Modern Evil Press – Page 32

Lost and Not Found audiobook, coming soon

I’ve been working on various aspects of this project throughout the month of August, and there is yet quite a lot of work to be done before the project is complete, but it is complete enough to begin putting it out there for the world to see (by which I mean hear). Tonight I submitted the first episode of the Lost and Not Found audiobook to Podiobooks.com. I am assured that their queue is not too long right now, so it should go up there … well, relatively soon. Maybe next week, but certainly within September. *cough* I hope to have everything in place to start my own podcast/feed of my audiobooks by the end of this week, at modernevil.com.

The podiobooks.com feed will be strictly the book by itself, same as for Dragons’ Truth. The Modern Evil Press podcast (Should that be just “Modern Evil Podcast”, or “Modern Evil Press Podcast”? Hrm…) will also include short stories and future audiobooks (including the followup novel to Lost and Not Found I am currently writing) as well as a small amount of “chatter” and promos for other podcasts / podiobooks I want to spread the word about. It should be an ongoing / continuous podcast, going forward. bleh.

I never really wanted to do a podcast of my own (though I did try my hand at audio blogging now and again, long before podcasts became popular, and it recently occurred to me that I was doing a sort-of podiobook back in 2001, when I “released” a serialized audiobook as I was recording it, week by week sending out installments… by snail mail, rather than the as-yet-uninvented RSS), so I’m not sure how much “chatter” I’ll actually be doing, but at least some more information and advertisement than in the 20-second intro/outro I did for the podiobooks.com version. At least to remind people that there are paper versions of the books available, and perhaps updates on what else I’m working on that week, instead of just saying “see modernevil.com for more info…”

I’ve never been much good at maintaining regular content-update schedules, so we’ll just have to wait and see how things go with the podcasts. I’ve got 5 episodes of Lost and Not Found recorded and -nearly- ready for upload. I can record/edit/mix roughly an episode a day at this point (since I’ve done most of the music and planning work in advance… though my crazy plans require a certain amount more work on the music for a few future episodes… you’ll have to wait and listen to find out what I mean), and I expect there to be in the vicinity of 15 episodes total, so even without working on it every day, I should still be a couple of months ahead before my birthday rolls around, which will make things easier in that regard.

Anyway, along with the podcast, I plan to be adding a proper sort of “news feed” to modernevil.com (and to wretchedcreature.com as well) with updates on things like the next Art Walk at Intatto Coffee (September 27th! Come and see my latest art, and get books signed!) or… well, I’ll probably go do the Phoenix Art Walk October 3rd, as well. And I need to throw together a website specifically for Lost and Not Found, like I did for Dragons’ Truth … except I need to let people know this one exists, rather than putting it up late and not really linking to it. I own lostandnotfound.com already. In fact, I’ve put a couple of media files there, already: Listen to a “five minute” preview of the Lost and Not Found audiobook, or grab the 60-second promo for Lost and Not Found to share with your friends/blog-readers/podcast-listeners/pets/self/et cetera.

That’s it for now… getting sleepy. Been up (and working) since before 7AM. Mostly on the audiobook. Forgot (slash was too busy for) to paint, today. In the middle of at least 4 new paintings, and have another I need to photograph & get online… Exciting stuff. And did I mention I’m over halfway through the new novel? I’m sure that’ll take up some of the days I’m not recording & editing audio between now and forever… So, lots of stuff in the works, I hope you tune in, and I’ll try to post again soon.

Pretty Good Art Walk

The local Art Walk at Intatto Coffee was yesterday. Length-wise it was somewhere in between a weekend festival (two or three full days) and the First Fridays Art Walk (four hours), with setup starting at 9:30AM (7AM at home, for me) and breakdown around 6PM. Daytime show in a shopping center meant plenty of casual walk-up traffic over the course of the day. Nothing like the downtown art walk, which typically has tens of thousands of disinterested people walking by in a rush every hour, but since people weren’t trying to ‘see everything’ and fight the crowds at the same time, it was easier to take a few minutes and talk to people about my books and my art. Usually people at First Fridays want me to be able to explain 8 books and 10 years’ worth of art in 30 seconds, and -oh, yeah- they didn’t bring any cash with them. This environment was somewhat more casual; people were willing to take more time and discuss the works.

Over the course of the day I sold (and signed) several books (good thing I brought them along, instead of just the art, eh?), and talked to a lot of people about the paintings I brought, and ran into a couple of old friends. Then, when I thought for sure I’d make more money from books than art at an Art Walk (which is about the opposite of my typical average sales numbers), in the last hour of the day, I sold one of my latest paintings, ‘fibonacci series #1’. Yay!

