More needly things

My last post was a moan about self publishing and what an utter pain in the arse it is trying to get reviews of your work. My theory is, and I might be completely wrong here, that reviews equal sales, and good reviews equal great sales. Getting those reviews is proving really hard, though.

The promotion for my second published novel Infinite Diamond ended last night, and I've looked at the figures in comparison to my first novel Satisfaction.

INFINITE DIAMOND

pre-promotion sales: 1  ::  reviews: 0

promotional (free copies) sales: 472  ::  reviews: 0

post-promotional sales (so far): 0  ::  reviews: 0


SATISFACTION

pre-promotion sales: 1  ::  reviews: 0

promotional (free copies) sales: 333  ::  reviews: 0

post-promotional sales (so far): 0  ::  reviews: 0

So I can see that I shifted a few more copies of Infinite Diamond than Satisfaction over the same period, but not enough to say that it's all that different. And in terms of reviews and sales, there's no difference at all. I can't even say giving away free copies is worth it because it doesn't seem to generate sales. I guess I can wait a month or so and see what happens but at the moment I'm a bit baffled. Of course, one possibility is that my books are just a load of boring crap that nobody wants to read. To my mind, that's the most obvious explanation.

I'll keep checking back on my sales (or lack thereof) over the next few months while I prepare my next novel Ghostwalker for publication. Maybe something will happen. I'll probably lose all control of my bladder if it does.

Thanks as always,

- Paul

INFINITE DIAMOND (sci-fi action adventure novel)
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DK2E94S
Amazon.co.uk:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00DK2E94S
Createspace: https://www.createspace.com/4332151

If you go down to the woods today...

Today is quite an important day for me. After a few (20) years of fiddling around with writing, starting stories and forgetting to finish them and coming up with ideas that never make it beyond a scrap of paper, I finally published a novel.

I say published in the loosest possible sense. E-published I suppose is more accurate. It's the future you know; ebooks supposedly make up 30% of book sales in the US now. To me though, unless you can hold a book in your hand, it's just not the same.

I suppose I shouldn't be talking like that, because it's demeaning what I've achieved. I wrote a book. A real book, that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. Nobody else wrote that story, or created those characters. It all came from me. It's unique. It means I have left a mark on the world, no matter how small or insignificant it might be. Nobody can ever take that away.

I've no idea how this publishing thing is going to go. A large part of me believes it will fall flat on it's face and go nowhere and it will just become some kind of embarrassing side note to my life that's better left forgotten. A small part of me thinks it might just be the start of something amazing.

The thing is, I know my writing isn't that bad. There's no reason my book shouldn't sell, and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to publish the other two manuscripts I have completed this year. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to write the five stories I have in development at the moment. In another couple of years I could have published 8 books. That would be a dream come true, particularly if they became self-sustaining and generated enough revenue so that I could write and make a decent living, but I know that's just a dream for now.

Incidentally, the book I published today is Satisfaction: A Sociopathic Romance. I published a large chunk of an earlier draft on this blog a while ago. It's still there if you wanted to take a look. If you wanted to buy a copy of the finished version and compare the two, then you know that would be very nice of you.

For the first month, Satisfaction is available at 50% off, just $1.49, with the following coupon: MH93C. It's valid until March 1st 2013. You can find my book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/280265 … It will also be on Amazon in the next day or two.

Who knows where this will lead. Somewhere? Nowhere? Round and round in circling futility? Your guess is as good as mine.

Thanks for reading

Paul

The W word

I don't normally write anything on here about what I do when I'm not writing, because I do do other things apart from writing.  In fact, the writing just fills in gaps between the other things I do.  Apart from cooking, cleaning, shouting at a small dog and generally irritating my wife, my main other occupation is photography.

I don't think I'm a great photographer by any means.  That's not just the old false modesty thing, you know, when someone goes "Golf, eh? Never been much good at it," right before they hit a hole in one and look smug.  I'm talking about an honest technical appraisal of my own capabilities and my ability to operate the cameras I have.

I've owned DSLR cameras for about 8 years now and like most things in life I've played with them sporadically.  I always shot with natural light mainly because I didn't know how to use a flash.  But since the start of this year, a kindly chap has taken me under his wing and taught me an awful lot about how to do good photography and really it's not that hard.  Most people go wrong because they're scared of all the buttons and settings, but if you take your time and learn what they all do and then do a bit of reading on how it all works then you will find yourself coming on leaps and bounds.

As a case in point, at the start of the year I was bumbling through weddings barely understanding what I was doing.  Now I can shoot a full wedding, process the images, print and deliver them to a client and have them turn around and say how much they like the pictures.

