Author: Luke M.

Luke Matthews is a writer, board gamer, beer drinker, and all-around geek. He currently lives in the Seattle area with his wife, two cats, and two German wirehaired pointers.
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Cliquety Cliques and Being A Loner

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Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with a former co-worker. The two of us had worked together for under a year, and quit our company within a few months of one another. We’d found that we worked well together and had very similar personalities, which made for a pretty strong friendship that has extended beyond the borders of our old workplace.

That wasn’t true of everyone I worked with, though. Don’t get me wrong – there are a few people with whom I’m still in contact from several of my old jobs – but they’re not necessarily the people I’d have expected.
It got me to thinking about the nature of cliques in my everyday life. In any large group of people brought together by a common goal – a school, a sport, a workplace – it’s inevitable that cliques will form. Many people define their high-school or college experience by which clique they were a part of, even though they may not phrase it that way.

The same goes for a workplace, only the cliques are now called “teams” or “departments”. In my last job, I technically worked in 3 teams across two departments. The first two teams, being part of the same group, allowed me to maintain ties with the people I worked with when I changed over, so I still had pretty strong relationships with everyone… Until I moved out of the department.

While part of that group I developed friendships that, I had thought, would extend outside the workplace. With the exception of two people – both of whom have been part of podcasts for which I recruited them – I’ve barely spoken to any of those people since leaving that department. Even while I was still part of the company, the moment I changed departments I was an outsider, mired in an unsubtle “us vs. them” attitude.

There are some people with whom I maintain social media contact, but only a few of them I would consider “friends” anymore. The department change came with a hearty dose of ostracizing, which I hadn’t expected at the time. It’s also something I didn’t notice as strongly until I put myself in a situation where I was working on my own, and no longer a part of ANY large, artificially constructed group dynamic.

I’m not going to school. I’m not part of a club (I used to be part of a major national LARP that had – still has – some of the worst internal politics I’ve ever been witness to). I no longer have a framework to define my initial contact with new people, and am – by the nature of my new “loner” status – no longer a part of a clique. Even in high school I was a self-identified “geek”, and had that group around me at all times.

Without that sort of defining framework, my group of friends is now a haphazard conglomeration of disparate interests. A few former co-workers here, some podcast-mates there, some old LARP-mates, my poker buddies, some outliers. The Venn Diagram of my groups of friends would, for the most part, only contain any overlap at me. In some ways, I’m saddened by this thought. Large groups of people with whom I had regular, positive interaction at several of my old jobs and hobbies are no longer a part of my life. On the other hand, it’s shone a light on where those relationships were only held up by the foundation of the cliques to which I used to belong.

The situation has one, major, positive result: I am more grateful now for the friendships I’ve maintained than I was before. Without artificially imposed structure, I have a better grasp on the definition of my relationships and, while it might mean that I need to work harder to maintain them, I feel like they’ll ultimately be more rewarding.

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The Perfect Reading Experience

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Since the inception of ebooks, there has been an ongoing argument about the value of print in the experience of reading. I’ve had many a discussion and even written about my opinions on the matter, so I’m not going to repeat myself.

I read in bed, almost every single night. It’s not the only place I read, but it’s the most frequent. Many times my wife will want to go to sleep before me, so I’ll have to turn off all of the room lights and read in the dark, which isn’t a problem because I read on a Kindle Paperwhite. Over the last few months, I’ve finally realized that this is, without question, my perfect reading experience.

kindle_paperwhite_dark_inlineI’m a huge movie buff. I love seeing movies in theaters, and even now have a theater room in my home. Watching a movie on a huge screen in a darkened room is one of the most immersive entertainment experiences available. That rectangle of light draws you in to tell you a story, the blackness around you blotting out all other stimuli.

And that’s exactly how I feel about my Kindle. With all the lights off and that soft white glow surrounding the words on my Paperwhite’s screen, I feel more immersed in the books I read than I ever have. I don’t have to have a lamp on, or a book light throwing shadows around the whole room. I’m free to darken my surroundings and go into sensory deprivation mode, drawing all of my focus into that little rectangle of light where a story plays out before my eyes.

It’s fucking perfect.

The experience isn’t limited to the Kindle, so please don’t take this as brand-shilling – I just happen to own Amazon’s e-reader rather than a Nook or a Kobo. For any of the front-lit e-readers (or tablets, if that’s the way you go), the experience would be the same. And it’s an experience you can’t get any other way.

External lights have come close – everyone who reads a lot has spent at least one night as a kid under a blanket-tent with a flashlight or book light – but it’s still not quite the same. That complete dampening of surrounding light, and the screen carved out of the darkness in front of you is the absolute finest way to be immersed in a book, eschewing all distraction.

There is just no better way to read.

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Reader Perception And Quality Control

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I recently read a couple of posts on Chuck Wendig’s blog over at TerribleMinds regarding a self-published author’s responsibility for the quality of the work they publish. For your reading pleasure, the whole discussion started with this post on John Scalzi’s blog HERE, where he drew an analogy between the writerly life to that of a baseball player. Wendig furthered the discussion HERE and HERE.

The gist of Wendig’s point is that, while self-publishing is easy and has destroyed the barrier to entry in the publishing industry, each author who self-publishes now holds the responsibility to do right by their readers. He posits that authors should act as their own gatekeepers, and that the moment an author asks someone to pay for something they’ve written they have a responsibility to the reader – their customers – to present a professional and complete product.

I won’t further that particular discussion except to say that I couldn’t agree with him more. While I was reading through these threads another dynamic was brought into sharp focus: readers’ tendencies with regards to association of quality. Here’s what I mean:

For a moment, let’s take self-publishing out of the picture and rewind to the days where traditional publishing was just called “publishing”. If a reader suffered through a bad book – be it poorly written or unprofessionally executed – that reader associated the lack of quality with the author. Rarely (and this is demonstrated in some of the responses to Wendig’s posts, and echoed all over the internet) did a reader associate poor quality with a particular publisher or the industry as a whole. The inverse was also true: read a good book, follow the author. I can’t remember a time that I’ve ever read a fantastic novel and thought to myself “Man, that publisher really knows what they’re doing.”

