Category: Thoughts

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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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On Endings and New Beginnings

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For most of my life, I’ve failed to get along with my older brother. Our relationship, even when we were kids, was… strained. One of the clearest memories I have of him from my childhood was from just before Christmas, 1989, when I was eleven. Like all kids do, we were searching around our house for our carefully hidden Christmas presents, and I happened to find mine, tucked away in the bottom of the closet of my parent’s camper-trailer. It was a Nintendo GameBoy, the original one, the year it launched.

I had fiddled around with a GameBoy at a local video store and had been begging for one for months. I was out-of-my-mind excited for it. In my euphoria I confided in my big brother about what I’d found. He seemed to share my excitement, telling me how cool it was. That night, I was pulled into our dining room by my parents and dressed down for having looked for and found the presents. My mom was crying – they’d put a lot of planning into this and were disappointed that I ruined the surprise. They contemplated the idea of returning the gift rather than giving it to me. My brother had told them what I’d done.

It might give you an inkling for the direction of this post, when that’s one of the strongest memories I have of my childhood relationship with my brother. For an eleven-year-old, I felt a profound sense of betrayal. I’d looked up to him before then – who doesn’t look up to their big brother? – but I rarely ever trusted him after that point, especially not during our childhood. That event set the tone for our relationship for years to come, and gave me a harsh lesson in the care I must take in choosing who I can trust. If not my own big brother, then who?

Over the years, our relationship had never been what you’d call good. He wasn’t really around for most of my junior high years, having shipped off to the Air Force after graduating high-school. Even after he’d been discharged a few years later and was living somewhat close by, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with him. When I did, it invariably spiraled into some sort of argument. I remember, when I was in high school, almost coming to blows with him in our house in central Oregon one day, barely dodging out of range of one of his punches.

My brother’s relationship to our family was never very tight. The older he got, the more embittered he became, which led not only to his own constant state of unhappiness but seemingly endless attempts to infringe on the happiness of the rest of our family. More times that I can count, my father or I would have to comfort my mother after he’d made some particularly horrendous comment to her, or railed against some decision or other that my parents had made through the course of their lives. In spite of everything my parents had done for him, there was always another poisonous comment or graceless barb waiting in the wings.

His was an attitude of “I didn’t ask to be born; the world owes me.” That attitude, combined with a constitutional lack of the ability to agree to disagree, poisoned every single relationship my brother ever attempted, from minor acquaintances to significant others to the closest of family. In his world, it is not possible for someone to differ from his opinion without that person being naive, ignorant, fascist, or some combination of the three.

We hung out more often through the late 90’s and early 00’s, but the more time we spent together, the more tense our relationship became. The pressure of our incompatibility would just build and build until finally exploding. Through most of our adult life, our interactions were punctuated by long periods of no contact, inevitably precipitated by some horrendous, un-winnable argument. Over the years, the arguments got worse and worse, not only in intensity but in content. The last truly major argument we had, he was blaming my ailing father for the death of our mother, who passed away from an accidental drug overdose due to a faulty medicine patch (needless to say, it had nothing to do with my father at all).

After that incident, our relationship was basically irreparable. Less than a year later my father passed away, and we made some superficial attempts to be somewhat brotherly again. The idea was a doomed one, unstable because of his dislike for me and my distrust of him. The tragedy of my father’s death brought us back into each other’s presence, but never really brought us closer. I’d realized this, but made the attempt anyway, out of an overinflated sense of family obligation that was never reciprocated. Everyone with whom I confided told me to not bother making the attempt, but I did it anyway because… well, because he was my brother.

Over recent years, not only had we grown apart because of our differing political opinions and underlying mistrust, but he continued to fall down a rabbit hole of borderline racism, blatant homophobia, and excruciatingly ingrained misogyny. But amongst all of that, the thing that I could no longer stand was simply his treatment of the people in his life. The pedestal upon which he placed himself never allowed for anyone to rise out of the muck he perceived them to wallow in, which resulted in a wild and never-ending disrespect for everyone around him.

We’d had yet another falling out a couple of years ago, mostly over political ideals. I asked him to stay away for a while; I needed a break from him if there were ever going to be a chance of repairing what little bond we still clung to. I’d seen him only a handful of times over the last couple of years, mostly on holidays. After spending a mostly nice and only slightly awkward Christmas together this year, he trod all over our relationship once again.

Where am I going with all of this? It starts here:

A few weeks before Christmas I’d watched this video, and it got me thinking. Thinking about the strain of my relationship with my brother, and the impact it was having on my life. Thinking about how often I talked about some shitty comment or other that he had made, thinking about how much of my thought-space he was occupying even without being directly involved in my life. Thinking about how stressed I was every single time I thought about him coming over and spending time in my home, or spending time with him in public.

