On temporary and uncharacteristic bursts of optimism

On March 30, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Writing1 Comment

giphy

I was entertained– this is genuine, I’m not trying to be passive-aggressive here– at how little attention my post about Sekiro got the other day. Clearly there isn’t a huge audience around here for wild technical musings about video games unless I’m complaining (complaining always gets attention). That said, we’re invoking the My Blog My Rules Goddammit covenant here, because my ass beat Genichiro Ashina earlier today, a feat that somehow only twenty-five percent of the players of this game have managed in the nine days since it came out, and I am damned proud of myself. So: booyah, motherfuckers.

ALSO! I have put new stuff on my Patreon twice in the last few days after ignoring it (and pausing charges to my Patrons; I don’t take your money if I don’t give you anything in return) for a couple of months. There have been two first chapters of old, abandoned projects put up– neither of those ever got finished, but if people like what they see in those first chapters, maybe I’ll revisit them. Remember, $2 a month gets you a whole book. We like books, right?

Today’s the first day of Spring Break, and while we don’t have any real plans for the week I have high hopes that I’ll get something done for the two conventions I’ll be going to this April– a new banner, at least, since the old ones are getting a little raggedy(*). I have been completely dry as far as writing fiction goes for all of 2019, basically, and dammit I’m gonna fix that this week. We’re gonna get something creative accomplished up in here if it kills me. And it’s not gonna kill me.

This is gonna be a big week, dammit. Big.

(*) ConGlomeration in Louisville, April 19-21, and LaffyCon in Lafayette on April 27 and 28. Are you near either of them? Come see me! I actually have some free tickets for LaffyCon, if anyone’s nearby and wants ’em.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On March 24, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

I’m Luther Siler. I’m an author. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I’ve written several books you might be interested in, ranging from short story collections to near-future science fiction to fantasy space opera to nonfiction, all available as ebooks or in print from Amazon. Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.

I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here are the important ones:

Support me on Patreon! Just a dollar a month gets you access to exclusive stories, early access to new books as they come out, and more! $2 or more a month gets you access to CLICK, an entire exclusive book!
You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. Warning: Twitter is where Politics Luther hangs out, and Politics Luther is usually angry and profane. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.

Thanks for reading!

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On March 3, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m Luther Siler. I’m an author. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here are the important ones:

Support me on Patreon! Just a dollar a month gets you access to exclusive stories, early access to new books as they come out, and more! $2 or more a month gets you access to CLICK, an entire exclusive book!
You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. Warning: Twitter is where Politics Luther hangs out, and Politics Luther is usually angry and profane. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.

Thanks for reading!

In which I’m suddenly taken seriously

On February 25, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

I should probably hold this information back a little bit, because right now I don’t have much more than what I’m going to tell you and there’s certainly a lot more to know, but I just got my panel schedule back for ConGlomeration this April in Louisville. And whoa.

First of all, I have a panel schedule. I’ve been doing cons for like four years and I’ve been on one panel. There were four people in the audience. One was my wife. (One of the other three bought a book, though!) I am doing five panels at ConGlomeration.

Friday, April 19, 1 PM: Writing Dialog
2 PM: Writing Compelling Characters
7 PM: Writing Science Fiction

Saturday, April 20, 3 PM: Setting Yourself Up for Success as an Indie
8 PM: Writing Fantasy

I’m not on any panels with Timothy Zahn, which makes me kinda sad, but I think Michael Z. Williamson is on the Writing Science Fiction one? He’s holding a gun with an attached silencer in his picture on Wikipedia and he once wrote a book called Brilliant Liberal Logic: Three Lies in Three Words, which implies that the word “liberal” is, itself, somehow a lie, which I’m not sure it is.

I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.

In which I need to snap out of it (again)

On February 14, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

It is not, strictly speaking, especially necessary to take this post terribly seriously. This is one of those “get it out of my head and onto the page” things, and it’s not like I have the sense to make anything private, so y’all get to see it regardless.

I’ve been on a prolonged dry spell, fiction-wise, lately, and it has rolled through my head a few times in the last couple of weeks that it would literally take less than half an hour to utterly eliminate every trace of Luther Siler– remember, it’s a pseudonym– from the internet. It’s basically just a matter of deleting a bunch of social media accounts. I don’t think I’d be able to completely eliminate the books from Amazon since it would continue allowing used sales, but I could stop new sales.

And if I did that, I wouldn’t have to keep worrying about the goddamn sequel to Skylights, now, would I? Or feeling crap about the fact that I haven’t put anything useful on Patreon in weeks and those folks are sending me money.

Again, don’t take this seriously. The punch line is this shit isn’t even true– I wrote Skylights before I’d ever even imagined Luther Siler, and I’d been thinking about the fucking sequel for years before this blog even got started. So this goddamn thing is going to be hovering over my head until I write it or die, whichever comes first. I could 86 my Luther Siler identity tonight and I’d still be kvetching about this damn book in a month.

