Employee of the Week

Rodney at work is a likable enough guy.  Everybody there certainly likes him (a heck of a lot more than they like me), and he has a charm and inherent decency that is hard to dislike.  But over the last few weeks, he seems to call me more and more to cover his shifts, to the point where, when I see his name on the Caller ID, sadly, I no longer pick up.*

So Thursday, my phone rang, and I saw it was Rod, and just let it ring.  He left no message, but called back again as soon as it went to voicemail.  I couldn't understand why anybody'd do that, and it's my (new) policy to always let folks leave a message before I deign to call them back or pick up the next time they call.  Like I said, no message.

But he did it again on Friday, not leaving a message, and I decided to complain about it to a coworker.  First I bitched that he calls me all the time to cover his shifts, then I whined that he called twice yesterday and now once today, and he expects me to just cancel whatever plans I might hav--

"Oh," my coworker interrupted, "did you hear?  Rod's dad died yesterday."

"Oh," I said back.

Yes, information that would have been useful before I began to complain about Rodney.

Rish "At Least I Didn't Send Him A Mean Text" Outfield

*Some of that is on me, after not showing up one day in February for the first time in the years I've worked there, and then getting written up about it, I pretty much decided to stop covering for others no matter who they are.

Rish Outcast 43: Mary Sue Ex Machina

A while back, I was going to do an episode of That Gets My Goat where I complained about people overusing/misusing the terms "deus ex machina" and "mary sue."  But Big canceled on me, so we didn't.

Later, I was glad we'd not recorded it that night, since I was misusing one of them too.

Let's talk about it anyway, shall we?

Right-Click, you monkey.

Babysitter of the Week

I seem to have maimed my nephew today.

I thought it would be fun to "pump" him on my new bicycle, and figured he'd be safe, since his mother insists he wears a helmet (which, I'll admit, seems ridiculous to me, since there were no helmets or knee-pads or Child Protective Services when I was a kid, and look how I turned out).  But I put him on the seat behind me, and told him to hold onto me while I pedaled, and we went down the block, not fast, but not slow either.  "If you start to fall, let me know," I said as we turned around to go back up the hill.

Well, he didn't.

Luckily for the boy, we were going uphill, and hence, very slowly.  Unluckily for the boy, he slid off the back of the bike, hit the tire, and then was rubbed raw by the rubber until I stopped.

He whimpered a little, but didn't exhibit much pain when it happened, so I figured it was no big deal.  However, once we got home, the crying really started, and I discovered it was for good reason.  I'd take a picture and show you, but . . . what the hell, why would I EVER do that?

Needless to say, the poor kid has deep scrapes where the sun don't shine, and is sleeping on his stomach right now, wisely pumped full of painkillers.  I hope I haven't traumatized him so he'll be afraid of bicycles in the future, since they provide me with a) a little joy, and b) the only exercise I ever get.

Rish

P.S. I was vexed about this, and feeling a little like a choad, but he was up and around again first thing the next morning, and had no problem going up and down stairs.  I did see him without the bandage on later, though . . . and I'm a choad again.

My Story "Rest Stop" Available in Text & Audio

"Rest Stop" is available to buy, either in text form at Amazon, or in audio form at Audible.  Links in the previous sentence.

This is a very simple short story about a man and his dog on a road trip.  It wasn't written long ago* but I can't remember what inspired it.  Maybe nothing did.  Is that possible?

I'm really trying to publish more of my short stories, even though it seems like an overly painstaking, thankless task.  I enjoy writing them, enjoy (to a lesser extent) editing/rewriting, and enjoy recording the audio versions.  But formatting them, sending them out to be evaluated, uploading the files and descriptions for sale, pricing, editing the audio, uploading that, and creating cover art?

Nope.

Speaking of which . . .  A guy at work this week revealed that he's not only an amateur artist, but is enormously talented at it.  I mentioned that I ought to get him to do a cover to one of my stories, and he seemed totally interested.  You and I both know that's not going to go anywhere.  Sigh.

