A few announcements of less than staggering importance

On November 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

FIRST! That upon careful consideration of the known elements of the story, the in-progress sequel to Skylights, formerly known as Starlight, has been renamed to Sunlight. While I am not officially participating in NaNoWriMo– in other words, you won’t be able to find an account for me on the site anywhere– I expect to be caught up on a 5oK words in November pace by the end of the evening tonight. I hope to have Sunlight‘s first draft finished before winter break, or at least before what would be winter break if I was currently working at a school. The progress bar is over there to your right, and you can expect that to be updated frequently as the month rolls on. The name of the third book remains the same, and also remains a secret, because I like pretending I am important and keeping secrets from people.

SECOND! The Sanctum of the Sphere still remains free, and will stay as such through the end of the night tonight. Its performance provides me with further evidence that the best sign of how good a free book is going to do on any given day is how busy Amazon in general is– the book is higher ranked than Skylights was the last time I made it free, or at least close to it, but Skylights had an even hundred copies downloaded over the course of the day and Sanctum is currently sitting at twelve. That’s ebb and flow at Amazon and there’s nothing I can do about it. Go download it anyway!

THIRD! Which is MORE THAN TWO, but SO WHAT! I keep forgetting what the third announcement is supposed to be. Oh, right! I currently have my next three books planned out, which is vaguely ridiculous. I expect Sunlight to be out in or around April of 2016, then the next Benevolence Archives book in fall of 2016, which will be a novel-length short story collection, and then in April of 2017 a stand-alone science fiction novel called The Imorah Protocol. I am considering moving Imorah into 2016 and pushing back the next BA book a bit. I don’t know who will care about this, but I’m telling you anyway!

Actually, I probably have my next five books planned out, because after whatever’s in early 2017 would be the third and final Skylights book, and then my fantasy novel that I have no idea for yet but I really want to write. That means I’m set until late 2018! That’s completely ridiculous!

That is all.

So, uh…

On October 31, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing8 Comments

…who’s doing NaNoWriMo? I’m not, at least officially, but I do plan on getting as much of the Skylights sequel done next month as I possibly can. Who should I be encouraging/occasionally poking fun at?

Day Two of November…

On November 2, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work, Writing2 Comments

…and I’m already like “Oh, God, just screw it, words are for people who can’t grunt properly.” It is very clearly Sunday. I have spent some time idly cleaning (which means that I move approximately two thousand small objects from where they are to where they should be, a process that ought to result in a more orderly-looking house but somehow never does) and reading a book that may well be beyond my intellectual capabilities at the moment. The tree in my front yard is clearly waiting for the first major snowfall of the year to drop the rest of its leaves. Oh, and I’ve been learning about how squirrels can climb down trees. Did you know that squirrels can rotate their back ankles 180 degrees? It’s kinda fascinating.

That’s been about it.

(Sidenote: it’s maybe 40 degrees outside. The neighbor boy, an eighth grader, is running around with no shirt on. Clearly, he’s out of his mind.)

I also sorta quit OtherJob, at least for the next several months. You can probably imagine that your average miniature golf course doesn’t get a whole lot of business during winter, and if you’ve been reading me for a while you’ll likely recall that I spend most of my time at OtherJob during the winter grading and writing. I have nothing to grade this year, and I make enough money that 6 hours of extra pay every two weeks isn’t going to make me or break me, so I spoke with my boss this morning and told him to consider me on call until spring when we ramp back up to seven days a week. I’ll still be in periodically (people are going to call in sick once in a while, for example) but I am effectively down to only one job for the first time in seven years until March or so, which is going to be a really weird feeling.

Wednesday I will be leaving for Nashville, where I’m attending an ed conference that will last until Saturday. I’ve been looking forward to this conference until this week; I’ve never been to Nashville and it’s all expenses paid, so that alone ought to be nice, but as the thing grows closer my innate homebodyness is taking over and I’m finding that I really don’t want to leave my family for four days. I’m spending an awful lot of someone else’s money for our team to go to this thing, though, so I probably ought to find a way to make the most of it.

Blargh.

On #NaNoWriMo

On November 1, 2014November 1, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing23 Comments

I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve “competed” and won three or four times, I think, and had at least one manuscript die on the page on me partway through that I wasn’t able to cross the finish line with. I haven’t officially tried in a couple of years now.

I love the concept of NaNo, guys. I think it’s amazing, and had I not won it for the first time in 2006 with Click I’m convinced that my life would be very different now, even though Click will never see the light of day. Skylights was originally a NaNoWriMo project, too, although the final draft of the project ends up close to twice the suggested NaNo length. I suggested that I had “outgrown” NaNoWriMo in a post a couple of weeks ago, an assertion that encountered a bit of pushback and was probably not the best imaginable phrasing. What I was getting at was this: I think a big part of NaNo is for people who are not first-time novelists to become first-time novelists, and the event’s damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead emphasis is a big part of that. I am not only not a first-time novelist any longer, but I’ve proven to myself that I can write without the pressure of NaNo hanging over my head– which means that I don’t “need” it to help me any more. Is that the only reason to do it? Of course not– but I have my own little community of writerfolk here, too, so I don’t need the breakneck pace any longer.

I am going to do this, though, in the spirit of the thing:

I’ll blog every day in November, which… let’s be honest, I was gonna do that anyway. Although I’m going to be in Nashville at a conference for most of next week, so the last part of the week may be late-evening and photo-post heavy.
I’m gonna work on Benevolence Archives 8 every day, too, at least a little bit, with the goal being having the first draft done by the end of the month. This should be less challenging than it sounds, because I don’t think the first draft has much more than 10-15,000 words or so left in it. This gives me December to not look at it at all while beta readers look at it and gives me a good shot at an early Spring release date.

nano_07_winner_small So I’m not doing NaNo, but I’m still going to be pushing myself a bit more than usual this month. Plus I’m growing my beard back in, but that’s a winter thing, and not a No-Shave-November thing. 🙂 What are you doing with yourself this month?

Question for the writerfolk among us

On October 15, 2014October 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing13 Comments

Anybody doing NaNoWriMo this year? Or do y’all kind of feel like you’ve outgrown it? I’m not, but because I know I won’t pull it off this year, plus BA 8 doesn’t have 50K more words in it. I did it twice successfully; I figure that’s good enough.