Exactly two years ago to the day, I sat down and decided, spur of the moment, to participate in NaNoWriMo and started making up a story on the spot.

After no less than nine drafts and several false starts, that book is now ready to go!

To read the prologue for free, click HERE.

For FAQs and a briefing about the book, click HERE.

To Purchase:

• Amazon (Kindle): US, UK, DE, FR
• Barnes and Noble (Nook): Here
  
• Lulu (ePub): Here
• Lulu (PDF): Here – Note that the Lulu versions are $1.99 because I was having problems getting it to accept $0.99. I apologize for any inconvenience!

A print-on-demand version is being looked into and will be announced as soon as I can.

Other versions (PDF, etc.) will be looked into if there is enough demand.

Oh, and I have also been added to GoodReads!

What I’m Looking For Now… If you read the book and enjoy it, please tell your friends or (honestly) review it! Lend it to people– all versions of the book are DRM-free so you should be able to.

This has been a fun little ride and no matter what happens now, I’m happy. This euphoria could last a week and then the book could fade away into obscurity and I’d still be happy, because I accomplished my goal, which was to prove that I could make a book from start to finish. I never went into this with any sort of loftier goal, so yes… no matter what happens, I’m happy.

But I can always dream, of course…

Hey. Hey guys. That book I’ve been working on for two years now?

Yeah. I think it’s done. FINALLY. I’ve passed it along to my dear boy, Mister Adequate, to give the whole thing a final proofread and then I’m going to e-publish it. And link to it here (and everywhere, I’m sure), of course! So, consider this your official heads-up!

Yay!

And now to answer some FAQs:

What Is It?: The title of the book is Windshifter. Although I’ve had a couple of the characters and concepts knocking around inside my head for years, 98% of this thing was something I made up on the spot for NaNoWriMo 2009. I surprised myself by turning it into a halfway decent draft, and I’d like to think I’ve carved a nice little story out of it since then. At least, I think it’s nice for a first effort!

What Is It About?: It doesn’t really fall nicely into any set genre. I tend to tell people that it’s a “steampunk-inspired alternate universe” story. I think it also skews a bit “young adult”, although ultimately I wanted to make a story for all ages to enjoy– think Redwall or something. Speaking of Redwall, this is kind of similar. There are a lot of fuzzy creatures, and a race of people descended from dragons. But they have guns and airships and things. So basically, think steampunk Redwall and you’ll be in the right ballpark.

What Else is it Similar To, Besides Redwall?: I had test readers compare it to everything from Final Fantasy to The Golden Compass/His Dark Materials to various Disney movies (The Great Mouse Detective, for example), and honestly that’s a good selection of the sort of thing that inspired me. I was going for a fun romp through an unusual new world. I’m glad my beta readers seemed to pick up on that!

When Will It Be Available?: I’m shooting for “by the end of October” but that’s closing in rather fast. Still, I’m really hoping this will be ready within a few weeks.

How/Where Will It Be Available?: I’m thinking I’ll start with Amazon (Kindle), B&N PubIt (Nook), and also through myself as a pure PDF file. If there is enough interest in other outlets or in a physical copy (via Lulu or something) then it’s something I’ll definitely look into right away.

How Much Will It Cost?: Probably $0.99.

That’s It? Don’t You Think Your Writing is Worth More?: Trust me when I say that this is something I’ve been looking into for months, and I’ve read all sorts of very long and thorough arguments both for and against the 99-cent price point, and after studying all of that I find myself leaning “for” it. I might change my mind if I see something very convincing in the next week or two but it’s still going to be very cheap. Less than a few bucks. I want everyone to be able to afford my story. If there’s enough demand for it I might set up my PayPal so that you can pay-what-you-want for the PDF. And obviously a physical copy, if I offer one, will cost more.

Why Aren’t You Traditionally Publishing?: Partially because I want to get the story out there faster instead of waiting around for years– I know a lot of you have been really waiting patiently for this. Partially because I like the idea of eBooks and e-publishing. I’ve always had a lot of admiration for, say, indie game devs and I see this as being similar. And partially because I sort of consider this story to be a big warm-up exercise more than anything, so I figure I’ll go ahead and use this as an experiment to see what sort of bites I get.

Okay, I think that about covers it. Any more questions? Just ask! And wish me luck!

