Writing » JL Brackett - Learning to Write

11MAY2013

May 112013

Yes, I’m still there. Obviously, I haven’t been posting much, but I made the decision to spend less time on the blog, and more time on the actual writing. Still, I owe you all at least a quick rundown of where things stand.

Streets of Payne – As you know, SoP was off to Red Adept Publishing for editing last month. Well, I got the manuscript back about a week later and it needs quite a bit of work. I had forgotten just how much work the editing process really is. I’ve been through the first round, which for me simply consists of going through all the various notes and comments, and accepting or rejecting the proposed changes (and believe me, there was a lot more accepting than rejecting going on.) Now I’m working on some rewrites, building up some characterizations, and shoring up a weak plot point or two. Progress is slow but sure.

Chucklers – Not much to report here. For the most part, Chucklers has been put on hold until I get SoP edits done. My priority is going to be getting my next book out there, and Chucklers is going to be further down the line.

On the personal front, Baby Bird came in for a surprise visit this weekend. You know, Mother’s Day weekend, and all. And it seems she’s acquired a new mouth to feed, albeit a very small mouth. He is a miniature dachshund, and his name is Prince Zuko (of the Fire Nation). And of course, he’s as cute as he can be. It took him a while to get used to Bella and Cricket, and a bit longer for them to get used to him, but the three of them all get along fine now.

What else? Hmmm… well, we saw Iron Man 3 (liked it, but it wasn’t the best of the series). I went to the NRA convention last weekend. It was a good experience, and I’m glad I went, but I think I’ll pass if they come to town again. I don’t care for crowds, and wandering those aisles made me feel more than a little claustrophobic. I think I’ll stick to regular knife and gun shows in the future.

Oh! We also finally broke down and bought the first two seasons of Game of Thrones. It was fantastic! I suppose that’s actually the best word for me, because I am truly a fan.

I suppose that’s about it for now. Back to work for me. As for Zuko, he appears to be ready for a break.

Catching up

Writing No Responses »

Apr 162013

I started this post back on April 9th and I kept getting side tracked. Now, of course, most of what I was going to post is outdated. That’s what I get for procrastinating.

So let me start over again…

Streets of Payne is off to the Red Adept for editing! After a few rewrites, and going through a couple of beta readers, I finally turned it in for the professional hack-n-slash. Then the real work begins. In the meantime, I’ve been working with Glendon Haddix at Streetlight Graphics on the cover art. After my extreme disappointment with my previous cover artist, Glendon has been a pleasure to work with. He’s very professional, communicative, and prompt with his replies. In fact, it’s usually him waiting on me for information, rather than the other way around. He’s already sent me preliminary concept pieces for the new cover, and I think we’re rolling right along. I can’t wait to see what the final artwork is going to look like.

In the meantime, Edward Lorn and I have begun our collaboration novel, Chucklers. This one is starting out to be an incredibly exciting undertaking. Ed and I get the unusual experience of feeding off of each other’s writing, as each of us pens the story from the POV of a different character. He writes a chapter from the perspective of Character 1, then passes the manuscript off to me. I follow with a chapter from Character 2′s perspective, and send it back to him. We have our main plot in mind (insofar as we know where we start, what the main crisis is, what we want our characters to do in a broad sense, and where we want them to end up), but as for how we get from A to Z… well, therein lies the story.

Something I noticed right away is that working with a co-author allows me to avoid the author’s enemy, writer’s block. It keeps the story fresh in my head, especially since I never know for sure how Ed is going to react to what I’ve written. If I have my character decide to take the interstate to get to location XYZ, Ed might decide that it could be fun for his character to get lost and end up fifty miles away when his car breaks down. It’s a subtle thing, but can change the whole dynamic of the story. Another big plus is how quickly the writing goes. With two of us writing various interlocking pieces, we’ve managed to write more than twenty-one thousand words in less than two weeks! At this rate, we should have the first draft done in a few months.

Assuming we actually manage to meet that relatively optimistic goal, that would mean I get to start Y12 (my planned HPM sequel) around July or so. I’ve had several people ask me in various venues when the next HPM book is coming, and I’ve never really been able to say. So here it is. Third quarter of this year will begin my journey back into the world of Half Past Midnight. And if it flows as well as I hope, I should be able to finish the first draft before the end of the year. Much of the story is already laid out in my mind, though there are admittedly some key plot elements that seem to be missing (or maybe they’re already there, and it’s part of my mind that’s missing).

At any rate, that’s the quick update. Now to get back to work.

Stay safe, everyone!

Mea culpa, mea culpa…

Family, Miscellaneous, Politics, Writing 1 Response »

Feb 132013

Sorry…

So it’s been a month since I posted anything here. Wow! First of all, I apologize. I know I told you I would be posting less frequently, but I honestly never intended for it to be a whole month. Still, it’s been a productive month, so I don’t feel like a complete loser. There have been the usual issues around the house. My dad’s been ill, my wife was ill, I was ill… we’ve just been a sickly bunch. LOL.

