I finished up Mass Effect 3 a couple of days ago. The game itself is terrific – they took the playstyle of ME2, added back some of the complexity and customization elements of ME1, and successfully iterated on the storyline that finally closes the story. However, there’s just one thing wrong with this: how they chose to end it.
Major warning: in-depth discussion of what happens at the end follows. Spoilers, spoilers everywhere. You have been warned. Read the rest of this entry »
I still don’t consider myself an author.
Sure, I’ve written a book. More than one, technically, though only this one is published. But there seems to me to be a significant gap between the self-declared titles of “writer” and “author”. Everyone’s got a story to tell. Some people never tell their stories. Some people try to live their stories. Others tell it through art, or music, or what have you. Some write. And of those that write, some of them become authors. What’s the difference?
It’s not whether you sell your book through the traditional method. I know I write better stories than some who have gotten their books picked up through big publishers, gotten agents, and so on. That isn’t the mark of an author. It’s not whether you actually sell copies – which I do. Not a lot, but enough to make me feel confident that I’m not all that bad a writer after all. What I consider to be the mark of an author is when your readers identify with your characters. When your setting becomes real enough to take them away from the real world for a couple hundred pages. When your plot draws them along to the inexorable conclusion. It’s making your readers care.
I don’t know that I’ve done that. I’ve seen glimpses of it, but I just don’t know that I’m there yet. And so, I feel like I’m caught in some sort of limbo, between “writer” and “author”. Maybe this is just a question of time, or a question of more people reading it, or simply getting better at the craft. But still, there’s just a certain level of uncertainty. It all seems a little too unreal to me.
So I have finally gotten The Demon Inside Me into print, through Createspace. It took a few weeks worth of work to get the formatting and the tiny little details down, but I think I did a pretty good job for my first time. I just have a few things left to do, like get the print and Kindle versions linked via Amazon, which I have already created. I also received a $100 credit with Google AdWords from a deal with my webhost so I may throw together a small ad campaign and see what I can get out of that.
In other news, I’m over the halfway mark in my draft for the sequel. Right now it’s looking like it’s going to be slightly shorter than the first book, around 21 chapters and probably around 100K words as opposed to 22 chapters and 110K words. I’m on course for getting the draft done by early summer, and now that I’ve gotten all of the print stuff out of the way, I can concentrate more on the draft.
To purchase a print copy of the book, you can get it from my Createspace storefront here: https://www.createspace.com/3737355 or from Amazon itself here: http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Inside-Me-Christopher-Nelson/dp/1468013041.
So far, I’ve successfully stuck to my weekend goals: finished up the draft of chapter 10 and did a brief outline of chapter 11. The end of chapter 10 was sort of painful – a lot of this book is sort of painful – it’s got some significant differences from the first book. It’s not exactly dark and brooding, but it’s a bit more serious in tone to start with, and it only gets more serious as things go on. The climax of the third arc is probably going to be difficult and painful to write, maybe more so than the fourth and final arc.
I do outline a lot of my writing, but not in any great detail. In the past I’ve tried to write stories without a framework, and ended up writing myself into a corner. My biggest problem with writing stories is that I know where I’ve been and I know where I’m going, but I get lost between those two points. It takes the most work to figure out the most interesting path from point A to B. Outlining each chapter in turn helps me take steps along that path without getting lost.
I’ve also nearly completed formatting and prepping a print version of The Demon Inside Me. All that’s left is the cover art, which is being worked on by the indomitable ess-vid, and a few more tweaks to the layout. I decided in the end that I should go with Createspace, rather than Lulu. It’s really a rather simple choice: when you go through Createspace, you’re going through Amazon, and the only one taking a cut is Amazon. When you go through Lulu, both Lulu and their distribution partners take a cut. What this means for the prospective author is that in order to get equivalent profit, you’d have to sell your book for significantly more on Lulu.
The downside of a POD service like this is that you’re not subsidized like a traditional author, which means that mass market paperback versions are right out. A normal mass market paperback, 5×8″ trim, costs the same to produce per page as a trade paperback 6×9″ trim. However, the smaller book will have more pages, which makes it cost more to produce, and then you’re expected to sell it for less because it’s smaller. The smaller books typically go for $8-9 these days (whatever happened to the days of $5 paperbacks?) whereas trade paperbacks go for $14-15. Through the magic of Createspace, I can sell a trade paperback for a couple bucks more than a mass market paperback and quadruple the author’s share. I think everyone wins there.
