Monthly Archives: May 2010

I Only Drink The Good Stuff

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Revellers enjoying the last chance to drink al...
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I never intended to become an alcohol snob.

Originally, I wasn’t very picky at all. In college, I would often drink whatever was handed to me. It was usually terrible, but I wasn’t drinking to enjoy myself – I was drinking with a goal in mind. Most of my early experiences with alcohol weren’t pleasurable, and I still get sick just smelling Southern Comfort.

But I knew that I didn’t like beer.

That started to change when I first went to England. My friend, Rik Sowden, made me realize that I actually really like beer – it was just American lagers that I didn’t like.1 I got introduced to beers of all kinds, and got a chance to find out what I like and what I don’t like. Over the years, as I got an appreciation for beer, I was able to become more experimental and branch out, but I really needed to understand what was good and what I liked first before I could really do that.

But I knew that I didn’t like wine.

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  1. Also, I learned that lager is only one type of beer, rather than just another name for it. I really didn’t know much about beer at the time. ↩

Reading My Own Work

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Desktop Awesome
Image by eddyfate via Flickr

Some writers won’t reread their own work after it’s published. I do. When I finish writing something and it gets published (in a book, in a PDF, on a website, or whatever), I often go back and reread it. How I feel about the writing, though, depends on how long its been since I last read it.

For products that go right from my keyboard to the audience (like this blog and Whitechapel), it’s just like reading a draft. Sometimes I’ll see a mistake and go back and correct it real quick, but most times it’s still too new, too fresh in my mind to be all that different between my hard drive and your eyes. It doesn’t feel different, aside from the look of the layout.

On the other hand, reading stuff that I wrote a couple of years ago feels like I didn’t even write it. Several months ago I picked up and reread some of my Cartoon Action Hour work, and it doesn’t feel like my work. I can remember writing it, and that’s certainly my name on the cover, but it almost feels like someone has done a relatively clever imitation of my writing style.

In the middle is work that I haven’t read for several months, like “Gloomy Sunday” for Close Encounters of the Urban Kind. After I got my copy, I went back and reread the story. All of the errors in the story jumped out at me, making me itch and want to get a red pen to rewrite them all. I felt like I was a blind fool to allow such terrible writing to escape into the wild. But this happens with everything I write.

On the upside, I called my mom for my monthly phone call with her, and she mentioned that she really liked the story. The last thing of mine that she read was my Star Trek fanfiction from over a decade ago 1 and she was impressed with how much I’ve improved as a writer. She even compared the work to Stephen King, one of her favorite authors.

The thing I’ve taken away from all of this is that the writer can never truly be the audience for their own work. In order to get an accurate assessment of a project’s strengths and weaknesses, you simply must have someone else read the work.

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  1. She has copies of most of my RPG work, but since she’s not into RPGs, she hasn’t read them because she doesn’t understand how these crazy games work. ↩

Got My Copies of Close Encounters Today

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Long day of work today, but I did get my two copies of Close Encounters of the Urban Kind in today!

GloomySunday1

And just to prove that I do indeed have a story in there:

GloomySunday2

(Sorry so blurry – my iPhone was having trouble keeping it in focus.)

I’ve actually lost track of how often I’ve been published now, but I never lose that thrill of seeing my name on the page. And it’s weird reading my own writing again, but that’s a blog for another time.

You can pick up your own print copy of Close Encounters directly from Apex Publications. Also, you can still pay what you want for an ebook version. I haven’t had a chance to read the other contributions yet, but I’m planning to once I get through some of my growing book stack.

Get some of my fiction. Pay whatever you want.

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Close Encounters cover

Close Encounters cover

I just got this from the folks at Apex Publishing.

Right now you can grab the eBook of Close Encounters of the Urban Kind and pay what you want over at Smashwords. That means you can grab it for free, toss a coin in the hat, or pay list price. It doesn’t matter. We only want you to get a copy of the book and read.

This link takes you straight to the book page: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/14757

Smashwords provides the book in a number of formats including mobi (Kindle), PDB (Palm), LRF (Sony), ePub, and PDF.

I contributed a story to this anthology — “Gloomy Sunday.” If you’ve been curious about this story, this is a great way to check it out. As mentioned, you can pay what you want, but I’d appreciate if you came back here and left me a comment to tell me what you thought of it.

Design Troubleshooter

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Sherlock Holmes in "The Man with the Twis...
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Before I launch into this post, let me take care of some housekeeping:

Yes, I’ve been quiet on this blog. I don’t expect this to be a habit – I’ve got a backlog of over a dozen blog topics I’m sitting on, and those bitches aren’t going to write themselves – but things have been crazy busy since Mexico. Aside from a ton of work from my day job, I’m working out two freelance assignments, and helping with the last bits of house work to get things ready for our housewarming this weekend. There’s also some podcast recording I have to do in the near future, both for my podcasts and for other folks. Things should be calmer around… oh… June.

No, this doesn’t mean I’m going to drop this blog, or any of my other projects just yet. It does mean that I’m not going to be doing a whole lot of extracurricular stuff for a while, but I don’t see a strong need to cut anything just yet.

Yes, I still love you. The sex is too good.

On with the blog!

Since way back in the mists of 2007, I’ve had the pleasure and good fortune to be friends with Russell Bailey. Among his many good qualities (such as being as big of a Doctor Who nerd as I am), he also has two creative preferences that I share: he prefers to write very noir-soaked prose, and he prefers to design in collaboration.

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Free Time is Not Free

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Puerto Vallarta
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I’ve been quiet for a while. I had a lot of things on my plate before I went on vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for a few days. Now I’m back to… uh… having even more things on my plate. I could have theoretically skipped the vacation to catch up on work,1 but that would have been a bad idea. Vacations are really important.

This might seem pretty obvious, but you have to put this into perspective. Most of the people I know and work with are either freelance writers (who often have two jobs – their freelance work along with a day job) or professional creatives (who sometimes don’t even notice that they’ve worked a 60 hour week until someone calls them wondering if they died or something). If you’re writing or designing a game or doing illustration, it’s often not because you’re making millions2 of dollars a year, but because it’s something you love doing.

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  1. Not really – it was a company vacation that I had planned time for since late last year. It would have been a really bad idea for me to bail on it. But, you know, I could have. ↩
  2. Or hundreds ↩