Between these actual sales and the fact that I didn’t have to pay for the privilege of setting up (well, aside from all the $$ we spent eating and drinking at Intatto over the course of the day…), it was infinitely better than First Fridays. No, seriously, I’ve never sold more than a single paperback (and usually less) at the First Fridays Art Walk. Maybe in the fall, but until and unless and in a few weeks I’ll be at Intatto again. I’ll let you know when I know more.

starting work on Lost and Not Found audiobook

I’ve begun work on recording the audio version of Lost and Not Found this month. I recorded the first 14 pages or so, though I need to re-listen to them … I think I may have been reading a little too quickly. I want to set a good pace, speak clearly, and really create a professional product. The current plan is to record at least half a dozen episodes and at least one promo and get it started online on Podiobooks.com under their “normal model” – which is to say, one episode a week until it’s done, somewhere between a normal podcast and a limited run series. They require 5 episodes done before they’ll start you, anyway, so that’s easy enough. Theoretically I could record them all in a week or so and get started as soon as they get the book started online. Due to some system changes they happened to be putting into effect at the exact time I submitted it, it was several weeks after I submitted it that they put Dragons’ Truth online. Since I’m known, since I’m already set up in the system, and especially because I hold myself to such a high personal quality standard (I really want to be putting out as professional quality of work as I can), it shouldn’t take as long with Lost and Not Found.

Depending on how recording goes and how quickly I read and how long each episode is (there are no chapter breaks in Lost and Not Found, so I have to find places in the story where it makes sense to stop), I expect to have somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen to twenty-five episodes for the full book. This puts the length of time for the serialized release at roughly three to six months. I would like to have the novel I’m currently working on come out concurrent with or prior to the completion of that audio program, since it is almost -but not quite- a sequel to Lost and Not Found, and the cross-promotion should probably be helpful. Also, since I expect to be able to do most or all of the recording of the audio version of this new novel during that period as well, so that people could start listening to one immediately after finishing the other. I’m trying to build an audience, see?

In order to get even a single episode of the audio book ready for publication I need both the text of the book recorded and to [select|compose] a [piece|pieces] of music for the opening, closing, and as a bridge in between different sections of the same episode. There is also the question of “bed music,” which I understand means music which plays softly in the background of the entire audiobook. Bed music has the benefit of covering the tiny amount of background noise which cannot be avoided without [buying thousands of dollars of gear plus building a soundproof recording booth | removing it in post-production and somewhat distorting the sound of your voice in the process], but also represents the challenge of finding music which relates to the story and setting without becoming distracting or annoying to readers, plus that of finding thirty to sixty minutes’ worth of it for each episode (depending on the length of your episodes). On one hand, I’d like to have bed music, to create the perception of a better recording. On the other hand…

Well, on the other hand, I don’t like to select music, I like to compose it myself. Not that I have any experience composing music – I’m certainly not trained, and I’d pause before describing myself as self-taught. I haven’t even looked up a basic how-to online. I just like to screw around once in a while, whistling, with an instrument, or in GarageBand on my iBook – and I’ve only spent perhaps a total of a few weeks in my life (a day here, a couple days there) doing anything musical at all before this year. On the other hand, I sit in front of an piano or pick up an accordion or a guitar and, after a few minutes of re-acquainting myself with the interface, music comes out. I sit down with an instrument and melodies build from my fingers. Not proper songs, usually, but in opposition to what I’ve seen happen with other people at untrained instruments (how do they get it to sound so bad?), something musical. Anyway, starting with Dragons’ Truth I began composing my own music and I plan to do so for my future audio releases.

For the purpose of opening, closing, and bridge music I only need about sixty seconds of music, max. For podcasts it’s a good idea not to put more than about thirty seconds of anything in before getting to the story itself, or more than about sixty seconds of anything at the end. More than that, and people tend to skip it. For some listeners, even sixty seconds it pushing it for a closing. Most promos (which theoretically I could get other podcasts to play in their episodes) are sixty seconds or less, as well. So for these things you don’t need more music than this. Easy, right?

Would you believe I spent the better part of last week (nearly four full days) working on the music I want to use for Lost and Not Found, and the end result -at four thirty in the morning yesterday- was a sixty second audio file? What if I told you it was just a first draft? That I spent the first three days scrawling in a notebook, obsessively crunching non-base10 math by hand, creating page after page of numbers, up to 24 digits in length (so far), and that I spent the fourth day transcoding the results into the computer as music? Music that I couldn’t guess the sound of before I was finished entering it in and hit play. Music that I think I like with a little faster tempo so maybe I’ll have to do another several hours’ math to get to a full minute again. Oh, and incidentally, music the math for which also creates the possibility of a generic sort of non-repeating but boundless melody, which I may be able to use as bed music? Which simple mathematical variations on could change the tone to match the four different stories in the novel that I’d like to each have individualized music? Hooray, crazy! Hooray, math! Maybe.

