Excerpt: WIP, 'Maintenon on Vacation.'

c2011 (S)


Author's Note:

This is an excerpt from 'Maintenon Gets a Vacation,' a working title only. The real title is much better. For the sake of clarity, Mr. Appleby is transporting the body of R.A.F. Flight Lieutenant Harold Hardy, victim of a mysterious plane crash, to the village morgue/undertaker's.

The recently-widowed Maintenon is, or was, on a walking tour of Dartmoor, in some sort of homage to his boyhood hero Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

...

Mr. Appleby was apparently as dumb as a stick and as deaf as a stone. Jimmy held the side-car up close to the left of the plodding wagon and of course Mr. Appleby was on the far side, trying to control a suddenly-persnickety horse. The animal was all too aware of the sputtering motorbike coming up from behind. The horse, an old dappled grey mare of the massively-built variety, was not deaf. She clearly despised motorbikes, lurching to the right, and turning her head to the left, ears rotating around to locate the source of the threat. Ghostly beech trees jogged backwards beside the road at a sedate pace, with Jimmy driving one-handed and reaching down half under Gilles and tugging at his pack.

“Argh,” grunted Gilles, suddenly irritated beyond measure or rational control.

Hot angry grunts rent the night, his face went all tight and his chin went down…he got a grip on himself. A couple of deep breaths of chill night air helped, but only just. These people were all so stupidly innocent.

“Hold on,” Gilles added in a show of politeness.

Damn the English!

The land was dimly lit by the glistering light of a thin crescent moon and glowing, billowing clouds. Bright stars were visible in the patches of black velvet between them. Jimmy’s yellowing headlamp dimly lit the road ahead, and finally Mr. Appleby seemed to be aware that this lighting was not natural. Gilles saw the grey head spin around suddenly, but the blasted man simply would not stop. Jimmy only had a pint of petrol in the tank, as Gilles could see from his own seat if he really cared to look at the meter. The thought festered but a moment more.

“You’ll have to jump!” shouted Jimmy. “He’s real stubborn, and he has no idea—”

“Va te ferre foutre!” blurted Gilles, uncharacteristically for him.

“He thinks we’re playing some kind of prank,” shouted Jimmy.

It was completely unprofessional, but luckily Jimmy understood no French, or so Gilles thought.

“I have no idea what you just said, but honestly,” said Jimmy.

Finally the cretin Appleby, half standing in his perch, all red-faced and blustering in the darkness as if staving off a posse of highwaymen, pulled the ancient thing to such a sudden halt the doddering old fool almost fell forwards over the dash-panel.

Gilles hadn’t had such a strange day in many, many years. He wondered if it was going to get better, or worse. He wondered if it would ever end.

With a groan, he tried to unwind himself from the snug space of the sidecar, all his muscles and joints aching. His knee was on fire. It was about this time that a big black car, surely the car of an important man, perhaps even a doctor, raced past them with horn blaring. It was headed southeast, or in the direction of the nearest village. In an act of pure masochism, Gilles thumped carelessly onto the hard bench set.

“Merde,” said Gilles.

Hearing an indistinct thump from the bed of the wagon behind, Gilles turned.

Illuminated by strong moonlight, there was revealed a limp white wrist, with a pale and lifeless hand attached to it, jiggling ever so slightly as they hit another deep pothole.

The wind whipped up the shroud, and he turned firmly away after a glimpse of the dead pilot. Shaking his head, Gilles wondered if they would ever get to a telephone.

For some reason he kept thinking of Poe.

“Va te faire foutre, Monsieur Raven!” he muttered darkly.

What he wouldn’t give to speak to someone from home, from the department, if only for the sound of a rational voice; someone with some degree of separation from the day’s events.

The night had suddenly gone very cold.

***

Note: Since posting this, I have added another line or two, which shows how organic the process of filling in a plotline can be. This story is at 22,220 words now. I'm not trying to see how fast I can go or anything like that.

