Tag Archives: short story

Fireside chat.

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Good news, folks!

Fireside Magazine has opened its doors to the public for free online viewing. Traditionally, the magazine has been supported by Kickstarter funding for yearly chunks. However, they’ve wanted to try and move away from Kickstarter and to a more communal funding effort. Thus, the options for subscriptions, contributions, and patreon funding have opened up.

If you want to take a look, check out the magazine’s full catalog over here. If you’re also wanting a direct link to my previously published piece of flash fiction, Reversal, the link is right here. To directly help support Fireside, check out their “Support Us” page.

So yeah, there we go. A couple days late, I know, but things have just been manic. The rig is mostly up and running now, so I’ll be completely on my feet before we know it.

~ James.

State of the Mind: June, 2014.

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… *sharp whistle*. It’s been a stupidly long time since we did a State of the Mind address, hasn’t it? Well, let’s crack some knuckles and get on with the show.

~

So, what has been happening? Well, I got out of my self-induced lull and have been busting keyboard keys trying to get new works out there. Enough so that it’s actually beginning to drive me insane with the workload.

Back on May 18th, I began work on the new version of Under a Falling Sky. I set a deadline of having (at the very least) the first 60,000 words of a first draft done by July 1st. To help track it, I wound up making spreadsheets and everything to help it along.

I’ve been, for the most part, keeping steady with the estimated requirement (1,364 words-per-day). There have been scenes that have slowed me down to a crawl, or nights where other things wound up interfering with the time I set aside for writing. At the same time, there have been weekends and days where I can make up the difference. Thus, I am still on-track to have that first 60,000 done on time.

Why 60,000 words though? A novel is classified as starting at 50,000 words, with average sci-fi novels running an average of 80,000-100,000 words. I figured that if I could get above the minimum done by July 1st, I would be on solid ground.

At the same time, while writing it, I’ve been making notes about scenes and characters to add, dialogue and interactions to better show off, or even marking where existing scenes will need severe re-writes.

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Words I am living by.

Words I am living by.

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Now, why July 1st? Well, that actually leads into some news that I am excited to talk about. In the next couple of months, a flash-fiction story of mine that was accepted by Fireside Fiction Company will be published in an upcoming issue. I’m still working on the exact date (I had originally heard the July issue), but I will let you all know when it comes time for release or as it becomes available.

I wanted to make sure I had something well on the way to being roughly completed by the time that story releases. Try to capitalize on any hype and all of that, show that there was something on the way and that I wasn’t entirely sitting around on my ass.

What this schedule has done is obliterate any and all free time I had. Days are spent at the day job, I squeeze in about an hour of R&R, and then I move straight on to writing through the night. It’s tiring, and it’s made me appreciate weekends all that much more (cut out the day job part for a couple days, more time for R&R), but I can’t deny the progress that has been made.

I’m slightly behind where I should be at the moment, sitting at 25,000 words when I should be at 26,000. Over the span of (roughly) 2.5 weeks, I’ve managed to pen half of the bare-minimum for a novel draft, which is good progress in my mind.

However, the progress doesn’t stop there. I am also currently working on a piece of flash fiction for another magazine submission. I have the story mapped out in my head, though I will likely have to cut parts off like it’s going out of style to condense it to fit (1,000 word-cap). I am looking forward to seeing how that goes, but if nothing else, I want it out of my head and onto paper.

What this all has done, outside of create a mountain of work, is limit my time for entertainment. Lone Survivor, which I saw in theaters and loved, came out and I haven’t had a chance to see either it or RoboCop yet. I’d normally watch it this weekend, but I am reserving that time for gaming and watching Edge of Tomorrow.

As far as gaming goes, I have a back-log of games consisting of A) more WildStar, B) more Watch_Dogs, C) Murdered: Soul Suspect, D) more Transistor, and E) wanting to go back and play the Freespace games. Yeah, not like I’m keeping track or anything.

Now, you might have noticed WildStar on that list. I have been playing since the head-start (though only level 17 due to time limitations), and have been enjoying the hell out of it. It has its own comical, action-y charm to it that soaks me in. Well, that and the (awesome!) player housing.

