Maybe a little too picky…

So, a short blog post by Tony Noland has me thinking about one of the things that’s sucked about becoming an addicted writer. All three of his points had me nodding, but the second is turning over some gears in my head:

2. Reduced tolerance.

I used to enjoy lots of different kinds of books, including genre works of science fiction, horror, fantasy, etc. Now that I’ve been writing it myself for a while, I get irritated with some of the books that are held up as leading examples of the field. I know how the sausage is made, and it’s made me lose my taste for it.

I wish I could say it’s just the leaders of the fields that I’ve gotten turned off of, but I’m finding it really hard to finish a lot of the books I read these days. It’s not so much that the writing is bad and I’m giving up because the story isn’t good. The problem is, it’s not the story I want to read.

I got started writing precisely because I found so many of the same cliches showing up in all fiction, regardless of genre. I wanted to make something to stand apart from the crowd, and I feel like I’ve accomplished that in many stories. (Though not all of them.) But the problem is, the little things that used to be minor speed bumps are now major problems for me because I keep seeing them over and over. Instead of skimming over the parts that irk me, I drop the books altogether.

This really frustrates me, being so picky about what I read that I rarely get to finish a book anymore. And yet, even when I say, “I’m going to finish this book no matter what,” I will typically hit some passage that sends me to the living room to rant at hubby about how delusional fiction is with these stupid cliches. Once I’ve really worked myself up, he’ll cut me off to ask, “Why are you still reading it?” And then that’s another dropped book.

Yeas, it’s another sales report…

Amazon’s sent me a payment report for this month, and I decided to wander over to the KDP site to check this month’s sales. I’ve got sales in the US, the UK, and Germany. Of course I want to thank all my buyers, but I want to take a moment first to thank the folks in the UK and Germany who are buying my books. The US market is still where I get the bulk of my sales from, but for a while, there wasn’t any reason to check the other country reports because I never got anything except a blank screen. But during this year, there’s been a new trickle of buyers outside the US, and it feels really good to see I sold something in Germany, even if it’s just one copy of Peter the Wolf that sold.

Folks in the US still carry the bulk of sales every month, and this month, y’all picked up quite a few books. Peter got some love there too, but so did Sandy, Amber, Vicky and a few others. (It’s early in the morning, and my brain is fuzzy.) That’s not enough to hire an army of minions, but definitely enough to pay for another cover. And, that’s not bad.

I do not want to seem ungrateful for this continued success, but I would like to ask y’all Amazon buyers in the politest way possible, if you’ve read a book from me and want to help me get more sales for it, a short review would really help me out. A few kind words from you carries more weight than all the words I use pimping my stuff. So please, do think about posting a review to let others know what you thought of the story.

I need to annoy you with a reminder that we still need contributions to pay my editor for Roll the Bones. We’ve had 3 donations totaling $45, so we only need $510 to meet our goals within 35 days. Although the incentive packages are loaded with my ebooks, I will be seeing no royalties from this campaign, and whatever we collect, minus fees from Indiegogo, will go to Tara to help her cover her debts and take care of her kid.

Those of you who already donated, thank you. And thanks to everyone who’s shared the link to the campaign too. It’s hard for me to do this kind of campaign on my tiny low-traffic platforms, so every signal boost and link means another chance to reach new people. So if we meet our goal, it’s only because of all the help you folks provide. Even if we don’t make our goal, Tara will get a partial payment, and I’ll resort to giving her a larger percentage of my other sales until she’s paid up for Roll the Bones. Then we can start worrying about paying her for working on Thicker Than Blood.

So, closing out this progress report, I wanted to point out that I have a few more free stories posted up for your perusal. They’re over in the sidebar under the books, but those links are kinda tiny. So I’ll mention them here and offer them as a small sign of my gratitude. For your reading pleasure, I offer two novelettes, Eddie’s First Circus and Served Cold.

Eddie’s First Circus was published on Kindle, but I’ve taken it down to offer y’all a free sample of my dark fantasy writing. Served Cold was a revenge story that I wrote on spec for a crime fiction anthology. I was told my story was being held for possible inclusion, but the book never came out, and the publisher went out of business due to the owner having serious health problems. (This happens a lot in small-press publishing. Either there’s too many sick people starting up publishing houses, or small-press publishing is bad for your health.) Anyway, Served Cold is what my husband calls one of my darkest stories, while Eddie’s First Circus is…slightly less dark. But it’s got a kid who talks to animals, so that’s kinda cute.