Fast forward to the modern era. That dynamic I mentioned still exists with traditional publishers. While the idea of self-publishing has brought publishers in general more into the limelight, readers still don’t tend to associate good or bad quality of traditional books with the publisher or the publishing industry – the quality association still falls squarely on the author. The same cannot be said of self-published work.

When a reader buys a self-published novel and it turns out to be fantastic, that author now has a new fan. The reader associates the quality of the novel directly with the author and that association is more pertinent without a publishing house acting as middle-man. But when a reader gets ahold of a bad self-published book – again, be it poorly written, edited, and/or produced – the mentality no longer defaults to “I’m not going to buy any more of that author’s work.”, it tends to be “Fuck this self-published crap.” The onus of quality now rests on an entire segment of the industry, full of individuals who have nothing to do with one another, the best of which now get dragged down by players whose attitude is simply to dump a block of text onto Amazon without a thought to its quality.

I think that mentality originates from the idea that the traditional publishing industry, with its gatekeepers in place, has developed a reputation for at least upholding a minimum standard of quality. Readers intuitively know that – for the most part – when they pick up a book at Barnes & Noble they can expect it to have run through several editorial passes and have been proofread a few times. Please note that by “quality” I am simply referring to editorial professionalism, not the quality of the actual stories being told.

Of course, the same cannot be said of self-published work. While the barrier to entry has been razed to the ground, so has the expectation of professionalism. Without “gatekeepers” in place, no one is held to any kind of standard at all, which allows any overzealous author to take advantage of the system – of readers – to collect money for sub-par work rather than hone their craft prior to charging for it. Which is exactly Wendig’s point: Without that ingrained expectation of quality that the industry took decades to build in the minds of readers, the responsibility now rests solely on self-published authors’ shoulders to not foist snake-oil onto their customers.

I am never going to be the person to say that a writer shouldn’t be allowed to self-publish (and neither is Wendig, so please don’t assume that as my point). In fact, the ease of self-publishing is likely going to be the reason my book sees the light of day. While I don’t necessarily think that “gatekeepers” – the traditionally difficult standards of entry set by agents, acquisitions editors, and publishers – are healthy in an environment that is beginning to value creator’s rights more than it ever has, I think that publishers will morph their role into that of curators of content rather than locking all the doors and holding all the keys, and in a scenario where self-publishing digitally becomes simple and ubiquitous, it might be time for service providers and device manufacturers to take an active role in building up the quality of self-published work.

In the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, the emergence of the home video game console experienced a similar issue. Atari created a console that was (comparatively) easy to program for and had almost no barriers to making games for it. Everyone from the big guys like Namco and Activision, down to programming teams of 2 guys in a basement, started making games. The result was an explosion of garbage – sometimes in the form of games that literally did not function. All of a sudden, there was a huge glut of expensive, quasi-functional trash, and no legitimate way to tell the good from the bad. Consumer confidence tanked, Atari went bankrupt, and the video game industry as a whole crashed – hard – and almost didn’t recover until a little Japanese company called Nintendo joined the fray in 1985.

Nintendo set a new standard for video game console manufacturers by providing a system that was easy to use and affordable for consumers, but simultaneously holding their publishers to a standard of quality by running every game through a battery of tests before it could be manufactured for Nintendo’s console. That system is still in place today at all the major console manufacturers, where all of them have a certification department that runs a series of tests on every single game to make sure that it adheres to a set of guidelines for usability and functionality.

These certification departments don’t judge the subjective quality of a game (if they did, we’d be blessed to never see another Petz or Babiez game again) instead simply making sure that a game functions properly, uses the correct terminology, and won’t break the console or hamper the user experience. And, in the face of a huge self-publishing boom in the video game industry, these certification departments aren’t going away – they’re adapting to the boom and working to help small video game developers publish games that never before would’ve seen the light of day.

The same model could be applied to self-published books. A company like Amazon could have a certification department full of proofreaders and copy editors whose jobs were nothing more than to comb over manuscripts and hold them to a certain level of production quality. Like the cert departments at Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, they would not comment on the quality of the stories, and they certainly wouldn’t act in a true editorial capacity (just like the cert departments don’t act as bug-testing facilities), but they would be able to identify the mechanical problems with a manuscript and have the power to reject one until it passes muster.

Granted, this would require an investment of people and funds from companies like B&N and Amazon who – at the moment – have exactly zero motivation to do so. Quality isn’t their concern, and they make their 30-70% off of every book sold whether it’s crap or not, so it behooves them to promote high quantity with a low barrier to entry.

Atari once thought the same thing.

We may never see something like that come to pass unless Amazon gets a rude awakening like Atari did, which is unlikely to happen in the modern publishing climate (at least not anytime soon). This, I think, is why publishers as curators will become the next wave of business in the publishing industry. The model that immediately jumps to mind is Image Comics.

Creator-owned comics were mostly unheard-of up until the early ‘90’s. Comic book creators, fed up with the Big 2 paying them a pittance for their work and taking their creations away from them, were looking for a new way to do business. Image Comics was formed with what was, at the time, a revolutionary idea: Let the creators keep the rights to their work. Image acts in a publishing capacity insomuch as they provide editorial support, access to printing and distribution, and a unified logo under which readers can assume a certain level of quality.

Image does, to some degree, act as gatekeepers just like Marvel and DC do, but the trade-off for creators is that they retain the rights to their creations. One of the primary drives, for authors, behind the self-publishing movement is creative control and the preservation of their rights. Image has been successful in this practice, which has been followed by other companies like Boom! Studios and MonkeyBrain, and the model seems ripe for introduction into the publishing industry.

It’s unlikely that any of the major publishers like Tor or Random Penguin would ever concede rights to new properties to their authors. The industry seems ready, however, for publishers to act less like gatekeepers and more, as I said earlier, like curators of content, sifting through the morass of self-published books to offer a middle-ground solution for authors who want to couple the benefits of unified brand clout with the flexibility of creator-ownership.