I’ll have to spend a couple more days entering the numbers into the system in various configurations to see if the calculations continue to sound good or if I’ll need to start from scratch (or worse, just modify this melody system heavily – I prefer the beauty of math right now) to create working music. And once the music is ready, it can be combined with the spoken word recordings of the book’s text and the book’s promos, and once that’s done I can submit it and start serializing it. Which reminds me, I really need to write a promo for Lost and Not Found. If you’ve read it, how do you think I could sell it to new [readers|listeners]?

One other little thing on the subject of the audiobook – since we don’t really have the room (or the money) to create a dedicated (or even isolated) recording space, I’ve set up in the bedroom. The other day while trying to adjust after working so that people could get by, a piece of equipment fell down and the jack on my headphones broke. These are relatively nice, closed ear headphones of sufficient quality to do near-professional quality audio work (really, my ears aren’t trained to do well enough to know the difference between these headphones and the ones that cost 5x-10x), and the only thing wrong with them right now is they can’t plug in to an audio source. All they need is the jack cut off and a new one spliced/soldered on, though I don’t trust myself to do a good enough job repairing them to end up with quality sound. So I took them to a local repair shop Monday (and called a second one) and the cost to have a professional repair it is the same as the cost to order another set online (depending on shipping cost). Sigh. I can’t really record any more until I have [new|repaired] headphones. So in reality it’s a good thing I’m spending days and weeks on the musical portion of this project right now, since I can’t get any more done on the spoken portion.

I’m sure I’ll post again when I have a promo. Oh, and when I have a site design for lostandnotfound.com, which I would like to be able to launch simultaneously with the Podiobook, and whose design should allow for the new book to be advertised along side it. Sigh. What should that look like? What should it do?

Working on a new novel

So last month, July, I decided to try to focus on writing. The goal was to try to get a new novel written before the end of the month. According to my calendar, I started on July 9th. I made reasonably good progress for about a week, and then my undisciplined nature began rearing its ugly head and progress slowed. Days would go by without writing anything. Writing a single chapter sometimes took several days instead of a few hours. I know I can write quickly, and during the first week of work I was estimating that I should be able to finish the first draft in under two weeks, second draft, layout, cover design, copy editing, and the rest done by the end of the month, and maybe have the new book submitted to my printer by August 1st.

Alas, it is now August 12th and I am only 120 pages into a manuscript I’m aiming for 300 pages with. And while I almost never know where one of my books is going until it gets there, the nagging feeling that I don’t know where this book is going just keeps pounding away at the inside of my mind. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the book has no conflict. No antagonist. No plot, that I am aware of, so far. This is not a new problem; most of what I write seems to have these [features|problems]. Dragons’ Truth didn’t really have a plot, an antagonist, or much in the way of meaningful conflict until chapters 13 and 14 (of 15) – and many readers agree with me that it doesn’t really have a good ending; it just stops, after an anticlimactic confrontation of only words. Lost and Not Found has four main stories in it, none of which have any real conflict or antagonist beyond the protagonist’s internal struggles and a couple of catty women who serve as little more than a foil to same. The Untrue Tales series was my attempt to write what I thought people wanted, and is chock full of conflict, sex, and a wide variety of antagonists — and frankly, I don’t like writing it, much, though there are several more books required to finish what I’ve started there.

This new novel is actually set in the same world as Lost and Not Found, and one of its main characters is featured prominently in the first couple dozen pages of that book. Everyone else is new. The setting is new. The theme may very well be the same, though I am not the best judge of such things – in my books or in anyone else’s. If you’ve read Lost and Not Found (which is available at modernevil.com as a free eBook in, like, eight different eBook formats -including the Kindle, if you own one- so what’s your excuse for not reading it? Paying is just one of your options), the story starts with Paul, who was predicting a sort of a doomsday at the beginning of Lost and Not Found. If you read the whole book, you’ll see that his doomsday comes, right on schedule – in a way. This book follows Paul, shows where he went to try to escape that world-changing event, and the lives of some of the other people who survived it and who live where he retreated to. Since some of Lost and Not Found’s timeline overlaps this new book’s timeline (and some occurs years later) and most of the characters are not (at least, not yet) in this book, I’m wary to call it a sequel. But it’s definitely in the same world.

Okay, a little more info about that: In early drafts of the book which turned into Lost and Not Found, there was another section after what is currently the end of that book. Like, twenty-two thousand words. After leaving Haven, ten years after the main story of Lost and Not Found, the main characters travel on to a flying city called Skythia and take up residence. They find Paul living there, among other things. That part of the story was cut out -in its entirety- from Lost and Not Found. This new book takes place in between the first section of Lost and Not Found (ie: the last place we hear about Paul in that book) and the section that was cut. So far, we’re within a few months’ time, so nowhere near the point where Lost and Not Found’s main characters would enter the story – though I won’t rule that out at this point, since I have no idea where this story is going.