Ash Beckham’s speech resonated with me deeper than I thought it would, pointing out my own “closet” – that hard conversation I’d had yet to have. Every time I’d had a falling out with my brother, I’d somehow let him back into my life. In most cases, it required an ever-escalating reason to overcome the initial transgression, the final time being the death of my father. I found that my reasoning was always something to the effect of “he’s the only brother I’ve got”. Over time, I began to realize (but didn’t want to admit) that that reasoning wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t enough to overpower all the negativity that came with just being in my brother’s presence.

A few days after Christmas, he lobbed the grenade that finished our relationship. It wasn’t anything that much worse than things he’d done in the past, but it was at a time when I’d finally come to grips with the fact that my familial bond with my big brother just didn’t exist. When, in one fell swoop, he disrespected one of my best friends, my brother-in-law, myself, and even the nice Christmas I’d organized for our family, I couldn’t hold the load anymore.

My brother’s M.O. has always been to act inappropriately and expect an apology after-the-fact to erase his actions. When he attempted his half-assed apology this time, I made the conscious decision not to accept it. I told him it was time for us to go our separate ways. I was oddly serene about it – I wasn’t angry or hurt or upset, I just wanted it over with. I was angered by his actions toward one of my friends, but I wished him no ill-will and simply told him that we’d be better off not being around each other.

In his final act of our relationship, my brother began by taking offense at my “tolerance” of him, and then proceeded to insult almost every portion of my life from my “oversensitivity” to my political stance to my career choices to my marriage, and in the course of that rant provided perfect and final justification for my decision to divest him from my life.

“Family” and “blood” are not synonymous. Whether you’re related by blood or you’ve taken the leap to accept someone as your family, there has to be limits to how far that idea will protect them from consequences. If someone has a cancerous presence in your life, you absolutely must have the will to excise them, regardless of any artificial constructs you may be using to support the idea that the relationship is necessary or unbreakable. We don’t have enough time on this earth to for those ideas to give someone carte blanche to infringe on our happiness.

It took a lot of years and a lot of heartache, stress, tears, and hand-wringing for me to learn this lesson. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I’ve freed up both the mental and emotional space that was occupied by my relationship with my brother, and it’s amazing how relaxed it’s made me. I know that this wasn’t a one-way street – he didn’t get along with me just as much as I didn’t get along with him – so hopefully he’s found the same sort of peace from this parting that I have.

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Obligatory New Year’s Post

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I’ve never quite subscribed to the “newness” of beginning a new year, because it’s really just another day. I do, however, understand the idea of finding reasons for a fresh start. Whether I think it’s an artificial construct or not is immaterial – if it’s helpful, it’s helpful. I’m using the start of this new year not (entirely) to change old bad habits, but instead to reinforce good ones and continue the new path I set myself on at the beginning of 2013.

2013 was a fantastic year for me. In truth, I have to encompass November and December of 2012 into my “2013”, because that’s when my wife and I bought our first house. We just celebrated our first full year of home-ownership, and that feels fantastic.

The purchase of the house has allowed me to rekindle some interests that had fallen by the wayside. I’m an avid poker player, but my home game had suffered for a few years. In the new space I’ve been able to breathe new life into the game, and now it’s a weekly Friday night fixture. Being huge geeks, as well, we’ve started the same thing for our waning board game habit. We absolutely love traditional games – board games, card games, RPG’s, and their ilk – but struggled to get any regular group together to play. That’s starting to change now, and it feels great.

We celebrated our 15th anniversary in November, and did so in style, spending almost a month road-tripping through Australia from Sunshine Coast (about an hour north of Brisbane) to Port Campbell (about 3 hours southwest of Melbourne), before wrapping up the trip in Melbourne and Auckland, New Zealand. It was, without question, the best vacation of my life (just edging out a two-week trip to Europe we took in the summer of 2012).

I finished writing my first novel and sent it to beta readers, and am now incorporating their feedback into the fourth draft. I began work on the second novel in the same series, and have begun querying agents in an attempt to get traditionally published.

For the first several months after leaving my day job, I concentrated really hardcore on writing, and succeeded in finishing, revising, and re-revising a novel. In the last several months of the year? Not so much. It’s now my time to find not only the creative juices that drove that push, but to reinforce the daily writing habits that helped it to be successful. I’ve begun building a routine at home for maintaining our house and being a stay-at-home husband. Every chore I complete is one that my wife doesn’t have to, so now that she’s bringing home the bacon, I repay her by giving her more free time away from work. I’ve been able to concentrate more on Trade Secrets, my comic book podcast, so that we are on a more definitive schedule and don’t have nearly as many interruptions. All of these are habits that I want to reinforce, and they all basically boil down to concentration, devotion, and routine.