The publisher can develop a brand identity unheard of in traditional publishing, where mainstream readers can go to find works they like based not solely on the author’s brand, but also the publisher. The author retains the rights to his or her work, and can build a brand of their own with the support of a larger entity. Readers would have a way to parse creator-owned work more than just by author, finding a stable or series of stables of curated content that fits their reading tastes. It seems like a win-win-win proposal, but I’m also not a business major.

I don’t think traditional publishing is going away. Nor do I think that self-publishing is steering the industry toward some inevitable implosion. I do, however, think that new business models will emerge that incorporate the best of both worlds, and maybe with a little bit of quality control on the service-providers’ ends, we could see a more balanced renaissance in the publishing industry that serves the business, the creators, and the consumers alike.

For now, though, all a fledgling author like me can do is ride out the storm, and try desperately not to suck.

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My Imminent Return to Social Media

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I’ve had an interesting relationship with social media over the last month. In December, I made a resolution to take the month of January off of all social media (which, for me, is basically just Facebook and Twitter). There was one caveat: I’d still post links to new blog posts or articles I’d written, as well as announcements for podcasts I post.

I haven’t really followed the resolution to the letter, but it’s been awful close. I’ve stayed well away from Twitter, but some of my real-world interactions with groups of friends have relied on Facebook invites for so long that I’ve spent some time looking there. In turn, I end up reading a few posts and, today, I responded to one. The perception of my resolution was an all-out ban, which has resulted in some gentle ribbing from some of my friends about the few posts I have put up. And while some would see my minimal access to social media as a failure of my resolution, I’ve found it wildly successful.

Before the resolution, I was allowing Facebook and Twitter to dominate my free time. Every time I was watching a movie, or reading a book, or even playing a video game, I was still periodically checking social media. I was letting it distract from my writing, including my novel and my blog, to the point where I’d go a full week or more without writing a damned thing. I was letting it eat me up.

In the time off I’ve accomplished loads more than I had previously. I’m about to finish a full revision of my novel in less than 3 weeks, a task that took me 10 and 16 weeks, respectively, for my last revisions. I’ve written more, and more substantive, blog posts in that time, and have now put my podcast onto a solid production schedule with definitive publication dates. On top of all that, I’ve learned how to find things I want to watch and read on the internet on my own, rather than relying on links to click-bait sites in my social media feeds.

In February, I’m going to go back to posting and reading social media, but not in as much volume, and hopefully with a more discerning eye for what links I will follow and discussions I’ll take part in. It’s given me perspective on what to share and how to share it, as well, which will (hopefully) be beneficial when I start promoting my book.

This is an experiment I’d implore everyone to try, at least for a little while. The rules don’t need to be hard and fast, and ignore the peer pressure of people telling you how you should be doing it. The break from social media reminded me of how to break out of my echo chamber and find information on my own, which will hopefully lead to me being one of the people who is posting more links for others to read rather than clicking on them. It’s helped my productivity and my overall mental state.

But, in truth, I can’t wait for February to come. There are a lot of social interactions I’m really missing right now, and it’ll be good to remind myself how much fun I have on social media. See you guys in a few days.

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Inspiration, Tenacity, and… hoo boy this is a long one…

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I’ve read a lot of blog posts and stories from authors about their journey with writing and the things that led to them becoming a full-time writer. Many of these are couched in the guise of writing advice, seeming attempts to latch onto the same anecdotal feel as one of my favorite writing books, Stephen King’s On Writing.

The stories I’ve read are almost universal in their portrayal of depression, self-loathing, and tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. As the social media/blogosphere has opened up unprecedented access to the thoughts of our favorite authors, aspiring writers are further besieged by tales of financial hardship and mental degradation.

Don’t take this to mean I’m discounting these stories, saying they’re untrue, or even saying they’re not an accurate portrayal of the average writer’s tribulations. I’m just taken aback by a couple of things: first, how different my path to writing has been from most of the stories I’ve read, and second, the alarming detail with which most writers remember their past.
blog_separatorI don’t remember the first thing I ever wrote. I’m always surprised by the stories of other writers, who can remember with perfect clarity every piece that’s ever come off of their pen or keyboard, and can identify the exact moment in their life that fired their desire to be a writer.

My long-term memory has always been shit. With the exception of a few specific, turn-key moments, my childhood is just a giant blur. I have looked at pictures from my childhood – of my family on road trips, of meeting family friends, of birthdays – and don’t remember any of the events depicted there. There are pictures of my brother and I at Bedrock City – an old Flintstones-themed park in Custer, South Dakota – from the early 80’s that I have no recollection of. Disneyland barely registers in a foggy haze of disconnected images.

So trying to remember the first thing I ever wrote isn’t just a chore, it’s likely impossible. I’m not sure how important it is, though. If I can’t remember the first thing I wrote, then it probably doesn’t have much influence on my current writing life.
blog_separatorWriting has always been a background thing for me. I’ve always been a storyteller (just ask my wife how many times she’s heard the same story of something-or-other), but until recently it was never something I actively *did*. I know that there was writing for many classes throughout high school, but I couldn’t tell you what any of those stories were about.

In high-school, I was way more interested in being an artist. I was always drawing. If it wasn’t doodles in my notebooks during class I was practicing techniques to become a comic book artist. I’ve always been into comics, and at one point thought that was a field I’d enter as an artist. My first attempts to get published took the form of comic book pages.

There was a small – and I mean very small – local press in Bend that created small print-runs of anthology comic books that were hand-delivered to the local Oregon comic shops on a bi-monthly basis. I had met the guy who ran the press a few times and, after showing him some of my art, he agreed to publish a 3-4 page story of mine in one of his books. After churning out a terrible 3-page faux-trailer for a 90’s Image gun-toting super-hero, I handed over the pages for the next issue.

He never produced another issue.

Along the same line, I wrote and drew an eight-page story that ended up in a collection of writing and art that was given to students at my high school. Wow, is it bad. The title character’s name is an acronym spelling F.I.R.E.A.R.M. – because, you know, he has a plasma gun for an arm, ala Mega Man. I’m not even going to talk about what that acronym stands for. The story included the line “The killing has become too easy. Living has become too hard.”