As you may know if you’ve been following me for a while– for months I’ve been sitting on a book, wondering how to go about publishing it. I’ve had a lot of people telling me I should e-publish for various reasons, and then I’ve also had a lot of people telling me that I shouldn’t and that doing so would be shooting myself in the foot. And so, for at least six months now, I’ve been sitting here trying to weigh the pros and cons and decide which option would be the best for me.

Then, two things happened. First, I saw this, and second, I realized that if I continue to sit around trying to decide how to publish it, it’s never going to get published. So, I’ve decided to commit to e-publishing. Here are just a few reasons for my decision:

• I Really Do Think This is the Future. I predict a future when books are akin to, say, CDs.  They still make them, and people still buy them, but most people just download the mp3 and stick it right on their iPod or whatever.  It’s just so convenient to have everything there in one spot, and owning a Sony Reader these past few months has made me acutely aware of how nice it is with books as well.  There are other reasons for thinking this is The Future, but that will turn into a huge essay, I’m sure, so I’ll refrain from going into much detail.
• It’s What My Characters Would Do. That sounds cheesy, but it’s true.  Why shouldn’t I create my book the way my book’s characters would want it to be created?
• I Learn From My Own Mistakes. If I’ve calculated wrong and e-publishing becomes the worst decision I ever made, at least it’s my fault and not the fault of a publisher or agent or bookstore or whatever.  If there’s one thing I know for sure about myself, it’s that I don’t ever learn my lesson unless I’ve been through the fire and thoroughly embarrassed myself through my own actions.


And now, a bouncing Scootaloo to break up the wall of text.

• I Don’t Care About the Darn Ribbon. There’s a saying I’ve heard somewhere– I’d cite the source but I can’t remember where it was– anyways, the saying is that being traditionally published is like running in a big race, winning, and getting an official ribbon for it, whereas self-publishing or e-publishing is running a race alone and then printing out a ribbon for yourself.  The connotation is that it’s silly and embarrassing and no one will take you seriously.  Truthfully, though, I really don’t care about the darn ribbon.  I’d rather ten people read and enjoy something I wrote than no one read it because it gets stuck at a gatekeeper somewhere.  I do realize that the gatekeepers are there for a reason, and that if I keep trying and pushing and I believe in what I wrote, then it’s bound to get through the gate eventually.  But how long might it take, simply because I’ve got the wrong word count or genre or something?  And even then, how would a new and untested author be marketed?  How much shelf space would a bookseller be willing to spend on me?  Would there really be any more people who saw my book wedged between others on a shelf than wedged between others on a website?  There are just too many variables.

Rainbow Dash talks almost as much as I do.

Now, I know there are a lot of downsides.  Believe me, I know, because I’ve been agonizing over this decision for months. I realize this is a risk I’m taking, a big leap of faith that requires me to be a little brave, a little hopeful, and just a little bit conceited– and that last one there is probably the hardest for me. But if I don’t try, then I’ll never know!

So, that is that. Once I do actually have the thing online, I’ll link to it pretty much everywhere, so I’m sure you’ll see it. It may not be for a few months, because I want to give the manuscript some final edits, but I’m pretty committed to all of this actually happening. We’ll see how it goes, eh?

Occasionally I get comments or e-mails from people who want to know why this fabled “book” I’ve been talking about for years hasn’t yet materialized. It flatters me that people would actually want to read the book so much that they ask me these sorts of questions, so I feel that an explanation is owed and in order.

Here’s the truth, then: Writing is the easiest part.

Forcing yourself to go back and read through your drivel and edit it is hard.

Deleting or changing scenes or characters that you loved in the name of plot or story flow is hard.

Staying motivated on your project when you’ve got so many other things vying for your attention is hard.

Working on a creative or artistic project when you’re not in the right mood is harder than any non-artist could ever imagine.

Gathering up the courage to talk to an agent is hard.

Heck, thinking about agents is hard because it reminds you how difficult this whole thing is going to be.

Realizing and coming to grips with the fact that thousands or tens of thousands of people out there are just as talented as you are, if not more so, and also trying to do what you are doing, is hard.

Rejection is hard.

Feeling pulled every which way by friends and beta-readers giving you conflicting advice is hard.