On the being social part of things, I’ve found that Google Plus is my social network of choice. I just don’t like the character limit on Twitter and I don’t like the vapid invasiveness of Facebook. I have been posting more on there than I have been here, obviously, so follow me there: https://plus.google.com/u/0/116912972752212756597/posts
Being sociable has never been one of my things – social media bewilders me. So, in an effort to change this, I’m going to take steps this year. Call it a New Year’s Resolution. I’m going to post more often about things that interest me. I’m going to save more of my “specialized” interests and writing status here on this site, but I’m also planning on actually making use of my Google+ account as well. At least 3 posts per week is my goal. I have to get past the idea of “why would anyone be interested in what I’m interested in” and just accept that some people just might be weird like me.
Progress on the next Demon book continues apace. I’ve started the draft of chapter 10, which is the last chapter of the second main story arc. Structurally, I’ve designed the story the same way as I did the first book. There are four major “story arcs” which consist of 5-6 chapters each. Each arc consists of a slow beginning, rising action, finishing with a climactic incident. Each arc pushes the rise in action higher than the previous arc. The overall story for this book is probably going to be a little shorter than the first book – I’m looking at around 95-100K words, where the first book weighed in at 110K.
The major reason for this is that there’s a lot less in the way of initial characterization. Readers of the first book know the main characters and how they interact. It’s two years later, so there are some changes which are touched on and explored, but there’s no need for chapters establishing how Tink and Zay develop their partnership, for example. Instead, I start straight into the main plot and put other plots on the back burner. The most difficult thing to work on with this sequel is simply how the characters have changed – two years change the group dynamics here and there. In some places, they’re minor, but other things have changed for the worse. I suspect this is why I’ve had so much issue getting this one flowing. Without spoiling anything, Zay’s situation isn’t anywhere near as tranquil as it was at the end of the first book, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.
I am still on track to try and finish the first complete draft by mid-late spring and start getting some beta reading going by early-mid summer. I’ve also learned that lesson – do some editing first before letting others read it. So that shall be done.
So, when going through the publication process with Lulu and with Amazon, I had the option of enabling DRM. For the uninitiated or uninterested, Digital Rights Management is basically a software method to limit what you can do with what you just bought. It’s shown up in many guises, for games, music, software, and hey, let’s apply it to ebooks now.
No.
Here is my statement on DRM, which is included in every copy of my book:
Please treat this ebook as you would a printed book. If you enjoy it and would like to share it with your friends and family, please do so! Your support is appreciated. This book is DRM-free – if you receive or purchase a copy that includes DRM, please contact the author. Please respect the author’s rights to make a living from his work and do not re-distribute this book in any format for commercial purposes or modify the content in any way.
I quite honestly do not care if you steal my book (the bookstores might though). I simply do not subscribe to the idiotic notion that 1 pirated book = 1 lost sale. Instead, I consider 1 pirated book = 1 more person reading my book than would be otherwise. I consider 1 person sharing my book with a friend to be a bonus. If that friend buys it down the line, awesome. If not, it’s one more person to say “hey, I read this book…” somewhere. I consider that far, far more worthwhile than the money I get from the sale.
In the end, I wrote this book because I want people to read it, enjoy the story and the world I created. I’m not in it for the money (ok, I’m in it for enough money to cover costs, the rest is gravy). Creative writing is something I enjoy. DRM keeps people from enjoying it. I don’t know a single person out there who will refuse to buy something because it doesn’t have DRM; I do know many people who will refuse to buy something if it does. Side note: it is amusing that Lulu charges you, the author, for adding DRM to your book. At least they don’t hard sell you on it, but I had a good laugh at that.
So, my book is available on the three major bookstores now: Amazon, B&N, and the iBookstore. It’s also available through Lulu itself. I have opted out of DRM every place I could, but I am unsure if Apple forces it. Here’s the deal: if you purchase a copy of my book and it has DRM, I will e-mail you a copy of a DRM-free ePub version upon request. Simply forward your e-mail receipt to contact@thedemoninsideme.com. If you simply want to strip the DRM yourself, by all means, do so. If you want to share it with someone, by all means, do so. If you want to buy a zillion copies, by all means, do so. The thing I care most about, with my writing, is that you enjoy it.
Several things have kept me from updating this quite as much as I’d like to. So, this is going to be an enormous recap post!
First off, the guild I was running in Rift finally collapsed a couple months back, resulting in my withdrawal from the game. We had to take fairly desperate measures to keep the guild going due to attrition, so we absorbed a smaller guild. Things went quite well for a month or so, and then the leaders of that smaller guild decided they wanted to leave the server and took their people with them, without any warning or discussion. Losing a significant chunk of our raiding force ended our hopes of continuing to raid. That actually left me with more time!
