Dry Run update

Very briefly, three things:

1.  I have started on my dry run story, and have a couple of pages written . . . in the darned notebook.

2.  I have come up with a temporary title for it (besides "Dry Run"), and if it seems like it will work, I'll "announce" it in my next update.

3.  Because I can't have nice things,* I decided this week to finally get a laptop computer.  It has been ordered and is, apparently, on the way.  I hope to use it to write this, and many other projects in the future, as well as using it to podcast and edit podcasts.  Yay!

So, there's my short update.  Though it's going to look pathetic, I said I'd do it, so here is the meter as it now stands:



Sigh.

Rish "Sigh" Outfield

*My nephew stepped on and ruined the screen of my craptop (which was a lil tiny netbook I didn't appreciate till it was gone), and then my brother gave me his decade-old laptop, which I used until this week, when I broke it after a Skype call.  I have a bad track record with electronics, but apparently Doctor Bruce Banner has a worse one.

Rish Performs "Technos" by E.C. Tubb on Audible.com

I finally got another of the "Dumarest of Terra" books produced, and it's available to buy on Audible and Amazon.  This one is the seventh in the series, and wasn't hard to get through.  Well, comparatively.

In "Technos," Earl Dumarest goes to farming planet Loam to seek a wise man who knows of Earth, and eventually ends up on its conquering planet of Technos, where he must flee from the authorities and seek out a woman with a photographic memory who may know the location of his homeworld.

"Technos" brings up several fascinating story elements--a planet where status is based on how everyone does on vocational/standardized tests, an unkillable toxic plant on an agricultural world that is encroaching on every farm (perhaps placed there by an enemy planet), a tribute of the poor citizens in which the wealthy elderly use their bodies for a chance to be young again, a sadistic scientist who develops elaborate mazes in which to test the intellect, physical prowess, and luck of the various prisoners he places in there, and a fear-obsessed, ageing ruler who sees betrayal and assassination at every turn.

Of course, none of this is ever explored in the book, but I think I might get on the old ouija board and ask Tubb if I can take these elements and use them in my own writing over the next few years.

The Link: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Technos-Audiobook/B00WL4MJ2A/ref=a_search_c4_1_6_srTtl?qid=1429938316&sr=1-6

Honestly, this was probably the smoothest, least-troubled Dumarest production I've done (although there was one chapter I had to do over because of an ugly static that came from me boosting the input all the way to record panels at a writers conference the day before).  I looked at my stats--feeling masochistic after misunderstanding the plot of 50 SHADES OF GREY--and discovered that the first Dumarest book "The Winds of Gath," is my biggest-selling audiobook, so I guess I'd better get off my duff and start another of these.

Rish

P.S. Not really sure what's up with the cover art, but it's still better than what I could come up with.

The Dry Run

So, I recently decided that 2015 would be my year for writing a novel.  It still seems to be the plan, though I have little idea how I'm going to pull it off.*  One of the problems is that I lack discipline.  That's a major one.  But a more minor one is that I do my writing--for the most part--in notebooks, written out with pen while I wait for things or during lunch breaks.  There's no way to chart my progress if the writing just stays in a notebook.

So, I thought I would do a test, a dry run for the next story/novella I write, and see if I can't force myself to get on here, chart my progress, and see what writing my novel this summer will be like.   Can I do it?

Wait, don't answer that yet.  I got an idea, a couple of months ago, for a story I'd like to someday write, and I found the paper where I jotted it down the other day.  I've been thinking about that idea, and even though I don't have an ending for the story yet, I thought I would choose it as my next writing project, and try to use my blog to track my success or failure with it.

So, what I'll do is, start the story, guess that it will be, say, 25,000 words long, and stick some kind of meter on here to see how far along I've gotten.  As of right now, the meter is thus:



It doesn't look great, but it does the job, right?

So, two things: 1) I have to come up with a title for the story (I'll let you know when I do), but for now it's gonna be "The Dry Run."  2) I can only count the words if they are computerized up and shareable with a potential audience, so that means I need to type up whatever writing I do in my notebook before it gets added to my tally.  Fair enough?