Rish

*In fact, I was looking through the notebook it was written in today and found the following paragraph: "Dunesteef sketch.  Big Anklevich is accepted to the Xavier School due to his ability to score with hot chicks."  Had no memory of that one either.  But it would've been a heck of an opportunity to do inappropriate Patrick Stewart lines.

Rish Outcast 42: "Oh Honey, Your First Novel!"

Well, this has been a long time in coming.

This post serves as a blog entry, and as a way to present another episode of my solo podcast, both with the same goal: to announce the publication of my first novel, "Into the Furnace."  I nearly called it "A Premise With Promise," but . . . well.*

It's not a long one, but I've been working hard on it the last few weeks, to get it out there, and in a condition that doesn't mortify me on the level of naked baby photos or police stoplight footage.

"Into the Furnace" tells the story of Sheriff Will Ford, who leaves a dead wife and a struggle with the bottle behind him, and moves out to New Mexico Territory to take over as the law in Bendo's Furnace, a small mining town that just keeps getting smaller.  It turns out that people (not to mention local animals and valuable livestock) just keep disappearing out there, and if anyone knows what's happening, they're not talking.

It's what I've been told is a Weird Western, which means a genre story (in this case, a bit o' Horror and Fantasy) in an Old West setting.  The text version is available on Amazon.com right now at THIS LINK, with an audio version to follow (I'll drop another blogpost/podcast when that becomes available).

I would greatly appreciate it if you'd go buy my book, and I'll put a discussion forum link HERE, just in case.

If you'd like to listen to the first chapter of the book, as well as hear me talk about it while trying not to spoil anything, here's another Rish Outcast:



Or you can RIGHT CLICK HERE to download the episode for later consumption.

*After that, this was called "Oh George, Your First Novel!"  But I discovered Lorraine actually says "Honey," which will make the reference a bit harder to catch.

Got Myself Covered

So, I've talked about cover art a time or two.  Every self-publishing panel I've been to has mentioned it, and how a good cover can make your book sell (or not sell).  Big and I have discussed it ad nauseum, and I never care much about my covers, as long as they convey the feeling of my stories.

Hence this:

I understand what everybody's telling me: that a cover that's good can convince people to buy the book/story, because it enhances the text and catches the eye, and that a lousy cover can convince folks that the content behind it is probably lousy too.

But I tend to be really, really minimal, especially because I don't *really* care whether people buy them or not.  And sometimes that works, such as:

Other times, not so much:

Not sure why I love green font so much, either.

The cover that people give me the most compliments on is the one I had Dave Krumanacher do for "Birth of a Sidekick."  I asked him to do a follow-up for the sequel, but I haven't got one yet.  It's really good:

So, when it came time to do the cover for my first novel (or "novel," if you want to be mean), I thought I would give more care and effort to it than I usually do.  I guess I first started thinking about it back in July, when I took this picture:

In the book, there are three buttes just outside of town, and the tallest one seems to be where there's trouble.  So, in passing this lovely Arizona butte (or hill or big rock), I snapped the photo, and then a couple of others, thinking that I could probably stick all three together sort of like this:

I ended up losing (or saving over) the original combination version, but ultimately, the cover was going to look pretty close to this here:

And that's fine, really.  To me.

Yeah, it looks a little bit weird, and kind of shitty, but with a green font and bigger text, I would've been fine to publish it like that (still could).

But then I found out that Austin at work is an artist, and a really fine one, and asked him if he would do me a drawing of three buttes, and a bunch of skulls or bones in the bottom right corner.  I did a sketch showing exactly what I wanted, but never ended up giving it to him (as he had started right away, just based on what I told him).  Almost immediately, he sent me this pencil drawing:

I liked it, and told him to make the middle butte the tallest and most prominent.  I then went to work trying to finish up my book (and audiobook) for publication, and asked Austin to get me the finished cover by Friday (5/6).