It's that last part that made me write this.  It's so nice to see people comment on a picture and say how much they love it.  The praise is not directed at me; there's nothing to say who the photographer was.  Instead, what they like is the mood and the emotion of the image, and that's what I strive to shoot.  I'm not technically the best but I like to think I can capture how people feel, and when they come back and comment to that effect, it makes me feel like I've done a good job.

That said, I'm still learning the trade, and I will use the rest of this year to improve my skills.  Next year, though, I'm going to be taking off and making some good money doing something I really enjoy, and you can't ask for more than that, can you?

Structuring an unstructured mind is like nailing a cat to a sail in a hurricane

The problem with having an overactive imagination is getting it to stop.  I can be walking along when I have a great idea, concept, lyric, line or something that flashes across my mind.  It's so great it puts the proverbial spring in my step as I let it run free and grow and build and I think 'I HAVE to get this down, this is amazing'.  Then something happens - someone speaks to me, a child punches me in the groin or a car tries to run me over (all have happened) and the great idea evaporates away before it has time to fully form in my memory.  It's a pain in the arse.

That said, a lot of idiocy and madness does survive that initial germination phase and makes it to a scrap of paper, a notebook, the back of a hand or any other place I can get it scribbled down, just enough to prompt the thought again when I look back at it later so that the idea is not lost amongst the noise of the world.

Even with all the loss, I still splurge out more ideas than I can realistically turn into worthwhile work.  This includes stories, songs and often just throwaway lines that I put on Twitter or to a lesser extent Facebook.  I've always written stories, even from a young age.  A couple of things stick in my mind from that period. Both involve the same English teacher, Mr Milner, who taught me at Oaklands School in York.  He must be dead by now, but he had a huge impact on my life, even though he doesn't know it.  In return, I never gave him back his copy of To Kill A Mockingbird.

My first memory related to his teaching - oh no, wait, there's three, not two - was when we were given a sheet of paper with a series of drawings, depicting a guy who gets a motorbike.  We had to use them to tell a story.  I sort of cheated, because I cut the page up, rearranged the sequence of pictures and turned one of the characters into a policeman reporting on the untimely death of the lead character at the end of the story.  Mr Milner wrote on it 'This is a work of the highest standard, well done.'  That stuck in my head because a) he was right, it was good and b) I didn't get why nobody else did the same thing.  It just seemed obvious to me.

Memory number two was a story about a raft.  I wrote it from the point of view of someone walking through a forest a spying on another person building a raft.  Mr Milner started reading that one out in class, much to my horror.  At that point I realized that I don't crave attention or validation for my writing.  I know when something works and when I doesn't.  I don't need other people telling me that.  If I let someone read something it's because I've gotten it to the point where it's progressed far enough to be presented to an audience.  That doesn't necessarily mean its the finished product.  That said, I do take onboard people's suggestions.  When people read my story I want them to find plot holes or any deus ex machina moments that need extracting and replacing with decent story telling.  I don't have a problem with that but generally by the time I have gotten to the point of letting someone read my work, such problems can be fixed with one or two lines of exposition.

Memory number three was a comment he put on a story about a deranged general trying to blow up a neutron bomb.  He wrote at the bottom - 'hugely entertaining, worthy of Jeffrey Archer!'  At the time I thought that was a compliment, but there will be more on that story later...

So that sort of brings me on to the point of this post.  I have a lot of stories in development, but a lot of them are pretty closely tied together.  In order to keep track of this, I need to set out a diagram of where they all fit together.  Apologies for the formatting:


Brotherly Love

                                                    Valiant Shield

Satisfaction                                Ghostwalker                                                      
Sympathy for the Devil               Ghostwalkers
                                                                                 Infinite Diamond
                                                                                 The Eye of Andromeda          Scorpio
                                                                                                                                  Northstar
                                                                                                                                  Nemesis

Okay, I have more than I thought, that's actually eleven books.  Given the length of book I seem to write, that's about a million words.  Seeing as I do at least one complete rewrite per story, that brings it up to over two million words worth of effort to complete all these stories.  Now you see why I see having too much imagination as being a bit of a curse.

Bear in mind that most of these are not written out in full, and that million word target is probably more around the three hundred thousand word mark at the moment.  In fact, only Satisfaction and Ghostwalker are completed to a reasonable degree, with Infinite Diamond close behind.  Brotherly Love has an outline and a few passages.  Sympathy for the Devil has a start and a premise.  Ghostwalkers has a premise.  Valiant Shield is based on the story Mr Milner likened to the work of Jeffrey Archer, and is little more than a basic pitch.  Infinite Diamond is the story I'm working on at the moment and is about half way through being rewritten. The Eye of Andromeda has an outline, as do the last three.