But I’ve gotten quite a bit done, too. I think my word count on Streets of Payne has increased by about 10k words since I last posted. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot to do on it, but the end is in sight. Yay!!

And I’ve made some decisions with regards to my last post. You know, the one where I threw in the towel and decided I’m going to quit trying to avoid the political infighting? Well, rather than let this blog turn into a long diatribe of politics and bickering, I decided I would dust off my old “Sm1ley’s Musings” page and post my rants there. I’ll link to them from here, but for the most part, this site will continue to be my “business” site, geared specifically to the craft of writing.

And to try to keep on a schedule that lets me write as much as possible, I’m going to try & keep these posts shorter. The majority of my time needs to remain focused on writing. As I’ve said before, if I want this to become a career, then I have to approach it in a businesslike fashion.

So, on that note, let’s see… other writing news….

Streets of Payne 06DEC2012

Streets of Payne – I’ve mentioned before that I was having problems with the artist I hired to do the cover art. I found several months ago that I was far from the only person that was having trouble getting her to respond. There was an entire thread on Kindleboards with various authors complaining about her lack of response (see “Anyone who bought covers from Ana Fagarazzi heard from her lately?“. She initially said she’d lost email service and also been involved in a motorcycle accident. Everyone calmed down, and it appeared for a while that she was getting back into the swing of things. I was happy to wait because the woman is incredibly talented, and I wasn’t in any big hurry. But this long journey with her began back in July, and now it’s mid-February. And once again, she seems to have disappeared. In December, she sent me the cover you see here. I was thrilled! I mean, that is an awesome pice of work. However, there are two minor changes I needed her to make, and I needed her to send me a licensing agreement so I could legally use the cover. I emailed her back, thanked her for the great artwork, and asked for the changes and license agreement. I haven’t heard back from her. Despite repeated emails and PMs in Facebook, she has refused to respond. Additionally, I’ve heard from other authors who contracted with her and she’s not responding to them, either. In one instance, it appears that the cover commissioned by one author was also sold to a second author for use on their book!

So, I can’t use the cover I paid for, I can’t get the artist to respond to any communication, I couldn’t trust her even if she did, and I’m running out of time. So here is the only look anyone is likely to ever get of the cover I was originally going to use. And now I have to step back and punt. I have to find another cover artist and hire them to do a whole new cover from scratch. And because I had my heart set on the one already done, anything else is going to take me some time to wrap my head around. It’s just a really frustrating situation.

Half Past Midnight - Sales have pretty much bottomed out. Last year was a hell of a year for HPM. The novel did so much better than I ever thought it would, and I am so grateful to those
of you who helped me with it. It was my first novel, and I learned a LOT from it. Honestly, if I had it to do over again, there are several things I would do differently. But I figure that’s as
it should be. I will always want to learn more, and I’ll always want to put out the best product I can. So HPM has taught me a lot, and will serve as a launch pad for another book later this year. But that’s for later.

Y12 – The sequel to HPM is still in the planning stages, but it keeps interrupting my flow while writing SoP. I find my conversations with Amber Payne are constantly interrupted by the characters of Y12. The bad thing is, I’m really fascinated by some of what they want to say, and often follow them off on a tangent, leaving poor Amber hanging in the lurch. I think maybe progress on SoP is slower than I would like because she’s pissed at me for ignoring her.

Explorers: Beyond the Horizon - This is the Dead Robots’ Society anthology I was a part of. I wrote a short story called The Burning Land that was accepted for the book, and I am actually quite proud of it. In fact, while I had no input into the creation of the anthology other than that one contribution, I really happy with the book as a whole, and am really proud to have been a part of it. Unfortunately, sales on it have been pretty abysmal. It’s pretty much what we all expected going in – anthologies as a whole simply don’t generally do well. It’s a shame because I think that short story is possibly the best thing I’ve written to date. Enough so that I would like to come back to it in the future to see about further exploring the world in which it takes place. But that’s for another time.

And for writing news, that’s it – except for this one little teaser…

You may recall that I mentioned that I was going to be working on a collaborative novel with Edward Lorn. I had it listed on the books as “EBS”. Well, he and I have decided to table that project indefinitely in favor of another. The main story line is straight from the twisted depths of Ed’s messed up mind (and I say that with love, E.), but the more we discussed it, the more I got drawn into it. By the end of our discussion, Ed had convinced me to try my hand at writing something so dark and disturbing that I honestly think this thing may give me trouble sleeping as we write it. I’ve never written horror before, but this guy has found a story that truly intrigues me. Yes people, Ed Lorn has pulled me over to the dark side. We plan to begin work on the novel this summer, and I think we’re probably going to make a teaser announcement soon, so watch for it.

All right, that’s really it now. For the writing schtuff, anyway. And if you’re interested in the more personal side of what makes me tick (or drives me crazy), keep an eye open for announcements about posts on my other site, “Sm1ley’s Musings“. In the meantime, stay safe everyone!

