There are just three days left for my Kindle Scout campaign for my novel Avatars & Identity. As of midnight this morning my campaign page has a total of 105 hits over 28 days. That’s a little less than four hits per day. While I have no idea how good or bad that is since Amazon doesn’t reveal anything about their selection criteria, my gut instinct tells me this isn’t good enough by far. I find this to be pretty disappointing, but also not the end of the world. The book is ready to publish so even if Amazon doesn’t pick it up, I’m prepared to put it up on all of the usual self-publishing sites. There’s still the small hope that I’ll get picked up regardless, but I’m definitely preparing for the opposite. Hopefully I’ll know by Friday/Saturday, though the decision may not happen until Monday.
Tag Archives: Writing
The Kindle Scout Campaign Continues
With seventeen days left of my Kindle scout campaign, my book has 72 views and has spent 0 hours on the Hot & Trending list. Not really the response I’d hoped for, but also not altogether unexpected. My ability to promote through social networks is minimal given my limited presence. I’ve considered ramping up my social media posts, outlets, etc., but I don’t really have the time or dedication to make that work I’ve often seen it advised to stick to what you enjoy using. I’ve never been all that fond of putting my every little thought out there either. This blog is the closest I come and I am far less verbose than many blogs I read.
All this boils down to not having the media clout to really push my campaign. I could try to make up for my lack of exposure by repeatedly posting updates on my campaign, but as someone who has been on the receiving end of such things by my friends that option falls firmly in the No category. As a compromise I will only be posting a few updates and reminders. Better to have the book stand or fall on its own merits. At worst, I have a third novel 100% ready to publish. In the meantime, there are several promising books I’ve noticed through the Kindle Scout site. Once I have a bit of free time I plan to use my remaining two vote to help get someone else’s books published.
First Impressions
Now that I’m in my third week of classes (but only my first full week thanks to our ridiculous starting schedule) and I’ve had at least one session with every class I have mostly put my fears to rest. I like all of my classes, though some more than others. Unexpectedly, I am seriously enjoying my ENG242 English Literature class. It’s one of two required for all English majors and covers English Literature from the late 18th century onward. We’ll be reading “Pride and Prejudice,” “Wuthering Heights,” and other classics. So far though we’ve only gone through selections from Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man. I’ve been far more interested in this very thick and heavy reading than anything from my previous literature class. My least favorite class so far is my creative non-fiction workshop. Mostly because I’ve always been a fiction writer, and reader, at heart. I’ll read most any story if it’s done well but somehow fiction has always resonated more with me. Still, it’s very early days.
What I didn’t underestimate, and fully expected, was the workload accompanying taking four English classes: one literature and three workshops. I’m already a very busy bee doing classwork. Pile on top the copy edited version of Avatars & Identity that I still need to finish plus the audio book version of Transformation that I need to get through ASAP and I’m swamped. I really wish both of my book items would have been ready for me before school started but thems the breaks, as they say. For now I’m up to date with homework and slowly chipping away at the rest.
New Semester, New Beginnings
Gotta love coming back after a summer of not blogging only to discover your site has stopped working thanks to a random WordPress update while you were away. Serves me right for being away so long. The good news is everything is almost back to normal. I just have to reinstall two plugins that I had to FTP in and remove just to be able to login. Then WordPress wouldn’t update to the latest and greatest and in fact couldn’t find the update page. After some intensive Google searching though I managed to find someone else who’d had the same problem. Turns out one little line added to a config file magically fixed the issue. Woot!
Now that I’m through an exceptionally lazy summer (where writing is concerned anyway) and I also have my main computer back up and running, it’s time to head back to college. This semester started strangely schedule-wise with classes starting the Wednesday before Labor Day. This meant my first week excluded ALL of my writing classes and included only my required English Literature class. Then Labor Day came along and I still haven’t been to my Create Writing Poetry workshop. Ah well, next week. Next week.
