Journal – Page 9 – Teel McClanahan

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!)

DNGR, and other projects I’m thinking about

Right now I feel like I ought to be writing, but I also feel like crap. I feel like I’m suspended, floating, somewhere between a deep depression and intense procrastineering. Last week I was closer to the procrastineering side, so I was getting a lot of things accomplished. This week I’m closer to the darkness. Sleeping around 12 hours a day, stopping whatever I’m doing to cry for a while, overeating some… And, importantly, not getting any real work done. Hopefully by this time next week I’ll have pushed myself in the direction of mania; as I tweeted, I think this is a book I could get written in a matter of days.

Before I get into the book I’m talking about, which, unless you follow me on Facebook/Google+, you’ve never heard of, I want to write a little about some (hopefully temporary) alterations to my writing process that I’m attempting this year. The biggest element is that I’m studying The Hero’s Journey – I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces this month, and have been looking over a few online resources covering putting its ideas to use in storytelling, screenwriting, novel-writing, et cetera. Why am I studying The Hero’s Journey? Well, as I said on Facebook, “I need practice doing formulaic writing for my Dragons’ Truth rewrite, which I want to be hyper-formulaic commercial tripe. I mean, if Dragons’ Truth is going to be my least favorite of my books, I’d much rather hate it (and everything it represents) than merely be disappointed in it, right?”

What’s that? You hadn’t heard me mention I’m planning on (slash/ thinking of) re-writing Dragons’ Truth as a proper children’s/YA adventure book? Or that part of the point of the re-write is not just to make it possible to write sequels, but to just go ahead and write a trilogy? Well, that’s been a thought I’ve been mulling over and developing these last few years, and we’re nearing the culmination point of those thoughts. Among them is to study both children’s/YA adventure books (such as Rick Riordan’s and Lemony Snicket’s books, and perhaps other top-selling books in the category) and to study (and follow) the formulae of the worst of the “all good books must…” insistences; the latter primarily concerning itself with things like following The Hero’s Journey, or scene-writing according to guides like Jim Butcher’s livejournal, or thinking about story in terms like those in Syd Field’s Screenplay. Now, there are limits to the number of different “rules” any one book (or series of books) can follow before it keels over under the weight of all that garbage, so I’ve been trying to narrow down to a limited set which can be made to work together without contradicting one another too severely. (And without destroying my soul, in the process; I’m only trying to do something very, very painful to myself, not actually suicide via bad writing.) So that’s been somewhat penciled-in on my calendar for as soon as I was done with Never Let the Right One Go – which was, effectively, done by the end of May. (Only 7 copies left, right now! Order while you still can!)

Step one is to do the research, read the books, the blogs, learn the formulas and the structures and the concepts behind them, read also the actual adventure books, plan out the trilogy (along with the marketing plan, book blurbs, et cetera – an important part of the method of writing I’m attempting to channel/emulate is to start with the marketing and work backwards to the book), and otherwise prepare. Step two is to write the books. Step three is the editing and marketing and publishing and all that. So, having barely reached step one, I’m beginning the research. With the looming deadline of “have physical products (preferably new) to sell at Phoenix Comicon 2013”, the deadline for at least one (and maybe all three – though that’s another blog/conversation/conundrum) of the books in the New Dragons’ Truth Trilogy is May, 2013. Except, look: I’m working on other things.

(As an aside: I’ve already outlined the hyper-structure of the interactive eBook I’m writing about my experiences writing and publishing, and I’ve already begun writing it. I’ve got a title, some elaborate plans for the various editions, and really just need to invest a few dozen hours in writing to get it ready to be built and published. So, there’s that. But unless it makes a lot of money and I decide to release it as a CYOA, I don’t foresee a future for it as a physical product to sell at Phoenix Comicon.)

Summer is here, and among the other things that means, it means Mandy and I are able to attend a few of the later-night social happenings we get invited to all year, such as a weekly Game Night our friends in the East Valley host every Thursday. During the school year, a social event that runs from 7PM or 8PM until 1AM-3AM and which requires a half-hour drive each way to attend is untenable; Mandy has to be up at 5:30AM on school days to get ready and get to school on time. Most school nights she’s in bed between 8:30PM and 9:30PM. During the summer, there’s a little more flexibility. So, a couple weeks ago, for the first time in months, we went to Game Night. About half of the friends involved in this event, including myself, are also involved every year in NaNoWriMo (and other literary projects) – we’re writers, we’re editors, we’re publishers, and we also happen to enjoy playing tabletop games together.