Deep.

I was way behind deadline on it and never inked the pages, but the penciled and lettered pages are forever immortalized in a spiral-bound, title-less collection that most of my high-school classmates have probably thrown away by now. I might still have a copy lying around. Maybe.
blog_separatorAfter high school, I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I moved to Seattle and spent 2½ years at the Art Institute working on a computer animation degree that never materialized into anything. I got an internship-turned-full-time-position at Wizards of the Coast, where I was constantly surrounded by writers and artists more talented and interesting than me.

I would like to say that I never allowed that to discourage me, but upon reflection I realize that’s not the case. For a lot of people that discouragement would’ve been front-and-center in their psyche – the sort of thing that leads one to write a blog post about depression and self-loathing. For me, it was more subtle.

The Art Institute had already burned me out on one creative path in my life, so the creative talent at WotC didn’t inspire me as it would others, instead it just pushed my ideas to the background. I subconsciously allowed myself to set those things aside without a fight, and most of my creative pursuits just faded out of my life.

But I was still writing. I was active in a live-action roleplaying game at the time, and had been using that as an outlet. It’s something I’d been doing long before I started at WotC, but somewhere on the internet there are e-mail groups with post upon post of in-game fiction that I was writing about the characters I and my friends were portraying in the game. Over the course of my time in N.E.R.O., Legacies, and Amtgard, I can’t even calculate the output of shared stories I worked on to help fill in the gaps between meetings.

My first real attempt at a novel is an aborted 25,000 words toward an epic fantasy story based on the characters from Amtgard. Of all the things that I’ve written, I would probably credit that story as the spark that made me want to write more seriously.
blog_separatorSometimes I wonder if my lack of depression or notable mental illness is something that hinders my credibility as a writer. So many authors, of varying degrees of fame, tell those stories and identify their experiences with mental illness as informative of their writing. It’s a widely held belief that authors are prone to emotional issues and substance abuse, and that – as horrible as those things can be – they can sometimes lead to moments or periods of creative brilliance.

I don’t really have that. While I have experienced depression in my life, it’s not in the clinical, chronic sense. I get sad when sad things happen and happy when things go right. And while I used to be a pretty cynical person, and I still tend to be a skeptic in a lot of ways, I found a long time ago that I was generally happier living with optimism.

Does that ruin my writer street cred? Writ Cred?

I don’t mean to be glib about other people’s problems. I only find it interesting that because of these kinds of stories from some of the world’s favorite writers, readers tend to automatically associate the term “author” with “depressed, socially awkward alcoholic”, and allow that association to lend some credibility to their artistic output, which I think is bogus.
blog_separatorI’ve always had ideas in my head for stories. I’ve been a gamer all my life, and have been playing Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games since I was 10… ish (I can’t remember exactly when I started; see above about my memory re: my childhood). Most of my story ideas came out in the form of outlines for gaming sessions, most of which were never run. Some of them morphed into bits and parts of roleplay posts for those live-action games, and some of them just banged around in my head with no purpose or outlet.

Toward the end of my time at WotC, when I was still in the midst of that novel attempt, there was an open call for a new novel based on one of the D&D campaign settings. I’d had this idea for a story swimming around in my brain since college that needed an outlet, so I wrote up a proposal and sent it in as part of the contest. I don’t think I ever even got a rejection letter.

So, that idea still hovered around in my brain, and I just couldn’t get rid of it. And, as life continued to intervene and fuel my utter lack of creative motivation, I wasn’t doing anything to get that idea out of my head. The outlet for it seems so simple, in retrospect.
blog_separatorAfter I was laid off from that job, I bounced around a lot and let financial need take over my brain. My wife and I lived pretty broke for a while, and for the next four years or so I floated inside my own head, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I had thought to make a career at Wizards, but should’ve known better, and was dumped back into the world, rudderless, at the ripe old age of 23.

A card game that I co-designed was published by Green Ronin Games, but that was about the extent of my creative work. I had a few articles published in the now-defunct Undefeated Magazine (by Pathfinder’s Paizo Publishing), but when that dried up I never pursued that path for writing. It was fun and I made (piddly) money at it, and to this day, I have absolutely no idea why I didn’t go after that.

The natural progression (as my brain told me) was to fall back on my original plan: become an animator. I worked some temp jobs and did some freelance work, but eventually convinced myself that my original path was correct (even though it didn’t pan out) and took a 5-week immersion course at a tiny school called Mesmer Animation Labs. I spent a ridiculous amount of our waning funds on the course and the materials, only to discover a few months after it was over that I had lost interest in an animation career.

I’m very lucky that my wife didn’t murder me.

There are many writers whose story of persistence and tenacity revolves around the idea of always writing, no matter what, and scraping by doing whatever writing they can to make ends meet. That story isn’t my story. The freelance work I was doing was mostly fun, my temp jobs were usually easy, and by the time I’d been a game tester at Nintendo for a while, I didn’t have a lot of reason to go do a shit job for the sake of money.

Testing wasn’t entirely stable, mind you, but it was simple and fun and my co-workers were nerds just like me. I tried working a couple of call-center jobs during my breaks from Nintendo, and couldn’t do it, so I just kept hovering back to testing. It wasn’t what I wanted to do as a career, but at that time I had no fucking clue what I wanted as a career. I just knew this was something I was good at and it made me decent money, so I stayed.
blog_separatorOnce the money situation stabilized, my creative brain started scratching at my skull again. Especially during long periods the utter boredom that is bug testing GameCube games, my ideas would run roughshod over my concentration. I had ideas for short stories, art projects, game designs, you name it. I designed and wrote and entire rulebook for a live-action roleplaying game called Unification, and even went so far as to run it for several months. I designed other card games (none published, yet), wrote some stories, and – eventually – went on to create several podcasts and Geekerific.com.

