Greeting from “war-torn” Portland! I will forgo the tempting political editorializing and get right to the point: I’m done with Fester Descent.
For now.
I finished with the third draft, and was contemplating a fourth. The idea didn’t really appeal – I had been immersed in the story for months, and needed a break. So I decided that three drafts was enough, and I could let the editor deal with the mess as it was.
Unfortunately, I had dragged my feet a bit in getting on the editor’s calendar, so she won’t be able to get started on it for a few more weeks. It’s well worth the wait, I think. Her name is Paula Guran, and she did the editing on the original Fester. I would have loved to have had her on Laughingstock. She hadn’t been available, and I’d had to go with an unknown quantity – with predictable results. However, with the delay, the book will probably not be available until early in 2026.
Things are good and the cover is nearly complete. A teaser is included above. After I’m done procrastinating (any week now), I intend to pick up the thread of Dungeon & Dragon, and see if I can bring that story to some nonsensical conclusion. New chapters soon!
Progress is being made on the latest MS; I’ve just completed editing the second draft of Fester Descent. The story’s tight, but could still use plenty of polishing. One polishing, coming up – but it’s also time to think about publishing and (UGH!) marketing the book.
I’ve already reached out to an editor who I’ve worked with before. She’s being cagey, as editors sometimes do. However, she did a bang-up job on Fester, and I’d rather work with her again than take my chances picking one randomly from Reedsy. That worked out very poorly on Laughingstock, and I’m not eager to recreate that experience.
While that drama is playing out, I’m looking at cover art – one of the most fun parts of self-publishing – mainly because I’m the one pointing our errors and demanding changes! No, it’s great to see how a written work will be represented graphically.
I found an organization that claimed that it could produce a professional-looking cover for a hundred bucks. Well, that just about fits my budget, so I thought I’d give it a go. (I’ll let you know the name of this organization once I’m satisfied with the work.) One bit of concern – will they use AI to create the artwork? There is a checkbox on the intake form about whether you want to avoid AI-generated content. It does not, however, specifically state that they won’t use AI if you check that box. I guess we’ll see.
Of course, conveying the intent of the book to the cover artists involved summarizing the book, which is something that many authors struggle with. I know I sure do. It needs to be done, so I got on it. Besides, this is just a clumsy explanation, but it will eventually morph into a reasonably decent back over blurb, and – eventually – a well-crafted Amazon Ads description.
I did submit an idea for a cover, based on some of the more interesting elements in the narrative. I asked the artists to create a cover that incorporates these three elements:
A brothel
An M50A1 tank
Upwards of three (3) monkeys
I’d like to think that a book cover with these elements just screams “great read!” Or maybe it will be something else entirely. We’ll see – stay tuned!
After getting off to a slow start, I finally got up a bit of momentum on the second draft of my latest project. After re-writing one of the early chapters, it was pretty much just picking up the redlines I had marked up the Shitty First Draft – easy stuff. Then my timeline came back to haunt me.
I had learned about the importance of having an accurate timeline from Paula Guran, who edited Fester. She was merciless in addressing the timeline, among other things. (Shame she wasn’t available for Laughingstock,which was an editing nightmare.) I hope she’ll be available to edit Fester Descent.
But just in case, I’ve been keeping a tight timeline as I’m working through the second draft. This is where I pay for the sins of the SFD. Timing issues are just one of many sins, but arguably the most problematic. And as I learned with Fester, you don’t want these problems to linger too long or they, um, fester.
So I’m jumping on it right now, at my earliest convenience. (No point in worrying about it during the SFD; that’s all about getting words on paper.) When cranking on the SFD, I was only worried about the sequence, not the timing. I just knew that event A came before event B, and to hell with the details. Now I’m dealing with situations where a character gets shot, but his wife doesn’t visit him in the hospital for five days. Oops! Gotta fix that.
It’s a knot, I think – and it pays to un-knot the story as quickly as possible. You can sometimes shove the knot down the rope a bit, but you sure don’t want to shove it all the way to the end – because it gets begger the further you shove it.
