stephen-turner.net

Got some good things going sales wise for SNAPSHOT… well, it’s not like it’s sold yet or anything, but it’s at least one step the right way down the path towards that end. I have a major local agent now considering the whole novel. Considering she’s asked for this based on a query letter only, I figure there’s some chance that she’ll like it. And if that happens, then who knows where that will lead…

I’m starting to think about things like publicity and marketing. Even if I can get my book published, it’s still a hell of a hard journey to get people to buy it. I’d like to assume that the publisher will help me with that, but it’s not always a given, so I figure that I will be doing most of it myself. There’s interviews and publicity in every medium, but I really plan to use the web a lot. I’ve seen what writers like Warren Ellis have done in a medium like comics – used the web to build up a following to great effect, and I’ve seen what movies like AI and The Matrix have done to extend the story to the web, and I fully plan to do something similar. It’s got to get publicity on it’s own, as well as attract people to the book. Publicity that generates more for it’s own sake is something I learned from Bryce Courteney – and hell, it’s worked for him. It’s still early stages, but it’s definitely part of my game plan.

Enough of that for now – back to the writing.

What I’ve been doing lately…

Woodworking. It’s interesting, and it’s different to sitting in front of a computer for 16 hours a day, which is where you can usually find me (either working or writing.) Right now I’m building a pot rack that hangs from the ceiling and gives you space to well, hang your pots. I haven’t done this before, but it’s looking surprisingly good.

Writing – well sort of. I’m been going over a few comic story proposals, but I wonder if I should bother right now. It’s not that I don’t want to, or that I don’t have any interest, but various aspects of this make it very difficult to do it alone (primarily getting an artist,) and I’m really not sure that I should devote my writing energies to anything that I can’t do 100% myself. Which means of course, that I should be devoting my time to the novel. Which is good most of the time, but I’m suffering from the dreaded “everything else is fucked up” syndrome. When I have so many other problems, it’s hard to keep up the energy to write, and worse still it’s hard to get that energy at the end of the day – at a job that barely taxes my interests at all.

MONEY – Right now, that’s where it’s all at. Despite the fact that I work fulltime, I have fuck all of it. Last pay check it was all gone in three days. My girlfriend unfortunately does not have a job right now, which is much of the problem, but it’s been a run of bad luck lasting a year now that’s really caused it. Car stolen, replacement car is a piece of shit that ends up costing me twice what I bought it for (it was fine initially of course.) Lose high paying job, end up with retrenchment payoff that disappears in no time. Moving costs more than it should have. Car fucks up several times. New job is hardly as well paying as I’d like – they have very strange super contribution rates (way too high.) And there’s not other sources coming in either….

Few. I’m not whinging here, but I just had to get it off my chest. It’s amazing how fucked up things can feel when you’ve got no money, or even worse, when you have money but it’s all spoken for and out of your control, so you’re actually earning it, but you never get a chance to do anything with it. I’ve learned that decent money will make even a crap job tolerable – that might be why my current job feels so shit, when realistically I know that it isn’t that bad – I’m just not getting any of the usual benefits out of it.

But fuck all that. My writing is where it’s at and it’s the only thing I shoud give a shit about right now. What’s good is good, and what isn’t doesn’t matter, since all I should be doing is writing.

Ha ha… jokes on me I think. I’m just not updating this thing at the moment.

I can see why the pros have someone else run their website for them. I really want to redesign this thing, but I just haven’t got around to it yet.

I should damn well be on this blog more often as well – most of my good posting goes to a few message boards – so I should probably get in the habit of putting those rants up here.

As for the writing, well things could definitely be on the up. SNAPSHOT sales attempts continue with great effort, and my new novel is speeding along, though I desperately need to find a regular schedul to write the thing. I hate not feeling like I can write when I get home from work – when I used to write, then go to work, it seemed much more manageable. Have to work something out.

More later – for real this time. Right now it’s late and I have things to do…