bathroom window in back.”

“Done,” she said. As she moved past the dresser, she stopped. “Wait. That.”

“What?” Flynn said.

“The flash drive.” She held it up. It was on a key ring holding a car key, a key to a door, and that. Selma looked at it, flipped something on the side, and nodded. “It’s a recording device. A spy thing. Used them on a job in an engineering office once. This one was on.”

“You do industrial espionage too?” Flynn said.

Selma tensed, glanced at Gupton, but then she looked at Newmark’s face. She understood there was no reason to worry about Gupton any longer or what he might hear about her. “Still want me to check the rear?”

“If you don’t mind,” he said. “Then you can leave. You go now, Flynn.”

“I’m gone,” he said, and then he was as good as his word.

“B-b-b-but Fer,” Gupton said.

“We need to have a talk, you and I,” Newmark said, to keep him calm. Selma came through said, “Clear,” and snatched up her bag and left via the front door.

“Okay, let’s talk,” Gupton said.

But they weren’t going to talk. Those three words were going to be the last Gupton uttered.

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I'm a big fan of Donald Westlake, both in his humorous mode and in his Parker/Stark mode. I always wanted to try a hardboiled crime novel a la Parker, but never have until Chuck Wendig's short fiction challenge gave me the title "Guppy Must Die." I failed in keeping it under the 1000 word limit, but I have a hard time keeping anything to that limit. Thanks to Chuck and Jeanette Hubbard for the inspiration, and apologies to Mr. Westlake's ghost. (If I were going to try this seriously, I'd immerse myself in Parker novels for six weeks first to "catch" the voice, which I don't think I caught well here.) Every writer with a functioning mind wants to be able to write as well as Westlake...but no one can. RIP, sir.