I think I’ve worked the knot metaphor for about as much as I can. Best to call it good right here. More news to follow as I finish up Draft 2 and start to think about showing it to an editor. I can hardly wait.
After nearly two months, I’ve finally gotten through “editing” the Shitty First Draft of my latest MS, working title Fester Descent. Now, when I say “editing,” I really mean reading and redlining the text, and making notes for the next draft.
Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that it took me so long to read through my own first draft. A nasty part of my mind tells me that a real writer would have gotten through the whole thing in a weekend.
In my defense, I have three good excuses as to the dilatory nature of my review:
I find it difficult reading my own writing, especially for extended periods
I had a whopper of a spring cold in May that sidelined me for nearly three weeks
I am monumentally lazy
However, now I’ve finished my review and now I have to write the Slightly Less Shitty Second Draft (SLSSD). Okay, I merely have to take a big breath and just start doing it.
Easier said than done, of course.
There is one thing that will make it a little easier: for a first draft, it’s not that bad. You never know what you’ll end up with at the end of a first draft, especially if you’re a pantser like I am. Usually, I end up with a large number of loose ends that have to be tied up, sometimes awkwardly. With this draft, that wasn’t so much of a problem. (OK, yeah, so I had to resort to a deux ex machina in the form of an Air National Guard F-16, but other than that…) Maybe it’s luck or maybe some small portion of accumulated skill, but it seems like things came together a lot more easily on this one.
That having been said, there is still a lot of polishing that needs to be done. Time to get down to it. Then sell some plasma so I can hire and editor.
In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to attempt the NaNoWriMo Full Meal Deal. That is, I was going engage in the National Novel Writing Month challenge of writing 50,000 of a novel during the month of November. This breaks down to 1,667 words per day. This was pretty intimidating to me; I usually only crank out ~500 words per day in my usual laid-back style of writing. This was going to take courage! This was going to take discipline! Did I have what it takes? I wasn’t sure, and it was only at the last moment (literally, Halloween) did I toss my hat in the ring and commit myself to the NaNoWriMo challenge.
On November 1, I wrote 2,187 words. It didn’t seem that hard. On the 2nd, I wrote 2,031 words, just to prove to myself that it wasn’t just a fluke. After a few more days of 2000+ words per day, I decided to shoot for an overall goal of 60,000 words by the end of the month. And I did!
I had a work-in-progress: the sequel to Fester, which is currently using the working title of Descent. The manuscript had been off to a sluggish start, with a little under 25K words written in 5 months. NaNoWriMo seemed like it would be a great opportunity to give the project a boost.
And it did – but it was not without its challenges. I am a pantser when it comes to my writing. That is, I don’t do a lot of planning or outlining – I just fly by the seat of my pants. This typically isn’t a problem when I’m writing at my normally glacial pace, but it got to be an issue for NaNoWriMo.
One of the fun things about pantsing is that the story and characters will take off in directions I’d never conceived. It can be fun, but also frustrating. Cranking out 2,000 words a day in this mode can be a problem, however. I liken it to driving fast at night. The headlights can only illuminate so much of the road ahead; the faster you go, the less time you have to react. And I was going pretty fast, especially towards the end of the month. It felt like I was running out of road. Up until then, I’d had a pretty good idea what was going to happen over the next three or so chapters. Not so for the last week, where I was pantsing it to the max. The verbiage became verbose: I was shoveling adjectives and adverbs as much as I could.
In the end it was a good thing, though. Having to write something, even when I had no idea what it might be, definitely introduced some interesting elements into the story. My characters really had to bear the brunt of my word count goal!
At the end, it was a good thing. Tapping into my long-dormant overachiever tendencies, I kept going even when I’d met the 50K goal. I needed to collect all of the badges (see image above). And I did, just because I’m a Lisa Simpson-type geek.