State of the Onion – January 15

Family, Politics, Writing 3 Responses »

Jan 152013

It’s been a while, and this post will be a short one. Part of the reason is that I’m trying to get some writing on Streets of Payne done whenever I have a minute, part of it is because my dad has had some health issues and we’ve been doing what little we can to help out with that, and part of it is because I’ve been struggling with what I want to post about. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on any of these three excuses, but here are some quick rundowns.

SoP - Basically, I’m pushing a deadline and some internal quandaries on SoP. I need to get the first draft completed asap, and go back through rewrites to get something halfway presentable to submit to my editor by early April. That deadline is approaching much faster than I would like, and every word I write here is one less word I have time to write on the book.

My dad - This one isn’t really my story to tell. Suffice to say, my dad has some health issues and he’s going through some medical procedures. We help out whenever we can, and that will continue to be a priority in my life.

My personal struggle on what to write about - It’s not that I don’t know what I want to write about. Quite the opposite, actually. You see, for the last few years I’ve promised those of you who follow my little mental meanderings that I will avoid discussing political issues. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have political opinions, only that I respect everyone’s right to voice those opinions as they see fit. However, recently I have seen postings that I feel pretty strongly about, and it has occurred to me that I’m not doing anyone any good by remaining silent. We’ve all heard the immortal quote from Edmund Burke, “All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.” Well, I have come to realize that by remaining silent, I am epitomizing that man who does nothing.

There will always be an argument made that what one person wants to do is evil by the definition of another. I can’t help that. But I tire of sitting in the background, thinking that I’m going to take the moral high ground, and all the while listening to people berate and ridicule those who have political views that differ from theirs. We all have our own choices to make with regards to what is right and what is wrong. But when the voice of reason is becoming increasingly drowned out by emotional beratings, and at times outright lies, it’s time for me to draw my line in the sand.

In short, I am giving everyone fair warning here – I will be breaking my promise. From this point forward, I will be unapologetically political on my FaceBook postings, and I will address political issues here on my blog anytime I see fit. I will attempt to do so in a respectful manner (much more so than most of the postings that have bothered me), and I will be happy to entertain differing opinions and debate. But be forewarned, but I will smash trolls as soon as they appear.

I apologize to those of you who may have thought that my earlier promise was a good thing, or somehow thought highly of me for it. I just can’t continue to sit back and do nothing while the world goes to hell in a handbasket.

For now, that’s all. But stand by … shit’s about to get real.

Be safe.

Happy New Year! (or “How about those resolutions?”)

Prepping, Publishing, Survival, Writing No Responses »

Jan 012013

Well, it appears we survived the dreaded December 21 apocalypse, so I suppose it’s time to get on with life. It’s now the first of a new year, and time for those dreaded resolutions.

Actually, that’s the wrong attitude, isn’t it? It’s time to grab the new year by the horns and take advantage of the opportunities presented. Yeah, it’s resolution time. So, first of all, health – I need to lose weight. I could stand to lose quite a bit, but I’m going to resolve to lose thirty by June and keep it off for the rest of the year. That’s going to be the harder part. I gave it half-hearted lip service a few months ago, lost a couple of pounds, and then entered the holidays with a full appetite. I haven’t gained any, but my weight loss stopped at two pounds. It’s time to change that.

Next – writing. I will finish Streets of Payne, and have it published before the end of the second quarter of next year. Additionally, I will have the first draft of the HPM sequel done, and will do everything within my power to have it published before the end of 2013. I can’t promise to actually have it published, because I’ve found that there are some pieces of the publishing puzzle over which I simply have no control. I don’t know what my editor’s schedule is like that far in advance (and neither will she at this point), just as I don’t know what the cover artist and formatter’s schedule is going to be like. But I can control the writing, so that is where I will concentrate my efforts.

Now for the more esoteric stuff. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m something of a survivalist. I simply view it as learning to embrace a self-reliant lifestyle. To that end, I’ve joined a web site called “13 Skills“. The site is an offshoot of “The Survival Podcast” forum, and is designed with the idea that those folks interested in learning to be more self-sufficient should take the opportunity to learn “13 in 13″, or thirteen new skills in 2013. I haven’t yet chosen thirteen skills, but the ones I’ve chosen so far are:

1. Aquaponics — Learn to build a balanced aquaponics system as research for upcoming book.

2. Archery — Acquire an inexpensive bow & arrows. Learn to shoot accurately. (Also useful as research for the upcoming HPM sequel.)

3. Concealed Weapons Permit — Acquire CHL.

4. Soap Making — Learn to make small batch soaps.

5. Sprouting — Sprout seedlings for spring garden.

6. Gardening — Learn and put into practice techniques for small footprint gardening. (Made a stab at this in the late fall, but it was just too late in the season, and everything has pretty much died.)

7. Cordage and Twining— Learn to make paracord items such as rescue belt & explore whether or not same technique can be used for heavier gauge cordage such as climbing rope.

8. Canning — Learn to can & put it into practice.

9. Fitness — Lose at least 30 lbs. & keep it off! (Already covered this one above.)

10. Water Catchment/Filtering — Acquire/build rain catchment system for back yard. Incorporate rainwater runoff for gardening.

That’s all I can think of right now. What about you? What are your plans for 2013?

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