Month: December 2012

End of the year lists, except I haven’t really got any proper lists…

It’s the time of year when a lot of people put together their end-of-the-year lists. Their favorite new books, movies, or music. The bests and the worsts of the year. I never know how they manage it. I’ve tried, and the only way I can figure it is if you work on the thing all year, every year, as you go. Even that, I lost track of before a year is out, usually.

The current world of constant, tiny, digital updates about everything I’m doing ought to help, but for most things there aren’t really any good filters. The best one I can think of, and I think I used it the last couple of years, too, is Goodreads, because I definitely “check in” every book I read, there, and I usually rate what I read, and frequently review them, too. So at the least, I can say things like “I read (finished) only 38 books in 2012.” I only gave one of them five stars, and then sadly gave its sequels 3, 2, and 2 stars each.

I did give 10 books four stars, though, so there were several good books, this year. Almost a quarter of what I read! The first 3 Circle of Magic books, the first 2 Young Wizards books (I haven’t read 3+, yet), The Diamond Age, The Search for Wondla, The Graveyard Book, The Eyes of the Dragon, and Dan Ariely‘s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

I also read all 13 books in the Series of Unfortunate Events and, sadly, couldn’t give a single one of them more than 3 stars. In fact, I gave almost half of the series 2 stars or less. It was a real disappointment.

So what about other stuff? Movies, TV, games, et cetera? I check in on GetGlue, but it doesn’t really break that down by year, and there’s no real rating/review mechanism there. I can scroll through my check-ins, my likes, et cetera, but most of those pages don’t have a time-stamp at all, and those that do are all relative & vague (2 days ago, 6 months ago, a year ago). I can say that I’ve been playing a lot of The Secret World, this year, not much Star Trek Online, and that I started playing a lot of (and burned out on) Star Wars: The Old Republic within the last 3 weeks. I played Mass Effect and enjoyed it, then tried going directly into Mass Effect 2 and hated the changes to the basic gameplay mechanics so much I stopped playing within a couple hours and haven’t touched it since.

I’m enjoying the final season of Fringe, though perhaps less than the middle years. The latest season of Misfits has been interesting, and Rudy has really grown on us (which he better, since not a single member of the original cast now remains on the show). I started watching Bones with Mandy a season or two ago, but I feel the current season has lost its way; the characters are acting out-of-character, some to the point of seeming schizophrenic not just episode-to-episode but within the course of a single hour. Castle is back to being light and fun this season, which is good – going too serious and dark was a major misstep.

Cloud Atlas and Life of Pie were amazing attempts to film difficult texts. Looper and Prometheus were fun to watch. The Master was an interesting experience. The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall, Resident Evil: Retribution, Underworld Awakening, Cabin in the Woods, The Amazing Spiderman, Men In Black 3, Dark Shadows, Total Recall, The Hunger Games*, Moonrise Kingdom, and even The Devil’s Carnival were … neither better or worse than was to be expected; I didn’t love or hate any of them, I wasn’t surprised by them or really engaged by them, they were just … the next one either in the series you know or from the team you know, and if you’re familiar with the old ones, you knew what to expect with the new ones. (*I included The Hunger Games, because it felt like it was just executing what we were already expecting & familiar with, and the rest of what I said was true.) Brave felt like yet another step down for Pixar; the 7 films from Monsters Inc. through UP were amazing, then Toy Story 3, Cars 2, and Brave have been incrementally steps away from their former creativity, depth, character, and meaningful storytelling. I don’t have high hopes for Monsters University. Safety Not Guaranteed was fun and quirky and better than expected, considering Duplass. Oh, and my standout favorite from the Phoenix Film Festival (which I should have done a post about right afterward, considering I saw close to 50 films that week) was How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song, which doesn’t have distribution (yet).

Oh, and then there’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s the first new film from Fincher I have little/no interest in owning. Not because of the filmmaking, which was amazing and beautiful and I’m sure painstakingly executed, but because the story was dull and predictable and needlessly violent – though not as violent or shocking as many viewers had led me to believe. I know it came out in 2011, I’m not sure, I think I waited until January to see it, but … sigh. The score/soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross though, I have been listening to a lot since its release. It’s excellent to write to, for example.