What links Valiant Shield through to Nemesis is one character.  He's called Nathan Hayes and in some of the stories he's a relatively minor player, whereas in others he takes centre stage.  The overarching span of these stories is really about his career, although you wouldn't see that reading any one of the stories.

The stories on the left don't involve Hayes and are a standalone little stories told from the first person point of view.  This is by far and away the easiest and laziest way for me to write, because I'm basically writing in my voice as I see it and hear it in my head.  If a character doesn't know something then they don't know.  I don't need to go away and research a subject or try to describe something I barely understand myself.  It really is much, much easier writing like this.  It's pretty much the same voice I use to write this blog, only it's fictional.  That's why when I start trying to publish, I'll be using thes stories on the left.  That way if I fail, it's at minimum damage to myself.  The other reason is to retain creative control.  I know where I want the rest of the stories to go and how I want them to fit together.  If I publish one of them without securing that creative control, it would run the risk of buggering up the overall structure that I have in mind.

The rest of the stories are very much more conventional fiction writing and range from thrillers through to straight action stories, mostly with a slight fantasy/sci fi element, although I don't include characters with names like Jxxfrkk or Gilfard the Great or anything like that.  It's a little more grounded writing than that, I like to think.  I do tend to write pretty visually and of course I think about how these stories could end up on film.  I'm also realistic though, and I know there's pretty much a zero chance of that happening, since they would be expensive to make.  So for now they will exist as novels, although another thought has occurred to me.  Being very visual stories, they could do very well as graphic novels.  I think the sort of stories I write could work in that medium and be marketed to the sort of audience who would pick up a graphic novel in the first place.

The only problem is that, like most things in life, I have no idea where to start.

The Go Kart

This is something I wrote years ago.

When I was little, my Dad got a job for a construction company working out in Saudi Arabia.  He went to live there when I was five, and a few months later the rest of the family went out there to stay with him.  I ended up living overseas for four years in total, and it made a big impact on my life in a lot of ways.  I developed a morbid fear of flying and I developed a wider understanding of the different cultures of the world.  I also did some very stupid things because there isn’t a lot to do when you’re a small child and you’re living in a country like Saudi.

We lived on a compound, which was just a village with a big concrete wall right the way around and a gate with guards at the front.  Apart from visits to the shops and the odd trip out to the desert, my life was lived inside those four walls.  We lived in two different compounds over the years.  The first one was in the south of the country, on an airbase called Khamis Mushayt.  Literally that translates as Thursday Market, so well done, you just learnt your first Arabic.  Later we moved further north to Riyadh, the capital city, but most of the insane events happened in Khamis.  This story happened there.

In order to give all the kids something to do with their lives apart from going to look for snakes and scorpions, the teachers at the little school in the compound started after school projects.  One of these was to divide us into teams and build go karts, which we would then race.  

It nearly started badly.  On the way to school that morning, I found a shiny metal thing in the sandy path.  I had no idea what it was, but I picked it up and liked the weight of it and the feel of machined grooves around the pointed tip. I put it in my pocket, and took it home at the end of the day.  Then we went back to the school all excited to be building go karts.  When we got there though, everyone was looking glum.  The teacher sadly announced that we couldn’t build anything because he had lost the chuck bit for the drill and couldn’t use it.  I had no idea what a chuck bit was but something sparked in my mind, so I asked him what it looked like.  He described the exact thing I had found in the sand that morning.  Excitedly I told him I had found it and I ran all the way home and all the way back to return the chuck to him.  He was delighted and I was a miniature hero for two minutes.  We could build the go karts.

We split into teams of four to build the go kart.  There were maybe forty of us, so that made for 10 go karts.  The teachers bought the materials.  The go karts were made out of wood with old pram and bicycle wheels, and plastic school chairs for seats.  Our go kart was built out of heavy sheets of plywood.  It had a flat floor with a plastic seat bolted to it, and a lap seat belt.  It had high wooden sides so that when you sat in it you could see nothing out either side.  Sticking out the front was a plank of wood, which ended in a T shape.  This was fixed with a central bolt, and rope was fixed to either side.  In this way it could be steered.  Two small wheels on either end of the T and two big bicycle wheels at the back completed the machine.  It took a few days to build, and when it was done it looked like a wooden armoured car.

When everyone had built their karts, we wheeled them up to the top of a hill for a race.  On the way we noticed the tiny flaw in the design of our go-kart.  It took two of us pulling it just to move the thing.  We had added so much wood to it that we had literally built a wooden tank.  Needless to say, when the race started, the older, wiser children in their lightweight, flimsy designs rocketed away and our behemoth crawled along barely picking up momentum.