Both stories feature deeply troubled kids trying to deal with problems in their lives, but while anti-hero Jessie Mendoza opts to do something positive for his little brother Eddie after the murder of their mother, the protagonist of Served Cold, Anthony, chooses to take a convoluted path toward revenge against a bully.

And so, there you are, free fiction. The ePub file is DRM-free, so feel free to convert the file to whatever version you need. And, one last time, thanks for your continued support.

Ramble on social media and self-publishing…

I’m taking a day or two off from fictional writing to clear my head after completing the rough draft of Thicker than Blood. So this mostly means I stare at Twitter and read whatever links catch my eye, or I chat with folks to pass the time. True, it’s not really productive, but usually it’s a great way to unwind.

Last night, I talked to a writer who is far more well known than me, and she was upset over some of the hateful things she’d seen on social sites. I knew what she meant, and I expressed sympathy and suggested that sometimes it was just better to pull back and stay offline for a while to avoid the stress.

This got me thinking about two things, as it usually does. The first is that, holy shit, I talked to a famous writer, and I felt like we had a connection, even if it was just for a brief exchange. Every time some big-time writer responds to me, I’m struck again by how social media enables me to talk to anyone, anywhere. And sure, lots of folks don’t ever respond. They probably get so much incoming chatter that it would be exhausting to answer everyone, or even a small section. So when some celebrity writes back to me, there’s this moment of admiration I have for the technology that makes this possible.

But this writer brings up the bad behavior of a lot of people, and then I have to think about all the downsides of the technology. This enabling platform gives a lot of people an over-inflated sense of entitlement to speak out on everything that annoys them, and they feel they have the right to bully other users of any given platform under the banner of free speech. They declare, “I have the right to say these things,” but never ponder that the hateful comments they make reach another human being somewhere on the other end of the connection.

Thicker Than Blood is done!

Despite the many gory distractions offered by Mortal Kombat, a nasty cold that came out of nowhere, and Mother Nature’s many sincere efforts to kill me, I have been cranking out steady word counts and edging my way closer to the end of Thicker Than Blood, the fourth and final Peter the Wolf book. Today I worked through my cold to write an impressive 6,500 words and complete the rough draft at just over 78K. The book will be a bit longer after I revise it, I’m sure, but I don’t expect this to stretch into the 90K range even with added visual information.

I feel very good about the ending, which is not a happily ever after. Peter’s suffered a lot through the four books, so a totally happy ending wouldn’t be fitting anyway. But there’s a note of hope implying that Peter will one day overcome the things his parents did to him.

Even as I’m closing out Peter’s story, I have ideas for a series for Alice, but I’ll have to leave those on a back burner and come back to them after I’ve put out some other stuff first. I have tentative plans to make a YA werewolf fantasy next, something a little less dark than Peter’s world, and using a very, very different wolf mythos, hopefully unlike anything previously written on the topic.

While I’m talking about Peter’s series, I would like to remind y’all that I’m still trying to pimp my editor’s campaign for Roll the Bones, book three in the series. I know with us indies, it’s sometimes risky to look at a series until you know it’s done. Well I swear to you, this series has an ending. And, it’s a good ending, too. So if you want to help pay my editor for book three and make it more worth her while to read book four, we can get this project done a little bit faster.

Thanks again to everyone who has given signal boosts on the campaign, and to the fine folks who have already contributed. We’ll be getting the rest of the series out to you soon, promise.

Video game review: Mortal Kombat for the PS Vita

Mortal Kombat is a game which stirs in me mixed feelings of nostalgia. I played this a lot in my teens, and some of my fondest memories include playing the arcade version of Mortal Kombat with my friend Ken at a San Antonio Taco Hacienda at 2 AM. Over the years, I’ve had budget concerns remove me from the arcades, and so I’ve not played anything since the MK3 arcade game.

And, I sucked at the games. But I loved playing them, even when people jumped in, because then I could at least see what the other characters were supposed to do when someone knew how to handle the controls. I got familiar with one or two characters at most, and I still got beat up and lost a lot of money. Hence, the mixed feelings about the MK series.

Hearing about a Mortal Kombat for the Vita, I was eager to sign up for this based on good nostalgia plus the positive reviews I’d seen from other people for this port. And, let me tell you, I was not led astray this time. Mortal Kombat is so good, I don’t even know where to begin with the gushing.

