Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

No, my reviews aren’t fake. They’re real, and they’re meaningful.

Frequently when I see/read an article/post/rant which is in any way about indie/self publishing, one of the off-handed remarks that seems inevitably tossed into the mix is something about how since “everyone has twenty or thirty friends they can get to give them 5-star reviews”, consumer-based ratings can’t be trusted. A book’s Amazon rating, to their mind, is meaningless. (Many such people also add that traditionally-published authors get “a slew of 1-star reviews having nothing to do with content, but merely in response to the cost of their eBooks” (presuming, of course, that somehow all traditionally-published eBooks are priced too high). This anecdotal evidence is just more proof to them that no Amazon/consumer rating can be trusted.)

I just want to say that, at least for me, this isn’t true. I wish my books had “twenty or thirty” reviews – regardless of whether they were “all 5-stars”! My most-rated book, on Goodreads, has 26 ratings (only 10 with reviews, some of those only 2-3 sentences), only 4 of those from friends/family (3 if you don’t count my own rating!). On Amazon, none of my books has more than 4 reviews, total! Most of my titles have zero reviews on Amazon. (Over on Amazon, Cheating, Death (which had 26 ratings on Goodreads) has only 3 reviews – one of them from my wife, posted in response to the 1-star, 1-sentence “review” that was the only thing there at first.) I have no idea how to get people to post book reviews, let alone friends and family – I can barely get my friends to read my books. To the point where, by now, it’s a running joke among half a dozen of them that none of them have read, or expect to ever read, any of my books.

The reviews my books have, by and large, are hard-won. Thousands of people read and/or listen to each book (sometimes tens of thousands), but most never even go so far as to give a star-rating, let alone a text review. Of those who pay for my books (which is a small percentage of my total readership), an even smaller percentage ever post a review. I don’t know who these flippant bloggers/journalists/ranters are, or who their friends are, or where they get their ideas, but they don’t have the whole picture. Some of us, the authors who are actually introverts, don’t have armies of friends – at all. Certainly not armies of friends we can mobilize to SPAM 5-star reviews across the internet, every time we put out a new book. Some of us write books that aren’t easy to summarize, whose emotional experience is not simple to express, and whose reviews/ratings represent the thoughts of the best of our readers, rather than the result of a popularity contest.

Incidentally, I get more “fan mail” (between emails, text messages, and phone calls) than reviews. Hands down, no question, simply more. Easily double or triple the number of ratings I get (across all sites put together) per book. Readers are more likely to look up my home phone number and call me than they are to take 60 seconds and put a star rating on the book they loved enough to call me about. (Even when I ask them to do so on the call, and they say they will.)

Alternatively, it’s possible that the reason I haven’t been able to marshall an army of friends to review my books is that they’re all terrible books. In that case, my friends might feel it wouldn’t be appropriate to write a “bad” review of my book, since we’re friends, so they feel better not writing anything at all. I mean, it’s a possibility. It seems contradicted by the semi-regular fan mail (and calls), but … it’s a possibility.

Thinking about interactive storytelling

Like a gear finally catching, and the machine lurching forward, a couple nights ago when I stumbled across inklewriter, my mind and momentum were altered. I’m still depressed, don’t get me wrong, I’m still overeating, feeling like crap, and being generally nihilistic – but instead of being distracted by video games, now I’m spending much of my time engaged in actual creative pursuits. The upside of which is much better than the upside for video games. My sleep schedule is off-the-charts weird, things have been extra stressful and difficult with my wife lately (she’s a teacher, it’s the first week of school, which I think is an obvious factor, plus her first attempt to get a reading endorsement didn’t work out as well as she’d hoped, so she’s having to sign up for additional classes… it’s a whole thing and I’m not posting about that right now, but I am dealing with it in my life), but at least I’m thinking about getting back to some creative work. Actually, I’ve been digging in a bit and getting my hands “dirty” with the tools.