Anyway, mentally, the presence of Skythia in a part of Lost and Not Found that was cut completely puts a few restraints on what can happen in this novel. Not in a bad way, necessarily. More like, I know vaguely where Paul -and Skythia- will be in ten years, as though this was all something that had actually happened and I’m merely documenting it with these books. Maybe I’ll work the cut part of that book into the end of this one. Maybe I’ll start a future sequel with it. Maybe it’ll remain cut out forever (or until I’ve died and someone decides to publish a new “more complete” version of Lost and Not Found containing the “lost ending” … bleh. Oooh, or maybe when I feel I’ve got enough readers that it would be profitable to put out such an edition, like the ‘anniversary’ editions of The Princess Bride with a new foreward here and a new chapter five years later and a new cover and a new afterward ten years later and so on…). Any way it ends up, the presence of that part of the story in my mind, in the universe of my imagination, creates a constraint on this novel. Even if I introduce the supervillain character I’ve been trying to wedge in, the city cannot be destroyed (not without being rebuilt) and Paul cannot be killed (not without being resurrected) nor politically ruined (I’m not telling). The utopian nature of Skythia and the basics of their government cannot change significantly. Et cetera, et cetera.

So, that’s what I’m not writing right now. It doesn’t yet have a title, but it does have zombies, robots, a utopian flying city, drama, politics, many fantasy races (elves, faeries, Kwytzwyk, centaur, &c.), ooh, and maybe dinosaurs soon. I’m not sure when it’ll be done, but I’m now trying to aim for it to come out in paperback around the same time the Podiobook release of the Lost and Not Found audiobook is complete.

An idea about reviews for new media & independent publishers

Alright, so here’s a post about a concept that has occurred to me. It would probably serve me well to implement and participate in it, but -like so many of my ideas- it will probably not get further than this post. Depends on how ambitious I feel, I suppose.

It’s a pretty basic idea: Old media’s old ideas about reviews don’t work in the new digital world.

Not just because fewer and fewer book reviews are being published, and not just because the old media isn’t interested in new media, independent and self-publishers, and anyone who happens to use the ‘new’ tech of print-on-demand (unless they “hit it big”, sell out, and stop being those things). The old ideas don’t work for reasons I discussed here semi-recently: More books are being written and published than ever before, and more than could ever be reviewed in the old media without overwhelming everything else. Over a thousand new books a day in North America alone, last year. Heck, five of those were mine. So what’s the solution for getting all these new books reviewed? Heckifiknow. But I have an idea for getting some of them reviewed.

How about creators themselves -rather than just pro and amateur reviewers- review each other’s work? There could be some sort of central site where authors could log in and connect with each other and readers could come and see all the reviews in a central, searchable, well-organized location. The reviews could be done quid-pro-quo, ie: I’ll review yours if you review mine, and every book review then brings visibility to both works (because there’s always that “[name of reviewer] is the author of books such as [blah] and [bleh] and writes a blog at [blerg]” at the bottom of a review). Authors could exchange PDFs (MP3s, HTML files, URLs, et cetera), or probably, if they wanted a paper copy of the book, send them a pBook at cost (instead of full retail, since you’re getting a review, but also because none of us wants to go broke trying to get internet reviews). Reviews could then be cross-posted to the authors’ blogs, linked form their books’ sites, et cetera… Increasing the visibility of the review site. And the site would be able to scale better than most of the solo-blogger-reviewers out there, since every new author that wanted to be reviewed would have to become a reviewer. It should be media-agnostic, since we’re all internet people, here: eBook, audiobook, POD book, dynamic hyperbook, whatever, it’s all good. Lots of duplicate reviews are (I think) good, since different people have different opinions on different books – book reviews aren’t objective. A system similar to the one they use at MiniBookExpo For Bloggers could be used (except not just for Canadians), so one could be restricted to three (or so) pending reviews at a time.

Obviously, such a site would take a certain amount of work to be put up and maintained, but since it’s powered by the strengths of the network (each independent author / publisher handles their own distribution of the books, and is in charge of posting their own reviews, and for generating traffic to the site, and the more authors are involved the better the whole thing works), it’s mostly a matter of getting it off the ground.

Ooh, or does this exist already, and I don’t know about it? Point me in the right direction. I’ll sign right up. I should be doing more reading, myself, and adding the selfish motivation of getting my own books reviewed sure would help get me to review other people’s works. I bet it’d do the same thing for yours. Know anyone who could help put this thing together?