Sure enough, on Friday, he sent me this:

He told me he knew it wasn't exactly what I had asked for, and if I wanted, he could work on it some more.  Or I could just not use it and he'd do better next time.

I quickly stuck a title on there, and ended up with:

Although it's exactly what I intended to create, even I admit that came out a bit lamer.  Is it that "Into" seems bigger than "the furnace?"  Is it the white outline on my name and the black outline on the title?  IS it the green?  I dunno, except that something was off on it, and though I had planned on publishing the book with the above as the cover, I decided to give it a day and see if I couldn't come up with something better.

Big has access to a lot more fonts than I do, and he seems to have a good eye for balance and design, so I asked him to do me one that was in a Western font and one that was in a Fantasy font (since the book's a bit of both).

Here was the first:

 And here was the second:

They both look better than mine, but he also included a couple of other takes (nine total), including one that I liked a lot that I called more of a Horror version.  I was sort of torn between using the Western one and the Horror one, but thought I'd let the kids on Facebook decide.  So, I created this image:

I told them to vote for their pick, and started on this blog post.  Now I've reached this point (in the spirit of full disclosure, I also called Big on the phone and played Plants Versus Zombies), and Option C received seventeen votes, while A and B each received two.*

One friend suggested I slide my first name over to the left, and I made a little alteration to the image, leaving this the final cover:

Guess I ought to publish it now.

Rish "Re-covered" Outfield

I won't always go this all out, though, I recognize that.  How's this for irony?

*After posting this, they continued to get votes.  It was actually an amazing turnout for a Facebook question, but I had already made my decision by that point (and the votes just confirmed the results from the middle of the night).

Lucky Find

Big emailed me tonight to see if I still had a (disturbing) photo I had doctored of his children as serial killers (don't ask).  But in looking through old pictures, I saw the ones of my work in the Lucky the Leprechaun costume from a decade ago.  It had always bothered me that the only photos I had contained an irritating watermark over them, and I wondered if normal ones existed.

Then I remembered this thing called the Internet.  I did an image search, and immediately, I found this picture of me and Neil Patrick Harris:

Which is different than the one I own.

I did another search, and found one of me and Jeff Daniels (again, better than mine):

Me with Dominic Purcell:

Me, with everybody's pal, Andy Dick:

And, oddly, this picture of Frankenhooker:

Yes, this was a better use of an hour than writing.

Rish Outcast 41: The Hocking Dead

This is a quick episode I scraped together to tell you a recent tale of happy fortune, sing a little song, and mention my latest story.

Next episode'll have to be about my book, I guess.

Or I could keep procrastinating.



HERE is where you'd Right-Click, if you wanted to download the episode directly.

Rish (Co-)Narrates "The Scarlet Albatross" on Audible.com

I've heard nothing but compliments about my performance of Abigail Hilton's last book, "Hunters Unlucky," from a year or so ago (still available HERE, if you're interested).  So when Abbie contacted me, letting me know a superflu-like plague had wiped out every other male narrator in existence, and she could use my voice for her next book, well, I signed up.*

"Scarlet Albatross" tells the story of Anaroo, a sort of assassin stuck onboard an airship (the titular Albatross), who ends up working with her mortal enemies, led by Silas Ackleby, the ship's captain.  Actually, several characters on opposite sides of wars and conflict end up having to work together, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the themes of the book.

It's a Fantasy adventure set in the land of Panimandorah, the world of Abbie's previous novels, "The Guild of the Cowry Catchers," "The Prophet of Panimandorah," "Crossroads," and "Ballistic: Ecks Versus Sever."

This project was unique for me in that Abbie also had another narrator, Lauren "Scribe" Harris, who narrated the chapters with a female point of view, while I did (with one exception) the chapters with male ones.  I'd heard it done a time or two in other audiobooks ("Gone Girl," Orson Scott Card's "Pathfinder," and "The Time Traveler's Wife" immediately come to mind), but I'd never known what it would entail before trying it myself.