I’ve spoken before about how the death of my father spurred much of the creative work I started in 2010, beginning with the creation of the After The Fact podcast. That step – using the creation of the podcast and the website to distract me from grief – began a cascading effect with my artistic drive. In the last four years I’ve been more creatively active than in the ten years prior, which led to the conclusion that maybe it was time to bring that to the forefront.

I learned, over the course of 2010, that the only way to get a creative idea to stop waking me up at night was to actually write it down and work on it. I know, I know – it’s quite possibly the most obvious “revelation” in creative history, and one that writers talk about constantly. It just never clicked before, and that realization has spurred a sort of creative renaissance for me.
blog_separatorIn the annals of my history, from – we’ll say – junior high school forward, there are uncounted ideas that I’ve had and let die, or just lost to my shitty long-term memory. I can’t even imagine how many stories I might have been able to write if I’d just taken the time to write notes on the seeds that wafted through my brain when I was younger.

The advantage, I guess, is that most of those ideas were probably utter shit, and it’s probably fine for them to be lost to time immemorial. On the other hand, there was a brief moment after I’d had this Captain Obvious-worthy revelation that I felt a profound sense of loss over all the things I’d let blow away in the breeze.

The beauty of my crappy long-term memory, though, is that I don’t remember a damned one of them, so I don’t have any real reason to latch onto what was lost and despair over it. I can just move forward, unhindered by history, afresh. Yay me?
blog_separatorAfter successfully launching the podcast I’d wanted to work on for quite some time, I decided it was time to get a story that had been banging around in my brain for a decade out of my head. So, toward the end of 2010 I sat down and wrote the first chapter of my first novel. It was like finally taking a piss after being stuck in a car for – roughly ten years. The catharsis was extraordinary, and it was only the first 3,000 words or so.

And then, it sputtered. It took a year to get the first 17,000 words down, and parts of that were like pulling teeth. I had no direction, no focus, and no discipline. I began reading all the writing advice I could get my hands on – blogs, books, podcasts, you name it – and the message was always the same: If you don’t have the discipline to get it down on paper, you’re not a writer. Get the fucker finished and worry about making it good after it’s done.

That first year was rough, trying to work the discipline to write into my daily routine. And by “trying”, I mean not trying at all and just belching out chapters in a haphazard fashion, right up until the last few months of 2011, when I was introduced to NaNoWriMo. Short description: NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, a contest/organization/workshop/social experiment whereby writers are challenged to write a complete 50,000-word novel entirely within the month of November.

Amongst my circle of friends and acquaintances, NaNoWriMo was a constant presence, usually in the form of “I think I might do NaNoWriMo this year.” Most of the “I think”s turned into “I didn’t have the time”s, but I saw a perfect opportunity to artificially introduce the discipline I’d been needing for the last year.

I sort of participated in NaNoWriMo 2011, not insomuch as writing a novel from scratch, instead using it as an excuse to add 50,000 words to my currently 22,000ish word manuscript. I figured if I could succeed in adding that much meat to the novel, I couldn’t possibly set it aside like I had my first attempt. And I was right. I fell 1300 words short of the 50,000-word goal, but the flip side of that is that I now had two complete acts and 70,000 words actually written down, and I was gonna finish this bitch.
blog_separatorI began keeping a story journal. I have a few, now, actually. I have one specifically dedicated to the series of fantasy novels kicked off by my first book, but my favorite is one that I’ve titled my “One Page Idea Book”. When I think of a story, I start a new page in the journal and write down the idea. I confine myself to one page, just to get it out of my head.

I started this journal because I found myself sputtering again after NaNoWriMo. I worked on the book all throughout 2012, but with nothing like the fervor I had for that month. I found myself constantly distracted not only by life, but by other ideas that kept popping into my head while I was trying to think about where to go next with my “main” story. The One Page Idea Book gave me something I desperately needed – finite control on getting ideas out of my head without letting them ramble.

That big push on my novel opened the floodgates in my head, and creative projects just keep tumbling out. That journal has a ton of new ideas for stories, a few of which are even still lingering in my head like Construct (my current novel) did. 2012 was just idea upon idea upon idea, mostly for books and games, but also resulted in a renewed push on my blog and podcasts.

I was amazed at how much actually working on something creative snowballed into an entirely new creative mindset. My priorities began shifting around without prompting, and before I knew it I was taking a serious look at my life balance and, after many discussions and negotiations with my wife, decided that I wanted to be the guy making something, instead of just working for the people who do.
blog_separatorAside from the distraction of new ideas, the hang up in 2012 was a two-fold problem – I really did (do) lack the appropriate discipline to get shit written down in a reasonable amount of time, and I started doubting my ability. I guess this is the part where I have the traditional lack-of-confidence moment that every author talks about, because WOW, I felt like a fraud.

I spent a good chunk of soul searching questioning my abilities, and marveling at the arrogance it takes to think that anyone would ever want to read the shit that I write. It dumped me in a hole for a little while where I couldn’t motivate myself to open that Word file one more time and finish what I’d started. I look back on that time, now, and realize that those moments are exactly what those other writers are writing about.

You may be disappointed to know that I didn’t descend into an alcohol fueled depressive slump. I frequently call bullshit on myself when I’m feeling down, and that’s exactly what I did this time. I took a hard look at how critical I was being and realized that I was being unfair. I hadn’t even finished the fucking thing yet, and I was already doubting my abilities?

Admittedly, this is where the stories of other writers’ depressive tendencies actually helped. I’ve been an artist of some sort all my life, but I still have problems internalizing the idea that every artist – at one point – feels like their creation is crap. Hell, my own father was a fantastic artist – I have a couple of charcoal still-lifes of his that I love – but he was so critical of his own work that he just gave it up and never drew again.

That wasn’t going to be me. I have stories in my head that I want to tell, and I know that I’m the only one that can tell them. I took to heart the stories I’d read and decided that I was going to tell my own, even if they’re all a giant dumpster fire.
blog_separatorToward the middle of 2012, I half-jokingly mentioned to my wife how awesome it would be for me to leave my job at Nintendo and become a house husband. I told her that, in exchange for not having to work, she wouldn’t have to do hardly any chores. She’d have a live-in house boy, and I’d get to write and work on my creative projects. To my surprise and shock, she didn’t laugh me off. In fact, her reaction was more like “ooooh…. That would be awesome.”