The new version of iTunes seems designed around emphasizing how badly previous versions of iTunes have screwed up my music collection, especially re: cover art. I’m thinking of maybe taking a few dozen hours to go through and clean everything up. The art is frequently wrong, it thinks a lot of files are missing but when I hit ‘Locate’ they’re right where they ought to be in the iTunes folder, and because of various changes to how compilations are handled over the years, those tracks are shotgun-scattered across my library. With the new interface, these problems make iTunes practically unusable.

Oh, and then there’s me. I finished writing, and published, two new novels in the first half of 2012: Sophia and Emily. I did a lot of research toward writing YA adventure books, and still have quite a bit of research left to do. I spent some time trying to develop a tabletop / deck-building game, and look forward to completing that project in the future. I wrote a book in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga, which I need to edit and will probably publish in the first half of 2013. I attempted to write a book about people who accidentally discover the cure for aging and death, but it fought me at every turn, and crashed and burned, and took my sanity with it – I’ve spent most of the last three weeks trying to get back to a moderate level of functionality, after that painful ordeal. I will probably attempt to re-write that book from scratch, some day, but not until I have more distance. My business has had more revenue and realized more profit this year than ever before, though it’s still small potatoes. I ran another unsuccessful Kickstarter, and have so far failed to sell out a tiny 50-copy limited edition of my latest book. Mandy and I have been happily married for a little over 5 years now, and will be celebrating Christmas (and, belatedly, our 5-year anniversary) at Walt Disney World next week.

Next year, I think I’ll start by not working on books for a while – I want to just focus on creating new artwork, at least at first. I’m planning on getting the DNGR book published in time to sell at PHXCC’13, but do not otherwise have plans to write/edit/publish anything else next year… though realistically, I don’t really have any plans, at all. I’ve been tossing around an idea about putting together a sort of anthology/periodical full of “short” works by myself and (primarily) other authors, so maybe I’ll work on that over 2013. After 5 years of doing this full time, I think I’m finally beginning to accept that I can just work on whatever I want to work on, without really paying too much attention to what people want, or what will sell; doing more-commercial work doesn’t actually result in more sales, but it does result in more stress and anguish for me. If I end up doing nothing but sketching and doodling and drawing all year -without producing any art to even try to sell- I’ll still probably profit, the way I have my business set up, and I’ll be that much better at drawing, for when I come up with something I actually want to create.

I think what I’m saying is: I’m giving up on the constant-release schedule I’d set for myself. I’m no longer aiming for 2-4 new books a year, every year, or to have 35-40 titles “under my belt” by 2020. (Which, you may not realize, has been part of my over-arching goals for the last several years.) If I have books to write, I’ll write them. If I don’t, I won’t. If I’m ready to write when November comes around, great, and if not – no NaNoWriMo for me, and that’s okay.

Stressing myself out to the point where I’m losing my ability to function day-to-day, that’s not okay.

I guess I could blog…

So. November came and went. My 2nd novel crashed and burned at around 32k words – if you follow me on Facebook, or are in my NaNoWriMo circle on G+, you already know the details. It took a wrong turn within the first 2 chapters, for example, veering away from my initial conceptual intent. Then, at nearly every opportunity, the characters & the writing veered the book away from any opportunity for plot, conflict, or in some cases for meaningful character growth/development – usually by skipping beyond the need for it. Solutions were cropping up before I’d reached the problems, nullifying whole sections of the plot. Interactions and conversations were demonstrating depths of character before I’d been able to express the flaws which the events of the book were meant to turn into that depth. And so on. Right now, I don’t even want to read that draft. I’m considering sharing it with a few trusted people (Let me know if you’re interested; you’re willing to give constructive feedback and can be trusted not to share a terrible, unedited, unfinished book around, right?), to get them to read it and tell me what they like about it, what they hate about it, and what they think I can do to improve & develop it into something that works – and then still not read it, but instead, later, write the whole thing from scratch. Probably with a plan, an outline, or some such thing prepared, first, rather than running in blind and on a very tight schedule.

The Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga book came out fine. I haven’t read that yet, either, but I know at least the first half is quite good. (The half I wrote this summer, which I did read, before beginning to write new material.) Tentatively titled Deep Noodling, I’m definitely looking for Beta Readers for that book, which I hope to have in print this Spring. I have a feeling that some of the descriptions need clarifying, and that my arguments on both sides of the Extreme-Copyright-Enforcement vs. Everything-Is-A-Remix argument could use some work, but I’m pretty sure the emotional arcs, the tone, and the world-building all turned out better than I’d hoped. Reading/writing this book made me want to read the rest of the books in the DNGR Saga… None of which exist. Yet.

