Author: Seething With Apathy

The Five Hundred and Seventy-first Post: The One Where I Need Help with Moving These Goalposts Down a Few Yards…

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Okay, I did this one to myself, but I have… well, no good reasons. I’m doing overtime at work and that’s cutting into all my time. GenCon wasn’t going to be conductive for writing and the week after was spent doing odd jobs around the house and certainly not writing. So, with all that being said – I am about two-thirds through the book, so it’s looking more like the end of September is going to be the new deadline. I have nothing happening to me, with me or near me to interfere with finishing The Catastrophic Christmas Party. October will be for reading and re-writing.

I’ve also begun looking at research for my NanoWrimo project. I am enthused about this one, since I am continuing to write horror and with any luck, this one will be finished and get me some notice. I need to get back to outlining the werewolf story and start that soon. I might get to that one for December – which isn’t that far away. Yikes. Well, at least this has been a productive year for me. I got two novels finished with their rough draft, and a third on the way (fingers crossed!). I might even be able to squeeze out a fourth, but that might be a little dicey.

One of the things I was worried about when starting the research was that I was hanging my literary hat on only one hook – a single study that could have been easily refuted. Turns out, there is a lot more evidence to back up the claim that voices in schizophrenics are dictated mostly by culture. The African continent and the East having voices that are gentler and more chiding than their Western counterparts is the whole plot point of this story. I know I am going to have issues when race is brought up (and I can see that it’s going to be), but the last thing I need is to be hamstrung by bad science.

I think next week, I am going to take a break from overtime and try to get back to writing twice a day. My home gym is also doing some renovations, so I’ll have to go to the one down the street after work. Maybe I can get steadier with gym-going and writing with a shorter workday. The money’s good, but I’m feeling funky not writing. I can’t explain it better than that.

That’s all for now. I am feeling tired, but I can solve that with more caffeine. Hope your week goes well, and I’ll see you in the next one.

The Five Hundred and Seventieth Post: The One Where I Listen for the Whoosh of a Possibly Blown Deadline…

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My confidence that I am going to complete the novel The Catastrophic Christmas Party by the end of August is waning rapidly. I have only myself to blame: I took on overtime which does cut into my writing time at home, but I need that money for next summer’s vacation. I am certain I can still get it done and published before the beginning of December. This one is not going before the writing group. My wife will read it and give advice, but this one’s going straight to Amazon like The Dreaded Day Job.

The novel itself is coming along in fits. The first part of the current chapter was a bit of a slog to get through, and the second part is coming along a lot better. I might want to consider coming back to that first part and tightening it up a bit when I begin the revisions. Having the whole conceit of the book ultimately being Evan at Christmas parties and various things going (hopefully) hilariously wrong does limit the scope, but I am having fun introducing the future love interest Sunny. It might not end up being a full 50,000 words, but closer to 40,000.

What else is going on? I got back the proof for the cover for The Show Must Go On and I am delighted with it. Next up is finish raising the capital to pay off the artist, who I will use definitely in the future. I do have tog et things together for the photoshoot for Christmas Party. I just wonder if my wife has a Santa’s cookie tray she doesn’t mind having a drill hole in it. Or maybe I’ll just buy one and sacrifice it for art. Also, need to buy an obnoxious Christmas sweater. For art, I swear.

Something less classy than this…

On the writing front there is not a lot going on beyond trying to finish this project and getting started on another (what it’s going to be is based on when I finish this current one). I haven’t even finished the outline for the werewolf book. It just slipped under the radar in the rush to get Christmas Party started. I might start it since I have quite a few chapters outlined, and just write the rest of the outline while I’m writing the first part of the book. Try to kill two birds with one stone as it were. Or hit two werewolves with one silver bullet.

I guess that’s all for now. Wish me luck in finishing up this slight interruption to the Year of Horror. I’ll see y’all later.

The Five Hundred and Sixty-Ninth Post: The One Where I Slide Under the Rapidly Closing Door!

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I’m working overtime, and that always throws me off for what day of the week it is, so I apologize for almost missing the day. Come to think about it, this whole week thus far has been in shambles. I’ve barely written or gone to the gym because I’m getting up an hour earlier to get in for overtime. I need to get back on a regular schedule.

I am still striving to finish The Catastrophic Christmas Party on time in spite of things going on around me. This Saturday will be the best time for me to do so, since I don’t have my gaming group, so I will have plenty of free time, especially since I will have to do the laundry on Friday evening so I can have something to wear on Saturday. Yes – sweatpants have gotten more comfy and they even have pockets now, but I feel like wearing them outside the house is a signal to the world that I have just given up.

I have good news on other fronts – I am getting cover art for my next horror book The Show Must Go On! Once I have made the payment, I will debut it here. The artist is very good, and I will put up contact information when I get the clearance to do so. I’m really excited about it, and I can’t wait to show everyone. The book itself won’t be out for a little while – I’m still getting Serve Me Now worked on, but once that’s done, I intend on getting the other one edited and finished quickly. I feel really good about this one.