Premium Distribution, Experience

c2011 (S)


I just confirmed that 'The Stud Farm,' available as a free download for a limited time on Smashwords has been approved for premium distribution. Because I have a separate account with Amazon, what this means is that my e-book, (actually a short story of 8,000 words,) will enter the premium distribution network. This includes Apple iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Indigo/Chapters, Sony Reader Store, Scrollmotion, Kobo, etc.

I am also on Lulu.com with a POD of 'The Case of the Curious Killers,' I'm on Google Books, where people can read online for free, and last night I enabled Google E-Books, although I still haven't uploaded Epub versions yet. In Amazon, (or on Amazon,) I have three distribution channels, which include US, UK and DE, the last being Germany.

I was in Borders US and AU, but recently heard they have dropped e-books altogether.

As far as 'The Stud Farm' is concerned, I nailed the formatting on the first shot, and that process is called 'the meatgrinder' when you crack open the free pdf formatting guide from Smashwords for the first time.

***

So last week I found that a site called 'Bookchums' had apparently taken a free copy of 'Stud Farm' and put it on their site for free downloads. I missed a kind of opportunity here.

Basically, I sent them three e-mails through the contact form, and they seemed to go through. No response. The next three times I tried, the contact form was jiggered, and it did not work at all.

A couple of days later, I signed up for the site as a member, but returning e-mails to the administrator 'bounced.' At that point, I went into a discussion where there seemed to be a fair number of recent comments, and pointed out that my book was copyrighted material. I can't bring up that page on search, and maybe it's gone now.

The problem is, I prefer not to get into it at all, and telling someone this is 'theft' and 'book piracy' probably wasn't pleasant for them, and it wasn't that great for me either.

The thing to do is to go into a popular comment stream and simply point out that your copyrighted work is available for free as a download on Smashwords. I was giving the thing away for free myself, after all, but as part of a plan. I need some control over it! I like to know what is happening...

The trouble of course would be when I go to set a price on it, and then someone is using my own work to compete against me. Also, that site had a counter, and at one point it read '104.' I have no way of verifying or proving that number now.

This is all due to inexperience on my part, and of course if it happens again, I will definitely handle it a little differently.

Planning, Plotting and Scheming.

c2011 (S)


My fourth novel, (SF) still awaiting suitable cover art and more free time for re-writes, incorporates world and ecology-building of a journeyman level, including hard and soft science fiction story elements. In this book I experimented with my own comfort zones as a writer, in terms of characters and their sexual preferences. I say this because the unsophisticated will always associate the writer with the thing that most stands out about the story in their own minds.

My fifth novel, (urban fantasy,) is safely in the can. It's a low-key, understated urban fantasy. It was a departure from science fiction into a world that had always impressed me as a little too easy from the writerly point of view—that is to say, ‘if your protagonist gets into a corner, all he has to do is to wave a magic wand and make everything go away.’ I’m not sure if I still feel that way. The rules of fantasy are there if you care to look. ‘Magic is acceptable and expected.’ But another consideration was how to compete in a field where ‘over the top’ is what people seem to be shooting for.

My solution—to downplay the fantasy elements and treat it as literary fiction about life in a small town after the mill closes down, where there just happens to be some shape-shifters running around, will probably fail in this market.

My sixth novel, (SF,) back again to hard sci-fi, allowed me to experiment with the creation of really different characters interacting as a group, while at the same time fine-honing the work, hopefully, showing rather than telling. The number one protagonist—there’s actually more than one—is an entirely humourless, yet still sympathetic character. Like an idiot, I called him ‘Kjarl,’ which any experienced editor would insist that I change. By this time I was comfortable with the pacing of the novel, as these last three came in at 76,000 to 80,000. This is perfect length to begin editing and re-writing the works.

When I look back a couple of years, and think about what I have learned, it does give me some confidence that I can plug away at my next book or story and get the thing done in fairly short order. All I have to do is to write five hundred or a thousand words a day, and keep the first draft a little light on details. This story (my new Maintenon story) was a 360-word start, until someone on Twitter mentioned, ‘a 20-minute writing blitz’ while her dinner simmered on the stove or something. I thought, ‘why not?’ It's up over 20,000 now. An hour a day, and in about a month we’ll be up to 40,000 or 50,000 words.