Of course, these good habits were balanced by one fairly bad one.

Over the last year, I found myself more and more inured to the instant gratification provided by social media feedback. I put out a post, and instantly get Likes or Favorites or Shares or ReTweets, and that gratification almost became an addiction. My attention span shortened and I became unable to wait for delayed gratification of any kind. I’d be reading a book or playing a video game, and find myself pausing every 20 minutes or between every chapter to check Facebook or Twitter, breathlessly waiting for the refresh to show me that I had new Notifications or Connections.

Those little micro-gratifications were becoming an outright interruption to almost everything I did, and eroded my sense of accomplishment in anything real or lasting. Tasks began to take longer because I needed to check my feeds with regularity, and constantly stepping away from long-form tasks to log into Twitter screwed with my ability to focus. It was almost like developing ADHD.

I don’t want it to seem like I’m putting down social media. I love it. LOVE IT. It’s given me the chance to interact with people I never would have before, and I’ve made some genuine friends online whom I never would have met otherwise. I’d never give it up entirely, but I found that my patience, focus, and attention span were all severely suffering. And those are pretty much the three most important things for a writer to be successful.

The one thing I know about my personality is that if something isn’t working for me, I have trouble easing off. It’s easier for me to quit things cold-turkey and slowly re-introduce them after their influence has been lessened or broken. So that’s what January is for me: my cold-turkey social media detox. I’m going to take a month to re-learn what it means to wait for things and accomplish goals without constant interruption, all the while reinforcing the traits and habits that made 2013 so great for me. Hopefully when February rolls around, I’ll be able to reintroduce Facebook and Twitter in small increments, and eventually find a real balance with them back in my routine.

I’ve had some really shitty years in the past. Between 2007 and 2010, I had lost a couple of friends and hit some really rocky patches with others, had been passed over for several jobs, had lost my way creatively, I had lost both of my parents, and I was mired in the fallout from those deaths. If 2013 has taught me anything, it’s this very simple lesson:

It gets better.

I hope you all had a great 2013. If not, then I hope you’re looking forward to 2014 and beyond. Happy new year!

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The End of a Small Era

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Today marks the end of a small era in my life: the publication of the final episode of the After The Fact podcast.

2009 was a really rough year for me. Amongst a terrible work/life balance, personal issues with people at my job, and general life stresses, we had taken in my terminally ill father to live with us so we could care for him. For part of that time we were also letting my brother – whom I do not generally get along with – stay with us. The last few months of that year were the most stressful of my life. My job sucked and my creative life was nonexistent. My brother and I had a terrible falling out. All of this was putting strain on my marriage. And then my father passed away on Christmas Day.

I was not in the best mental space of my life. The next few weeks were just a haze of trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other. I was desperate to find something to concentrate on to take my mind off of all the bullshit.

That same year I’d had an idea to do a podcast about classic video games, a subject I was (and still am) fairly passionate about. I have some pretty pointed opinions about older games – especially about the effect of nostalgia on coloring our opinions of a game’s actual quality – and I wanted to talk about that very topic. It had only been a passing notion until the beginning of 2010, when I decided to do whatever I needed to do to make it a reality.

At the beginning, it was a distraction; something to keep my mind occupied so that I wouldn’t just fall into despair. It was a proof of concept for cheap, homemade podcasting that could compete in quality with the high-end shows from 1up and IGN and Destructoid. It was really hard. And, for something that I was doing as a hobby, surprisingly rewarding.

The show never had a hell of a lot of fans. There were a few dedicated followers that loved the show as much as we loved to make it, but I don’t think our real human downloads ever broke 600 for any episode. But it didn’t matter, because we were more interested in the discussions than whether or not we had a huge fanbase. We just loved doing the show. I, especially, took solace in my time preparing, producing, hosting, and publishing After The Fact. It not only allowed me time to heal from quite possibly the worst year of my life, but rekindled a creative spark within me that had been dormant for a long time.

Over time, the show became more and more difficult to maintain. Gaming podcasts by gaming journalists are easier, because it’s those journalists day-job to learn, know, write, and talk about games. The podcasts they do are practically just recordings of their day-to-day work conversations. Our prep for After The Fact was more difficult only because it was layering another time-consuming hobby into lives that were already basically full.