You’ve got several different modes to choose from for your fighting pleasure, and Komplete Noobs and Old Fogeys (like me) who need their memory refreshed will find a practice mode that’s rather useful in exploring different combos without being punished by an aggressive AI opponent. For people looking for meaty play, there’s a story mode that spans most of the cast of hero characters, plus a few of the villains. The voice acting is decent, and the cut scenes have great animation standards. This is by far the best cut scenery I’ve ever seen in a fighting game, and up to a certain point, I loved the story.

Eek, Indiegogo, please say this is a mistake!

This morning I woke up to a tweet from my editor that Indiegogo had charged $475 to her credit card. This has got to be a glitch of the worst kind. My editor has probably already submitted an email to get this cleared up, but talk about bad luck. We’ve only just start the campaign and have three contributions totaling $45. So according to Indiegogo’s terms for flexible funding they say they want 9% for a transaction fee. $475 is…um, a lot more than we’ve made so far. I sure hope was can clear this up, because it would suck if I had to help pay pay my editor for our efforts to get her some money to pay down her college debts. =^/

We’ll hopefully get this sorted out soon. Once we do, I was thinking about adding a couple of new print books to the raffle, but they’re not from me. They do fit in with the same theme of fantasy, as I’ll be adding Martin Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl and Curse of the Wolf Girl. I’d like to add more to make the raffle a big deal, but the shipping costs on those three books will be a leeetle on the expensive side. Still, the winner of the raffle will get three great books in print, plus a few ebooks, depending on which incentive level they spring for.

We could really use more attention on this, so if you have a blog and want to share a link to the campaign, it would be greatly appreciated. Several people on Twitter have retweeted links from me and from Tara, but tweets don’t tend to last very long in a fast moving stream, while a blog post has a better chance of catching peoples’ attention. We appreciate all the help we can get with signal boosts.

And while our campaign is starting slowly, I did get another email last night that a campaign to help pay for medicine for the editor of Loose ID went well past its initial goals, which is fantastic news for Raven. She’s got enough cash to make some breathing room for herself, and money in the bank for extra medication. I donated a tiny amount to this, but some people donated a whole lot more. The campaign actually made its goal in two days. Just…wow.

I’d love to get similar results for Tara’s campaign, but we’ll see what happens. First we still have to find out why so much money was taken from Tara before the campaign collected one tenth of their withdrawal.

EDIT: The charge appears to have been removed, so panic is over for now. =^D

New arrivals at NBP…

I have great timing, as it seems I submitted my books around the same time that No Boundaries Press was updating their site. So it took a little while, but this month’s titles are now on my profile page. You can also check out the new releases using this handy list:

The Life and Death of a Sex Doll
The Sole Survivors’ Club
Mmmm…Crunchy!
In the Grasp of the Devil
Trail of Madness
Zombie Punter

All books on NBP are priced the same as Amazon and my bookstore via Gumroad, so you can choose whichever vendor works best for you.

In other news, I’ve started playing Mortal Kombat on the Vita, and I suspect a good review will be forthcoming within the next week or so. I’m doing web editing as a temp assignment, so writing will take a bit of a nose dive this week. The weather continues to bounce around, so I’m not doing so hot lately.

Um what else? Oh right. I’m still looking for contributions to this Indiegogo campaign for my editor. If you’ve already contributed or shared the link, thank you very much. And now, sorry for the short post, but I need to return to the couch for another rest break. I sure will be glad when the weather commits to acting like any one season with some consistency. =^/

Video game review: Lumines: Electronic Symphony

Remember how I said this game was a little glitchy because of a patch? That’s still true, but I got on a kick for playing this game and finally worked around the glitchy d-pad controls. At this point I’ve beaten the Voyage mode and played every other mode except duel. And that’s only because I only have one other online friend playing this, and we’re never online at the same time. Anyway, I’ve tried out the playlist feature, messed with the Master Modes, and played all levels of stop watch mode. I’ve learned that there’s an XP cap at level fifty, but earning XP and gaining levels doesn’t really seem to do anything for me in the game. Doesn’t really matter though.

Lumines: Electronic Symphony isn’t a port so much as a reboot specific to the Vita platform. The blocks had been remade from sprites into 3d tiles, which look really pretty on most levels. This was true of the version I played on Steam last year, and the colorful blocks on highly animated backgrounds is a great way to show off the Vita’s gorgeous screen.

Just the graphics and the puzzle playing aspect would be enough to addict me, but Lumines also goes for my other weakness, a love of all kinds of music. I’ll admit a few of the songs are merely okay, but the vast majority are really catchy, and I found myself humming or singing many in between gaming sessions.