Trying not to be scared about making the wrong move in this whole process is hard.

You see, the past couple of years have been a mind-opening experience for me in terms of this whole writing thing. I always used to figure that getting published was easy. You just had to sit down, write your story, toss it at the nearest publisher, and then POOF, you’d be set. In short, I always assumed that writing was the hardest part.

But it’s not.

Getting the story out of my head and onto paper was the easiest part of this journey so far. And, guys, that wasn’t exactly a cakewalk.

So bear with me while I get this all sorted out. You’ll have your book, I promise. Heck, you’ll have more than one. Writing more stories is, after all, the easiest part. So I guess that’s the upside to all of this!

Wow, I stink at updating this blog, don’t I? I’ll admit, I kind of fell out of it for a couple of weeks. As such, I also owe you all lots of Classic Video Game Mondays. Derp.

Exciting news, though, if you are one of the two people who haven’t heard yet because I’ve posted/shouted this everywhere. A publisher… a real, live publisher… has the manuscript to that novel I wrote a year or so back. Yes, they liked the query letter and synopsis I sent them and now they’re reading my book. It’s got me terrified and it’s giving me the weirdest nightmares about sudden random major errors in my book that I forgot to fix.

ANYWAYS, if everything goes well, they’ll like what they read, and hopefully this will eventually lead to physical copies of this mythical Pike Project that I’ve been dropping hints about for so long.

Oh, and my apologies if this turns into a Writing Blog for a while. I was attempting to dump all of my Writing Rambles in one spot, namely another blog that no one reads– which is fine, since a lot of my rambling is for my own benefit more than anything– but sometimes I get that itching for feedback, so you might see some stuff here, as well.

TODAY’S WRITING RAMBLE: Writing down a story is like pulling a tooth. It just sits there and bothers you until you go through the painful process of pulling it out, which sucks, but then it feels a lot better when it’s out.

(“Weird Metaphors” is my middle name.)

You know, when I was in film school, it was all about being super deep. Everyone worshipped “Memento” and “Fight Club”. David Lynch was viewed as some sort of deity.

But you know what, there’s a reason why “Avatar” is the highest-grossing movie of all time. And it’s not just because of 3D or because James Cameron has more money than God.

No, it’s because he took a bunch of familiar character tropes, mixed them up in a blender with “Dances With Wolves”, made a very tantalizing dish out of it and served it to an audience hungry for exactly that sort of thing.

…why is that bad?

Hint: it’s not.

We live in a world where there is much emphasis on absolute originality in creative pursuits. If you make a story and some character or plotline has already been done, everyone sees it as some sort of grave unfortunate error. But the truth is that that’s how stories work.

As a storyteller my job is first to entertain you and secondly to hopefully teach you something. Both of these things are best done by allegories, fables, and parables. By the familiar hero that is almost like us, if maybe we were just a little more brave. By the familiar character arc that is almost like our own, if we had been born a little different. In that world that is almost like our own, if you hold a funhouse mirror up to it. That’s where you make emotional connections and that’s where you tell the best stories.

Yesterday I watched “Elf“. It was completely unoriginal. But it was thoroughly entertaining, it made me laugh, the ending made me go “awww”, and I loved every minute of it. That’s what movies and stories are supposed to do.

Guys, if you’re a writer or a dreamer or an artist or what-have-you, and your goal isn’t to make the next “Ulysses” but to make the next “Warcraft: The Last Guardian”, then stand up and be proud. Who cares if you’re not super hardcore or deep? Who cares that students won’t have to BS their way through long papers about your work sometime in the far future? You made someone’s day a little better.

I would rather make the next “Elf” than the next “Apocalypse Now”. And I’m not afraid to admit it.

Dear NaNo Graph,

I hate you for sucking up all my free time.

For tying me to the shackles of an enticing statistic. “Your daily wordcount average is dropping! OMG, get your butt over here and write before it’s TOO LATE.”

For making me write piles of crap when I couldn’t think of anything else to write.

For making me look at my story that I loved at the beginning of the month and hate it for all its flaws. …well, okay, dislike it. Dislike myself for coming up with it and for not being prepared to fix the flaws and for putting my characters into such a trainwreck.

