Copies of 1% FREE can be purchased from Barnes & Noble POD, and the ebook can be had at Barnes & Noble ebook. The physical book is $18.95 and the ebook is $4.99.
END TIME reprinted
Downloads of END TIME can be purchased from SMASHWORDS.
I’m on a roll. I use an example to illustrate a social reality. Then I give the background to the example and the social reality. Finally, I go off on a tangent from that social reality. Voilà, I have three completed pieces.
For the past month I’ve been on a writing jag. In all I’ve written three non-fiction political columns, each of approximately 1,500 words. The first uses the term tertium quid to segue into the topic of Perón and justicialismo as a way of introducing the subject of Third Positionism generally. The second delves deeply into Third Positionism, using Perón’s meeting with Ernesto “Che” Guevara to develop the concept of Third World Third Positionism and then circle back round to First World adherents to Third Positionism. Finally, I use a chance comment about Labor Zionism’s implied Third Positionism in my second column to write a detailed essay about the promise and problems of socialist Zionism partially from experience to compare and contrast with my personal experiences on the US Left. Instead of being exhausted by this marathon writing session, I’m wired and itching to write more.
I’ve decided to cap this sudden series as a three-parter instead so now I’m rewriting and reworking all three. Then I’ll give them to my copyeditor one at a time for a final polish before I give them to MRR and publish them on my website. Life is good.
“The Death of David Pickett” is a speculative cyberpunk mystery set in 2023 San Francisco as a prequel to my 2042 near-future science fiction thriller “1% Free.”
Part-time archivist and full-time scenester Jesse Steinfeld digs deep, questioning the enigmatic death of charismatic local political activist David Pickett as urban tensions mount. While popular demonstrations occupy San Francisco’s Mission District in the name of a revolutionary “Mission Commune,” bringing the city to the brink of social insurrection, Jesse realizes nothing is as it seems in Pickett’s cryptic life and mysterious demise. The full-throttle street politics of today collide with tomorrow’s slow-motion apocalypse in this explosive tale of identity, mortality, technology, and reality in the city by the bay.
I’d intended to link the beginning of my campaign to digitally publish, promote, and distribute my story “The Death of David Pickett” by publishing it first through Smashwords. Well, the only way Smashwords let’s me set a publication date for TDDP is by doing a pre-order which requires that I assign the book a price. But TDDP is free, to be given away for free, and so a firm and fast publication date will be impossible. Instead, I’ll send it to Smashwords the weekend of September 22/23, with initial distribution of all digital formats starting the week of September 24. That means I’m dependent on when the manuscript gets digitally published by Smashwords through their infamous “meat grinder” software.
Meanwhile, I’ve created useable EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, PDF, and DOCX files through Scrivener and Calibre and plan to construct my publisher’s download page by next week. I’ve investigated 90+ digital sites—blogging communities, document sharing sites, ebook publishing/syndication platforms—and created viable accounts on the 80 or so promising ones through which to upload my digital files. I’ve already joined a dozen science fiction and cyberpunk Facebook groups and I’m now posting regularly to them in anticipation of promoting and if possible uploading TDDP to them.
The one remaining task that I still need to do is build a MailChimp email list out of the 2,000+ addresses I’ve scrounged together to do a mass advertising email blast. Part of that will be a 150 analog snail-mail-out culled from the various Goodreads POD book giveaways I’ve done. And I’m still debating purchasing an email list from Kirkus Reviews.
All of these efforts are targeted to directly promote and distribute TDDP and indirectly advertise my novel 1% Free. TDDP is a prequel to 1% Free, so everything I’m doing is designed to hit both. The downloadable TDDP itself—the various digital files—provides links through which to purchase 1% Free.
The writing, editing, and rewriting of my story “The Death of David Pickett” is finished. Now I’m working with my illustrator Jon Hunt. I sent him an email describing the project and its various elements (background, drone, main character, his t-shirt, action sequence). He sent me back the following two rough sketches. I chose #2, then emailed him back the marked-up sketch plus my revisions: larger drone, larger character, and my author byline under the title. Can’t wait to see the finished graphic.
4/14/18:
A man, a typewriter, a weekend. I got the edited manuscript back from my editor. You know where I’ll be this weekend.
[all photos are of Ray Milland from “Lost Weekend.”]
4/15/18:
I spent the weekend going over my editor’s notes and comments. There are a dozen problems with the manuscript, but she liked it overall. I’m jazzed. Now I’m setting up for the rewrite, and the more I organize myself for one thing in my life, the more organized I get in the rest of my life.
My original project was to take a finished novelette-sized fiction piece, expand it into a novella, and publish it as a digital book. I joined a Finishing School group of fellow writers to work on it, only to realize that progress was going excruciatingly slow and I might not be done by the end of the year. So I switched over to another completed fiction piece, a longish short story called “The Death of David Pickett” (TDDP), with the idea of converting it into a prequel to my near-future science fiction novel and giving it away for free as a digital book. By doing so I’m hoping to get a “two-for,” perhaps a “three-for,” in that I want to complete a long fallow piece of fiction, dovetail it with my novel both thematically and promotionally, and thereby expand my impact as an author.