If anyone reading this is playing the game, you can go ahead and add me. I am currently playing on “Orias [NA]” as Exiles. My main character is “Ashayl”, though you can add my account nickname of “Darrow”.

What can I say, I tried to keep it simple.

So yes, that’s where we’re at for the moment. I’ll keep on working on Under a Falling Sky, along with work on the other project. I’ll also try and keep my sanity with some R&R, though I really can’t promise that. Until I see you guys online (or on Nexus in WildStar), see you around.

~ James.

State of the Mind: February, 2014.

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Well, this has certainly been an interesting month. Be that as it may, it’s time for the monthly State of the Mind address. So, let’s kick it off.

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1) Work! I’ve been pounding out progress on a rewrite of Salvaging Life (WIP title, not final). You might now be saying, “Wait, I thought you said you were going to be working on Echoes!” In which case, you’re rather observant and correct all at once. I did say that I was going to be working on Echoes at first, but that plan has since changed.

I sat down and started to reread Echoes so I could get a feel for what I had again. Keep in mind, this story is about a year and a half old by now, so it feels ancient. Upon reading it, however, I saw how bad it seemed to be. Upon looking at it, the story felt like it needed a complete and total rewrite to bring it up to snuff. Needing that extensive amount of work ultimately placed it in the same spot as a number of other stories.

At the same time, I’d wanted to revisit Salvaging Life. Originally a short-story that was around four thousand words that I had submitted to Clarkesworld Magazine, I decided that with the recent commercial release of Blood in the Machine, maybe I could go back and check it out.

When I looked over Salvaging Life and read what I had, I could easily see why it had been rejected. It wasn’t the majority of the story, it wasn’t the characters, and it wasn’t the quality of writing. What set it back was the story I tried to tell was too confined at the length I had, and the ending felt at odds with the tone of the story.

The thing was, I already knew both of those things a month ago when I started thinking about it then. Reading it now felt like confirmation bias, but I also had some ideas of how to fix it. So, this last weekend, I began enacting those fixes by rewriting the story from the ground up.

I’m now three thousand words in and the story is feeling stronger than ever before. The characters felt good in the first version, but feel much stronger now. The pacing feels about right, though some of the tricky parts will rear their ugly heads in the later sections. At the same time, I have to do some research and treat a certain topic with some delicate attention, but it’s integral to one of the characters.

At the same time, I’ve also been working on the codex and mapping of a rewrite for Under a Falling Sky, which I am also eager to tackle soon. Who knows, maybe if Salvaging Life goes well, that might be the next project I tackle.

2) Resting! I’ve actually been rather bored recently. I’m stuck in a spot earlier on in Final Fantasy XIII-2 at a boss fight, so I have to go back and grind fights to get ahead. Not exactly my idea of fun. Instead, I played the Titanfall PC beta last night, and I have to admit that I am massively impressed with what I see.

Oh, and I have Kelly Sweet’s version of In the Air Tonight stuck in my head since hearing it in an ad for a TV show. Somebody, please help me, I’ve been listening to it on repeat in effort to try and get it dislodged, but to no avail!

At the same time, Game of Thrones Season 3 comes out tomorrow, so I know what I’ll be watching. It’ll also help tide me over while I wait for Gravity to come out on the 25th, alongside Thor: The Dark World.

Meanwhile, I’ve finished reading How to Archer, based on the TV cartoon (Cobra!). Times like these make me wonder who exactly dreams up the notion that it would be a good idea to write a book in the perspective of Sterling Archer. However, it lets me get on to reading Ender’s Game for the first time. No, I’ve never read it before, but I wanted to read it before I saw the movie which is sitting on my shelf.

3) Mental Health! … Improving, slightly optimistic. Might be in need of a good sit-down and ass-kicking soon if it doesn’t clear up.

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So yeah, there we have it. Things seem to be looking up and I am slipping back into my groove with some ease, which helps make things a bit easier to work with.

~ James.

State of the Mind: January, 2014.

