Category: 2020

[Novels]

[link to excerpt]

[kindle] [paperback]

[Barnes and Noble]

[Bookbub]

[goodreads]

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: [Not yet recorded]

Word Count: [~12k as of April 3, 2021]

Publishing Date: Pending plotting, editing, writing, more editing, more writing, a final readthrough, and then betas

 

Summary:

[Summary has yet to be written, but it involves rewriting a death]

 

Sum it up in one sentence:

Dmitrya turns to a self-important street magician for help in dying a little differently.

 

About:

Well, this story features two characters I originally made for a LARP. Don’t know what that is? I’ll put the Wikipedia link [here]. That means I initially acted as both of this story’s main characters (albeit in a different setting). Dmitrya and Amine (Ah-meehn) were tremendously fun for me to play. They were also two of the first LARP characters I ever created. I did conclude Amine’s arc, but it bugged me for a while that I couldn’t get some of the details to unfold in quite the way I wanted them to. Dmitrya never interacted directly with Amine in a LARP setting (because, well, I played them both), but they do make a lot of sense together. When I started writing Amine into a story, it made perfect sense to me to include Dmitrya. She even arrived with a premise for the book. The current conclusion I have planned wraps up both characters’ arcs and satisfies their lives in story form.

Curious what LARP? Well, this wasn’t an official one. This was me and a bunch of friends at college in WestMo’s basement. This story’s setting, Victory Dreams of Techno Sleep, also fits these characters wonderfully. I know, that setting’s not so well fleshed out yet as it could be, but I’m getting there.

 

Dmitrya’s song? The Glorious Sons Everything is Alright. You can [find it on youtube here]

Amine’s song? He should have one, but I haven’t picked it yet.

 

[link to excerpt]

[link to amazon page]

[link to return to novels]

And, no, that’s not just because it’s March and finishing the reorg is part of this year’s first quarter stra+ (that’s short for strategy, think assessment / gameplan).

I’m actually declaring it done. Here’s why:

• The world descripts are a massive undertaking and generally huge endeavor from my perspective. It’s an ongoing project that I’ve noticed, by necessity, evolves with my books. This is a large portion of what’s remained of the reorg, but I can’t see it being completed any time soon. That’s not for lack of trying. It takes time to fully develop and type out a descript. The Balance of Souls, when first typed out, could combine into well over ten typed pages. I’ve since added to it.
• Widgets and such. If you haven’t noticed, I’m sometimes surprisingly tech-savvy, but usually not. My former laptop thought it was French (which I do speak, but I couldn’t tell you how that happened). Part of the reorg was adding features to the site. Well, now I think it’s easier to add these features more slowly as I come to them. Although, speaking of –
• That central hub still needs . . . revamped. I want to RSS feed my author social media to it but that’s still . . . getting done. I’m not really a social media person, although I do understand the value of internet marketing. Almost everything I read about author promotion suggests a strategized social media presence. Honestly, that’s a little overwhelming to me. I’ve only had a personal facebook for I think about four years. I’ve never had a myspace (although, admittedly, I still have a Gaia). I barely used my personal facebook until recently when I started backpacking. Even now, I still view it in a very utilitarian way. To me, it’s an easy way to get information (like trip photos) out to a group of people (my fb friends) in one go. But I watched a webinar recently on author marketing where the presenter actually suggested a different focus for authors who are overwhelmed by this. So, I’m picking one social media to focus on building professionally. I’m actually thinking Twitter might serve me best. The main problem? I haven’t set it up yet. I have to have a professional author social media presence (or at least account) to connect the two. But that’s also in this quarter stra+, so something should . . . materialize. I hope.
• Aside from that, I actually think the reorganization is holding me back. In the process of getting more serious in my author marketing (as an attempt to boost sales / build a bigger following), I’ve noticed that I seem to hesitate a bit on my site. I should have called it complete a long time ago. Yes, I know it’ll likely never be “complete”, but I can certainly finish an undertaking that started too long ago. And then I can move onto my promotions.

Happy writing 🙂

[Blog]

Well, for starters, author marketing feels counterintuitive to me.

I write books that I would have loved to read as a teenager.

Does it really have to get more complicated than that?

I’m in the process of establishing control of (i.e. claiming) my goodreads author page. This means that I’ve also been poking around goodreads’ site. Some of it’s useful to me, and some of it’s not. But I did find this post:

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/1233-the-business-of-being-a-writer-turning-attention-into-sales

It’s about author marketing. Something I certainly have been trying to improve. It presents an equation I’ve seen at least a dozen times (the right message + the right words+ the right audience = success). Then the writer goes into some details for the formula.