I was actually pretty upset about the whole scheduling thing until today when one of my teachers happened to mention that this semester is extra long and ends on a Tuesday. Clearly they’re making up for their own scheduling stupidity. Would it really have been to hard to start classes on Monday even though it would have been August 31st? Apparently.
The classes themselves have been good so far, though it’s really hard to say at this point how they’ll really pan out. The first sessions are all syllabus readings and constant introductions. Today I had both my non-fiction and fiction workshops. Pretty sure I’m going to like both but man am I going to be busy with three workshops and my lit class. Then there’s my own writing and publishing that I have to find time for.
Speaking of my writing, I just got Avatars & Identity from a copy editor I found on a site called Fiverr (it’s like the eBay of personal services without any actual bidding). Started going through his edits and discovered that at some point in my life I completely ignored what I’d learned about commas. Apparently I’m allergic. (Not really, I just think the so-called rules call for so many commas that they break up the flow of narrative.) Still, I’m accepting most of the changes since I want my book to be on its best behavior when I submit it to the Kindle Scout program.
For those who haven’t heard of this yet, and I’m sure there are many who haven’t, Amazon is becoming a full-on publisher with their Kindle Scout program. The way it works is you submit a fully completed and copy edited novel of at least 50k words with an awesome cover, blurb, and one-liner. They’ll shop it around to a select group of readers. If the readers and Amazon’s own people approve you’ll get to sign a contract. This contract in fact. After reading and hearing about all of the horror stories regarding contracts with the big publishers I was very happy to work through Amazon’s very simple and straightforward contract in fifteen minutes flat. It’s for worldwide e-book and digital audio rights for a 5-year term that renews barring poor sales or voluntarily on the author’s part. There’s even built-in guarantees that if you don’t earn enough through royalties you will get all of your rights back. From a new author standpoint I have to say this contract is a better deal than what you’d get from almost anyone else. I’m super excited to get Avatars submitted and see what happens.
Whelp, that’s enough for now. Homework beckons.
Fun with Hardware
While I’ve been waiting for the graphics for my Fuzzy Adventures series to be completed I’ve been doing my personal edit of Avatars & Identity, making corrections to my first two novels in preparation of some business stuff, as well as dealing with a bunch of personal issues. This has kept me pretty busy but now I’ve got a serious wrench thrown into my plans: my main computer is having issues.
Now I’ve been building my own PC’s for the past 17 years or so which means I’m no stranger to problems. I’ve had some that were seriously difficult to figure out and fix. This one takes the cake though. My PC is randomly crashing to a black screen. No BSOD so there’s no error messaging from Windows. I can’t even replicate the crash as the conditions vary so wildly I don’t know what’s causing them. Part of the issue is pieces of my PC are over 4 years old now. This includes my PSU, motherboard, CPU, and RAM. I’ve run just about every software test I can think of and they all pass with flying colors.
This leaves me in quite a quandary. Based on my research this is most likely an intermittent hardware issue indicating one of my core components are failing. The most likely culprits are the PSU, motherboard, and graphics card. I’d like to think it’s not the graphics card since that is barely a year old. If it’s the PSU, then it is not the 12V rail that is failing. I can read that through GPU-Z and that sucker is super steady at 11.5v with no real fluctuations. So now I’m going through the process of re-checking all of the physical connections. Again. Dusting and cleaning. Again. Ultimately culminating in a re-installation of Windows. Fun times. I’d rather be working on my book/gaming series but without my main PC I’m pretty much dead in the water. Here’s hoping I don’t have to shell out money I don’t have for new PC parts.
Let the Fuzzy Adventures Begin!
With my summer now in full swing (even if the weather disagrees), I’ve started work on my new Fuzzy Adventure series. This was item 6 in my post about what I planned to do this summer and I’m super excited to get to work! I’ve done a test session already with a short run through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to see how my setup works:
I’m using a StarTech USB3HDCAP to hook up my consoles to my PC and XSplit to handle both the Twitch streaming and video recording. The cool thing about the capture box is it can handle any console so I can play and record on anything from my old NES up to PS3. Since I just picked up Ni No Kuni I may end up doing a regular Let’s Play as I work my way through that.