While I never got “burned out” on the show, in the traditional sense, the burden of its production had become taxing after a while. When it all started it was a distraction, but we had pushed so hard for it to become quality entertainment that I very quickly grew to love the show and every minute I was on it. But as I switched to a more intense job and my wife’s work ramped up, and then we expanded into more podcasts on Geekerific.com, it became harder and harder to maintain the quality bar we’d set for ourselves. So we decided to end the show on in high note.

And I think we’ve succeeded. In the middle of 2012 we had a meeting about what the final 10 episodes of the show would look like. Our list of games we wanted to cover expanded to 15 – ending the show at episode 80 rather than the initially-planned 75 – and those last 15 shows turned out to be some of the most solid in our run. And some of the most interesting, for me, because they contained some of the most fun games in the show’s four-year run.

And now, it’s over. I just posted the finished, final episode to the web, and that small-but-important era of my life comes to a close. I’m extremely happy with the quality of the show we produced over the last four years, and I’m glad we decided to end the show before it fell apart on its own. But as I posted the final episode I couldn’t help but look back at the terrible time in my life that stood as the impetus for its creation, and everything the show has grown to mean for me over its span.

The show helped me through a difficult time, re-sparked my creative fire, solidified some of my best friendships, introduced me to some new experiences, taught me a ton of new skills, and was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t very sad to see it go, but now it’s time to move on to new things. I’ve already started the “next phase” of my life, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me.

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On Leaving Things Behind

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On Thursday of last week, I finished the second draft of my first novel. This weekend I sent it off to a proofreader, and once the proofread pass is finished I’ll send it off to beta readers. I’m unbelievably stoked and absolutely fucking terrified.

I find myself, this Monday morning, reflecting on all of the things going on in my life now that I’m looking forward to beginning my second novel. If you’ve read my blog you know that my obligations and hobbies are pretty much split between writing, podcasting, video games, comic books, and poker. There was once a time where the biggest output of effort (aside from my marriage, of course) was a live-action roleplaying game called Amtgard.

I attended my first LARP in my sophomore year of high school in 1992. It was the Yakima, WA chapter of a national game called New England Roleplaying Organization, or NERO for short. For people who don’t LARP, the hobby is vilified as quite possibly the nerdiest endeavor one could partake in. It is seen as being populated by closeted dorks with no social skills who are outcasts even amongst their own hobbies.

For me this couldn’t have been further from the truth. When I began playing NERO I was about as introverted and awkward as a nerd could get. Playing that LARP – and several others since – was truly what drove me out of that shell, out of my comfort zone. LARPing forced me to get out of my house and interact with other, like-minded people, and I credit it with being the catalyst that completely changed my personality.

cal_1Once I moved away from home to go to college, I wasn’t able to attend NERO anymore, and I missed it. For almost two years I wasn’t part of any live-action games at all. When I met my ex-girlfriend, she had been part of Amtgard, a LARP that started in El Paso, Texas in 1983, for several years already. It wasn’t the same as NERO – being much less roleplay oriented and more geared toward live combat games – but it was something.

I began playing Amtgard in 1996. I played consistently for eleven years until “retiring” from the game in 2007. Over the course of that time I founded a chapter that is still running strong to this day, founded one of the longest-running recurring campout events in the Pacific Northwest, and was a fixture of the game in this area the entire time I was part of it. It is a humongous part of my history, and a formative piece of my life.

Toward the end of my time in the game, my mood began to sour. As with any major hobby, there are people who take it too seriously, and whose lives become so wrapped up in it that they know no other form of personal gratification. For them, the game is no longer a hobby – it becomes their entire self-worth. It was those people – while few, very loud – who began leaching the fun out of the game for me. I was there to gather with friends, play a game that I enjoyed, and have a good time. They were there to advance their reputations by any and all means necessary.

In 2006, I ran my last major event in Amtgard before retiring from the game. 90% of the event was extremely successful, in the face of some bad apples striving to ruin it. In the closing minutes of the event, that group decided to vandalize a state park structure as a parting shot toward me on their way out of the event. With my mood already soured toward the game as a whole, dealing with the fallout from this action was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I lasted less than a year in the game before finally calling it quits.

Amtgard was a huge part of my life. It was my dominant hobby and the foundation of my entire social circle. I knew that leaving it behind was necessary, but it crushed me at the time. It was like leaving my family behind. It hurt. A lot.

cal_2Over the next several years, my attentions were diverted from the game I’d left behind. My parents both passed away about 2½ years apart right after leaving the game, I was hired into a job I’d been striving to get for quite some time, I began writing more regularly, and I started a podcast. I filled the void with a lot of things I realized I’d been missing over the years, pouring my efforts into creative pursuits that I’d been setting aside in favor of the game.