Well, err, tool, anyway. inklewriter. It’s an authorship and hosting/sharing tool for choice-based interactive storytelling. (This is, apparently, as opposed to the sort of interactive fiction you got in the old text adventures, where your inputs were freeform and parsed; in the most recent popular, web-based wave of interactive storytelling, the reader is presented with explicit options to choose from, rather than a command line.) My brother has also been looking into creating interactive storytelling of his own, but where I want to create things closer to books or short stories (ie: longform narrative, closer to literature than to games), he wants to create things closer to the video games end of the spectrum (he’s a big fan of failbetter‘s Fallen London). failbetter themselves are working on adapting the tools they used to build Fallen London into StoryNexus, a platform for creating very game-like interactive fiction. Another developer associated with that team has been working on Varytale, which is geared toward more book-like interactive fiction, broken into small chunks they call storylets. (I recommend you read one of their sample interactive books, How to Read, about how to read interactive fiction but more importantly about the uses, implementations, and value of interactivity in storytelling.) I am also obliged to mention additional tools/platforms like Playfic and Choice of Games, both of which are very deliberately wading in the games end of the interactive fiction pool.

Some of these tools are publicly available now, some require you to request access or submit a book/game/project proposal, and others are still in closed beta. Some of them have very user-friendly, GUI interfaces that require little or no coding, others were clearly designed by programmers who think everyone thinks like a programmer, and a few explicitly require you to code all the interactivity in your stories by hand. The three I’m most interested in are inklewriter, Varytale, and StoryNexus – in that order. inklewriter is the only one of those which is open to the public right now. It and StoryNexus don’t require any real coding. It and Varytale are designed with more-booklike projects in mind. None of them, unfortunately, offer any tools/capabilities (yet) for exporting/saving/backing-up your stories, or hosting them on your own site. They’ve all got plans to integrate monetization, but none is actually up and running with those features, yet.

Of course, my books (especially my digital books) don’t actually make much money, anyway. So I’m seriously considering making my next project an interactive fiction project. As I said at the beginning of the post, I’ve been tinkering in inklewriter for the last few days. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to be able to have meaningful and responsive conversations with their Twitter account about the current features and future plans for the service. I’ve made several pages of sketches of plot structures made possible by the technology (most of which would be unimplementable on paper, ever, and unlikely to work within existing eBook formats), I’ve actually used the tool to implement one of them fully (though it’s just a skeleton, without much of the flesh of the story itself, so far), and others partially (to see how my initial ideas had holes in them, mostly, though also to wrap my mind around meaningful logic implementations for coherent narratives), and I’ve begun brainstorming about what sort of very-large (for interactive fiction) project I’d like to build.

I could flesh out (and design logic for) my initial insane idea. I’ve determined that for a target average-story-length of 3k-5k words, I’ll probably have to write 40k-60k words to fill out every possible path/branch/intersection/insanity I initially mapped. It’s only about 200 discrete story chunks with about 100 total decision points, but getting them all to play nicely with one another, the way I’ve designed it, would be … challenging. Probably what I’ll do is play with another few short projects, and share them freely with everyone (maybe enter them in one of the ongoing interactive storytelling contests – I’ve never really submitted anything to contests before…), and then do something … big.

What I’ve been thinking about most recently is building my possibly-pending adaptation of Dragons’ Truth as interactive fiction, in one way or another. Actually, it would be the whole trilogy (yes, I’ve been planning on turning it into a trilogy when/if I re-write D’T), and then the problems become things like producing print and audio editions. If I had a larger, engaged fan base and appropriate analytics tools, I could do something like tracking which choices readers make most often or polling people about their preferences, and let the readers decide what the “definitive” version of the books will be for the audio version and the limited-edition print runs… though if I do it this way, to me the interactive version will be the truly definitive version. And then later I can release a “director’s cut” eBook with the version I get from my own responses…

Of course, I’ve still got a huge backlog of research and planning to do before I can tackle that project, and then I’ve actually got to sit down and write it. (And write several times as much as “normal”, if it’s interactive.) So … it’ll be a while. But that’s what I’m thinking about now. My decisions in the coming days and weeks will certainly shape the nature of my research and planning in coming months.

As always, your responses are welcome, though not expected. Feel free to comment, email, text message, call me, or send a letter with your thoughts. Bonus points if your letter arrives by post and was typed on a manual typewriter.