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Take a breath, would you? Breathe in that new 2014 air, let it sink in that we’ve already pissed away another year. Done? Good, because it’s time for the new State of the Mind address.

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1: Work is progressing on The Veil and we’re actually nearing completion. There’s only a few more chapters left at the most, which I am actually quite grateful for. I’m desperately wanting to get my hands into something new, something not as flawed and broken as The Veil.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not that I hate the story, but that I know its pacing, characters, and overall condition is not good. After a few chapters, I knew it was flawed but was already too invested into it to go back and fix it. There might be hope for a good story buried in there, but it’s just a mess in its current form.

With that all said, I’ve become confident that I will likely host the story for a few months after the last piece goes up, but will then take it down. As I’m sure anyone who’s read Blood in the Machine and The Veil can attest to, there’s an almost night-and-day difference in terms of quality. So, if it’s not a proper demonstration of my quality or even a well put together story, why leave it up for people to read and pass judgment on?

So yes, once The Veil is done, I’ll set up a tear-down date on the top of that page so people know when they need to finish reading it by before I mothball it. I’ll not delete it in entirety, but more shove it in a proverbial shoebox. There may come a day I decide to return to it and tell that story right, but it isn’t now.

2: What happens after The Veil is done? I’m thinking that the first priority will be to go back and rewrite Salvaging Life, as I mentioned before. There are a couple loose ends I need to tie up before I consider the premise solid and golden, but I think it is something that might produce something worth investing time and effort into.

Its characters will also be something a bit darker than my normal form, so I want to give them a shot as well. Right now, however, I need to explore options as to what “the threat” is and why it makes the main protagonist respond like she does (yes, I said “she”).

3: I managed to get myself sick again! Yay! Not really. It seems to be a minor cold that has gotten hold over me, laying me out from work for a couple days so far. It seems to be only a minor one however, more sapping any energy I have instead of the normal nasal and respiratory hell that a normal cold represents. Not how I wanted to spend my time, to be sure, but such is the way of things.

4: This last Sunday, I had my 24th birthday. Spent most of the day disconnected from the computer, or at least the online portion of it, but something struck me when I came back to it. Birthday notifications filled my bar, mostly all from Google+. This isn’t an unknown thing for me, having got notifs like this before (not nearly as many, mind you).

When I examined the notifs in detail, I was struck by a variable from each and every person that sent them. That detail? The countries they all came from. The USA (obviously), but also the UK, Germany (had to Google the translation and how to say “thank you” in German), Canada, South America, and more.

I think it struck me right then and there about how massive this thing is. Sure, this readership is quite small in comparison, but it’s built from people that aren’t even bound by a single country.

For the record, the single largest reason I write is because I love the ability to form and create a story, then pour it out and onto a page. To hell with money, this is the second biggest reason I had ever written stories. Maybe not even the idea of having a large readership, but having a diverse one.

Even this website’s statistics show where its views come from, and let me tell you, it’s from everywhere. France, Australia, Japan, Russia, Iceland, etc. To see that, to know that people from around the world are even offering a split-second glance, is an astounding thing that I am extremely grateful for.

5: So, what is the current battle-plan as far as commercial releases go? Well, novels are on a bit of a back-burner right now. The number one piece of praise I have gotten when it comes to Blood in the Machine was how the pacing seems to have felt solid and that it didn’t drag. Hearing that, and seeing that a novelette is capable of actually catching people’s attention, has lessened my desire to produce an overly long work.

Instead, I aim to focus more on some smaller works and have them as polished as I can. How I see this playing out is actually rather simplistic, start small and gradually grow bigger from there. I started this whole thing off with short stories, then I solo published a novelette. I know Salvaging Life is a bigger project, though I’m not sure if it is a full novel. After I spend some time with full novels, however, then I will break out the Dark Stars universe.

It’s a simple plan, but one that – I believe – should help pay out as far as experience and skills are concerned. After all, length of content isn’t something I am terribly concerned with, but more the quality of the work. I’d rather be known for producing higher-tier works, rather than just having a shelf full of half-baked projects.