What it meant was that Lauren--who did the vast majority of the book--voiced all of the characters at the start, and I had to listen (or at least make notes) and try to do similar voices for those same characters.  Scribe, it turns out, is a master of doing regional accents, so I ended up having to re-voice a character or two, since I found myself outclassed in that arena, as we went along.

I was able to sleep at night, however, knowing that Abbie felt that only one of my characters sounded like Fake Sean Connery.

Anyway, the book is very, very good, and is the start of a new trilogy.  Unless I am mercifully beheaded whilst traveling on the freeway with Big Anklevich because I couldn't reach the seat belt (which seems to be placed in a position only Elongated Man, Reed Richards, ElastiGirl, or Plastic Man can get to), causing my severed head to bounce around, knocking into Big's face, back, and crotch (as he has warned me is inevitable), I'll be back to do the second book before long.

I look forward to finding out what happens to Silas and Company when that happens.

The book proper can be found at this link.  And here is the link to the AUDIO VERSION, way over there at Audible.com.  Also, I believe you can hear a hefty chunk of the book for free over at Abbie's website, The Worlds of Abigail Hilton, or the whole damn thing, at her Patreon page.

Enjoy!

*Abbie does require me to actually read the book before I record it, which I am loathe to do, for some reason, but that inconvenience is offset by the fact that she actually pays me for my work.  Which is a refreshing change.

Rish Outcast 40: Abram the Ghostly Friend

This is another storyless episode, kids.  In it, I talk about a horror movie I had rented (it's called THE AWAKENING, starring Rebecca Hall and Imelda Staunton), and then about an idea I had for my own ghost story.

I never did write it.  Although if you asked me to, I might just change my mind, and let you in my life forever.

Yeah, I still like Celine Dion.  Wanna fight about it?



If you want to download the episode, you might want to Right-Click here.  Then rethink your attitude.

The Book That Broke the Camel's Back

So, I set the goal for myself to have my novel, "Into the Furnace," available on Amazon.com by the time CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 comes out, and I was well on my way.

Then I hit a snag.

I either had forgotten to type up a particular chapter, or (even scarier) had never written it at all, resulting in a missing section and a fairly-glaring plothole.

Which reminds me: I'm kind of struggling with how to present this book.  I have friends who are writers, and have enjoyed asking them about the marketing and promotion of their work, and always come out of the conversation with the thought that I need to accurately describe the book so that those who would (possibly) enjoy it will seek it out.  But there's a couple of ways to go about that.  The first is a sort of J.J. Abrams "only reveal what you want the audience to know" strategy, in which case, I just describe my book as "a Mystery set in the old West."  Or maybe give a summary of the first chapter, which sets the situation, and let the reader choose for him/herself whether to make the purchase.

That's how I intended to put out the book and talk about it.  But another strategy--perhaps a wiser one--is to simply give away the central conceit of the story, put it front and center, and hope that that hooks readers.

For example, I've always planned to have the cover be three buttes in the American Southwest, and let people know the genre by the font I use for the title and byline.  I realized that this is a pretty dull cover, though, and thought maybe it would help to put skulls and/or bones at the bottom right of the cover, thus hinting at danger or violence, or at least death.

But that's not as dynamic a cover as simply depicting the central conflict of the book, which a) shows exactly what the genre is, and b) would sell a lot more copies.

I even started to ask my artist friend yesterday if he might prefer to do a cover like that, because they always say you've gotta have a catchy, flashy, exciting, illuminating cover in order to sell this kind of indie stuff.  And if done right, it'd be a heck of a cover.

Not that I've ever cared about such things.

I'm not a numbers man.  I don't give a fig about how many people listen to my podcast or come read my blog or purchase copies of "The Minnesota Diarrhea Ghost" or like my Sean Connery impression.  And I don't even eat figs.

But I like to hear Big Anklevich tell me that there are many fans who like (if not love) the Dunesteef, or that he's gonna send people a link to my blog so more people hear my solo stuff, or that he's got a pretty, blind country cousin who thought it was the real Sean Connery we'd gotten on our show. 