When I get this one ‘done,’ it would be a good time to make some decisions, about what to publish next. Then the re-write and editing process would take a few more weeks or months. In the meantime, if I stumbled across the perfect artwork, something that I could work with for the marketing image, it would be tempting to do one of the three books I have sitting there. That part is flexible in terms of planning.

Every so often, when I get a spare minute, I go off to morguefile.com or photobucket.com and look for images, as I also want to re-issue ‘Thirty Years Gone,’ in other formats. Right now, it’s on Lulu.com with a plain black cover in the pdf format only.

So basically, we're planning, plotting, and scheming our way through the next few months. Rather than dwell on our weaknesses or past failures, we've been doing some assessing of our strengths, our skills, and our special attributes, insofar as they relate to the future.

Oh No, Not Again.

c2011 (S)


Oh no! Not again!

What began as a short story is showing unmistakeable signs of turning into a novel.

These signs include an increasing attention to plot, and today a lot of fact-checking. Calling a character 'the chief of police' when in fact he is a 'superintendent' will quickly lose a writer a lot of readers.

This is the tough thing to remember about genre fiction: it must above all else be accurate, although I think I will stick to fictional names rather than try to tie in a fictional story with actual historical figures, which would of necessity include more research into the person who was the actual Superintendent of the Territorial Police CID in Devon County, UK, back in 1927-29 or thereabouts. And Dartmoor is definitely in Devon--I'll know all this stuff off by heart in a few more days or weeks, don't you worry about that.

Another tough thing about the novel: my first novel was a work of seven years. You can read a draft many times in seven years. The next few novels all took at least three months just to get a first draft. Each and every one of my published novels has been read at least 150 times.

It is important to keep in mind that I'm only three or four weeks into the project, with about 19,000 words down, and yeah: it's another bleeping novel, when basically I just wanted another short story.

At this stage, of course I'm worried, and of course much of it is fragmentary at best. The thing is just slightly too long to read it all before starting the day, and just reviewing the short bit I wrote yesterday isn't much help sometimes.

Today is a good day to hit Wikipedia and other sources, and maybe do a little fact-checking. At this stage of the game, 500-1,000 words a day isn't unreasonable as a writing goal.

Tough Times, Tough Decisions.

c2011 (S)


Out of simple curiousity, I Googled a few names the other day and got some interesting results.

Last summer I recieved a contract for a book. Checking out the publisher on 'Absolute Write/water-cooler' I found some negative remarks about the company, and nowhere what I would call positive remarks. Yet, remaining objective, it occured to me that a disgruntled former author/disappointed partner might not accept their own failures and end up disparaging someone who was actually quite good.

For my own reasons, I felt unable to sign that contract. There was no advance, and at that time, a $1,000 or $2,000 advance might have gone a long way to convincing me!

Even then, the decision not to sign was a tough one. Then, just before Christmas, this very same publisher approached me again, via e-mail, and again they had a lot of positive things to say about my work.

Again, that tough internal debate, that tough decision. The decision not to sign was made a little easier by the lack of response to certain questions I had about the contract, and again no budging on the advance or lack thereof.

Six months later, with no characterization or value judgements offered or implied, that company is gone. They are just gone. Nowhere in that contract, (and at the time, I didn't know enough to ask,) did it clearly state what would happen to the parties, or who would own the rights, or when the rights to the product might revert back to the author, in the event of company closure.

Speaking purely objectively, if my company was in trouble, and things were not going too well in the cash-flow department, as an officer of the company, I would have little choice but to continue day-to-day operations as if nothing was wrong, and to continue to do everything within the realm of my sole fiduciary responsibility, which would be to the company and its shareholders, and not necessarily to newbie authors, especially ones we haven't signed yet and who ask a lot of questions...to try and save the company and to make it work.

In another similar instance, the company is still going. The company is smaller, and has fewer staff. Again with no characterizations or value judgements, we can only 'objectively' assume that tough times called for tough decisions, and it is entirely possible that I will someday regret not signing with them either.

It's just a really tough call either way sometimes, and especially now.