Looking back, I realize that I may have actually hamstrung my real life in the late ‘90’s by being too active in my hobby. I loved Amtgard for what it gave me – hell, I can directly attribute it to meeting my wife – but, in retrospect, I allowed my career pursuits and even my last few quarters at college suffer in favor of putting my time and energy into the game. And I only realized that fully once I found out what my life was like without it.

There have been several times over the last 5 years that I’ve thought seriously about going back and becoming a regular again. I can never seem to find the time now, though; those extra minutes and hours now being filled with the things that are fulfilling me domestically and creatively. But I still have those urges… To hang out with the old crew, to get drunk around a campfire telling stories, to hit people with foam-padded sticks, to continue my journey toward awards and honors within the game – namely the Knighthood I never attained.

Never has that pull been stronger than in the last few weeks. I was reminiscing with a few friends who were also long-time Amtgarders, while also trying to explain the game to some people who were not familiar with it. It was like a flashback to the innumerable times I recruited a new player into the group that I was running at the time, or explained the game to onlookers while we were playing out in the park. The nostalgia ran high, and I felt the undeniable pull to go play again.

And I had a ton of fun doing so. I went out to the park and reminded myself how old and slow I’d become, how sedentary my lifestyle is without it. It’s an extremely physical game and I wasn’t up to it, but I pushed myself anyway and had a blast. I capped off the night by hanging out with a whole group of other long-time Amtgarders, some of whom I hadn’t seen since my exit in 2007.

I was hyped again. All the long-dormant neurons were firing, pulling me back toward the game that I’d once loved and lost. I thought about fighting more, making new garb, and going to campouts. I thought of all the fun I used to have… and all of these thoughts immediately led into all the anger at everything wrong with the game as a whole.

See, Amtgard isn’t just a fighting sport, it’s also got a huge element of in-game and interpersonal politics. The interpersonal politics are inherent in any large group activity. Friendships bloom and die, rivalries grow and fester, relationships burn bright and flame out. The in-game politics – each group is run by elected officials – are more prevalent, and tend to bleed into and poison the interpersonal ones. Again, this isn’t a new thing for any group (just look at the recent trials and tribulations of the SFWA). I found, during my time in the game, that the game’s politics hold an unreasonable sway in many players’ lives and that they dictated the course of too many friendships and rivalries.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve realized that none of that has changed. The game is still the same game it was when I started playing 17 years ago. The politics still dominate and the drama still runs high. Many of the older players are still playing, and new players are entering the fold all the time, but the game never seems to advance or recover from the things that spoiled my enjoyment of it.

Every time I return I’ve been greeted by varying numbers of older players who politely grill me about whether I’m coming back full time and what they can do to draw me back in. Every time this has happened I’ve wondered why they’re pushing so hard. I mean, I won’t deny that I may have had some influence on the game in my time, but no one cared when I left. I didn’t burn out… I faded away.

And then it hit me: it’s desperation. The old guard in the game are – just like in real life – longing for times past, when things were “better”, and desperate to commiserate with people who know of the glory days. I saw the same thing amongst the “old timers” when I first joined the game, and now I see it from their point of view – only I’m on the outside looking in. I see a game that is struggling with the exact same problems it had when I was a noob, just under a different regime. I realize that Amtgard has never changed – but I have.

So now, although I’m not facing the same decision that I had to make in 2007, I’m facing the next tier of that same process. I don’t believe I have even the time to devote to being just an Amtgard player. When I left it, so many years ago, I replaced it. There is no longer an Amtgard-shaped hole in my life. Although nostalgia will pull at that wound, it’s been stitched up, healed, and well scarred over.

I now sit, scratching at that scar, wondering if I ever completely left the game like I wanted to. Like I needed to. Amtgard was a part of me all through my twenties. But I’m not in my twenties anymore, and with a five-year separation from the game, I can’t say it has a place in my thirties. I think, maybe, it’s time for me not just to leave the game, but to leave it behind.

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Everything Needs An Ending

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I’ve had several conversations on my comic book podcast, Trade Secrets, about continuity in long-running comic books and how “mainstream” books differ from creator-owned works. It became very apparent to me this week, when I realized that my subscription list at my comic shop contains only a single Big 2 comic book: Rick Remender’s Captain America.

I grew up on comic books, but I never really grew up on the Marvel or DC lexicon like many kids did. I’m not sure what it was that kept my interests away from them, but they just never grabbed me like other books. Before I started getting comics of my own I’d read my brother’s books, which consisted mostly of Vigilante and ElfQuest. When I started buying my own stuff it was related to my favorite cartoons, so my first comics were Transformers and G.I. Joe.