Toward the end of this particular game night, on the cusp of June, Owen mentioned that he’d signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo (Write a novel in the month of June! Or August! – For people whose summers are easier to find free time in than their Novembers, I guess) and, it being after midnight, was already technically behind. So we got into a conversation about writing and story ideas, and I brought up (after fighting with my phone for a bit – Simplenote seems unreliable on my iPhone for some reason, though I use it all the time on my iPad & have no trouble syncing it with Scrivener) an old, pending idea for a book I’ve had lingering on my to-do-list for at least a year (or several): Write a sequel to “Book 1 of the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga”

Now, over the course of the conversation which ensued, the nature of the goal shifted a tiny bit, as two or three other people there declared their interest in tackling this goal. Here’s how I explained it on Facebook and Google+: “…so rather than all of us attempting to write “Book 2 of…”, we’re each writing an indeterminate sequel – and we’ll figure out what order they go best in later. Then we’ll all write Book 1 (and possibly a concluding story) collaboratively, something which can sensibly lead to all those other stories. Then we’ll edit them and publish the saga, probably via Modern Evil Press, and almost certainly in print (in some form or another), eBook(s), and audiobook(s); we would love to have these to sell at the next Phoenix Comicon.” I also added the following vague guidelines:

We’re looking for short novels (the easier to compile them into a massive single volume), and to have first drafts done quickly – since at least two of the participating authors were already doing Camp NaNoWriMo, I’d recommend aiming for about 50k words, and having a draft done by the end of June (or July), 2012.
We’re hoping for family-friendly (or at least YA-friendly) books, if possible – this basically just means we’re hoping to avoid any explicit erotica and/or explicit horror-porn, though addressing serious/mature themes and situations would be awesome, if handled and written well. If one or more authors writes a really, really compelling book where the NC-17 content is absolutely vital to expressing their plot/characters/themes, we’ll adapt, but it would be best to aim for a general audience.
We’re looking for art inspired by (and inspired by the vague idea of) the Saga; I’ll probably make another call for artists when there are actually books written, for the cough uninspired cough artists who actually want to depict something one of us put in one of the books. Realistically, if we could get any sketches or art within the next few days/weeks, it could influence the direction of the stories.
I’ll probably be the big-E Editor for the Saga, since I’ll probably also be the publisher. Write the best story you can, and know I’ll be working with you (and probably so will all the other authors) to make it even better. Depending on who actually finishes any books and how it all comes together, we’ll figure out money/etc later on.

Now, if the idea of “write a sequel in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga” doesn’t immediately give you some ideas about what to write, you probably aren’t the right writer for this project. If you want a series bible, to help prevent the inevitable contradictions about things like “is Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot one person, or three? Or four?” and “does the DNGR Saga take place on contemporary Earth, or some other time/place?”, this probably isn’t a project you can work on (yet). I think, maybe, some (not necessarily all) of the authors currently “working” on the project have some conception of what they mean when they agree that DNGR might be a band (Robot is clearly the drummer, I hear) who solves crimes/mysteries. Realistically, if you didn’t want to have that part of your book, it’s just a page or two to explain away, in the inevitable Epilogues&Prologues bridging our wildly disparate books. There’s so much leeway, and it’s such a fun (for me) sort of book to write, I got to work on it right away.

That is to say: The next day (or so) I started studying The Hero’s Journey. I started thinking about what sort of story in the DNGR Saga I wanted to tell, who would be the Hero, what would the theme of the book be, what would it be “about”, et cetera. Within a week I’d finished the meat of Joseph Campbell’s book, re-read several online essays I’d bookmarked over the last few years, and outlined Death Noodle’s journey in lockstep with the monomyth… while telling an important/exciting story about excessive copyright enforcement. Then I went through and fleshed out and expanded the outline with the scene-by-scene formulas recommended by Jim Butcher (among others). I set up the project in Scrivener, sync’d it with Simplenote, divided up my fleshy outline into each chapter’s file, and it’s now sitting there, waiting, ready for me to start writing at any moment.