If you'd like a bit more rambling than these short paragraphs, I talk about it in a short, very boring Podcast That Dares Not Speak Its Name, which you can listen to here.



Rish Soon-To-Be-Novelist Outfield

*Which is made all the worse by the fact that I don't know what it's going to be about.  I made a list last week of the novel-sized ideas I still have kicking around inside my head, and without exception, they all feel like screenplays to me, which, last time I checked were not the same thing as novels.

Rish Performs "Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthian Eyes" on Pseudopod

Pseudopod is a horror fiction podcast that is, amazingly, over four hundred episodes long.  It is hosted by the Lord of hosts, Alisdair Stuart, who elevates even the word "Hello" when he says it, into poetry.  A couple of those episodes have, unfortunately, been tainted by my foul narrations, and this week's is one of them.

The story, if it can be said in a single sentence, is "Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes," written by Tom Ligotti, and as the title suggests, this was a bit of a throwback kind of story.  It reminded me of Poe, when in "Tell-tale Heart" he goes on a first person diatribe about the Eye, or in "Cask of Amontillado," where he pontificates about his desire for revenge.  The narrator is a mesmerist/hypnotist/entertainer, delighting the rich attendees of a party in a huge house, and his contempt for the people he has enthralled is only barely contained.

I tried to deliver the dialogue in a classic, melodramatic, mid-Atlantic manner, channeling (perhaps) Vincent Price in another Poe tale this reminded me of, "Masque of the Red Death."  Because of the language and type of story, it was a challenge to make it sound natural, and only you can decide whether I succeeded or not.*

I'm always happy to narrate stories for other shows, but some are more challenging than others.  Here be yon link: http://pseudopod.org/2015/04/17/pseudopod-434-drink-to-me-only-with-labyrinthine-eyes/

Rish "Labyrinthine Arse" Outfield

*Sorry to get off on a rant here, but I've meant to write about this for years.  There's this Activision video game called "Skylanders" that runs on gaming platforms, but requires kids to purchase action figures to play the game, placing a figure on the stage setup and being that character in the game.  There's a demo of the game at every Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, Best Buy, and Barkley's Fun Funeral Home location in the country.  And on the demo, there's a voice-over explaining the game in excited tones to any child that happens by, and the thing that always stays with me, every time I hear it (and I've heard it dozens of dozens of times by now) is when the narrator says, "Only YOU can save Skylands by placing a character on the game portal and defending the land from evil!"
It strikes me somewhere down deep when I hear it.  Only you.  Only you can be a hero.  It's up to you.  You're our only hope (Obi-Wan Kenobi).  The ball is in your court, and if you don't pick it up, no one else will.  It's that Call To Adventure that Joseph Campbell spoke of, and the way it's phrased always makes me want to stand tall and say, "Alright, I'll do it.  I will place a character on the portal and I will save this land.  Because if I don't do it, no one else will."  It speaks to me, even though I once considered myself smart, and have been around the block long enough to know that a) Skylands does not exist, and b) that thousands of other kids will step up to save the world if I don't.
Someday I'd like to sit down with the guy who wrote that, and tell him how I reacted in a Pavlovian way every time I heard that recording.  I hope he knows what the devil I'm talking about.

Rish Outcast 22: Ask Me No Questions (An Unexpected Journey)

Fan and friend of the Dunesteef, Tom Tancredi, recently sent me a list of questions, expecting me to answer each one.  I did so, in my usual, verbose, over-long fashion.

Well, as the hours, days, and weeks passed, it seemed prudent to share them with everyone (i.e., all four of you who listen to the Rish Outcast).  This, technically, should've been an episode of the Podcast That Dares Not Speak Its Name, but because I recorded the intro in the car, my lawyers say I must refer to it as an Outcast.  Thanks, guys.

To download the episode, right click HERE and save to your dee-vice.

Almost There . . . Stay On Target

Wow, I haven't blogged in a long, long time, the calendar claims.  It seems like I was just on here, writing a bunch of words no one would ever read, but it was apparently weeks ago.  Also, my hair has gotten longer than the last time I checked.  Should I see a doctor, do you think?

