Teel – Page 56 – Teel McClanahan

Possible back-cover copy for FWYCR

I’ve been working all day on the cover design for my new novel, Forget What You Can’t Remember, most of that time spent on writing the copy for the back cover. This is what I have after about 8 hours of trying to write two or three paragraphs to sum up and sell a 292-page book:

Zombies! Doomsday! And someone who actually finished writing a novel in a month!

Mary, Lance, Brady, Lorraine, and the Sergeant are a handful of the survivors from a zombie outbreak that decimates a city. Each of them responds a little differently in the aftermath of the tragedy and to the inexplicable and possibly unrelated memory loss some of them seem to be suffering. Paul is obsessed with a worldwide cataclysmic event he’s been predicting for years, and while everyone else seems able to go on with their lives in its wake, he just can’t let it go. Add a utopian city in the sky and a mathematician who can fly, then watch all these elements intersect and converge in a place where some see a moral void and others can’t escape deep questions of right and wrong.

Forget What You Can’t Remember explores everything from economics and ethics to politics, post-traumatic recovery and the lonliness of heroism. If it doesn’t leave you guessing, it’ll at least get you thinking.

And then, in another part of the cover, alongside a small version of More Lost Memories‘ cover (which I haven’t even started on yet… Ugh.), the following:

More Lost Memories is a companion book to Forget What You Can’t Remember, a collection of short stories each of which delves deeper into a character, event, or situation from this book. Find out how the zombie trainers died, about Lance’s restaurant, what was really going on in chapter 21, and more. Available now from Modern Evil Press.

That’s assuming, of course, I can fit all those words on the cover in a readably-sized typeface.

Please, please, please give me your feedback, either here in the comments or via email or via Twitter reply, or via Plurk ASAP. As soon as I can get these cover designs done, I can send the books to the printer. The sooner that happens, the sooner I’ll have them for sale. I’d really, really, like to have them for sale close to the time the podcast of the book starts (1/2/09, on Podiobooks.com). Thank you!

A lot of podcasting

You’ve been reading a lot about it here because it’s been dominating my time and my thoughts a lot lately. In case you somehow aren’t aware, I’ve been podcasting my fiction and poetry via the Modern Evil Podcast, and simultaneously releasing my podcast novels over at Podiobooks.com in sync with my personal feed. My feed (the Modern Evil Podcast) has also included (in addition to the weekly, half-hour episodes roughly identical to the Podiobooks release) poetry and short fiction in mid-week episodes.

<complain>
What this means, for my time, is that I have effectively been running three weekly podcasts: The podiobooks feed, with just the novel, the Modern Evil Podcast Friday episodes, with the novel and alternate introduction and closing, and the Modern Evil Podcast mid-week episodes, with my poetry and short fiction. ~2.2x the recording and editing, 3x the mixing, converting, and uploading vs. doing one weekly podcast. It’s been a lot of work, and time and thought consuming.
</complain>

So, along with the upcoming release of my new book, Forget What You Can’t Remember (now targeting a January release), I’m going to be starting podcasting it. In fact, I’m planning to overlap the two novels’ releases, so that people who listen to the final episode of Lost and Not Found on Podiobooks can immediately go subscribe to Forget What You Can’t Remember and so that people who subscribe to the Modern Evil Podcast will -instead of going for a while without episodes- get an extra episode or two during the overlap. Now, here’s the lazy part:

I’m going to continue releasing on the MEPodcast at the same time as Podiobooks, but Forget What You Can’t Remember is already broken into chapters of roughly even length, each of which should be around 15 minutes long. I’m going to release one chapter at a time, twice a week, into each feed. No poetry or short stories in the MEPodcast during the run, just chapter after chapter of the novel. Also: because of the structure of Forget What You Can’t Remember, the majority of chapters have no “breaks” in them, and thus will have a somewhat reduced editing time and effort – a savings then multiplied by the double feeds.

The Forget What You Can’t Remember podcast should wrap up around mid-April, 2009, according to this release schedule. Hopefully by then I’ll have another book or two written.

Getting easier, getting better

Podcasting is getting easier, the more I do it. I’m either getting more confident, or more sloppy, the more hours of audio I record and put online. Today I put together this week’s episode faster than ever, partially because there was less editing required. The mid-week episode wasn’t so bad, either, and for a similar reason. That, I think, has something to do with another thing I think I’m getting better at: writing.

It isn’t necessarily going faster, or easier, during the actual writing. But especially as I’ve been deep in the midst of writing a spinoff novel to Lost and Not Found and my immediate flow into a spinoff of that while recording the audio version of Lost and Not Found, I’ve been able to see how my writing has changed. Or, at the least, to see how much my writing could be improved from what was in Lost and Not Found. Hopefully by seeing that I’m able to steer away from it in my new writing. Even just little things like maintaining tense consistently, or using the same version of a word throughout a book (ie: either the British or the American version, but not switching back and forth between the two), which I thought I’d corrected in the Second Edition of Lost and Not Found, are very frustrating. I don’t know how much time I want to keep sinking into that book, but it isn’t up to my current standards.