Right now I’m filled with dread and anticipation of two distinct sorts: The first will begin to resolve itself as soon as I begin writing, and will have evaporated as soon as I reach the end of the first draft. (It will then condense into the more terrible dread and anticipation which fills the cracks between writing and publication.) The second may not ever be resolved; it is the dread that this sort of terribly formulaic, painfully structured prose is what readers actually want (i.e.: dread that this book will be loved), mixed with the dread that after over a decade of writing novels, by the time I get to my 19th book (which this will be), even sticking to bad formulas won’t keep me from writing a good book (i.e.: dread that this book will be loved) and I won’t be able to tell whether they like it because it’s formulaic or because I wrote well in spite of the formulae, and further mixed with the anticipatory dread of finding out what people think of it – the anticipation that very few will read it, and/or even fewer will like it, and I may never know one way or the other. This, I can assure you, is a terrible place to be in, as an author.

I’m trying to write the best and most interesting book I can, while also trying to wedge in all this other garbage, these rules, these patterns, this structure within a structure (neither of them my own, or determined by the story, but handed down from on high by “experts”), and it’s a struggle. Worse is being in a position of dreading that my book will be enjoyed. What a stupid thing to not want. Especially while wanting and working so hard to realize its opposite. Might be related to some of that procrastination. Might even be connected with the depression, the tears. Anyway, any day now (maybe next week) I’ll begin work on my (first) entry in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga – and hopefully will have the first draft done before the end of the month (at the latest) and will keep you updated as the work progresses.

I really do think people will like the book I’ve come up with – I just won’t know what to think about their liking it, and if they like it for the “wrong reasons” I might want to quit writing, is all.

Biosphere 2 day-date (and other summer plans)

It’s summer break. This seems (at times) to mean doing more than when not on break. Comicon to begin with, of course. That’s always an adventure. Then I got a cold (or a flu, or whatever, con-plague) and had a tough week, recovering, which is part of why you haven’t heard anything from me in over a week. But it’s Mandy that’s really on summer break (she teaches high school English, and gets about two months off for summer break; rather than teach summer school, Mandy teaches extra classes during the school year, so she can have a real break); I don’t ever really stop working – I was working on several upcoming projects while I was driving back and forth across Southern Arizona, today.

Which, I suppose, brings us to travel. Mandy and I like the idea of travel. We can’t currently afford much in the way of travel, since we’re still working on paying off so much debt, but a road trip every few years seems to fit into a budget we can work with and some years Mandy’s school pays for a professional development conference at the end of summer in Las Vegas and I can tag along and we can see the sights (or a show) at night. Our non-pd trips longer than a day-trip so far (2008 and next month, 2012) have been to visit Mandy’s family and friends in Wyoming. In 2008 (the first summer after we married, so I could be introduced around to everyone) we went through Roswell and Los Alamos before heading North to WY, then hiked Arches National Park in Utah on the way back home. This year we’re going to get the National Parks annual pass and do (at least) Mt. Rushmore, Devil’s Tower, several days at Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon while visiting Mandy’s mother, brother, friends, father, et cetera (all around WY). Then we’ll try to make good use of the pass during the remainder of its 12 months of use, at least making other visits to the Grand Canyon, which neither of us has ever hiked.

We’ve had to schedule the trip around a couple of major things; first my sister’s travel (to visit our other sister, who moved her family across the country), and then suddenly an opportunity arose and Mandy is taking a “class” (practicum?) at GCU this summer. (It’s part of a program/process/practicum to earn her reading endorsement. Not being in Education directly, nor having studied it, I don’t really understand well enough to explain it here – but it’s a good thing, she may be able to get the endorsement before the new school year starts, and she’s quite nervous/excited about it.) So that’s happening and taking up several weeks of summer. Before it had popped up, she’d already scheduled three other pd’s (since we aren’t doing Vegas this year, at least part of that is paid for by her school), plus Mandy’s been teaching herself sewing, plus plus plus… summers seem sometimes to get over-scheduled.

One of the things we scheduled for this summer (because we saw a Groupon deal for 2-for-1 admission, and neither of us had ever been, and it sounded interesting to us) was taking a day-trip to Biosphere 2. I scheduled it in between this and that and after taking the car in for its 100k mile service (I’m probably not going to write about that; surely you already know cars are very expensive things to own & maintain), and it was tentative in case something was found seriously wrong with the car, but everything went (reasonably) well (if painfully expensive) and today we made our first summer trip.