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That’s where we’re at, and I gotta say, it’s pretty exciting. We’re on the cusp of ending something old and poisoned, replacing it with something new and exciting. Always a good time to be had there, though it will definitely require a bit more planning before I sit down and start penning it. After all, with how I work, I need to know how it ends before I can even begin.

~ James.

In the aftermath…

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It’s been just over a week since Blood in the Machine launched. I think now is a good time to sit back for a second and look at how things have cracked up.

It’s been borderline chaos, what with having to set things up and reorganize things in the wake of it all. Having to get in touch with Goodreads and get my account enrolled in the author program, contact M.S. Fowle (who did the cover work) and request an Author’s Spotlight (of which I am quite thankful for and can be found here), learning the Kindle portals and tools, etc. There’s been a lot of figuring things out.

At the same time, this website has also undergone a bit of a change. The Veil‘s release announcements are gone, a section of the article pages have been trimmed down, things a bit more organized on the menu to the left, and other changes.

It’s almost like cleaning up your house, which is normally a pig-pen, when you learn your distant family is coming over. Everything’s awkward, nobody really knows each other, and the host is trying to impress everyone he can while shoving old trash under the rug.

So, how has the launch gone? Outside of being chaotic, it’s been rather interesting.

The number of copies that have been sold has been above expectations. Then again, when you set you expectations for your debut solo piece to be 2 (one for each living parent), it’s easy to be pleasantly surprised.

We aren’t breaking big numbers here, but when you factor in how I’ve joined this race (an almost non-existent following, a completely unknown name, not much knowledge to draw from, etc), it’s quite surprising. There’s even our first review on GoodReads, something that made me smile both when I saw the sign that it was there, and also when I read it.

I think, however, what I’ve learned will definitely help expedite the process in the future. I know more about how and who to approach for artwork, edits, and so forth. The only thing that should be holding me back should be my own pace.

This doesn’t mean that I will suddenly break out and start shoveling half-baked stories out into the Kindle marketplace, don’t worry. I’m someone who gets incredibly paranoid about whether a story is good enough to stand on its own.

As for what’s next on the writing list, we’ve got the continued chapters with The Veil, and I am making headway on Beyond the Rift, though I hold some doubts on it.

With The Veil, we’re getting closer to the end, something for which I am thankful for. It’s not that I hate the story as a whole, it’s more that I see an insane amount of ways that it should have been designed differently. This version of it will definitely not be the final form of it, a re-write will be on the list of things to do.

Given how broken and fractured it feels, hiding it on the website for some time after it ends is a tempting prospect. I’m not entirely sure if I will or not, so if you want to voice your thoughts on it, go ahead.

As for Beyond the Rift, it’s definitely a first draft. There’s some fluff that needs to be cut out from what I’ve written, of that I’m sure. However, I think the foundation for a decent story is there, so it’s just a matter of trying to pry a good story out of it. It’s definitely not in nearly as bad of shape as The Veil is in.

For other stuff besides those two, I am actually looking at Salvaging Life, my former submission to Clarkesworld. Since it’s free of any word limit, I have some ideas of what I want to do to it. I’m going to start jotting down some notes to remind me, but I’m curious to see what I could do with it.

Firs thing I could do would be finding a better name. After that, expanding it drastically so I could make the plot grow and feel more natural. Maybe it’s just me coming down from the release last week, but it feels like the kind of story that Blood in the Machine started out as. That in mind, it makes me wonder if I can grow it into something more, something akin to how BotM came out.

Before that, however, a friend of mine has pointed out a couple continuity errors with Blood in the Machine that I will see about getting rectified with his help. After they are dealt with, I’ll upload the new version of the story as a soft-update on Amazon.

Once that is all said and done with, it will be back to the grind. I had let my writing schedule slack just a bit due to the release week and relaxing from it, but I’ve gotten back on track. 500 words a night at a minimum is a fairly easy goal to hit, yet it keeps me productive with time on my hands.

We’ll see how it all shapes out, but I’ve definitely got my hands full for a while. Then again, given how my mind spins things and how I work, I’ll have my hands full for another twenty years. Until the next time, however, enjoy the show.

~ James.