When the ’90’s rolled around and Image was born, I was all about the first few comics they made. I was a humongous Spawn fan, and I really enjoyed The Savage Dragon. I had collected some of the lesser (at the time) Marvel books like X-Factor, but Marvel’s premier books and DC’s stuff just weren’t my thing. Over time, I even began to drop my favorite Image books, because I kept losing interest. Stories dragged on and on and there was never any resolution to anything. Everything was a cliffhanger, and for every plot thread that closed, two opened.

When I look at my current habits in consuming all kinds of media – be it books, television, movies, or comic books – I realized how much I want endings. I don’t want to be indefinitely strung along by a character’s plight. People don’t live forever, and when I see that Peter Parker is still in his mid-thirties after 60 years of comics, or that Bruce Wayne is still the same grumpy, mid-40’s playboy he was in, well, the mid ’40’s, I just lose interest. No matter how good an individual story might be involving those characters, they’re never going to end. I’m never going to get any kind of closure.

I don’t generally watch TV shows that are still running anymore (and I’ll limit this statement to dramas, because sitcoms don’t really count). I have become reluctant to go to a movie that I know is part of a series that won’t be finished for years (a perfect example: I haven’t seen The Hobbit yet, and I probably won’t watch any of that series in theaters). I won’t start a book series unless I know there’s a definitive end to it, which is why I haven’t started The Song of Ice and Fire yet.

I no longer collect comic books from the Big 2, because I know that no matter how much I love a story or a creative team, that story is never going to be the end of the story, and the creative team will be shuffled around at some point.

Marvel NOW! was the first time in a long time that I was excited by mainstream Marvel titles. The creative teams were astounding and it looked like they were going to give a fresh take on some of their tried-and-true heroes. I picked up Uncanny Avengers, Avengers, and Captain America, and quickly realized that I got caught up in the hype and may have made a mistake. I dropped Uncanny Avengers pretty fast, and this last week dropped Avengers. I’m going to stick with Captain America for a little while because it reminds me heavily of Remender’s Fear Agent (one of my all time favorite books) and it’s effectively an “elseworlds” or “what if” title that will hopefully come to a reasonable conclusion.

But that’s just it: Although Marvel NOW! and DC’s New 52 represented new beginnings for these long-running franchises, they still don’t represent any kind of ending. There is no promise of self-contained stories. There is still no permanent death for characters. No meaningful aging, and rarely any lasting growth. There will never be any closure.

And I can’t stand the thought of that. Continuing stories with characters that I love are great, but I want even the longest ones to END at some point. I need to know that there is a denouement, and that I’ll get some satisfaction that my favorite character’s actions were actually meaningful. They don’t have to be heroic or even happy, but without an ending, nothing has any meaning. There’s no arc It’s just a series of false heartbeats in an eternal flatline, and while the first few might represent some semblance of hope, eventually cynicism sets in and there’s no longer any reason to care.

So now, if I don’t have at least a decent inkling that an ending is coming, I won’t partake until something is already over. I don’t watch ongoing TV shows until they’ve ended anymore (with Supernatural being the one exception right now). I don’t start book series unless I know how many books the author intends. I generally don’t watch movies that I know don’t have some semblance of a wrap-up. And I don’t collect ongoing comics anymore.

I’ve fallen in love with independent and creator-owned comics of late. When people look back on the best comics ever made, most will shout to the stars about books like Preacher and Y: The Last Man and 100 Bullets. All books which are great because they’re self contained. They’re stories – not just ongoing background noise. I’m not saying that there haven’t been phenomenal stories told within the pages of Batman or X-Men or Captain America. But the longer a series runs and the more creative teams are given access and input, eventually those older stories get twisted, ignored, or outright shit on.

When I know a book has an ending, I’m all over it. My favorite books right now are maxi-series like The Sixth Gun and The Massive and Fatale and Locke & Key. These are series that have the best of both worlds: long runs that allow for spectacular development, and a definitive arc that comes to a real conclusion.

It’s possible that I’ll become invested in these stories only to find out that the author is incapable of developing an ending that lives up to their ideas (which is my typical experience with Brian K. Vaughn). But I’m willing to take that risk, because – even in that terrible instance – at least it will be over. And maybe once each one of these stories is finished, I’ll look forward to more work from those creators, because they will show me that they’re capable of telling interesting stories.

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Device-Specific Ecosystems Are JUST FINE

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I read a few different “bookish” blogs, and have been getting into the world of prose publishing more and more lately for obvious reasons. I mentioned in one of me previous posts how I’ve seen a lot of people in the traditional book world talking about their transition to eBooks.