The first starting point?

It starts with this sentence:

“Come up with at least two or three established writers who produce work similar to your own.”

My first thought?

I don’t know of any other writers like me.

I’m sure there are some out there. I just don’t know of any off the top of my head. After some googling, I would either find at least one, or become even more disillusioned. An openly non-binary writer who pens mostly science fiction? Yeah, right.

That looks depressing when I type it out, doesn’t it? Maybe I’m just feeling disillusioned right now. I’m trying to improve my book sales, and I am trying to build an audience, but I feel like I’m back staring at some dead writer’s poetry in tenth grade English. Like there’s some magic key everyone else has that I just haven’t gotten yet. Back in tenth grade, that magic key was how to read poetry. Now it’s how to successfully do author marketing and grow my sales.

On the bright side, I did eventually figure out how to read poetry. But not in the way Mrs. I’m-going-to-leave-her-name-out-of-this intended. I think studying Socrates actually helped. (Want to know what I’m talking about? Click [here]. It’s dense but the points that resonated with me are in there.) But I’m not sure if that viewpoint really helps me with marketing.

Maybe I’ll figure it out better with time.

1. Yes, the narrator is deaf. No, I am not. N (I’ll get to that name in a moment) was initially hearing impaired but lost their hearing as time went on. This is clarified in chapter one (“we both knew I could not hear his words” and “I remembered reasonably well how to say that word aloud. I lost my hearing around twelve or thirteen, so I could not hear my own voice.”). I believe that inclusion of diverse characters is important and I tried to write this character as best I could. Yes, I did my research. No, I am not perfect.
2. The narrator is intentionally unnamed. Wondering why? See the blog post [here]. You’ll see references to what should have been another post, but that post actually went unpublished. So, here goes.

Have you ever pictured a character with brown eyes, only to discover on page fifty that she has blue eyes?

This is a rather basic example, but bear with me for a moment. Because this is actually a huge pet peeve of mine.

I know sometimes this is done intentionally (I’m recalling a book where the writer didn’t reveal the narrator’s race until later on as a way to shatter stereotypes), but that tends to be the exception. When I started getting more serious about my own writing, I determined that I would never make that type of change or late reveal unintentionally. Most people who know me in person know that I have a very logical mind. What they don’t always pick up on is that I used to be able to recite my first book from memory. Or that I’m a secret type A. It is exceptionally rare for something in my books to be unintentional (since that means I f-ed up or failed to consider some possibility).

So, once I realized that there was no good way to introduce a character’s gender early in a short story I wrote for creative writing in college, I got creative. I wrote a de-gendered character. And I went all in.

First, I intentionally mixed up gendered mannerisms and language. Authors are actually more likely to use certain verbs for certain gendered characters. For example, see [here]. I mixed these verbs and neutralized the gendered mannerisms in both the POV character and in how the other character interacted with them. Then I decided to run a little experiment on my small group. None of them were told that I’d done this before reading my piece.

A little over half of my group thought the main POV character was male. The rest of them didn’t know or thought the character was female.

Experiment . . . a success?

That short story eventually turned into Will to Speak. But, in the meantime, I was intrigued by having written a de-gendered character. When I began writing Into the Unknown, I realized that there was no good way to introduce the POV character’s gender. So, I de-gendered the language and evolved the character’s voice from that base. N does arguably lean a bit feminine, but that’s due to the natural evolution of the character’s voice. I made a personal choice to keep the character unnamed.

There is, arguably, another reason at play here:

“All fiction is largely autobiographical, and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.” –P.D. James.

As I began exploring my own non-binary identity, I also began exploring how gendering and gendered understandings manifest in the world around me. I was especially interested in how I expressed and pushed back against the gendered lens I’d been socialized into. I could argue that the de-gendered voice I used as a base for the character’s voice is, in fact, a voice removed from the gender binary. In a way, that makes this character’s voice highly personal. N also reclaims a bit of femininity which is a process that I myself went through. There is nothing wrong with a gendered character having a gendered voice. But, as a non-binary author, I am in a unique position for creating differently gendered character voices. This is something that I definitely do intend to experiment with more in the future.

Note from the future: (Yes, I know, I’m including this when the original post is made. Trust me. I’m not a mind reader, but I can point out something now.) GT’s gender isn’t clearly revealed until later in Will to Speak, but their ambiguity is revealed early on. For example, Kitsy notes how odd GT’s attire is for a male avatar. I did this as a way to combat some stereotypes and add a wonderful splash of representation. So, yes, that later reveal is intentional.