Anyway, last time I wasted your time with my typing, I had begun work on a sequel to "Birth of a Sidekick."  And then somehow, it was April.  I don't really understand it myself, but February and March were each apparently only two weeks long.  Is this how life is going to be from now on, with the days, months, seasons, and decades getting shorter until the morning where I hit the Snooze button and wake up to find someone new is President, and popular music has miraculously gotten even worse?

Anyway, back to writing.  I have quite enjoyed writing BOAS 2, I write four or five days a week, and  have been limiting myself to using "apparently" only once each paragraph, but I'm still not quite done with it.

But I am close.  This thing has gotten bigger and uglier than I ever guessed it would get.  At around the halfway point, I realized I could probably quit there and call it a story in and of itself, and then the second half of the story could be a third story.  Do any other writers do that kind of thing?*  I think at that particular point, the sequel was already as long as the original story, and when I wrote the second half, it turned out to be twice as long as the first half.

And I'm still not done, apparently.  The big confrontation with the bad guy has yet to happen--I meant to start on it today, but I sat on the toilet and emptied the trash instead--and then the story is going to end so abruptly that any reader who stuck with me that far will rue the very day I was born.  That's the plan, anyway.  And after that, I'll have to a) type up the damned story, b) try to fix all the problems with it, and 3) attempt to give it a more Western flavor, at least as far as description and dialogue go.

My plan is to have the story finished this week.  After that, I've got a story for a contest to write.  I've already got the idea (and I sketched out how it would end on a Post-It note at work the other day, only to find it in the trash can when I came back from lunch, so that apparently bodes well).  As all contest stories are, it's supposed to be wicked short, so that should make my job easier.

The "Birth of a Sidekick" sequel has not been a chore to write (though that doesn't mean it's inspired rather than terrible), but I have been tempted, a time or two, to set it aside and start work on the story for the contest, since that may well be easier.  Or more fun.  But at the writers symposium I went to . . . let's see, it feels like eight to ten days ago, but the calendar claims it has been seven weeks . . . one of the speakers really stressed that you must stick with the project you are currently working on, no matter how distracted you are by shiny new ideas.  He said that a writer works on one project at a time, finishes one project, and then can reward himself (or herself) with that second project as soon as he/she's finished.

Apparently.  So I'm going to take his advice, just this once, and keep to the plan,  After those two projects are done, I will possibly have time for one more story before I take up Big's challenge of writing a novel this summer.  And for that . . . I vow to limit my "apparentlys" to one per chapter, at most!

Rish "Ostensibly" Outfield

*Obviously, the writers of BACK TO THE FUTURE, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and THE MATRIX 2 & 3 know what I'm talking about.  Except what they did was worse, even though I like 4.5/6th of those movies.

Rish Outcast 21: Metacast

Rish talks briefly (alright, semi-briefly) about the point of the podcast and ruminates a bit about creativity.

To download the episode, right click HERE and save to your infernal device.

Rish Narrates "The Early Conundrums" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch on Audible

Last summer, Kristine Rusch put out a collection of her "Spade/Paladin Conundrum" stories, which I had done the audio versions of.  Her agent asked me if I'd like to record the audiobook for the collection as well.  Now, I'd been told before (and many more times since then) that novels sell much better than short stories, and that a collection is closer to the former than the latter.  So, I was excited at the prospect (especially since I had done 80 to 90% of the work on this already, so in a way, it would be like free money).

I'm not sure what, exactly, happened between last summer and February, but I finally got the contract to produce the audio, and within a couple of days, I had the whole thing done.  It contains a new introduction by the author (which was oddly enjoyable to record, since it reminds me of the Dunesteef and my own author's notes), and the five extant Spade/Paladin stories, "Stomping Mad," "The Case of the Vanishing Boy," "The Karnikov Card," "Pandora's Box," and "Trick or Treat."

It's available at this link.

I know I pooh-pooh the whole money-making aspect of writing and audiobook work, but it would be pretty grand if this sold a lot of copies, because a) I would find ways to spend the cash, and b) Rusch might feel the push to write (and publish) more of these convention detective stories.

And then we can collect those into a second collection, hopefully not titled "The Humdrum Conundrums."