I dunno. This is how I work; I have prolonged periods of Nothing and then a switch in my brain will flip and I’ll write two books in three months. I was hoping that the pressure of the Patreon would get me better at reliably producing short fiction but apparently ha ha ha I’ll just take your money is winning instead. I mean, there’s a whole book on there, so it’s not like it’s a worthless investment, but I want regular new shit, and right now I’m not producing regular new shit.

Baaah. Need to kick this and get back on the horse. Just gotta figure out how.

Some book musings

On January 4, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m basically done with the “break” part of my break; I have the weekend and then I’m back to work on Monday. Usually by this point at the break I’m climbing the walls and chewing on my extremities; for the most part, other than yesterday’s post, I’ve managed to avoid going slowly crazy. I’ve gotten a fair amount of stuff done over the break. What I haven’t done is any of Luther’s stuff. It’s all been Clark Kent nonsense over here for the last couple of weeks.

My first priority in 2019 has to be to decide what to do with Skylights. I have so many half-written drafts of the sequel, under more than one title, that it’s frankly kind of ridiculous. That may or may not be the cover. It may or may not be the title. And once I have the sequel written I have to decide if I’m doing a second edition of the first book. A second edition wouldn’t be too different, but the first book already mentions things that didn’t happen in 2018 (because 2018 was, comfortably, The Future when I wrote it) and the events of the book are at this point far too close to Now for comfort. If nothing else, I need to remove specific dates, and probably rewrite the prologue to give the story some breathing room. I don’t think I can tie the events of the story so close to something that happened in 1984, for example; it just makes Gabe too old.

(20-minute break while I research the FAFSA and explain how taxes work for a former student; I avoid using the phrase “this would be easier if I adopted you.”)

Anyway, point is I gotta figure this shit out. And I probably should have reformatted some of my books to get them away from CreateSpace and over to Ingram over the break. And maybe done a new banner, since the one vertical banner I have is Skylights-focused. I should probably have one for at least one more of my books.

Point is, I didn’t spend as much time being Luther over the last couple of weeks as maybe I should have. And now I need to figure some stuff out over the next couple of days. This week shouldn’t be too hard (he said,) so I should have some brainspace left to get things done when I get home from work. And who knows? The next couple of days might be hugely productive.

Just, like I said, I’ve got some decisions to make, and a weight to get off my back.

What have you been putting off lately?

#Saleswanking for 2018 and more

On December 29, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

This is going to be a very short post, considering the amount of work that went into it, because Amazon and Square don’t play nice with each other and neither of them makes it especially easy to get these numbers in a format that I like. HOWEVER! I haven’t looked at book sales in a systematic way in a while, so this kinda needed to happen. And, frankly, included some nice surprises.

Note that “Amazon” includes both paid sales and free downloads, and I’ve smushed together both physical and digital copies as well; nearly all of them are digital. The Square sales are sales in person; some of those are going to be free giveaways for one reason or another but all of them involve physical books given or sold to people by me. This is 2018 only:

Eight hundred and fifty-seven books seems like a lot, honestly. The little discrepancy you see with Click from 2018 to the total includes the 14 people who got free copies through Patreon, which is one of the only ways you can get the book (pledge more than $2 a month!) and the 9 on the Square set were sold in person at conventions, which is the other way to get it.

As of right now, my books are starting to drop off of KDP Select, which means I’m about to lose the ability to give them away on Amazon. I am either trying to get all six of them (Click isn’t on Amazon) on the same schedule or about to broaden back out and put my books on other sites again. I haven’t decided. As of January 2nd, everything will be off KDP select, so I’ve got a few more days to think about it.

The overall numbers really surprised me. I didn’t think I’d moved this many books.

So, basically, if you include the occasional sale that isn’t captured here (Barnes and Noble, Apple, non-convention personal sales that I didn’t bother recording in Square,) I’m probably at right around five thousand books sold or downloaded since I started doing this.

Which, on the one hand, is a larger number than I thought it was going to be, and on the other hand, if I look at actual money earned from this … yeesh. I’m not going to share that because Amazon accepts currencies from all over the world and I’m not about to start digging through my tax returns, but suffice it to say that I’ve absolutely lost money at playing author since 2014. Cons and hotel rooms and book printings and all that cost money, and again, a lot of those Amazon numbers are from giveaways, not sales.

The totals for in-person sales, which are included in the above– this is just a summation of the “Square” lines:

Which, again, this isn’t nothing. Every one of these represents an actual human standing in front of me who bought books from me. Am I J.K. Rowling? Hell no. But this is a lot larger of a number than zero, which is what it would have been when I started doing this.

I should probably set some hard and fast goals for 2019. Not yet; I need to absorb these numbers first. But maybe that post is coming. Tomorrow, the 10 best books of the year.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On December 9, 2018December 9, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m Luther Siler. I’m an author. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here are the important ones:

Support me on Patreon! Just a dollar a month gets you access to exclusive stories, early access to new books as they come out, and more! $2 or more a month gets you access to CLICK, an entire exclusive book!
You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. Warning: Twitter is where Politics Luther hangs out, and Politics Luther is usually angry and profane. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.