Fortunately (or not as the case may be), several other games jumped up to fill that void. First of all was Dark Souls on the PS3. This sequel to Demon’s Souls is just like it, in terms of being brutal, unforgiving, and just plain hard. It’s also intensely rewarding, challenging without being overly frustrating, and enjoyable. To date I’ve put over a hundred hours of playtime into it without finishing it yet, though I did start over after putting a lot of time into my first character. While it’s nearly impossible to gimp your character completely in this game, it’s entirely possible to build poorly and end up in a place where you can’t correct it without some ungodly amount of time and effort. My new character is a pyromancer though, as opposed to the previous character’s sorcery. Fire is just a bit better.
Second and third, Dungeon Defenders and Battlefield 3 on the PC. Dungeon Defenders was a $10 purchase I’d been looking forward to for ages, since it was supposed to release in January 2011. They delayed it 10 months or so while they put it on iOS and Android etc. In the end it was a good idea, as their release was extremely well polished, integrated well into Steam, and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s a tower defense game that’s been crossbred with action/loot RPG conventions and a very cartoony art style. There are a few different classes who have different defense styles, towers or traps or auras, plus their own skills. I didn’t expect it to be as fun as it has been, and I need to play more of it.
Battlefield 3, on the other hand, I haven’t played much at all. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the BF series. While they’re great fun when you have good teams on both sides, players who skew the curve can do hideous things when they get into a tank or jet or what have you. This is only made worse when the teams get stacked. The Ars servers have always been horrible about teamstacks in previous BF games and this one doesn’t seem any different. Worse yet, I’m simply getting older and I’m just not as good at FPS as I used to me. This is exacerbated by the ultra-detailed graphics in the game. I can’t even tell if that blob there is an enemy or not until I have half a clip of bullets arrayed in my chest and face. Suffice to say, this is the purchase I regret most in the past couple of months.
I’ve also picked up playing League of Legends again. That’s always been a fun game, though it absolutely brings out the worst in people. People who want to win get angry because poor play by one player on their team can cause a loss, no matter how well they play. People who want to play for the sake of playing get angry because people in the first category get angry at them. People who want to troll others have the time of their lives because they can cause the first category to stroke out on a regular basis. I’m honestly surprised we don’t hear more about people passing out from apoplexy while playing this game. The most amusing point of the game is that no one has a very good grasp of how good they actually are. This leads to people who are average players thinking they are great and attempting to play the game as if they were great, which leads to them being bad. Very bad.
Finally, Skyrim. Yeah, Skyrim. Enormous sandbox open world RPG. It’s amusing in many different ways. Need to play more.
On the more passive side of entertainment, I finished reading the Malazan Tale of the Fallen, and immediately read it again. It’s such a rewarding series to read – while not every book in the series is top flight, the end is entirely worthwhile. It’s massive payoff for the previous three-odd million words. I was shaking while I finished off the last third of the final book. Want more.
I also watched an enormous anime series called the Legend of Galactic Heroes. It’s old school space opera, two interstellar nations at war, space battles and politics in full swing. It is an old show, having started in 1988 and ending in 1997, going for 110 episodes. Yeah, 110 episodes. It took a while to finish. Some of it was somewhat silly, but in general, it pre-dated a lot of the annoying anime tropes that infuriate me these days, and it’s simply good solid space opera. It’s actually given me some ideas and motivation to try my hand at my own space opera – I had actually brainstormed some ideas about that some time ago, and they’re sticking in my head.
Finally, I picked up a new Nook Tablet a couple days ago. It’s a nice little device. I haven’t ever used an ereader or a tablet before, so this is all new to me, but I’m digging it so far. I did have to turn on my router’s wifi, which made me sad, since I live in an apartment building and I’ve always been moderately concerned about interference. Luckily, the scan showed that there aren’t all that many access points that are actually reachable from my apartment. I guess brick and concrete construction is pretty good for such things.
As for my own book…more to come on that in a couple of days. Suffice to say, the day is just about here.
Work on my own has finished – waiting on cover art to be completed, which should be done sometime within the next few weeks. I’ve already started drafting the next book, and the going is pretty slow, since it’s a fairly significant shift in tone from the previous book. That being said, I’m about 3 chapters and change into it, somewhere between 20 and 25K words. Having been stuck in editing hell for the past half a year has really messed with the creative side of my head – I have to constantly keep myself from going back and rewriting already. Still, it’s enjoyable!