Writing Update - The Notebook (but not that "The Notebook")

I did mention a few weeks ago that I started on a sequel to "Birth of a Sidekick," which is a story I published, audio-booked, and podcasted, but feel free to buy it anyway.*

Well, I do continue to work on it, nearly every day.  It's already eclipsed the size of the first story, and shows no signs of stopping.  In fact, there was a point last week or so where I realized I could just write "The End" and continue the narrative in the next installment.  It may actually have been a wise choice, but ah well, I forged on.

I'd say I'm about at the two-thirds point, and if I haven't finished it by the end of the month, then I'm even lazier than I realized.  I'd like to talk about the story's theme, and how having a theme in mind changed the way the story went, but I could easily do a whole post about it (and how I'm scared it's gonna be nearly novel-length, even though it's not supposed to be), but I don't want to be here all day.

I do need to finish the dang thing soon, though, because I went ahead and entered my name for the Masters of the Macabre contest (for the fifth time), and this year, they want an audio drama (with other voices, sound effects, and music in it), which is, frankly, more ambitious than 90% of writing contests.  And maybe even for me, we'll see.

In a related (semi-related?) story, I finished out my notebook this week.

Now, I guess I should explain why this is--if indeed it is--significant.  I write my stories longhand in spiral notebooks.  I do this because I am too distracted when I'm at a computer, and because my experiences with laptops are almost wholly negative.  I keep planning on getting a new laptop, and use it only for writing (which is easy to say, and damned difficult to actually pull off), but for now, I write my stories on paper.  It's frustrating for the (few) people who want to read my work, though, because there are no easily-shareable ways of letting them read the stories, save scanning, photographing, or transcribing my scrawls.  In fact, I vaguely remember asking once if somebody wanted to try their hand at typing up one of my stories, so that I wouldn't have to do it, and I can't remember if there were any takers.

Regardless, doing my writing in this way is pretty darn inefficient, in that it's all in one single location, so if I lose the notebook (as I did with the one I took to work, and wrote "A Lovely Singing Voice" in, only to find it again months later), those pieces are gone forever.  I like to think that I get an easy rewrite when I sit down and type up the stories, but it's actually an easy way to get typos into a second draft, when I should be cleaning them up.  Also, people ask me how many words I've written on something, and unless I go through and count them (which I've only ever made the mistake of doing a time or two), I'll never know.

Even so, it is pretty great to have filled another notebook, and to soon start up on another one.**  This is gonna sound self-indulgent (but hey, it's a blog, what else are they for, unless it's to generate ad-revenue, which is even more self-indulgent, you arrogant, money-hungry bastards), but Tom Tancredi recently asked me about claiming to write a lot of stories, so I thought I'd take a moment to look through it, before it gets tossed in the closet and covered with dirty clothes, like the last two notebooks.

I don't know if you can see this picture or not, but it's of the first page, the folder part, of the notebook.  It's got a printout of an old (unfinished) story, "Training Program" there, and then a list of stories in the notebook, with asterisks by the ones that were actually completed.  The next page starts with the story I was calling "Baby Talk," from where I had left it in the notebook before ("Who the hell are you?" Alex asked me.  I couldn't help but laugh.).  But here's the project list from that first page:

Unreleased
Baby Talk/Say Uncle
Sin Eater (western vampire story)
carnival story (Mick Attends)
space opera
Caller I.D.
Parsec song
Unconventional
Greetings From Sector 19 (squad report george lucas)
percy jackson/devil daughter story
christmas zombie story 2 (TRU)
Caller I.D. sequel
Balms & Sears
The Gold Bug
Subtext 2 (text from dead students story, "Callback?")
Van helsing script
Murdertown 1 Mile
A Lovely Singing Voice (rewrite)
plane crash (alt history tale)
From Another World
3 witches tale (Expected Visitor)
Lost & Found (teleporting boy story/Finder of Lost Children)
Annabel Lee
Unpleasant Truths
Superman-type tale
Birth of a Sidekick sequel

That's quite a bit there, no?  It didn't include author's notes and journal entries and additions to pieces like "The Calling" and "Like A Good Neighbor" and "Last Contact" and who knows how many ideas for stories that never went anywhere.  It made me realize that I wrote "Caller I.D." to please some longtime reader of my blog, and I never put it out there.  I really ought to do that soon.