I had a decent break over all – GenCon was a blast I will do again when I get the chance, and I will try to throw myself into more games and mini painting tutorials next time. The week afterwards was decent. Not a lot of writing because I was recovering from the convention, but now I feel like I am ready to further procrastinate! All in all – what tends to be a rather depressing month for me has been very good, and I hope to continue this feeling into the next couple of weeks and roll into September.

Well, that’s all for you. Enjoy your time here and I look forward to giving you better news soon.

The Five Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Post: The GenCon After Action Report!

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GenCon was great! I got to play a few games, one of which I hadn’t played since college. I also tried out a game that I like and I hope to be able to play again in the future. I met a couple of people and got some pictures of cosplayers. I’m going to admit that I am not the best photographer, but I am proud of some of the pictures I took.

I learned a lot about painting miniatures and found out that what I was doing initially was wrong, but I got some good correction, and I will be applying these lessons to the next set of miniatures I will be painting.

I also got some dice because I am a dice goblin at heart. I can’t wait to show them off with my gaming group Saturday. I also got a couple of books as well and some more minis to paint (correctly). I supported my favorite stores and publishers. I did good.

I also did no writing at all whatsoever. Didn’t have an idea, didn’t break out the laptop to catch up on missing days. I had a genuine vacation that was nice. I did a lot of walking, though. While I was there, I registered 10,000 step days each day I was at the convention. So, I got in my exercise as well.

I did miss the celebrities, however. I never got to see the ones that were there at GenCon because they were doing other things that I couldn’t get tickets for. Oh, well – better luck next time, I guess.

Now that the vacation is over, I am back to work and trying to get a little caught up on The Catastrophic Christmas Party by writing four times a day with 850 words a session. This is to catch up from the days off I took. I need to have this manuscript finished before the end of August so I can get it edited and ready for December publishing. I can get it done. I’ve done it before with The Dreaded Day Job and I am confident I can finish this in time.

I had a good vacation, but it’s time to get back to work.

The Rules…

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The Rules for GenCon:

  1. No laptops, notebooks, fancy-schmancy pens. This is a vacation, and I am going to play my little brains out. No writing.
  2. We’re not going to stress out over time by leaving early enough for the events that I got tickets for. I have the schedule on my phone, so I have no real excuse to miss or be late for an event.
  3. I have a certain amount of money. I am not going to exceed that amount. Yes – I am going to buy from my favorite merchants, but I am not going to go hog wild. I also need to feed and hydrate myself.
  4. Speaking of feeding and hydrating myself: I can’t be too lax with my diet. I can indulge a little now and then, but I must maintain my diet for my health.
  5. If I happen to see a celebrity (and I intend on running into this guy), I am going to comport myself professionally. I will ask for an autograph, not gush and thank them for their time. I accept that I will be nervous and maybe a little hesitant to ask for an autograph – they are human beings and will not bite, taze or mace me (hopefully).
  6. I am going to take a lot of pictures. I will not be bashful in getting permission. I will walk up to them and ask permission.

How many of these am I going to follow? 2-6 definitely, but number 1? I will be honest – I don’t know. The writer part of my brain I can’t turn off. While I am not going to have my laptop with me (I am afraid to lose it), I can’t guarantee that I am not going to buy a notebook. I am a sucker for those homemade leather books that GenCon is going to have in spades. I probably will buy one of those because I like them so much. I’ll use it to take notes, directions and more than likely since I have said that this is a vacation, my muse will no doubt go into overtime with ideas.

The reason why I have rules 5 and 6 is because – believe it or not – I am a very, very shy person. Approaching other people is difficult for me to do, asking for an autograph is almost impossible. Usually, I have my wife do things like this because she’s way better at it than I am. However, I am going to push myself to go out there and be a little more extroverted. My wife is going to be with me for most of the time – there are late night games, and I am not going to keep her here until 1 A.M. I’m going to take her back to the hotel room so she can get some sleep. I am going to take a tablet for her to watch some TV on it. She’s not a table-top gamer like I am, and I want her to have a good time, too.

When it’s over, I am going to load up some of the better photos I took and put them up here in the blog. Will you see me? Maybe.

The Five Hundred and Sixty-seventh Post: The One Where I Am on a Roll!

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Well, I have good news! I finished The Show Must Go On, at least the first draft. Now it sits aside for a couple of weeks, and then I begin the re-writes on it. I’ve finished two drafts in one year – and the year isn’t over yet! I might be able to get a couple more out. I think I am going to take a bit of a working break from writing for a week or two. I’m still working on the outline for Your Tribe, Our Tribe – my werewolf novel. I should have that done in a couple of weeks and I’ll start on it and try to get the rough draft on that one finished before November and Nanowrimo. I’m still going to do Immigrant Voices for that, and that might be the last horror novel I do for the year.