My dreams of piloting a mass of angry wood and rope at barely controllable speeds were shattered.  I had had a vision of hurtling along with the passing world a mere blur, but instead we were humiliated.  Downcast, we dragged our creation home, and it was dumped unceremoniously outside the house and left to blister away under the relentless sun.

My dreams of speed did not die though.  I continued to think through where we had gone wrong.  Looking back, I suppose the simple line of reasoning must have come from being a small child, but instead of going for the obvious and lightening the go-kart to make it faster, I decided what it really needed was a steeper hill to work with.

In the very centre of the compound there was a huge artificial hill.  When the compound had been built, all the waste and spoil had been dumped in the middle.  This formed the big hill, and right at the top they built a house, with a narrow footpath leading up to it.  In a moment of inspiration, I realised that this path would be the perfect launch pad to unlock the true potential of the go kart.

With a lot of persuasion, I got my brother and sister to revive the beast and drag it to the centre of the compound.  I was the most enthusiastic out of the three, because it was my idea and I was going to be the driver.  It took a lot of effort to get it to the big hill, and then a lot of pain and struggle to inch it up to the top of the hill.  The hill was steep – virtually a pyramid of earth and sand.  It was covered in rocks and thorn bushes, broken only by the narrow path leading up to the house at the top.  I don’t know who lived there; I have a feeling it might have been empty, but it was hard to tell from the outside.  All the houses looked the same; single storey prefabricated structures with whitewashed walls, corrugated iron roofs and air conditioning units bolted onto the side.  If anyone was there they never came out to watch the climb or the ensuing carnage.

Eventually we got the go-kart to the top, turned it around and pointed down the hill.  I got in, strapped myself into the seat and looked at the long slope ahead of me.  My brother and sister stood on either side at the back, ready to push me off.  It was at this point that I began to have doubts about what I was about to do.  At the bottom of the hill was a road running along perpendicular to the path, then a kerb, and then a brick wall surrounding the garden of the house on the opposite side of the road.

Now bear in mind that I was no more than six at the time.  I didn’t know anything about potential and kinetic energy, friction, acceleration or any of the other forces I was about to experience.  What I did become suddenly and acutely aware of was the major design flaw in the go kart.

It had no brakes.

My young and inexperienced mind was telling me that there was no way in the world that the go kart was going to stop before smashing straight into the brick wall at the bottom of the hill with me strapped helplessly onboard.  At that moment I changed my mind.  I didn’t want to drive the go kart down the hill anymore.  I wanted to get out and walk home.  I tried to explain this to my brother and sister.  I tried to say ‘I don’t think this is a good idea’, but all I was able to get out was ‘I…’ before they gave a big heave and pushed the go kart from the top of the hill and down the slope.

I don’t remember thinking ‘Oh God, I’m going to die’.  I don’t even remember swearing a lot which I’m pretty sure I would do if this happened to me now.  What I did was try to think my way out of my impending death.  I figured that if I could steer the go kart gently to the left, I could turn it as it went down the hill and by the time I got to the bottom I would be running along the main road, safe and sound.  This decision only took a couple of seconds to make, but by this time I was halfway down the hill and hanging on for dear life as the weight of the previously unmovable go kart now helped to accelerate it like a rocket.  It was now or never.

I pulled on the left hand rope and the kart turned gently to the left.  So far, so good, until the left front wheel left the tarmac path and ran onto the sunbaked earth.  Immediately it dug in and wrenched the whole front of the go kart to the side.  The go kart jacknifed half way down the slope and veered completely out of control before starting to roll and then tumble down the hill with me inside.  I still remember it now.  I don’t know how many times it turned over; it felt like forever but it can only have been two or three.  What I do know that as it rolled it must have hit every rock and thorn bush in the way.

I mentioned earlier that the go kart was built like a tank and that this was a problem.  Well, I’m pretty sure the fact that it was so strong, the fact it was high-sided and most importantly the fact that I was wearing a seatbelt saved me from serious injury.  What it didn’t prevent was me getting ripped and scratched and battered by the rocks and thorns and everything else I encountered on the way down.  Eventually it reached the bottom and stopped rolling, landing back on its wheels in a cloud of dust.  I immediately unbuckled the seatbelt, jumped out and ran home screaming, covered in blood.  My brother and sister just stood at the top of the hill watching me run away.  

The go kart was eventually wheeled home, battered but unbroken, a bit like me.  It was left in the garden and eventually rotted away, never to be taken out again.  It was the end of its short but illustrious career, and the beginning of my attempts to either injure of kill myself in more and more ludicrous and inventive ways.