Those unfamiliar with Lumines despite its long history will find the concept instantly easy to grasp, and veterans will find the new Vita features are useful instead of feeling forced in. Blocks of four tiles come down from the top of the screen in combinations of two colors, and to the left of the playing field is a three block preview of the block combinations that are coming up. Match up four or more tiles, and you clear those tiles and earn points. As the music plays, a time slider wipes away blocks you’ve cleared, and the stack collapses, forcing you to reassess the queue and plan ahead.

Another payday…

Yesterday I was checking the Indiegogo campaign, which has $20 from two contributors, and between watering my garden and making tea this afternoon, I was lamenting that I wished I just had some cash to give to Tara outright instead of waiting till the end of the campaign. Then I checked my email and saw that I had a a final quarterly payment from Smashwords for $75. Nice timing!

So Tara got $50 today. True, it’s only 10% of the campaign goal, but it is a nice extra bump in the meantime. I’m sure I’ll send her more next quarter too, regardless of what sells and whether she edited it or not. She volunteered to edit without asking for money, but I’m happy to share my profits with her for taking some of the work off of me. An extra pair of eyes is invaluable in hunting down typos and problematic wording. So if I’ve got some cash on hand, why not send it to the nice lady who’s willing to fix my mistakes?

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to pay her at all if it weren’t for several of you picking up my books. This quarter has been a good one financially, and I’ve been able to use profits to pay hosting fees, buy cover images, and send money to my editor. I even had some funds free to donate to other folks’ Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, as well as sending donations to charities. Your money goes out to others so fast I sometimes have trouble keeping track of how much I made. When I do add it up, I’m kind of stunned that I’m doing this well.

Another thing: I’ve just opened the bookstore, and I’m doing the spammy routine on Twitter. I’ve had a lot of RTs for links to my store, and to Tara’s Indiegogo campaign, and although I’ve said thanks there several times, stuff flows by quickly in the tweet stream. So if you missed it there, thanks for sharing my stuff.

Folks also shared my links to CeCe McDonald’s petition, and they shared her address to write to her. CeCe’s petition is now up to 1,200 signatures, and I want to thank y’all for your efforts. Really, some of you Twitter folks are all right.

Um…so I guess that’s it. I’d say rants will follow soon, but I’m pretty sure my next post will be a gushing video game review. But I’m sure another train wreck is coming soon. I just need to deal with some of this icky positive stuff first.

Amendment 1…

I won’t have to link to any story, because by now you know that North Carolina joined the states who have voted against all forms of civil unions between gays and lesbians. And obviously this law is written in such a way to deny trans folks marriage too.

In the next few days, there’s going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame to be shared. But the main problem here isn’t with any one group. It’s that the people who don’t like gays and lesbians are willing to work together on this issue, even if they hate each other’s guts on lots of other issues. Those people work together, and they make every civil rights issue into a football. Abortion, gay marriage, black civil rights, immigration laws; it’s all the same game to them, and in the political game, they keep scoring points because none of our lobbying teams work together like theirs do.

It isn’t the fault of GLBT groups that they failed to rally more troops, and it isn’t the fault of any one group that this got passed. It’s the fault of people who didn’t see a need to vote, because this is such a done deal. Who’s gonna vote for hate? Those folks who stay at home don’t see a big deal with not caring about an issue one way or the other, and if we can’t convince those folks to stand up for others, then this will always be the way every civil rights issue is treated, as a metaphorical victim of a popularity contest that turned into a gauntlet.

This is why I’m willing to speak up about issues that aren’t in my “core group,” because I recognize that we need all these people working together on the same page for every issue, and not just the problems facing them. This is hard when the problems facing each group are so huge, and there’s the temptation to only want to cover your people. I know there’s enough trans news that I could ignore violence against cisgender women and race issues and still not run out of issues to talk about.

But looking beyond my own group, I can see how abuse has become the standard for a lot of minorities, and this is happening because the people who approve of abuse work together. To stop it, all of us who are affected need to present a unified front on every issue. That’s a lot of work, more work than most people were hoping for. You’re already burdened, so who wants to pick up more weight? I completely understand.

And then there’s some folks in minority camps who don’t want to work with each other, either for past slights, or for ongoing issues that have remained toxic topic for both sides of various minority camps. I’m not going to list slights, because no matter who I name, it’s just going to anger someone when my intention is the exact opposite.

But putting it simply, if we can’t stand together, we will all find ourselves politically hung by the same influential lobbies. We can’t win when each of us is bound to defend only our turf, and no one can win a popularity contest again hate, because hate is always popular.