As for the Fuzzy Adventures, I anticipate doing at least one episode per week. Each episode will probably include about an hour or more of game time (no doubt subject to the game being played) along with the written portion. Since this is all new to me I’ll have to see how much writing is involved for each hour of game play. I’ve also engaged the services of a professional graphic artist to handle the graphics for the videos. I really want something that looks well-made. All of this should be ready within the next week or two. Can’t wait to get started!
The Semester’s End & Things to Come
So yesterday I had my last final. I’m really glad it’s done but I’d also like to kick the person who decided to hold finals and graduation on the same day. Seriously stupid. Why not have graduation on Saturday instead? Makes way more sense. Whatever, it’s done and I’m pretty sure I did well on both of the finals I had to take. My hand is still mad at me though. Nothing like having to hand-write a five page essay in under an hour. Fun times. Now though it’s time to move on to super fun things!
Starting Monday, barring any life events, I will be starting my new Fuzzy Adventures series. All of the gear I needed to make it happen came in on Thursday. Took me a good day or so to get everything set up as well. Still have to do a few things on the software end but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Tested out the video capture card by hooking up my trusty old PS2 and booting up the first game I’m going to use for my Adventures series: Castlevania – Symphony of the Night. I wasn’t sure I was going to start with that one but the Kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night decided me. For those who haven’t heard it is a gothic-themed side scrolling action adventure RPG made by the same guy who co-directed Symphony of the Night (SOTN). In his opening video he says that he’s wanted to do another game like SOTN for a long time but the AAA publishers say there’s no demand for such a game. Considering the campaign is already at $2.1 million with 27 days left to go I’d say the AAA have their heads up their asses. That’s not news though. Personally I’m really glad crowdfunding has allowed game developers to give AAA pubs the finger and do what they and the gamers want: make awesome games without publisher oversight and interference. Just look at what happened to Maxis and Simcity. EA took a beloved franchise and forced Maxis to limit and monetize the game to the point that it was a huge failure. Then EA blames Maxis and closes them down. Fuckers. But I digress.
I’m excited that I’ll be using my Twitch channel quite a bit more. I still plan on doing Live Writing sessions since I have plenty of writing to get done this summer. Each Fuzzy Adventure will entail quite a bit of writing per episode. I haven’t decided how long each finished video will be since I don’t know how long it will take me to do the writing for every 15 minutes of game play. I suspect that will vary greatly from game to game. SOTN isn’t exactly plot or dialogue heavy so I’ll be making a lot of stuff up to tell an interesting story. If and when I get to games like Final Fantasy 6 or Crono Trigger though I’m sure the writing portions will be much, much longer with less deviation from the game plot & dialogue. Either way I’m super excited to get going on this!