Video games as distraction from depression

I’ve been playing a lot of The Secret World, lately. It’s quite fun, a good diversion. So far, I’d say I’m getting my money’s worth (and I bought an LTS, so that’s about $265) so far, with high hopes for the future. I’m about halfway through Egypt, as of last night, so I’m going faster than I did my first play through Star Trek Online, but in no way rushing through (like some people did, finishing everything available in a matter of days). I really want to be playing it right now, actually.

STO hasn’t been drawing me in much, especially Season 6, which is all about fleets and team-based play – I’m not in a fleet and I’ve never much played STO with other people. I’ve been thinking of starting a fleet for myself and my alts, though, and beginning work on the Fleet Starbase… it’s a long-term project designed to take a 50-player fleet about a year to reach max-level, and a 5-man fleet much longer. How long do you suppose it’ll take a fleet with one casual player?

Playing video games, MMOs especially, seems to be a good way to keep myself (my mind, my hands) occupied when things get bad. When my depression gets bad. Like it is, now. Spending all day thinking about a video game may not seem like a good use of my time, it may not seem to accomplish anything, but when the alternative is spending all day contemplating suicide, eating junk food, and/or laying in bed crying, the result changes. Eight hours playing a video game, right now, accomplishes a great deal – especially if I have some fun along the way, but certainly if it keeps me from doing anything to hurt myself.

Even when my mind is too far gone to generate new ideas, to do the real creative work, and even when I’m having enough difficulty focusing that I can’t even carry out already-laid plans for the ideas I had when I was feeling better (which is how I get 60%+ of my life done – make plans and routines, generate ideas, and set things in motion when I feel well, then simply follow those plans by rote when everything goes dark and I can’t see past the pain), I can usually focus enough to do some casual video gaming. Luckily, they’ve been building MMOs for “casual players”, in recent years. There’s a lot to do, there. Almost nothing that requires more than half an hour on any one thing. (Though last night I got to a point where I couldn’t effectively play TSW’s ‘sabotage’ missions; I was too worked-up/unfocused/crazy, I couldn’t keep track of where the guards were, and I kept getting caught/killed/starting-over. I got to a point, for a while, where I wasn’t capable of much more than sitting around, self-loathing. (Not because I wasn’t doing well at the game; just because that’s how I feel, lately. I’m generally pretty good at TSW. I can even (usually) do sabotage missions without any trouble.))

I’m not obsessed with the games, though I do enjoy them (more often than not, and right now, more than most of life/reality), but right now video games are one of the few things standing between myself and deeper depression, self-harm, or worse. While I’m playing, I’m usually pretty-well-distracted from the depression. I’ve used movies (and TV) for this, in the past, but video games is really doing it for me, right now. Though I’ll probably spend a while watching strange foreign films on Netflix Instant, as soon as I reach the end of Transylvania in TSW; they’re almost all I have left in that queue.

Summer Vacation, 2012 – mostly Wyoming

This year, having set aside a little money for travel (beyond the occasional PD in Vegas I may have mentioned before, but we aren’t doing this year; Mandy’s been trying to get her reading endorsement instead, this summer), and not having visited her family & home state since the summer after we got married (four years ago), we’re traveling around Wyoming for about a week and a half. In fact, I’m writing this post from Wyoming (on my iPhone, please pardon any obvious autocorrect errors I may miss), having driven straight through the night to get here this morning. (Mandy is bonding with her mom over Trollhunter on Netflix instant, crowded around her tiny computer screen; I’m opting out (seen it) mostly to avoid making the crowding any worse. I’m not, say, being terrible and staring at my phone during family dinner; the family dinner is tomorrow night!)

So, moving back a step, we started our trip by heading North through Flagstaff, timing it to be able to eat at Pizzicletta for dinner, yesterday. Delicious, and a great story about a great guy, Caleb Schiff, who has realized (brilliantly! profitably!) his dream of making a great Neapolitan Pizzeria. We’ve only been in once before (last summer, on the way home from Vegas/PD), and Caleb recognized us and came out from hand-crafting pizzas to greet us when we came in. An amazing experience. (And the gelato is worth raving about, too.) Notably, we also planned the timing & end of our trip to be sure we’d head back through Flagstaff at a date/time we could enjoy Pizzicletta again; care to join us for dinner 7/22/2012?

