Tag: Forget What You Can’t Remember

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.

Temporary new theme

Okay, okay, after a few bugs with CommentPress (and my semi-custom installation thereof), I’ve decided to -at least for now- switch themes for lessthanthis.com to something more conventional. This means, for right now, that all old posts which had comments now have comments again. Except where the posts were broken by switching to wordpress from movabletype, in which case, those posts are still broken, and probably their comments aren’t there, either. Sorry.

Theoretically it’s all working okay, though, now.

In other news, switching themes on my blog has assisted me with procrastinating an extra hour or more tonight that I ought to have been working on my NaNoWriMo project. Passed 15k words at Starbucks tonight (while Mandy was busy passing 23k words), which feels pretty good. Wrote almost double my average for most of the month so far, actually, which is good. Writing action, and a scene I’m particularly interested in and excited by seems to help. I’m almost to the point where the 5500 words I’ve written of this short story so far tie directly into an interesting sequence in Chapter 20 of Forget What You Can’t Remember, and reveal that all is not what it seems. All is, in fact, much more interesting than it seems.

Except then that story will be over and I’ll have to write a new one. And/or some sort of depressing resolution to this one.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s past halfway through the month, so I’m supposed to be halfway to 50k? Note: 15k != 25k sigh.

((Ooh, maybe I’ll do a painting from the word ‘sigh’…))

Attempt number seven

It’s that time again. National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo to those in the know. This is the 10th year it’s existed, and they’re celebrating with an ugly t-shirt. This is the 7th year I’ve participated. I’d have started sooner, but no one told me. Actually, I heard about it too late to play in 2001, but ran a local one of my own in the spring of 2002, so this is sortof my eighth go. I’ve also attempted to write novels in 30 days or less on several other occasions since 2002, so it’s more of baker’s dozen times I’ve faced down this challenge.

Officially, for attempts in Novembers, I’ve only “won” three times. 2002, 2003, and 2004. That’s Lost and Not Found, Dragons’ Truth, and UTFBF, Book 1, respectively. 2005 was a big fail, 2006 was practically a mental breakdown, and 2007 was a sort of emotional cleansing that ended in my getting married on December 1st. So this year (and from now on) the TGIO party is also my wedding anniversary. (I’ll have to remember not to confuse the sentiment of “Thank Goodness It’s Over” with thoughts about my marriage, though – it should be relief/joy that one thing is ending coupled with relief/joy that that other is continuing.)

As I believe I’ve stated over and over again in various places (was one of them this place?), for NaNoWriMo this year I’m writing a collection of short stories instead of a novel. At least, that’s the idea. That was, incidentally, the idea for 2005 and 2006 as well – and those didn’t turn out well. (Though I do have the several short stories I’d managed to complete those years on my HDD somewhere, just waiting for something to do.) The stories are all supposed to tie in to and expand upon the fiction and world of the novel I wrote this year, which I’m currently calling Forget What You Can’t Remember, which I can then sell as a companion book to the novel -expect both to be available in December- and which I’m thinking of calling More Lost Memories. On one hand, doing short stories makes things easier in a few ways: If I get stuck somewhere I can just switch to a different story. I can podcast the individual stories as they get finished without worrying that something I write later will contradict something already live. (The first story from More Lost Memories to hit the podcast is available now.) If one story or one set of characters runs out of steam before 50k words it’s no problem, because I can just start another one. Yay! On the other hand, I’ve never succeeded in writing a book-length collection of short stories. This will be the second attempt this year, and the sixth attempt in four years.

The collection of time-related short stories I was working on is close to okay, but it needs a good edit, and at least a couple more stories before it’s the size and scope I want from it. Problem is, I don’t currently have more ideas for time-related short stories. Hopefully I’ll come up with some in 2009. You can see four of the stories in their current state at modernevil.com/inProgress, and give me paragraph-level feedback on the text (I’m also using CommentPress over there) or general feedback on your impressions of the stories. The short story collection I started for NaNo’05 is less than 20% complete, on a story-level. I don’t know how long it is. I tried to throw one together last year, but it was a mess. I have one mapped out, outlined, characters developed, and barely half of one story written yet – that one I’ve been working on since 2003. The short story collection, so far, has eluded me. Hopefully that streak will end, now, and perhaps by this time next year I’ll have two or three such collections in print.

Anyway, so far I’m not doing great on my word count. The daily target, to hit the goal on time, is 1667 words. I’ve been writing between 750 and 1200 words a day, so far. Right now, my word count is only 5240. At midnight (almost 2 hours ago, now), it was supposed to be 8333 or more. The 860+ words in this post are definitely not in my novel’s word count. Neither are the words I’ve been posting in the NaNoWriMo regional forums. But I’m pretty sure they’re worthwhile. Just as I’m pretty sure podcasting my book-in-progress is worthwhile. And helping my brother try to get his car working is worthwhile. And the break I took to play the Mirror’s Edge demo, a little while ago, was pretty cool. There was that one jump that took me thirty or forty tries, but otherwise it was a lot of fun. Depending on how tomorrow goes, maybe between editing Friday’s Lost and Not Found podcast and helping my brother with his car I can get some writing in before the write-in at the library tomorrow night. Maybe I can catch up to where I’m supposed to be.

If all else fails, in a couple of weeks I’ll start a new novel -a proper novel- and get it written by the end of the month, anyway. Actually try to do NaNoWriMo right for a change.