I was FLOORED. Fast forward 7-ish months, and that’s exactly what happened. I left Nintendo after nine years, came home, and got to work finishing my novel. I wrote the last words in the manuscript on March 13th, 41 days after leaving my job. I’ve spent the last 11 months revising (I’m working on the fourth draft), querying and being rejected by agents, and researching my options for publishing. And, a few months ago, I threw down the first two chapters of book two.
blog_separatorEven though my story may not be one of depression and broken relationships and drug abuse, I guess it still does ring with that tenacity vibe. For me, it’s all been a matter of discipline, and simply realizing that my creations are unique to me, in spite of the world trying to tell me that I’ll just be another pebble in the gravel pit.

Have I always wanted to be a writer? I have no fucking clue; I can’t remember that far back. Does it really matter? I’m not so sure. I know that I’ve always wanted to make stuff. I want to build something and put it in front of other people and revel in their enjoyment of it. Or hatred, maybe, I don’t know.

My path to this point seems non-standard, if I’m judging by what I’ve read from other writers. Although the impetus for triggering my creative flood was a tragedy, the creation isn’t an attempt to escape from constant tragedy. I am, in spite of being a writer, a generally happy person, and I still consider myself an optimist.

So, my advice? Oh, no, no, nononono. That’s not what this is about. This is just a story. I neither have the experience nor the background to be offering advice, certainly not on writing. Glean what you can from what I write and if it helps you, great, but don’t call it “advice” because then, instead of occasionally just feeling like a fraud, I actually would be.

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Harry Potter and the Peril of Movie Adaptations

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harry_potter_5_coverConfession: I haven’t ever finished reading the Harry Potter books.

I burned through the first four books ages ago, before the movies started coming out. For some reason – and I honestly can’t explain why – I made it about a chapter into Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and just… stopped. There was no real reason for stopping, I just set the book down and didn’t pick it back up.

As the movies trundled on, I kept trying to convince myself to go finish the series before the movies caught up to me. Upon that failing, I convinced myself that it would be more interesting to watch the movies without any prior knowledge of the story, to form a different opinion than 90% of the people watching.

Yeah, it was just an excuse.

So, I saw Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows without having finished the books. I liked them. Alfonso Cuaron’s direction set the perfect tone for the series, and Order of the Phoenix is still my favorite of the movies, without question.

Last week, I decided to finally go back and start reading the series again. Not from scratch, but starting where I left of, with Order of the Phoenix. Holy hell, is it rough going.

Let me say that there’s nothing really wrong with the book. By this point Rowling had hit her stride and become an infinitely better writer than when she started, and the tone of the books had become decidedly more adult as the series went on. Not quite as dark as Cuaron made them, mind you, but not as ‘kiddie’ as the first couple of books.

Having seen the movie version, though, the book just feels like a drag. Things that I may have been upset at having been trimmed out in a movie adaptation now feel like extra baggage – like a plodding director’s cut that never should’ve seen the light of day. I’m only about a quarter through the book and I feel like I should be much deeper into it, with as much as I’ve been reading.

I never anticipated that seeing the movies prior to reading the books would’ve caused so much difficulty with my attempt to finish the series. Here I am, though, feeling as though a perfectly good book is going to be a chore to finish, dumping a book that I know I would’ve liked before into the same category of dreadful slogs as The Sword of Shannara and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Okay, not nearly that bad. This book I’ll actually finish.

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The Possibility of Self-Publishing

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I talk a lot about the book I’m writing. I finished the first draft of the book about 10 months ago, and I’m now on my 4th draft of the manuscript. Throughout that time I’ve been diving into research on the publishing industry, weighing my options for getting my book and its sequels published.

My initial idea, and the one I’m still technically following, was to attempt the traditional path first. Send out a ton of queries, find an agent, sell to a publisher, and get the book on physical shelves for a small advance. The advantage of this method is, quite simply, publicity. Having access to a solid editing staff is also a huge boon, but none of that matters if the book isn’t in front of faces. The traditional publishing route has more marketing reach than an individual author (unless that author is named King or Rowling).

Marketing a self-published book is – how can I put this mildly – insanely difficult. Trying to discern the best route for your meager advertising dollars is a brain-melting exercise, and one that may not even see any real results once you’ve figured it out. Getting anyone – even indie book blogs – to review your work is like herding cats, as most of them are already buried under months-long backlog and their submission requirements are getting stricter and stricter as time goes on.

So, while self-publishing might be easier and provide a more immediate, if smaller, return, there’s an almost ironclad guarantee that nobody will even see your book in the first place. Thus, you can’t really sell your book to anyone other than friends and family, sad trombone.

Then why am I now taking a serious lean toward self-publishing my first series of novels?

The short answer is that it feels right for me. I’m not writing a book for money or prestige. While it would give me an amazing heartswell to see one of my books on the shelf at Powell’s, that bit of bragging rights isn’t where my motivations lie. Nor have I ever harbored the illusion that I’d ever be a millionaire playboy philanthropist author. I’m not Richard Castle.

I have stories in my brain, and I want to tell them. I’ve probably forgotten more stories over my life than I’ve saved, mostly because I never really thought about writing them down until the last several years. Writing a book has been exhilarating for me, and I just want it out there, where people can read it. So, when I read a ton of articles from both successful and not-so-successful self-published authors, it’s hard to discern which path is the right one.

In almost every case of someone who’s not an author, the “correct” path is determined by potential financial gain. The idea is that self-publishing is akin to painting a diamond grey and throwing it into a gravel pit expecting someone to find it later. And, to some degree, that’s true. Bestsellers are virtually always backed by a publisher, even if they were self-published first (ala Fifty Shades of Grey).

But if financial gain isn’t really the goal, which is the better option?

That question is harder to answer. The vast majority of fiction authors have other means of income – usually centered around writing, yes, but it’s not their books alone. So finances aren’t really a concern for me, because even if I get traditionally published there’s no guarantee that I’ll even get a “living wage” off of whatever advance I might find as a new author.