After dinner I drove us across Navajo territory, North through Utah past Moab, East across Colorado to Denver, and North to Cheyenne in one long drive. (With brief stops for gas, food, et cetera.) We’ve been hanging out with Mandy’s mom all day, and will do so again tomorrow, then tomorrow night we’ll all head to Mandy’s brother’s place for a family dinner with his SO & daughter. Saturday we’re either heading to Denver to hang with one of Mandy’s college friends, or straight to Laramie to see her friend Jim, who we’ll definitely be spending Sunday with.

Early (early) Monday morning I’ll be driving us to Mt. Rushmore (they say it’s best in morning light), and we hope to spend the day seeing sights like that & Devil’s Tower (and maybe some other things in that general area, depending on time. I’m not sure how time consuming Rushmore will be) before driving all night Monday night to reach Yellowstone before dawn. I think that’s the longest “day” for me, depending on whether I take any naps, either before heading out of Laramie or before getting in to Yellowstone (ie: at a rest stop). Luckily I have extra hours available in pill-form. With any luck, we’ll be able to hike part of Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon and see the dawn over the falls (supposed to be amazing). Then we have two and a half days at Yellowstone (and campsite reservations, of course) where we’ll be pretty aggressively seeing the sites. Since we aren’t actually backpackers or campers, and own no tent or gear, I think that’ll be enough time.

Next we’ll drive South toward Afton, and spend a couple days with Mandy’s dad. I hear he’s taking us fishing, maybe? Very rural. I have the impression it’s like a farm? Maybe I’ll post about it later. I’ve met the man a couple times, but this will be the first time visiting him at home.

Then we’re planning to head back to Arizona by way of SLC (Mandy has never toured Temple Square, which is kinda neat, and maybe we’ll have a nice meal there, too), hoping to reach the South Rim of the Grand Canyon by early morning and make a day hike of … I have it written down somewhere… South Kaibab, maybe? We’re taking plenty of water, but that’s supposed to offer the best views into the canyon on a day hike, and possibly a view of the Colorado if we’re up to long enough a hike. Depends how dead we are after Yellowstone (and all that driving!), really. After the Grand Canyon, the return to Pizzicletta, and just a quick 2-hour drive home!

Yes, we’re missing the opening weekend of Dark Knight Rises, and yes we’ll do a marathon of the trilogy on our own after getting home & recovering.

Also: We bought the America the Beautiful annual pass to all the National Parks, and plan to make use of it. More trips to the Grand Canyon, day trips to any parks we can reach, and next June we’ll probably do a totally different road trip, see some parks neither of us have seen (or maybe heard of) before. Depending on what the price of gas does, maybe another 3k-4k mile journey, next summer?

The pass is good for up to four adults (in one vehicle), so if there’s a park you’d like to visit with us some time in the next year, let us know. Road trips, weekend trips, and day trips are generally pretty fun, if you like adventuring, and adding some people to our trips once in a while seems worth a try, eh? (Especially if you have places you want to see, and/or can contribute toward gas!)

Art Sale Reminder – last chance?

This is just a quick reminder that all the art I still have available is “on sale” – name your own price, no reasonable offer refused. You can see most of it at wretchedcreature.com, and a few other pieces in a blog post I did, earlier this year. This post is also a warning.

Among other projects I’ve got lined up, one of the things I’ll be doing in the next few weeks is taking all (or nearly all) the art off my walls and putting it into storage. That’s everything left which hasn’t sold. (With one or two possible exceptions.) I’m going to do a little bit to keep them from being damaged (I bought some cheap plastic sheeting to wrap the art in), but then they’re basically going into nearly-outdoors storage. I’ll probably have to split them between a room that is more-protected from the rain, but not really climate-controlled, and an old, rusty, somewhat leaky shed which will subject them to extremes of heat, cold, humidity and aridity. I don’t have a better option for them, except your homes.

That is: If you don’t buy them now, they may not survive. This may be your last chance to own these pieces.

On one hand, I don’t want to simply paint over them (with one or two exceptions), or to throw them away. On the other, I want them out of my sight.

Getting them on the walls of people who want them there was my initial goal, but casting them aside is the next step, and it is approaching rapidly. If you have any interest, at all, in any of these pieces, please: Let me know. We’ll work something out.