I’m writing something very strange, right now. I’m not sure anyone will understand it. I’m not sure what to do with it, this collection of stories. The strangeness, the expected failure to understand, are iterative. I see them in individual sentences & paragraphs, in each story, and in the collection as a whole. I’m not sure it’ll be book length when it’s complete. Maybe, but book length feels very far away, right now, and my list of stories yet to be written for it feels like it’s dwindling. Perhaps I will write a series of stories even further removed from Forget What You Can’t Remember, which are spinoffs of these spinoff stories and which show the stories of characters who are incidental to the stories of the incidental characters in that novel. I already have one in mind, actually. If it’s just the one, I’ll pretend it’s relevant. If I can come up with more, perhaps I’ll divide More Lost Memories into chunks.

I discovered in the last few days that NaNoWriMo doesn’t really matter to me, any more. Not in a giving up way, not in an apathetic way, but in the following way: This is my job. It doesn’t matter whether I hit your word count goal, as long as I reach a length that I, as the publisher, feel is ‘book length’. It doesn’t matter whether I hit your time goal, because if I finish early then great, get to work on writing the next thing sooner and if I don’t finish on time I still have to keep writing. This is my job. This is what I do. I write. I make publishing decisions. When one book is done, I work on another (I’ve got at least four books either partially written or entirely written and partially edited right now, with at least a couple more ready to be worked on, and an endless supply of imagination) and when that’s done this will still be my job. So it doesn’t matter. Not practically. Although: we did buy Little Big Planet as NaNo-bait, and we aren’t allowed to open it until both Mandy and I finish our books. So, there’s that.

Alright. It’s 5AM. This isn’t an early post, it’s a late one. Been up all night. Barely written anything. Even more fun, I need to be up on Saturday, during the day, for North Valley Art Walk, followed by an Iron-Chef-type battle (Pumpkin), followed by the NaNoWriMo all-nighter, followed by church, then probably the Scottsdale Art Fair, and then my Nephews’ birthday party. No, seriously, if I don’t get to bed on time tomorrow night I’ll be running from early Saturday morning until late Sunday evening on almost no sleep at all. Because my life is awesome. Time for bed. Whenever it is I get up, I’ll record an intro for the Modern Evil Podcast, mix the episode, and get it online, ASAP. I’m going to aim for …9AM? Someone call me at 9AM.

tragic/wonderful

I’ve just been poking around my sites’ statistics, and this blog’s archives, and caught another glimpse of how tragically broken my archives are. Broken links, incomplete posts, lost of inbound links that link to … things that aren’t there any more since I switched from MovableType to WordPress, and it’s no wonder that traffic to the site dropped something like 66% when I switched and has yet to recover. Tragic.

In other news, I stayed up all night last night. Some time after 2AM, when the house had been quiet for over an hour, I managed to start writing, working on my NaNoWriMo thing. I wrote until 5:30AM, when Heath walked back in (he delivers newspapers), adding roughly 2500 words to my word count. Which is pretty wonderful. I think that’s better than almost every other day I’ve been writing. Wonderful.

According to all those widgets I put in the last post, my daily goal for the rest of the month is apparently higher than 2500 words, so that puts a little perspective on it, a little tragedy, but I expect to be able to write more tonight, between the write in and the I-just-slept-all-day-and-expect-to-be-up-again-all-night, so hopefully I’ll have an even more wonderful word count tomorrow.

In other news, I still don’t hate the theme I chose, so that’s good. Perhaps not quite wonderful, but far from tragic. Alright. Now: grocery shopping. Later: more writing.

Silly NaNoWriMo 2008 Post

Mostly “widgets” I think. First, here you can see that Mandy is beating me (as I write this – the images below will update live as this goes on) by almost exactly 10k words:

And you can see from the two calendars below that while I apparently only hit the “goal” for daily word counts on Saturdays, Mandy has had good success with weekends, overall:

vs.

Ooh, and here’s a strange set of graphs, showing daily word counts vs. goals, scaled to our highest daily wordcounts. I think that the goal (red) scales automatically to what you would need to be doing daily at each point to still reach 50k by the end, which is neat, and also why mine is creeping up and Mandy’s has been fairly steady:

vs.

And then we get into the regional numbers:

This year, “Easy Valley” broke off from “Phoenix”, taking 220+ writers (100+ of whom have actually put up word counts as of right now) out of the official Phoenix community for the first time. A full third of Phoenix’s active writers, broken off – they think they’re so different, so “East Valley”, but look at them, right now they’re performing within 1% of Phoenix on a words per person basis! We should have stayed one region and just had dual write-ins. One Central PHX ML, one East PHX ML, and lots of opportunities for everyone to get together! Heck, there’s been a further split, with “North Valley” people breaking off and having their own write-ins on my side of town! This disintigration cannot be good for the “community” – we must stick together!

And then there’s the rest of Arizona, with Tucson (as always) leading in words/person, Flagstaff not far behind them, and both ahead of Phoenix and East Valley regions. And then there’s that guy in Patagonia:

I think I’ve run out of things to say. Time to go make dinner, I guess. Happy novelling, everyone!