If you’d like access to the Google Docs Drive document where I copy/pasted the first draft chapter by chapter as I wrote it, let me know your Google email address so I can share it with you. I’d love to get as much feedback as possible before going to print. And this one, I think, needs a lot more work than Never Let the Right One Go did.

I also need to ‘get off my butt’ and get to work on drawing. I’m hoping to create a series of illustrations for the DNGR book, as well as a cover unlike anything I’ve attempted to date. I just need to start by figuring out how to draw a set of characters whose descriptions were, at best, still quite surreal. I mean, how can a noodle, while remaining noodly, also become skeletal? What does it mean for my protagonist to be a noodle? Is he a humanoid version of something like the FSM? Does he have hair? And Glitterfairy… I’m pretty sure she’s basically just a cloud of glitter which appears to express the silhouette of a fairy when you look through it. Except she can play musical instruments and interact physically with people and the environment. And then there’s Robot. Who is a robot, of alien design/origin, at least vaguely humanoid, capable of excellent drumming, and … metallic, I think, may have been the only physical descriptor I used?

Maybe I won’t try to draw them … but then what do I put on the cover?

I don’t know…

Anyway, after my brain broke over that 2nd novel like Batman’s spine over Bane’s knee, I’ve spent the last couple weeks recuperating. Too crazy and messed up to accomplish anything much. Playing video games, mostly – did I explain that here, before? About how I’ve been using video games this year to distract myself from thoughts of suicide and other mental/emotional danger zones? I’m still super-broken, right now.

I mean, yesterday (or the day before, or … some time this week – time/space/dates are flowing/blurring together for me, lately; was it last week?) I read someone’s brief blog post about how they’d approached publishing a book in an out-of-traditional-order way, by podcasting one set of stories before going to print with another (related) story, and were considering some third route for their next book. All stuff I’ve done, mostly stuff I’ve seen others do, even the stuff they’re thinking of as new/original, just things I naturally did in those untraditional ways from day one (over a decade ago, now) of my publishing adventure. Anyway, there was some throwaway line in the middle about how their podcasting had helped them build interest in the book before it went to print so they were able to sell 1,000 copies as soon as it was available – and characterizing that as not having been enough to consider the book’s launch a success.

So, then I spent a few hours (days?) having a slow-burn anxiety attack. At first, I didn’t even realize what was happening, or why. I just felt like dying, like being crushed, like death, like pain and acid and suffocation, and like failure and disappointment and giving up. Because, in a way which oughtn’t be so deep down, it hurts me that my highest-volume title has sold fewer than 80 copies, and that my highest-revenue title has netted me around $450, while other people sell 1,000 copies in a day of their first book and don’t consider it a success. I’ve built a profitable business out of my dozens of sales; can you imagine what I could do with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of sales? And this doesn’t feel like jealousy; it feels like failure.

And I know, I know, and am handily reminded by people like Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, that what I create is worth creating, even if there are plenty of other creators out there, and even if my work doesn’t have mass appeal or doesn’t have a broad reach. And I know that even affecting one person’s life means that my work was worth producing. And that there are (at least) a dozen people I’ve never met who have been moved enough by my work to reach out and let me know. Probably dozens. I have no way to count, not really, and certainly not right now. But there are some. There are people who have been moved by my work. Changed by it, their minds or hearts thinking differently, beating differently, even just for a little while, because of what I’ve created. I know there are people who are very happy to hang my art on their walls, and/or who are very excited to read my books. It isn’t hundreds of people. (That I know of.) It isn’t thousands of people. But I tell stories that only I could tell, in ways only I could tell them, and when I put them out into the world, they enter and alter people’s lives. And I know this. I know this.

I know.

But still, my heart aches sometimes. My heart aches to be stilled. I ache. To give up. To end.

I’m a bit broken, right now.

Perhaps I’ll be well enough to create more great work in January. To finish the DNGR book. To get back to my YA Adventure research & planning (or at least to definitively give it up). Soon enough to move forward with one or the other of the big projects I pushed back for NaNoWriMo, only to go from a little broken to completely shattered in just a few short weeks. A few more weeks, and … well? Well enough, anyway?