Remind me.

This third photo is just of a random page in the notebook, with three things on it: a list of stories I might put into a collection called "Something Weird," a half a page from "Sleeptalkin' Gal" where Eli watches the episode where Kevin calls the pretty girl on the phone (this part didn't make it into the audiobook version, unfortunately), and the beginning of a story I wrote for a contest, which will eventually be published as "Greetings from Sector 19," but was there called SQUAD REPORT GEORGE LUCAS (sadly, this story won that particular contest, I type with head lowered in shame).  It's got the names of the two main characters at the top of the page (to keep them straight), and the date of the story has 2041 crossed out, and 2106 replacing it.

Writing can be difficult, but boy, can it also be fun.  As I complete this notebook, and continue on with my BOAS sequel, it's remarkable how enjoyable this tale has been to write (at least the first draft; I may be horrified by how bad it is when it comes time to type it up and start fixing things).  My worry had been that this story would be boring, and that it's overly long, but I think I had those same fears on the first one, and people seemed to like it quite a bit.

Dean Wesley Smith's attitude has been: put out all your stories (for people to buy and read), and if one is bad, figure out why it was, and focus on not doing that in your next story.  I wish that I could follow his instructions/commands to the letter, and self-publish ever single one of them, happy to spend the money, and not care if somebody dislikes one or two (or all).

I am working on it.  Seven of those above stories have seen publication, so I'm not completely pathetic.  I dunno.  I do like the whole notebook thing, though I'll admit that it's not as efficient as it should be, and I really ought to become more efficient.

In my blog-writing as well.

Rish "Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook" Outfield

*This probably ought to be its own post, but I just wanted to say that SOMEBODY'S been buying my audiobook recordings over on Audible.  It used to be that I'd log in there, discover I hadn't sold anything, and if I was lucky, I'd find the number increased by one when I'd try back in a week.  Now, though, it increases every time I log in.  I wouldn't go so far as to say I sell a copy a day, but it's darn close.
And that's a pretty good feeling.  I've got one more book finished, and I just reached the halfway point on a second Dean Wesley Smith book (in narration--the easy part, not in editing--the uneasy part), after which I will begin another E.C. Tubb book.  All of which should add up to more sales.  If I can keep this up--and the sales continue--I could effectively retire and live off royalties, oh, somewhere around 2051.  Not bad, eh?

**Right now, I'm using the aforementioned "Lovely Singing Voice" notebook, which I used to keep under the passenger seat in my car, and would fish out only when I got an idea for a sketch or a song to use on the Dunesteef.  There's still an abandoned Valentine's Day 2012 sketch in there that would be a fake commercial for "Love Songs For One," which would've been a bunch of songs about eating, dancing, and sleeping alone.  Also, an abandoned Barbie sketch (a Batman parody, "Barbie Begins"), which I tossed when Liz M. stopped working on Dunesteef episodes.

Rish's Performance of "Suns of Liberty: Revolution" available on Audible

Seems like a long time ago, but I narrated a superhero novel by Michael Ivan Lowell called "The Suns of Liberty: Revolution," and that book is now available to purchase over at Audible (and I assume other places).  Here be yon link.

This takes place in a future America ruled by iron-fisted corporations.  A sort of superhero rises up and challenges the authorities, and soon, others are inspired by his example.  But the government develops super-soldiers of their own, as well as a weapon able to wipe entire cities off the map.

You know how I feel about superheroes, right?  If you feel the same, check it out.

Rish

Rish Outcast 20: Creature Feature

Rish presenta otra historia que perdió una competación hace poco.  

Rish presents another of his recent contest-losing stories, this one entitled "Creature Feature."*  One-time TV newswoman Carly Page arrives at an old lighthouse with a plan to interview the man who lives there, but actually hopes to catch a glimpse of a sea monster.

With luck, maybe Renee Chambliss will join Rish on this one, or Fake Sean Connery will treat us with a song.  Either one, but surely, not both.



To download the episode, right click HERE and save to your dee-vice.

*Aka "Lighthouse View."