And, once you take the money out of the equation, there are a few things that might be deal breakers for me when it comes to traditional publishing. First, is the publishing industry’s notorious reputation for being glacially slow. The time frame from securing an agent to seeing your novel published is measured in double-digit-months, and sometimes years. Second, most publishers want an ironclad non-compete clause in their contract. This prevents authors from doing any kind of work on the same property in any other form – such as digital shorts, stories in fiction magazines, or novellas published through other means. Third, the author has almost no control over subsidiary rights – like foreign language editions or film rights. So I, as the author, have little-to-no say in who makes a movie of my book, if that route becomes a reality.

But most important, for me, is creative control. In this particular instance we’re not talking about a single novel. It’s not a thriller or a romance novel or a dystopian YA book – it’s an epic fantasy series. Series. I’ve already got the framework for 3 ½ books planned, and I know how the whole series is supposed to end. Getting a contract for a potentially 5-book series at a traditional publisher, for a first-time author, for an epic fantasy series, is nigh-impossible. The contract side isn’t a discouragement, though, it’s the simple idea that I might not be able to see the series through like I want to, even though this story’s been in my head for over a decade.

No one should think that I’m saying this because I’ve been rejected too many times. Every major famous author has stories about how many times they were rejected before they sold their first manuscript, and I’m not close to the 50-100 range that many of them are (I’ve been rejected 10 times). So, when I say that I’m leaning toward self-publishing this bad-boy, it’s because I think it might just be the right path for me.

The creative control, the freedom from contracts, the bigger royalties, and the flexibility of distribution are all very attractive to me. It means that I’ll have to put in a metric fuck ton more work than if I had a publisher at my back, but I ain’ scurred. Just know that for brief periods of time during the process you’ll see me turn into a straight-up shill, and I am absolutely not afraid to beg for word-of-mouth publicity.

I said before that I hadn’t made a final decision on which path to take, but it looks like I’m pretty close. And the closer I get to finishing my 4th (and I hope final) draft, the more pressing that decision becomes. We’ll see.

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Thoughts On The Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure 2014

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Poker TV, in general, is pretty much crap. While I enjoy watching the WSOP broadcasts and I used to enjoy the WPT, they are – as every poker player tries to make clear – not an accurate representation of the game. A lot gets edited out and plays that seem weird in a 2-hour show make total sense if you can see the 7 hours of play that led up to it.

One of my vices, right now, are the European Poker Tour live-streams. I don’t watch a lot of them because, being held in Europe, their timeline doesn’t usually match my sleep schedule. The one event I try to watch each year, though, is the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure, a large tournament held annually at the Atlantis Resort & Casino in the Bahamas. Several years ago, when Pokerstars partnered with the EPT, this became an EPT event despite not being anywhere near Europe.

The live streams, for the most part, are played without showing the hole cards. The featured tables have the capability, but they don’t start broadcasting with hole cards until the final table, which they play on a 1-hour delay so that it doesn’t affect play (much). Even without hole cards the broadcasts are engrossing, mostly because they are entirely uncut. You get to see every move a player makes, and you get a real sense for the flow of a major multi-table tournament. That didn’t work out quite the way I’d have liked for this year’s PCA, though.

Poker tournaments are unpredictable, and players will bust at the strangest times. In this particular case, Day 5 of the tournament was playing down from 20 players to the final table of 8. The day ended up being very short, with the 9th place player busting less than 5 hours into the day.

What did this mean for the final table? It meant that every player at the table was super deep-stacked, with the average stack having almost 100 big blinds, and even the shortest stack sitting on almost 40. While that made for some awesome deep-stack poker when it was 8- and 7-handed, it also made for an insanely long final table and one of the most boring heads-up competitions I’ve ever seen.

I started watching the live stream at around 11:15am on Monday morning. The final table wrapped up at around 2:45am Tuesday. The 3-handed and heads-up battles lasted hours, and the tournament wound up with a really unfortunate end.

Before I talk about the ending, though, I wanted to touch on something that – as a “poker enthusiast” – I found really interesting. When the tournament got down to 3-handed between Mike McDonald, Isaac Baron, and Dominik Panka, the players stopped the tournament to make a deal. This is pretty standard in large tournaments – the top few payouts are extremely weighted toward first place, and the players like to flatten that out and limit their liability a bit.

Since this was a live-stream and not an edited show, they actually filmed and showed the entire process of the deal. The players discussed their chip-stacks and worked with the tournament directors to flatten the payouts, and the tournament directors actually adjusted the direct payouts so that the players wouldn’t have to come to some sort of under-the-table agreement. Rather than over a million dollars separating 1st and 3rd place, things rounded out to all 3 players getting over a million with only 350,000-ish separating 1st and 3rd. In addition, they set aside 100k to “play for”, that would go solely to the winner along with the title.

As boring as it may sound, I was fascinated by the discussion between the players as they worked out the math using a method called Independent Chip Modeling (or ICM) as a guide. Seeing the tournament directors getting involved was awesome, too, because it’s so much safer for the players when there’s an external entity doling out the money instead of forcing them to rely on and trust each others’ individual judgment to make sure they get paid. This is one of the downsides to the WSOP, in my opinion: They do not endorse or support deal-making, even though it’s an integral part of the larger game, and players have gotten screwed in the past when they’ve attempted to make off-the-books deals with less than trustworthy players.

But I digress. I thought it was cool.

What wasn’t cool was one of the most boring heads-up battles I’ve ever watched. While there were a few interesting hands it was all very straightforward, with McDonald in the lead for what seemed like an eon. Even worse, though, was that after 14 hours of final table coverage, the final half hour of the tournament came due to a fatigue-induced implosion by the tournament favorite, Mike McDonald.

I was rooting for McDonald the whole way. I like the guy. He’s super smart, he’s one of the best No-Limit Hold ‘Em players of the last ten years, and he was well on his way to becoming the first ever 2-time EPT champion. He had small-balled the living crap out of Panka for a couple of hours, maintaining anywhere from a 3-2 to a 2-1 chip lead over him at almost all times. It was when he had a 2-1 chip lead that his slide began, and he sloughed off the tournament on two very suspect hands.