Oh, and "Minnesota Diarrhea Ghost" has never been purchased.  It's free.

But right now, in April 2016, with about seventy-five percent of the book finalized and recorded, and more than half of it edited and ready to make available, I still don't know that I want to give everything away through a summary or illustration, such as the following:

"The Sixth Sense, a novel by M. Night Nolastname.  Doctor Crowe, a child psychologist, meets a disturbed child, Cole Sear, who can see and speak to ghosts.  He helps the boy deal with his fears, enables Cole to find out the ghosts' motivations, and ultimately discovers the truth about himself."

This is a perfectly cromulent entry for that non-existent novel (though who knows, maybe there's a novelization), but it does a disservice to the story, which doesn't reveal those pertinent details until pretty far into the tale.  Or worse, think of how ROSEMARY'S BABY was promoted, and that that information is actually revealed, narratively, in the closing three or four minutes of the film.

At the same time, if I tipped my hand with the art and/or synopsis, doesn't it make the central mystery of the book a bit boring, as the reader would have to slog through fourteen chapters before finally getting that scene depicted on the more-dynamic cover?

So, back to the beat, y'all.

I reached this segment of the book, and worried about what to do about it.  I went through my notebooks, looking for the lost chapter, and it wasn't there.*  It was possible I wrote that part on my laptop and then somehow saved over it (this has happened on several occasions, because laptops notoriously hate me because of the great Powerbook Holocaust back in the Nineties. 

I was only a guard, doing what I was told!

So, I had no choice but to sit down and try to write that missing chapter, to fill in the information that it needed, and to make it fit with the rest of the text.  But it wasn't as easy as that.  There was no easy way to create a new chapter in between Chapters 25 and 27 that said the things I had not previously said in the book.  And if I did just create a Chapter 26 that says, "And then Will thought back to a conversation he had had a few days before, which was not mentioned before . . ." it would have been worse than not addressing the plothole at all.

What resulted was three new scenes that I had to retroactively place earlier in the book, as well as a couple of references to that information later on, so that when you get to Chapter 27, it's all perfectly natural.  It ended up adding almost two thousand words to the manuscript (which is nice, since I keep worrying it's barely a novel, not when my contemporaries are writing 150,000 word epics).

What's more, because I had already recorded all the previous chapters--and edited some of them--I had to go back and record all the newly-revised bits, then hope I could seamlessly edit in the new segments.  Which I was mostly able to do, despite it taking a while to get done.

Honestly, even though the book itself was written rather painlessly last year (as just a very long short story), this has been the hardest part of the whole thing.  And on more than one occasion this week, I did ask myself, "Is this worth it?  Do other writers try this hard to make their work--which is never going to be perfect to begin with--better?  Should I have sent all this out to friends or strangers, hoping they'd find the inconsistencies themselves and provide me with suggested changes to make it a little more historically accurate**?  Would it have been wiser to do several drafts of this thing, ensuring that each version is a little more complete, a little more satisfying, a little closer to a debut novel that doesn't suck?"

All good questions, no?

But Big Anklevich gave me some advice, and I'm gonna try to follow it.  He said, "Just put the book out there.  Publish it and mention it on your blog and on Facebook, and let me promote it in a couple other places.  Make it available and move on to the next thing.  And whatever you do, don't ever, ever read the comments section on Amazon."

So, we'll see how that goes.

Rish

*There was a two or three sentence summary of what happened there in my notes, which I had written during one of those stretches where I get stuck and say, "Okay, and then what happens?"  And I spitball ideas onto the page, hoping they kick-start me back into productivity.  What, you don't do the same thing?

**For example, I changed "lightbulb" to "arc lamp" having spent a few minutes researching the invention of the electric light.  Which is probably unimportant, since there are many more glaring inaccuracies in the book, and I've been told on more than one occasion that the Old West of popular entertainment didn't even exist.