Next year, I am going to make it the year of fantasy and finish up two projects and try to have them ready: The Marvelous and Malefic Doomsday Medicine Show and The Deadly Barrow to have them done and in the hopper for being reviewed by my writing group after the horror is finished up.

I really feel that things are coming together now. I’ve gotten a cover artist for The Show Must Go On and if things work out well, I might have her do the covers for Serve Me Now and maybe Immigrant Voices if I can afford her. She’s getting $1,000 for the first cover, and I hope this isn’t money misspent.

This is not me…

What I really need to do is churn out something for immediate consumption. Something that doesn’t go through a strigent review process. Maybe go back to Catastrophic Christmas Party? I think I had most of that done, I just needed to pad it. I might do that now and work in the werewolf outline on Sundays, work on re-writes for Serve Me Now on Saturdays and dedicate the weeks for Christmas Party with an eye for December release.

Did I just make a plan? Am I going to follow through with it?

Yes to both of those.

Wish me luck.

Oh, in case you didn’t know – my first novel The Quietest Heart is free for the remainder of the week. So snatch it up before you have to pay for it. Also – I have a couple of other books, ranging from comedy to horror written by me and several dear friends. Check them out and send some love their way.

Stay well.

The Five Hundred and Sixty-sixth Post: The One Where I Feel Messed With and Not in a Friendly Way…

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I’m popular when I’m free, apparently. The Dreaded Day Job is for free this week and I got 12 purchases. Never got a thing when it was full price at $4.00, which is considerably cheaper than a lot of other books out there. I wonder if Amazon puts it up higher on the list when it’s free than when you have to pay full price? That makes no sense to me. What are you doing to my heart, Jeff?

This is really messing with my self-esteem. Am I only getting sales because it’s free this week? Is my writing ‘I’d never actually pay for it’ good? Am I barking up the wrong tree when it comes to things like this? Am I overthinking this?

Why does my breath smell like peanut butter?

I need to take a step back and evaluate this carefully. One: everyone likes free. Yes, I think Amazon does put free stuff higher up on the list to get them in the door, as it were. My book is highly rated, so it’s not bad for something I dashed off in about a month with little in the way of editing. It’s cheap, so price should be no barrier to entry. Unless I should lower the price further? Knock off a dollar? How far down should I go? Maybe I’ll experiment with a temporary price lowering in a few months and see what that does.

Any authors who read this blog: Do you have the same issues when it comes to free versus paid sales through Amazon?

Sorry this is so brief, but this is kinda seriously messing with my head. I’ll have something better for next week. I promise.

The Five Hundred and Sixty-Fifth Post: The One Where I Try to Plan Ahead!

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Well, I am amid killing the final anatagonst in The Show Must Go On, and I am at a quandary as whether bump the main character’s kill count to three and axe the producer, or should I stick with the two? No doubt there are people in the entertainment industry who are not producers screaming their opinions at the screen right now. I might being the main character to the brink of doing just that, and then have the cops come in and arrest him. I don’t want this to turn into a legal drama, so…maybe? I’ll have to think about it for a while. I haven’t gotten a good handle on that part yet.

I’m also trying to figure out which story to write as far as Nanowrimo goes. Yes, I know we’re smack dab in the middle of summer, but I want to do as much pre-writing as possible. For that I have several choices:

  1. Immigrant Voices: A schizophrenic Kenyan discovers that the voices don’t travel well
  2. All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Fangs: a young woman is turned into a vampire. This story is played for horror and humor
  3. A Game of Chinese Whispers: In a world interconnected, madness is the web’s undoing.
  4. Breeder: A woman inherits a haunted house, and the spirit that dwells inside wants out.

I have quite a few ideas, and I hope to get through two of them by the time the year is up. I’d like to do the first two. The first one is an idea I’ve had for a while, and I think it’s ready to be put to paper. The second one kinda tickles my funny bone. At first it was going to be super serious and a deep dive into the horror of being a vampire, but my natural sense of humor kept creeping up in scenes I would write in my head.

The last two are certainly good ideas, but they’re still a little half formed, with the last one needing to interview some women about child birthing and how society views that. So, those two might be held back for a while longer to get them ready. These are the four ideas that are coming to mind right now, and if I have some better ideas, I will certainly expand on them a little bit.

Right now, as far as reading goes, I am in the middle of Maeve Fly and I am liking it. It’s got an American Psycho feel to it, which is always good for me. My current break from fantasy is complete for the year. Not reading any, not writing any until next year, when I hope to finish Medicine Show and begin the editing process for that piece of work.

Well – less than a month out from GenCon. I can’t wait for the vacation! Four days of gaming and relaxing. I really can use it. I have some rules, which are going to go up the day GenCon starts, which is a Thursday. With any luck, there won’t be any gaps in posting, since I’ve been fairly good about it up to this point.

Please take some time to peruse the offerings on the right side of the blog – both from me and very talented writers. Have a good day and stay safe.