The first hand was 3-betting Panka with KJo. Panka had pocket 9’s and 4-bet shoved. After thinkin for less than a minute, McDonald made a senseless call of Panka’s shove. The 9’s held up and the chip stacks reversed, giving Panka a chip lead that he never relinquished.

I mostly think that McDonald just wanted the tournament over, and was willing to flip for it. I have a feeling that in the back of his mind he had the thought that, under most circumstances, even if he lost the hand he had enough of a skill advantage over Panka that he could battle his way back from a 2-1 chip deficit by using the same small-ball tactics he’d been punishing the guy with all night, but he figured he could end an already long night – where he was obviously fading fast – if he won a simple race.

Unfortunately, a combination of fatigue on McDonald’s part and solid big-stack play on Panka’s part just seemed to wear him down. When Panka raised with A2o after having built a 4-1 chip lead, McDonald completely imploded, making an impatient bluff-shove with 7-4 suited. It was a move that McDonald just didn’t need to make, but you could tell he was exhausted. Panka flopped a meaningless 2, and the board gave McDonald a glimmer of hope when he turned a 7, but an Ace on the river sealed the deal for Panka.

It’s a shame. And a real disappointment for someone who’d watched 14 hours of poker that day and seen McDonald smoothly transition from table domination to chipstack conservation to soul-reading hero calls, proving why he was the favorite right up until a massive deterioration in the last hour of play.

As much a fan as I am of watching these tournaments live, this one gave me pause about watching the next one all the way through. I’m not sure I can stomach seeing that much awesome poker get tossed aside by fatigue and impatience again.

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Cascading Inspiration

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Since I’ve begun making a solid attempt at writing, I’ve found that the most fun I have “on the job” is when I get sudden, cascading bursts of inspiration.

I’m working on the fourth draft of my first novel, incorporating feedback from my beta readers. I received some invaluable feedback which has resulted in a ton of corrections and re-writes. Some of the most significant changes come at the expense of a character that – only after hearing from readers – I’ve figured is superfluous. So, the vast majority of that character’s appearance – including two full chapters written from his perspective – is being removed from the book.

In the process of working on these re-writes I, of course, have found a number of other changes – both structural and grammatical – that I’ve been working on. Yesterday, a series of those changes sparked a fire in my brain about how the final conflict in my book comes about, and prompted me to write several pages of notes on how to change it. Ideally, the changes will simultaneously add some plausibility to the scene and ratchet up the excitement of the book’s climax, but the brainstorming session brought with it an unexpected benefit.

While I was writing notes for the new scene, I kept thinking up little bits of info for the second book in the series, on which I have only just started working. As I began taking these notes I found myself getting frustrated, much like a kid who has a video game waiting for him but has to finish his chores before he gets to play. The moment I finished the notes for the first book, I plummeted head-first into the notes for the second, and I found myself doing something I haven’t done before: plotting out an entire character’s throughline for the second book.

The notes for the first book would be indecipherable to anyone but me. They’re a haphazard pile of written and re-written ideas with passages scratched out or highlighted, margin notes, and scribbled notes on the margin notes. The “process” worked great for me, because I’d just brain dump into my notes journal anytime inspiration struck.

That’s sort of what happened this time, too, but the process cascaded from a few notes on book one’s climax to scattered character and plot notes for book two to organizing book two ideas and separating them from the book three notes to writing out the entire path of one of the three plotlines in book two. It’s rare that I’ve been struck by this type of hardcore inspiration all at once, and it felt fantastic.

This, without question, is the most fun I have with my writing. Generating random ideas and figuring out whether they’ll work or whether they’re ridiculous (or maybe a combination of both) is invigorating, and tends to be way more interesting than actually coming up with the words. The wordsmithing part of writing is an odd combination of tension, fun, and drudgery, but brainstorming sessions like this one are all the gaiety with none of the grind.

And the beautiful interconnectedness of it all? Yesterday’s note session was like cranking the generator handle that charged up my literary batteries. I can’t wait to dig deep into the second book.

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Weekly Pulls, January 9th

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Happy New Year! Yeah, I know I missed last week’s pulls, but that’s what we get when new release day is on New Year’s Eve. Aaaannnyyywwwaaayyy…

Three is a consistent book, but its historical trappings may not be for everyone. I like it, and think you should check it out when it comes out in trade form. Letter 44 lost me a little bit with the second issue. Although it had a pretty brilliant opener, I’m not entirely sold on the ongoing story. Issue 3 may be a make-or-break point for me on that book. Mike Carey’s Suicide Risk is consistent, and is my remaining connection to superhero books each month since I don’t read Marvel or DC, and I’m hoping that Fatale picks back up for me since it’s been a little slow the last few issues. On the opposite end of that spectrum…

sheltered_6_coverSheltered continues to be a solid thriller, and ratchets up the tension of its “pre-apocalyptic” world with every issue. The beauty of this book is its firm grounding in human interaction, in a story where we don’t actually know whether an apocalypse is coming (or has come) or not. The sense of absolute isolation created by the scenario that drives the narrative is fantastic, and has me looking forward to every new issue.

sex_criminals_4_coverSex Criminals is one of the strongest books on my shelf right now. the tone is fantastic, the story is compelling, the humor is perfectly delivered. This book just can’t get much better, and this is one of the few comics that I re-read previous issues every time a new one comes out just for the fun of it. What a fantastic book.

This week’s Honorable Mentions: Having just read the entire original series, I’m still a little iffy on 100 Bullets: Brother Lono #7. If you liked it, though, here’s more of it, centered around the original’s number one psychopath. I’m not gonna lie, I loves me some Morning Glories but I read it in hardcover so I’ll have to wait to find out what happens in this week’s Morning Glories #36.

Luke’s Picks for January 9th, 2014: Fatale #19, Letter 44 #3, Sex Criminals #4, Sheltered #6, Suicide Risk #9, Three #4