What’s been eating my time? Well, Rift has been eating my time – running a guild is sometimes like a part time job, though I practice fairly hands off management for the most part. I’ve also managed to pull off the (moderately) impressive feat of configuring PCSX2, the Playstation 2 emulator, to work perfectly on my machine, plus ripped my old PS2 games to ISOs for emulator use, and finally managed to find a good driver setup to get my PS3 controller to work on the PC. This means I can toss the emulator window to my big screen and enjoy old PS2 games in HD resolutions and rendering. I may actually finish more PS2 games than Persona 3 and 4 now!
Also, many books! In July, there were two major book releases that I picked up ASAP. First off, A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin, the long-awaited next installment in the Song of Ice and Fire. Verdict: resoundingly average. The story was obviously designed to push certain characters in certain directions and it felt forced, like he had written himself into a corner in some ways and needed to spend some serious time digging himself out. He did, by the end, but large chunks of the book suffered for it. The second major release was Ghost Story by Jim Butcher, the latest installment in the Dresden Files. After the major world reset in Changes, I’ve been dying to find out what happens next, and this was a good story to come back to. The main gimmick in this one was weak though – the ending made it seem somewhat pointless. Again, this was a bridge story, allowing Butcher to advance the story in a way that wouldn’t be possible if he simply continued the formula.
Other than those, I’ve been making my way through the massive series by Stephen Eriksen, the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a 10-book series that he wrote in the same amount of time it took GRRM to get two books out. I laughed. It’s even better than the Song of Ice and Fire, and I’m only partway through book 8. It’s gritty and brutal in the same way, but is tremendously epic in scope and has a zillion characters (who also get killed off in horrible ways). He also drops you right into the story without much explanation of anything, which is confusing as all hell, but it allows for a lot of “ah-HA!” moments as some of the story threads link and you suddenly understand something that seemed obscure before. Major recommendation from me for any and all epic fantasy fans.
Dear Me,
It’s done.
I know you think you can do better. I know you can, in fact, do better. There are still parts of the book that you aren’t completely satisfied with. There are still parts that seem silly or lame or even just plain bad. But you know what, you’ve done what you can do. Your options are either tweaking it forever and ever and still never being happy with it, or sticking a fork in it and saying “this is done, it’s time to publish”. You know you’d rather be done with it. You know you want to get it out there and see if people actually buy it. You can’t be scared of it forever.
Just finish it and move on. The next story awaits.
Me
Finished up a great anime series called Bakuman a few days ago. Normally I don’t talk much about the anime I watch because most of it is crap or only interesting to anime fans (how many harems does it take before you build up an immunity? I don’t know. I don’t want to know) but this series was rather appealing to me because in some ways it parallels my current writing situation. The show is about a pair of protagonists who decide that they want to become manga authors, at the ripe age of 15 or so. They have a goal – to become serialized and have an anime adaptation before they graduate from high school. The reason for this rather daunting goal is because the artist side of their duo has a massive crush on this girl, who is in the process of becoming a seiyuu (voice actor). When he and his partner tell her they are going to become mangaka, he tells her they’ll reserve a heroine role for her, and when she confesses how much she wants that to happen…he asks her to marry him when their dreams come true. She says yes. Oh, Japan.
The show then proceeds down the expected paths, where the duo strive to become published. They meet rivals and inspirations, they deal with pressures of life as middle/high schoolers, they get better and better at their chosen art. They go about it in a stupidly mature fashion – focused on their goal to the point of the smart writer part of the duo to abandon his prospects at a high quality school to go to a lesser school just to be able to devote more time to story crafting. He finds a girlfriend who accepts taking second place to his dream. The artist and the voice actor pair are obviously deeply infatuated with each other, but they specifically avoid each other so that they don’t abandon their dreams for each other. It makes sense in a twisted sort of way. The characters remain interesting all the way through. Their actions and reactions to events (winning and losing competitions, for example) are excellent. As long as you accept the postulated characterization, that they are so focused on their dreams they’re almost autistic, everything flows from there. It works. I bought in, entirely, and it made me think.
It’s not like I can quit my day job and go forth and write full time. I wish. I’m not that focused. I don’t have that sort of dream. But it makes me think about it. I’ve been slacking on finishing up Demon here – I should have been done two months ago. Now I want to finish. I’m going to finish it up by mid-July and get it up and running. I still need cover art and I have to finish up another dozen chapters on the final-final-final edit pass. Then I can work on the second book, or I can rework the previous novel to put that into self-publishing as well. Maybe I’ll even be able to pick up one of the random ideas I started working on before and flesh it out. I don’t know. But I need to get this out and done.
Also, Bakuman is getting a second season. Wheeeeeeee!