For making me keep writing anyway when I wanted to stop and do something else,

for forcing me to solve problems,

and making sure I didn’t quit because then how embarrassing would the graph look?

And that, NaNo Graph…

…that is why I love you.

50k, back-to-back.

(You guys won’t mind too terribly if I turn this into a weird writing blog while I NaNo, will you? You won’t? GREAT! <3)

So I've been doing NaNo this year. Before you ask, last year's NaNo is in publishing limbo. You know, where books go to hang out for years and years and years before a great and holy publisher decides to save them from eternal torment. Or something. (Don't worry, if it takes too long I'm gonna get impatient and e-publish).

Well, I've been working on this year's NaNo, tossing words onto pages and in general just trying to get the story out. Here's the weird thing, though: it doesn't really feel like writing. See, I’ve spent the past year editing, so to me editing has sort of become synonymous with writing. Editing is where you chisel out the story. Editing is where, to borrow a phrase from Michelangelo, you set the angel free.

So I’m feeling really awkward about actually writing. I feel like making the outline was kneading the clay, writing is dumping it on the potter’s wheel, and editing is actually shaping something out of that giant, messy lump of clay spinning in front of you.

Of course, the catch is that in pottery, putting the clay on the potter’s wheel takes about half a second, and in NaNo, it takes all month.

It’s a weeeeeird feeling.

I’ve recently made it a personal goal of mine to write one novel-length book every year for the rest of my life.

…ambitious? Eh. I’m reasonably certain of my abilities to do it. And hey, no one said I was sane about this sort of thing.

(Just between you and me, I have this fantasy of somebody discovering this huge box full of dusty old manuscripts years after I die and it somehow making this big impact on said person’s life, but then again I have weird fantasies.)

Anyways, I’ll be participating in NaNoWriMo again, because I’ve found that, for me anyways, there is nothing like a healthy combination of peer pressure and a Daily Word Count graph to get you off of your butt and writing.

Now last year I wrote my book entirely in Open Office, which is a spectacular program by the way. And you know what, Open Office is great for if you’re just making it all up as you go along, which is what I was doing last year.

This year is different. This year I already have a pretty strong outline of the entire story. On top of that, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over this last year of editing, it’s that going into the project with a strong idea of linear progression for every plotline in your book will save you a lot of headache later on down the road.

So, having heard good things about these newfangled “writing programs” that give you a place to sort said plotlines, I went off in search of one.

I downloaded and tried a few. Most were too simple, or too complicated, or didn’t have what I was looking for. A program called “Writer’s Cafe” came pretty close but the trial was pretty limited and I didn’t feel like forking out the cash, especially since I’m still unemployed at the moment. A different program, an open source project called Kabikaboo, also came close, but ultimately it’s an outlining tool more than a writing tool (although to be honest, it’s a pretty dang good outlining tool and I’ll probably be using it as a supplement while I write this year’s book.)

Still, it was looking more and more like I’d be writing in Open Office again when I got Scrivener working in Wine.

See, Scrivener is known as the writing app, and for years it’s been Mac-exclusive. Recently, they released a beta test for Windows, and of course, all us Linux dorks came crawling out of the woodwork on the forums– but I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Basically, the main idea of Scrivener is breaking your writing project down into little manageable chunks, which you can then assign custom tags and re-arrange at your leisure. This makes it easy to move scenes around and organize the aforementioned plotlines.

It’ll look something like this (sneak peek of my upcoming book! Le gasp!):

The "Corkboard" View

...and the Outline View

As you can see, as a way of testing the program, I’ve tossed a bunch of my book’s early scenes into the program, and I’ve been able to sort them and tag them and summarize them, and already I can see how helpful this is going to be for keeping track of all those pesky plotlines.

I’m sure it’s got all sorts of other functionality that I’ve yet to discover, as well.

My only real concern at this point is being able to export the final project out to a different format if needs be; I haven’t yet tested it and while it has an export to .rtf feature I need to see how nicely that will play with Open Office. That’s next up in the Testing Queue.

But lemme tell you what really sold me on Scrivener already.

Remember when I mentioned that all of us crazy Linux folks showed up at the Scrivener forums, helping each other get it working and providing bug reports alongside everyone else?

Well apparently the Scrivener programmers were pleasantly surprised at this and are gonna throw together an (albeit unofficial and unsupported) Linux-native version for us to play with. In their own time.