Mandy’s day started at 5:30AM (I had stayed up all night – I’ve been up about 26 hours as I write this, and that’s after only a two or three hour nap), we left the house a little after 6:30AM and started a great little day-date. One of the best things about our marriage (apparently in contrast to a lot of other people’s, from what we’ve seen and heard) is that we really enjoy talking to each other. (Also nice: the silences aren’t uncomfortable.) We have a fair amount of things in common, which helps, but we can even talk pretty easily about the things we don’t. A couple hours in the car together is a joy.

We got to the Biosphere right on schedule (just before 9AM, when they open), presented our Groupon, and were directed toward the first tour of the day (with ample time to meander our way across the interesting campus and take in the sights, look over some of the science displays, et cetera) which … I won’t try to describe. It was like touring Biosphere 2 in almost every way one would imagine if one already knew quite a bit about Biosphere 2. It was interesting and fun and worthwhile. After we finished the guided tour, we poked around a bit more (the self-guided-tour parts of the place) and we were back on the road almost exactly when I’d initially expected. Having received no request to do so by 11:30, we did not take a route which went through Casa Grande, instead heading directly to Tempe.

To Rula Bula; a nice little Irish pub & restaurant we like to dine at once in a while – and which we saw a daily deal for a week or two ago, making it more affordable and a nice cap to the Biosphere daytrip. Making it more of a day-date. Lunch was amazing. The usual suspects; fish & chips, Irish lamb stew, smashed potatoes, bread pudding – altogether too much food. Then we took a walk around downtown Tempe, which was quite nice, as well. Down to see the work being done on the mill, up and down along the lake, into the arts center to visit the museum, along Mill Ave., down into the ASU art museum (Nelson), and then a quick stroll into the neighborhood I used to live in, to show her that little patch of beauty sitting within spitting distance of all those tall, glass-and-steel, failed-gentrification projects (which I’m actually also quite fond of, but I love the contrast, too). By then, we were worn out (in a very good way) and just wanted to get home and veg out and watch some movies – which is what we’ve been doing the whole time I’ve been writing this.

All in all, a good day. A good date. A good sort of practice run for some of the days we’ll be having on our longer road trip in July. (Longer-than-24-hour days for me, plenty of driving, lots of walking/hiking/sun, a moderate amount of excess.) Maybe not worth your time to read a huge long blog post about? I don’t know, it’s my life. I originally intended to write a brief post about today’s trip and a moderate-to-long post about the new book I’ve been working on, but … now it looks like it’s about time to head to bed. If I don’t sleep, maybe I’ll write about the new book – otherwise, just friend me on Facebook and circle me on Google+ to keep abreast of such things. (I’d also meant to go look up the links and fill this post with links to things like Biosphere 2, Rula Bula, the various national parks, the museums, et cetera – but now you’ll just have to Google them yourself… Sorry.)

Anticipation, optimism, disappointment

Phoenix Comicon is coming up quickly. I basically have to be done/ready by tomorrow afternoon; my best opportunity for exhibitor setup is Wednesday evening, after Mandy gets off work. Thursday afternoon I’ll have a little time to finalize setup, but considering our schedule (we probably won’t be able to get there until 2:30 or 3PM), I don’t really want to be loading in any product or display elements that close to the event; Preview night / Thursday night, the exhibitor hall opens at 4PM. Then from 4-9PM Thursday, 10AM-7PM Friday & Saturday, and 10AM-5PM Sunday I’ll be stuck at my booth (small press table #227), trying to sell my books.

I decided not to try to get on any panels again, this year – intellectually, I know I’m an expert in several relevant areas, but emotionally I feel inadequate, and financially (which is a lot of people’s key yardstick for measuring someone’s worth) I’m downright anemic. Also, like last year, I’d rather be at my booth than attending a panel, since I’d just be worrying about not being at my booth the whole time; I definitely lose sales by being away, sometimes even within a few minutes for a bathroom or food break. I come back and hear stories of the someone who wanted to meet me, wanted to buy a book & get it signed, and who says they’ll be back – but they almost never come back. So really, I’ll be at my booth nearly the entire weekend. If possible, I won’t even leave for meals.