Brainstorming for Summer
With just two finals left this semester will be done before I know it. This has been making me anxious. Mostly because it means that my schedule next week and going forward will be up to me and it would be nice if I could manage to not waste this free time. After all how many 30 something’s get a real summer break? I know I never thought it would be possible once I was neck deep in the soul sucking 9 to 5 grind. To that end I’ve been thinking that it’s time to brainstorm and come up with a list of goals for this summer. So without further ado (and in no particular order), here is the list:
- Write book 3 of Stephen’s trilogy
- Do my own Let’s Play series with the Terraria 1.3 patch
- Do video readings for some of my short fiction
- Finish re-edits for Transformation & Induction
- Edit and publish Avatars & Identity
- Complete at least one Let’s Play + VG Writing Series (Fuzzy Adventures)
- Compile, edit, and publish the class fiction and poetry book
- Find and check out local writing meetup and social groups
- Design BFG Publishing website
- Shampoo the carpet
- Move my desk
- Re-organize this blog
- Write more short fiction & poetry (At least 1 poem & 1 short story/flash fiction per week)
- Send stuff to magazines/publishers every week
- Continue the Live Writing series or combine with some of the above
Whew. Looking at this list I realize that I have my work cut out for me this summer. This to-do list is in addition to the usual goofing around and just having fun that will be required to stay sane. I’m also going to have to prioritize if I want to get even half of this done. The Fuzzy Adventures series is something I’ve been thinking about most of this semester. I love video games and I love writing & reading. I wanted to combine those somehow. That’s when I struck on the idea for re-visiting some of the games that I loved so much as a kid and doing a combination let’s play with an episodic writing series. The basic idea is that I’ll play a game in sections and write a story to go along with it, also in sections. Basically I’d have a separate area of this blog devoted to these series with each game getting it’s own sub-section. Each blog entry would be an episode of the story and video both. I’ve got a short list of games I’m considering, but I’ll probably start with something short like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night instead of an epic length game like Final Fantasy 6.
I’m thinking the other thing I’ll need to help keep me on track is some kind of daily schedule. I’m not very good at sticking to schedules that I come up with on my own but I might need to give it a shot. Anyway, glad I finally got all of these thoughts down. The list reminded me that I’m missing a couple of key pieces of hardware that I’ll need for a number of these ideas. Amazon ho!
A Quick Update
It is now the last week of classes at UW Madison so things are hectic indeed. Next week come the finals. My Create Writing class doesn’t have a formal final thankfully so once I turn my portfolio in on Friday I’m done with the graded work. Not done with the class though as we are putting together some of the stuff we worked on over the semester to publish as a free ebook. I offered this as an opportunity to the class and everyone was all for it. I’m interested to see how it turns out.
In other news the UW Creative Writing Award ceremony is this Thursday and since I submitted a couple of things to two different contests I will be attending. They don’t tell the winners ahead of time so you have to show up to find out. A rather devious way of making sure plenty of people attend, not just the winners. No idea what my chances are but I’m not holding out much hope. I am a very new writer after all.
I also received my very first rejection notice from the folks over at Flash Fiction. Woot! I was pretty happy to see that and I plan to keep every rejection I get as a souvenir of the work I’ve done. This may seem a bit strange but I think of it as proof that I’m really giving this writing thing my all. I hope to have many, many more rejections by the end of summer. And a few acceptances as well of course. Without classes to worry about I have some big plans. Which I need to sit down and write out. After finals.
Writing into the Darkness
It’s almost 1 AM now and I’m still awake. Despite having morning class tomorrow and knowing that being up this late is going to make me super tired for my favorite class. This isn’t the first night this week I ended up late. Why? I’ve been asking myself that very same question and so far I don’t really have an answer.
Things aren’t particularly bad right now even if I do have a tone of work from school. With just three weeks left of classes, plus one week of finals, things are getting pretty intense. The two literature classes that were manageable all semester have become a bit overwhelming. Yet really it’s just a lot of reading. Nothing I’m not used to in the end. Except I’m having trouble sitting down and doing it. I’m distracted and I have trouble concentrating.
Dead Wesley Smith talks about writing into the dark on his blog. It’s the phrase he uses to describe writing when you have no plan, no plot, and no idea what you’re going to write about. You just start writing and go. I really like this idea and I’ve been itching to try it. Then I realized that’s pretty much what I always do with my blog entries. I don’t have a plan. Sometimes I have a thought and that’s my starting point. One little thought. Tonight my thoughts are rioting among the streets and alleyways of my mind and it’s making me crazy.
I’m sad and depressed, yet hopeful and determined. Mixed feelings describes it well. Then there’s the fear. The nagging, little voice in the back of my head fear that this is all going to come crashing down and I’m just a stupid little idiot for every thinking I could pull off writing for a living.
By Aaron Lowe