Wow. Making a version of your software for less than 1% of the desktop market share, just to be nice. I’m so impressed. I mean, you could make the argument that they’re just tossing us a bone to get us out of their hair, but even then NOBODY HAS EVER TOSSED US A BONE BEFORE.

Yeah, I’m pretty stoked.

And that’s why I’m here to tell you about this program. 99% of the time I’m all about the Free and Open Source, and Scrivener is admittedly neither, but I like to make exceptions for good software and good people and so far I’m impressed. If you’re a writer and on Windows (or Linux!), go test the Beta version. If you win NaNo you get 50% off when the final program is actually released. And that’s a pretty good deal.

The penguin gods are pleased today!

Disclaimer: You may or may not want to listen to me since I may or may not actually know what I’m talking about.

WRITE/DRAW/WHATEVER YOUR THING IS EVERY SINGLE DAY

Guys lemme tell you a story. Once upon I time I was about… 15 years old? And I decided I wanted to be an animator, for Disney. Now you have to understand something very important, and that very important thing is as follows: I COULDN’T DRAW. I wish I knew where my old stuff was so I could scan it in and show it to you to prove it. But I don’t know where it is so I can’t. Regardless, the point remains: I couldn’t draw. Once I decided I wanted to go into animation, I pulled out a sketchbook and tried to draw something. It was **awful**.

So you know what I did?

I started to draw

every

single

day

for months and months that eventually melted into years. I filled up sketchbooks every few months. I spent hours and hours a day drawing.

Slowly, I started to improve. It was a step by step process. I remember learning how to use basic shapes and things like circles to “build” characters from and I remember how much better everything got after that. Even then I still had a long way to go. But I was getting better and better and pretty soon my work was very much improved from how it had been that fateful day when I decided to “learn to draw”.

So by that time (I was about 17 or 18) I figured, what do artists do? They do art school stuff! So I took AP Art in high school. Looking back on it I was woefully unprepared, I’d only been really drawing for a couple of years after all, but I was game and took it anyway. At the end of the year I rounded up what I thought was my best stuff and sent it off to the AP scoring people.

A few months later I got my score: a 1. The lowest score possible.

I was insulted, and bitter.

I mean, really bitter.

So I quit drawing.

…

Yep, that’s right. Cause I got offended rather than choose to improve.

I didn’t start “really drawing” again for a good few years after that. In that short time since then I’ve seen how much I’ve improved and I wonder how much I would’ve improved if I hadn’t quit the first time.

DON’T FREAKING QUIT

I hate to break it to you but you aren’t going to become a crazy-awesome artist or the next bestselling author or the next chart-topping musician in two years. Probably not even five years. I know we all have fantasies of that sort of thing, heck, I have those fantasies all the time, but it’s just not feasible.

THIS DOESN’T EXCUSE YOU FROM TRYING EVERY DAY AND/OR MAKING A PLAN BECAUSE “OH IT’S JUST GOING TO TAKE TEN YEARS ANYWAY”

It’s really easy to procrastinate this stuff. Guess what: if you keep procrastinating you are never going to get to where you want to be.

If you are a creative person, I mean really truly one of those people who feels like they are going to die if they don’t do that thing they do (you will know what I’m talking about if you are)– well, chances are very good you’re prone to procrastination and/or getting discouraged early, since that seems to walk hand-in-hand with creativity, but you have to realize that this whole thing is just 95% perseverance. 95% realizing that yes, you’re going to have that crappy job for the next ten years but it only has to be ten years if you’re willing to put in the extra-curricular work on plying your craft.

Do I sound like a bad motivational poster yet?

No?

How about now?

Okay, terrible jokes aside, I’ve had tons and tons of creative friends lately who are getting discouraged. I’m not going to tell you “don’t get discouraged” because everyone gets discouraged. I get discouraged. It’s a part of the process.

I am going to say: be careful. Don’t let “being discouraged” turn into “never getting anything done”.

If you believe you have something special to show the world, then you do.

A wise man once said that 80% of people in the creative world quit before “making it”.

To which I have two things to say:

One: Don’t be one of those 80%,

and

Two: Man, imagine all the cool stuff we’d have right now if they didn’t quit.

Just sayin’.