A recurring theme of these conversations centers around the major e-Reader makers and their DRM. Many people complain that e-Books available on Kindle, iBooks, and Nook are tethered to those devices, citing that you never had to worry about where you could read a book before eBooks. The book-reading community, as it were, seems to believe that eBooks should be an open platform, and available anywhere, all the time.

First off, I think the term DRM is slightly misused here. Most of the time, “DRM” (Digital Rights Managment) is used to describe the bits of code a company embeds in a particular file to prevent it from being copied (pirated). In the case of eBook readers, it’s less about piracy and more about file format: Each eReader has it’s own proprietary format that ties a piece of content to that particular type of device. The idea being that purchasing a book on Kindle ties you to that device and thus, into Amazon’s ecosystem, is apparently the Devil’s work in the eyes of many readers. My perspective as a geek and gamer places this practice under a wildly different lens.

I grew up playing console video games. My first console was a Nintendo Entertainment System and over the intervening 25+ years I’ve owned almost every major video game console. Having been a staunch Nintendo fan for many years – a stand that has now shifted to Playstation – the idea of “console wars” is ingrained in my childhood. There have always been two or three major console manufacturers vying for real estate in the video game landscape, each with their own proprietary format and exclusive titles.

And that’s never been a problem. If you wanted to play a Mario game, you owned a Nintendo. Same with Sonic & Sega. In the modern era, Playstation has Uncharted and Killzone, Xbox has Halo and Gears of War. I can’t plug a Playstation disc into an XBox. I can’t use a Wii U gamepad on my Playstation. Not only are these divisions expected, but accepted.

So why isn’t the same mentality true of eBooks?

We live in a world where hardware technology does not support itself. It’s too expensive to develop and manufacture, so hardware makers are forced to find other avenues of profit in order to make their devices successful. Console manufacturers don’t make money on their machines – Sony is a great example of this, having only recently started turning a profit on PS3 hardware after spending 7 years selling it at a loss – they make money on licensing fees and software sales.

Amazon loses money on Kindles, Barnes & Noble loses money on Nooks. Even Apple doesn’t turn a profit on iPads. These companies make all of their money – and fund the development of better hardware – by making it as convenient as possible for the owners of their hardware to stay within their own ecosystem and not venture outward. Every Kindle book sale funnels 30% (or more) into Amazon’s coffers. Without that money – if everyone were able to buy their eBooks elsewhere and read them on any device – the Kindle ceases to exist.

So why is that a problem? The major eBook hardware manufacturers have their own exclusive titles, but the vast majority of eBooks are “multiplatform” – either available in a universal format like ePub or PDF, or are simply released in multiple formats for the different hardwares. This is virtually the exact same model that has been used by the video game industry ever since hardware competition generated the tagline “Genesis Does What NintenDon’t”.

Once the digital publishing world settles down, it will no longer be an issue: It makes ZERO sense for a 3rd Party publisher – be them a behemoth like Harper Collins or a self-published author – to limit their exposure by sticking to a single platform without a major exclusivity contract that pays them hefty licensing fees. The vast majority of books will filter out to all platforms, just like video games from major publishers like EA and Ubisoft do.

I’m sure that the big eBook manufacturers will continue to have their own exclusive titles – especially in light of Amazon starting their own publishing house(s) – but the idea that hardware exclusivity is some sort of demon seed that’s destroying the integrity of eBook publishing is… well, it’s old fashioned and silly. Bookish folk who are just now encountering the notion of hardware exclusivity need to realize that this is not a new idea, nor is it a problem.

Besides, books have a huge advantage in this scenario: If all I have is a Playstation and a game isn’t available there, there’s no way for me to just buy the game in a standalone package and play it anyway. If a book isn’t available on your e-reader of choice, you can go buy a physical copy and still read it, legitimately, without any problems.

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Holy F**K I Wrote A Whole Book

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On Wednesday (March 13th, 2013, for those of you reading this IN THE FUTURE), I finished the first draft of my first full-length novel.

Well over 10 years ago I had an idea for a story. Being a geek, it was inspired in part by my gaming hobby. It was a fantasy story, about an artificial being called a construct – a sort of metal golem powered by a magical core. This construct had the ability to read the thoughts of other artificial beings, but an accident sort of hotwires his ability so that he begins receiving the memories of any construct in the vicinity who gets destroyed. Through the vision-memories he learns some startling truths about some very bad people, but the influx of new memories starts driving him insane.

Over time, the idea morphed a few times. At one point I had rejiggered the idea in order to submit it to an open call for novels at Wizards of the Coast, where the story was now set in the Eberron setting and the protagonist was a Warforged – that world’s version of the constructs I envisioned in my own story. I was only 23 at the time, and my writing was… rough, to say the least. My proposal did not get accepted.

