Friday night I received my copy of “Roll the Bones“, the anthology that my story Playable Character comes out in. It’s a Lulu-published book (which doesn’t and shouldn’t undermine its integrity, I use Lulu too). It’s taken a long time since its inception to come out. When I first received word that it was accepted, the publication date was September 2010. But now the common man can pick it up and read awesome stories about fantasy fighting. I haven’t been able to look at what my story looks like — it’s quite thick — but I did manage to look at the Table of Contents. There my story is listed…
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Live Blogging Playable Character
Okay, I got to admit. I haven’t listened to my own story yet. Too nervous. I’m too afraid if everything went right. I feel like J.M. Barrie in “Finding Neverland”. Are they going to like it? Do they care? I looked at the comments for the post. After a week, it seems most were about the commentary after the story. But that’s fine. Of that, four or five comments were thumbs up. The one thumbs down was due to the audience being too “guy factor”. That’s fine by me. The story is about video games, so guy factor isn’t really something I could control. I know girls do play video…
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Playable Character (formerly Avatar) is Published!
Say, you want to see my first published story? Well, have I got a deal for you. Go to The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine to listen to “Playable Character“. I promise you, it is awesome and funny and everything you’re looking for.
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Dunesteef Is Awesome
Since I’m getting published in Dunesteef, I figured I should at least listen to a few episodes (boy, I hope they’re not reading this). I listened to the three most recent ones and I have this to say. First, wow. I was blown away by the production values on this thing. I’ve listened to every episode of EscapePod and its brethren, but that’s all straight story narration – no fluff whatsoever. This… this has SOUND EFFECTS and AMBIENCE. You can hear feet crunching the leaves and they get quicker when someone’s running. You hear the bloops and beeps of the computer. You hear the crackle of fire. It’s more like…
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Avatar’s Contract
Dunesteef has now sent me a contract for Avatar. Instead of something to print and sign and all that, they are sending me an email with some contract verbiage, and I’m to respond in the affirmative. This raised some red flags to me, but it’s not a large market, so it’s doubtful they’d try to rook me. I don’t want to get into a Todd MacFarlane lawsuit. But it’s for audio rights only, so I’m not going to worry too much about it. But let the record show that if history proves me wrong, this was the moment I was an idiot. However, they also brought up a point that…
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My First Sale!
Avatar has sold! My first publishment! Me! I sold a story! I’m a published author (or I will be, as soon as I sign the contract — never count your chickens until you can link to them). Avatar’s going to go up at Dunesteef – an audio fiction magazine not dissimilar from EscapePod. I’m not sure when it’ll be up, but they said they have two months worth of stories in the hopper. So probably around November/December, just in time for the yearly Christmas letter. Last night, I checked my e-mail and saw an email from Dunesteef. I thought I was about due to get a rejection notice, so I…
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Vampire Family Story Done
I’m done revising Vampire Family Story, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. Unfortunately, it also ballooned up to 6,000 words, which limits some of my publishing options. It’s no Hugo Winner, but it’s a good story, and I think I improved it to the point where many people will be pleased. I wondered, as I was revising, whether I was trying to please everyone. I tried to only fix problems that multiple people complained about. But even multiple people can be wrong (and make me pump the story to too many words. That’s the double-edged sword with getting a lot of critiques. Too many cooks can spoil the…
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Avatar circles the Hub
Avatar is finished. I took out that other character and now it’s a bit less moralistic, but I think it’s a stronger story. I submitted it to Hub Magazine, a UK e-publication. I selected that one because in my notes, I said it would be a good place for Avatar. They pay good – $50/story (25 curly-L-with-the-dashes), but they take a long-ass time to respond, which I didn’t realize before I submitted. Their website lists response time as 4 months, but Ralan puts them at 250 days. Either way, that’s quite a bit of time to wait for a rejection. I might have reconsidered if I’d checked, but I didn’t…
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Blood 2 Now Available
You’ve heard me talk about it – now go read it. Blood 2: The Unforgiven is now available in either serial format on FanFiction.net, or you can read the whole thing from the Blood Wiki. See the 1/8th of the iceberg for the 7/8 of work I put into it. I’ve been debating about whether to update my personal Blood website with the story. I’ve already got the stories on the file system, I just need to edit the HTML to include the links. It wouldn’t be too much effort to do that, but I don’t want to make it a big involved thing like Blood: ILA was. That had…
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Blood 2 is Done, Now What?
So now it’s back to the real world of writing – where nothing is even close to being finished and you’ve got a mountainous queue of stories waiting to be written, like ghosts that only you can see, and they all want something different. I stepped into Black Hole Son today to make some small changes that I thought of yesterday. This reminded me that it’s 321 pages. The story I just worked on so arduously stayed around 210 pages. This is 50% longer. True, it’s in first draft form, but I’m having trouble thinking of stuff I can cut. With Blood 2, it was easy. I could have cut…