I’ve been working pretty hard to get things ready in time (especially if you count the last several months’ work getting Never Let the Right One Go written, edited, and printed in time for Comicon), and the anticipation has been steadily building. Right now it’s fairly intense, which seems a bit weird to me, considering how basic my participation is. I’ve really boiled it down to a very straightforward, low-key experience for myself. No real pressure to make a certain sales target (last year’s sales covered this year’s fee, and if the sales aren’t there to justify exhibiting, I have no problem simply not buying a table for next year), no major or elaborate displays (more on that in a moment), just me and my books and ten or fifteen thousand potential customers. I know I can’t really afford to hand things out for free to ten thousand people (I only made 200 copies of the promotional chapbook for Never Let the Right One Go, I only have a thousand or two business cards on hand), so one of my biggest concerns is trying to get what I do have into the hands of the right few hundred people, and hope it translates into new readers and/or sales.

(The promotional chapbook, by the way, is a little flipbook containing the first two chapters each of Sophia and Emily. Like an eBook preview, but on paper, and specifically for Comicon – to try to sell the hardcover.)

Along with the anticipation seems to be coming a (potentially inappropriate) sense of optimism. Ideas like “maybe I’ll sell the entire Never Let the Right One Go limited edition” and “having to tell people I’d sold out would be an awesome problem to have” keep crossing my mind. Right now I only have 41 copies left for sale, so it isn’t entirely unfeasible to think they might all sell over the con. Unlikely, given my sales history, but not impossible or unreasonable. Key elements, like the cover design, the subject matter, and the target audience for the books should help. As should the book display I’ve envisioned and outsourced – I haven’t seen it yet, and we’re getting pretty close to the deadline, so I’ve been preparing myself, mentally, for not having it, but theoretically it’ll be functional and delivered on time: It’s a rotating book display, being bolted on (and designed to fit perfectly with) my book shelf/display (purchased from a closing Borders last year), which rotates the book end over end to show off the flipbook/two-books-in-one nature of Never Let the Right One Go. The constant motion and unusual nature of the display and the book should draw the eyes of passers-by, and, between that and the preview chapters and my own ability to talk about the books to people, I seem to be getting my hopes up a little.

It feels the same as it did before I launched the Never Let the Right One Go Kickstarter campaign – like, maybe this is the book, the event, where I’ll finally reach a wider audience. Before the Kickstarter, the most optimistic part of me was able to unabashedly envision exceeding a 500-copy limited edition and needing to build the unlimited-edition paperbacks to handle the demand. Obviously, with the actual 50-copy print run, there’s now an upper limit on my optimism – but I still feel hopeful about selling those 41 remaining copies, plus a bunch of my other (radically cheaper than last year) books.

Which brings me around to the disappointment. I was disappointed by the Kickstarter campaign. It didn’t prevent the book’s publication, but it didn’t push my new work to the next tier of popularity and financial success, either. (In terms of meaningful success, I believe Never Let the Right One Go was successful before it was even published, as evidenced by the reactions of readers who both understood and appreciated the two books for the things I worked so hard to create in/with them. See Scott Roche’s review for an example.) Even as I approach Phoenix Comicon with an immense sense of optimism, the feeling that I might actually sell most (or all) of the hardbacks I have left … I am also anticipating disappointment. If I invested $250 in the booth, bought $65 worth of copies for the free chapbooks, and spent up to $50 (I don’t know how much it’ll be, but I told them before they started I couldn’t afford more than about $50) on what may be a single-use mechanized book display, plus time, plus gas and parking and food… If I don’t make at least $350-$400 in sales (10-12 copies of the hardcover book, btw), I won’t just be disappointed, I’ll be in the red. (Sorta; as I said, the booth rental was paid with last year’s sales.) With all this optimism, though, will only selling 15 copies, or 20, be disappointing because it wasn’t 40? Or what if, with ten or fifteen thousand people walking by, I can’t manage to find 200 people interested enough to take even a free chapbook? Last year I barely gave away a couple hundred business cards (if I remember correctly), despite having thousands available. How disappointing, if I can’t even give my work away?