Over the next few years, the idea just kept pounding around in my brain. No matter what else I did, at periodic intervals this idea would pop back up, and I’d just keep adding bits to the story. I knew that I wanted to write a series of stories centering around this character. I knew how the first book started, and I had a clear vision of how it ended. I knew the themes that I wanted to run through the book, and little tidbits I knew I wanted to include. The plot just kept banging around in my head.

At the end of 2010, I decided to try and write the first chapter. I knew so clearly how the story began, even though it had evolved quite a bit from my original idea. I sat down and banged out a 3,000 word opening chapter in about two hours, involving our hero’s entrance into the world, having woken up with no memories in a burning room, next to a dead man.

It was terrible. I’m sure part of that opinion is every artist’s pitfall of thinking their own art is all shit, but I mean it was really bad. I still have a copy of that version of the chapter, and I cringe when I read it. Even the current version – which you can read HERE, if you like – isn’t entirely finished. I can’t count the number of times I’ve rewritten that passage. I’m still not satisfied with it, but holy hell is it better than the very first version.

After writing that first chapter, I set it aside and didn’t touch it for several months. I picked it back up at random in March of 2011 and felt compelled to add to it. Over a couple of days I plunked in another 4,000 or so words, introducing the main antagonists of the story. That passage was wildly better, and has remained mostly unchanged. I still wasn’t really dedicated to working on it, so I unconsciously set it aside again.

I got a wild hair up my ass in October of 2011 and over two days dropped over 10,000 words into the manuscript. I furthered the journey, introduced a new main character, and felt like I really had something. It was another burst of energy though, and my discipline wasn’t really in place, so it sat for another few weeks without getting touched. I decided then and there that I needed to motivate myself into finishing the damned thing, which meant putting enough words into it that I felt I couldn’t just set it aside again (I was 25,000 words into another novel that I haven’t touched since 2003).

NaNoWriMo was the answer. If you don’t know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a nifty writing exercise with a website and a community that challenges writers to write a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. If you succeed, you get a certificate from the NaNoWriMo folks and a badge on their forums that identifies you as a “winner”, even though it’s not really a competition.

I didn’t really involve myself in the competition part of it, because I wasn’t really following the “rules”. I wasn’t creating a self-contained manuscript; Instead I was using the NaNoWriMo goals to add bulk to my existing novel. I set aside most everything else and proceeded to write every day in November of 2011, sticking to the running goal of 1667 words per day (which will net you just over 50k in 30 days). I didn’t quite hit 50k, but I dropped 48,000 words in that period of time, and succeeded at what I’d set out to do: I now felt entirely committed.

I mean, I now had a little under 70,000 words in the manuscript. How could I let it go now? I continued to write throughout the next several months into 2012, albeit not at quite the same pace, and then hit a wall. It wasn’t writers block so much as I’d written myself into a corner that I felt I couldn’t get out of, so the next couple of months were spent on an extensive mid-book rewrite, digging trenches and building dykes to redirect the flow of the river. It worked, but I was exhausted when I’d finished.

It almost broke me. That rewrite accomplished what I’d wanted it to, but I was amazed at the brain power it takes to rewrite my own work and still manage to maintain any sense of continuity in the prose. My life became a jumble of sticky notes and notepads and random scraps of paper where I’d jotted down the plot points I’d changed and tried to figure out their downstream effects. A lot was changing – including killing off a character I hadn’t intended to before – and keeping it all straight was daunting.

When I finished, I just… stopped. I wasn’t actively trying to not write, but I just, well, didn’t write for several months. It took some outside forces – namely a number of friends constantly asking me how I was doing on my book – to get me to bust my ass back into it.

Toward the end of 2012 I lit a fire under my own ass to finish the damned thing. I’d originally set the goal of finishing it by the end of that year, but didn’t quite make it. This time, though, it wasn’t because I wasn’t writing, it was because I kept seeing holes I needed to close before the end, which kept adding length to the overall manuscript. I quit my job at the beginning of 2013 to finish it and spent the entire month of February – a month loaded with distractions – writing.

It took longer than I expected. From first keystrokes to last, I spent roughly 27 months on the first draft. If I actually calculate real writing time, though, I’d say the book probably took about 10 months of real work to complete.

At this point I could be humble or self deprecating, but fuck that it’s not who I am. I FINISHED MY BOOK. And I’m proud of myself for it. It’s going to take a cubic-fuck-ton of editing and rewrites to shape it into what I want it to be, and I know I’ve got a long road ahead to get it published, but HOLY SHIT IT’S FINISHED.