To that end, I first sent TDDP to a few readers to evaluate its impact and problems. Then I hired a developmental/line editor for a more thorough evaluation of my manuscript. The fully edited text comes back around April 15, and I’m giving myself 2 luxurious months to rewrite TDDP. Along the way I’ll approach my illustrator to do a snappy cover for the digital book, and as soon as I’m done with the rewrite I’ll hire my copyeditor/proofreader for the final touches. Running parallel to this will be lots and lots of research into the best ebook software to use; the possibility of doing an audio ebook, how to do a mixtape soundtrack; how to make pdfs audio; the various SF FB groups I belong to and what they allow re distributing pdfs/ebooks; other social media distribution possibilities, the potential digital publishing platforms for free publishing and distribution; compiling and augmenting my mailing lists; potential Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews promotions; vetting document downloads for email and digital distribution; creating a secure download site, etc. etc. Only after all this do I actually design, create, and distribute TDDP as a digital book.
One minor problem. I use two word processing programs, LibreOffice for mundane everyday work like letter writing and scheduling, and Scrivener for my creative writing. Together, they do what I need them to do. My editor for TDDP uses Microsoft Word, of course. MS Word has robust and, in my opinion, overly complicated editing and tracking features. Unfortunately, Scrivener doesn’t import edits and comments from MS Word, and LibreOffice allows me to see only the edits, not the comments from MS Word. So I need access to an MS Office 365 license to do a compilation of my editor’s work, accepting, rejecting, or modifying her edits through Word’s Track Changes software. Once I have my editor’s final notes then, I’ll purchase an Office 365 license as a a 30-day trial “rental” and run my edited manuscript through the MS Word meat grinder. The Office 365 installation is nearly 8 gigs, which fortunately my old computer can still handle. I’ll schedule the first half of my planned rewrite to process the edits and comments, then cancel my Microsoft subscription.
Which gives me the following tentative schedule for publishing TDDP:
APRIL 9—JUNE 15: RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
APRIL 15—MAY 15: PROCESS EDITS & REWRITE
MAY 15—JUNE 15: FINAL REWRITE
JUNE 15—JULY 31: CREATE ALL DIGITAL MEDIA
AUGUST 1: PUBLICATION DEADLINE
I’m ensconced in my favorite office-away-from-my-home-office at The Octopus Literary Salon. It’s the day after my Mechanics’ Institute Indie Publishers Working Group where I learned a lot about positive and negative strategies for self marketing/self promotion. First, blogging is still a thing, and so I’m going to get regular about posting to my blog Playing for Keeps. Second, display advertising deals offered by Kirkus Reviews and others are a bad deal and ineffective in generating sales let alone self promotion. Third, I should seriously consider doing my 10,000 word prequel to my novel as a taste of the novel proper and should be giving it away for free. Lots to think about.
I’ve just submitted my next MRR column to my copy editor, but in doing so I’ve depleted the column reserve I keep as a cushion dangerously low. So this weekend, I’m working on columns. The one about defending the left of the Left is going slowly. Instead I’ve got one about comparing countercultures, from beatnik and hippie to punk. I’m only covering those countercultures I have a working knowledge of, but I hope to draw some conclusions that can be universally applied.
A four-color brochure predicting what the United States, and the world, will be like in 2042, 25 years from now. Included:
• Outside Cover: Front cover art plus description of countrywide and worldwide changes in the next 25 years and brief explanation of the title “1% Free.”
• Inside First Fold: 9 full color maps of Europe, Indian subcontinent, and southeast Asia in 1910, 1935, and 1960 indicating vast changes 25 years can make.
• Inside Second Fold: black & white map of continental United States depicting extent of social breakdown and second civil war by 2042.
To get this FREE brochure, you will be prompted to enter your email into the popup window which will appear after 20 seconds. If the popup window does not appear, please send me an email with your name, mailing address, and return email to gamatiasz (at) icloud (dot) com and you will receive the brochure FREE via snail mail.
I’ve written and published two books in twenty-two years. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to complete a third book before I die. In light of that, I’ve gone through several score of potential story ideas at various stages of development–from basic idea to completed rough draft–in my word processing program Scrivener, winnowing wheat from chaff to select out a handful of candidates to work on.
I’ve come up with four possibilities, all science fiction. Two are completed rough drafts of novelettes (7,500-17,499 words) I could try to boost up to novella length (17,500-39,999 words). One is set in a post-apocalyptic far future where the main character, an ex-soldier with various biological military upgrades, meets up with someone who claims to be her brother. The second is a time travel/alternate universe story premised on the early, complete assassination of Lenin in an alternate time line.
I also have two promising ideas for full-length novels (40,000+ words), neither of which are anywhere near completion however. One is set entirely in 1968, the year I got politics, which has the main character traveling around to various iconic/historic events, with a sci-fi twist. The second is near-future science fiction in which neanderthals haven’t gone extinct but live secretly amid regular humans on the verge of self-extinction.
The incomplete novels would take a lot of time to finish, but they have the greatest potential story-wise. The novelettes would require extensive rewrites, but they’re basically done. My plan is to concentrate on these four pieces. Which will be difficult because I always have fiction stories in reserve, like two possible, incomplete sequels to my latest novel. One is set five years after the current book, the other a century later, and both are novelette/novella in length. Also, in addition to the archive of fiction ideas and snippets archived in Scrivener, I’m coming up with new ideas all the time. I’ll continue to write my non-fiction MRR columns, of course, but narrowing my focus in the fiction realm seems best.
I’ve updated this site’s extended blogroll to delete five non-functioning links. Not bad for ten years of personal blogging. As always, please let me know if you find any other dead links.
“The Death of David Pickett” is a speculative cyberpunk mystery set in 2023 San Francisco as a prequel to my 2042 near-future science fiction thriller “1% Free.”
playing for keeps 