Trying to accurately balance my anticipation on this end with nearly-inevitable disappointment on the other side of the con is tricky. How much (of either) is appropriate? Do I care more about sales volume, or revenue? More about selling, or about making connections with new/potential readers? Am I more happy to have Never Let the Right One Go available for sale at Comicon, or more disappointed I didn’t finish my book on writing&publishing in time? It’s all quite complicated, inside me. Luckily, within a week, the event itself will be over and I’ll be able to move on to worrying about something new.

Having fallen behind: Web design/development

As I mentioned recently, and have been making some strides to correct, in early 2005 I effectively stopped blogging. In the last few months it has come more and more to my attention that, probably right around the same time, I stopped paying attention to what was going on in the world of web design / web development. It might have been a little earlier, perhaps by mid-2004 when I had to give up being a near-full-time creative, move to the city, and get a desk job, but certainly not much later. I remember when, in mid-2009, I redesigned modernevil.com (it still uses this design), I had only heard of -never used- CSS sprite-style mouseover/effects, and the bulk of the time/effort I put into implementing the site was spent learning the technique well enough to put together the buttons at the top. This is a technique which had begun to replace JS/DOM mouseover effects in mid-2004 and was standard practice (apparently) by 2006/2007, but it was new to me in 2009 – and it’s still foreign to me, since I only ever used it once; I don’t really understand my own code/design right now, when I look at it.

This, as you may imagine, is frustrating to me. Worse still is that, apparently, the professional web developers moved past that sort of thing, too, and have moved on to the next thing. And the next, and the next, in so many areas. I follow a few design-related blogs (via Google Reader / RSS, which many people have “moved on from”, as well) and when I’ve recently tried to read articles about things which interested me, I’ve found designers are assuming everyone understands and uses techniques I didn’t know existed or worked, such as gzipping most of the files which make up their website, or using (apparently linux-only?) tools to further (somehow losslessly) compress their JPEGs, to get everything just that little bit smaller. Part of what I was looking into was how to make my sites look better on my new iPad (love that retina display, don’t love half of everything on the web looking pixelated and weird) – how to serve even larger image files… and the articles all assumed a bunch of things I had never heard of.

Tonight I was reading further into some of the things I’ve missed out on, in some cases following concepts backward through three or four years of their history/evolution to be able to reach a point of grasping what I’ve missed. Responsive web design being the new/old/standard that the hip web designers swear by, but it being based on flexible grid design, which seems pretty straightforward to me except I apparently stopped paying attention to web design before fixed grid design took hold in everyone’s minds, so it’s like an iteration of an improvement of a design foundation I’d never learned or used. Or even just things like being aware Typekit exists, or that the whole “serving fonts to webpages” and “doing web typography” issues apparently got pretty-much solved. I’ve never used jQuery, wouldn’t know how (I guess it’s a JS library?), but am aware that “good” web developers are all trying to minimize their use of JS altogether and now joke amicably about the “old days” when they used jQuery, usually while explaining their new solution/standard in terms which only make sense to people who used jQuery daily for years – and often while offering “a workaround for older browsers, which is built on jQuery”.

I think I’m going to need more study. I don’t know CSS3, HTML5, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know modern web best practices. More and more, I want to redesign modernevil.com, overhaul the back-end (which is currently based on WordPress, and will probably eventually be based on WordPress plus a custom plugin that … I guess I’ve got to figure out how to write), add some functionality to it… I don’t really want to be a web designer/developer. That might be the other part of why I dropped out of the field (though good money is on depression, oppression, and a general creative malaise), that I’d realized I oughtn’t waste my time doing work I didn’t want to be doing – except it’s like a lot of the rest of the work I do, these days, where I want the work to be done, and to be done to exacting specifications, and certainly can’t afford to pay an appropriately skilled web artist to do it for me, so I’d better put my nose to the grindstone and figure out how to make it work. If I want something done right (or really, done at all), I’ve generally got to do it myself.

So, added to the list of things to do, now, is re-immerse myself in modern web development and design. Learn what I need to know to catch up, and re-design all my sites to make use of my new knowledge – and then keep them up to date, rather than allowing them to fall further and further behind. For example: With a little dedication and application of effort (and of focus, which I’ve been having some difficulty maintaining, in my depression) I should soon also learn how to use Amazon’s cloud servers, and then use them to compete directly with Amazon, to sell my own eBooks and audiobooks directly. Possibly even before I learn enough to do a thorough front-end redesign.