More than that, it really helped me as a writer. First, it helped move my latest project along by getting 10 or 12 months’ worth of writing done in just one month. It also allowed me to understand how to deal with some serious production. I intend to keep moving Descent along sharply – but I’m taking a week off just to let things percolate in my subconscious. I have a lot of loose ends to tie up in the story now!
It’s November, and for writing weenies like me, that means it’s time for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I believe that earlier to get full credit for NaNoWriMo, you had to start with a blank slate (or manuscript) at the beginning of the month. Now they’re cool with works in progress, which was good for me, as I had the sequel to Fester sort of farting along in low gear. This seemed like a good opportunity to give the project a kick in the pants.
To get to 50K words in 30 days, that boils down to 1,667 words per day. That’s three or four times as many as I normally crank out in a writing session. I had done a truncated “personal goals” NaNoWriMo a few years ago – but that was only for 500 words per day. I made that goal, but to get full NaNoWriMo bragging rights, you need to hit that 50,000 word mark.
I’m nearly a week in, and I’m pleased to report that I’ve been able to keep up a solid 2,000 word a day pace without unduly straining my brain (or fingers). I know some professional writers who would scoff at this pace, but this is on top of a full 8-hour day of work. So, pffft.
So that’s it – I’m doing NaNoWriMo and I’m off to a good start. Will I maintain? Don’t know. I do know that I ought to be able to milk this topic for at least one intermediate post before I report the final disposition at the end of the month. See you soon!
Well, if I’m to follow in Mr. Dumpty’s footsteps, I’m due for an awesome fall – because this summer was, in fact, rather sucky.
July was okay, just hectic – but in August, things went downhill in a hurry. In early August I had stomach surgery, which is all well and good. At first, the recovery went great. They sent me home with a large bottle of opiated syrup, and that was just fine. However, about a week and a half after the surgery I got hit with a GI bug, and it cleaned my clock. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it was a strong and persistent bug that laid me quite low for five freakin’ weeks. It wasn’t just nasty, it was dag nasty.
I didn’t make a big deal of this on social media, partly because I don’t like sharing personal details online*. Also, I didn’t want to unduly worry my legion of insanely-devoted fans, at least until I felt I was out of the woods. I’m sure I spared many rendings of garments, not to mention much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Naturally, my writing suffered. I did get some feedback expressing the expectation that I was doing wonderful writing during my recuperation. There are two reasons for this: initially, large bottle of opiated syrup; then, 24-7 vomit-o-rama. Neither is conducive to authorial motivation. Robert Louis Stevenson may have written wonders from his sick bed, but I was either giggling at the cracks in the ceiling or clutching my spasming belly and moaning piteously.
It was a bit of a chore to finally shake the rust of and get back down to writing the sequel to Fester.I managed to fake my way through a few writers’ groups with chapters I had already completed before the surgery. Soon enough, I had to get cranking again. It was tough at first, but pretty soon the thoughts began to outpace the fingers and the word count continued to ratchet up.
I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m developing new characters – or rather, they’re developing themselves. The characters from the original book have already revealed their personalities to me, but these three new Schmidts (Ronald, Ophelia and Thelma Louise) are just starting to become more than cardboard cutouts, which is always fascinating to experience. Of course, there’s plenty of fun in seeing what the old characters are up to. For example, Billy Snyder is working on a restoration project that is really batshit crazy.
Enough for now. I don’t want to give too much away – especially since it might all change by Draft 2. Suffice to say that I’m well on my way to recovery and cranking on the word count.
*I’m only sharing this info here because I’m pretty sure hardly anyone will read it.
After a bit of a rocky start to the summer, I am moving forward more briskly with my sequel to Fester. The working title is Fall, although that is almost certain to change eventually. I had hoped that this story would be an easier one to write because I had somewhat of an outline.
The outline came from a series of local newspaper articles from Astoria, Oregon. It chronicled the final downfall of a once-prominent local family called the Flavels. And the end of their story was so weird, it seemed straight out of Fester. In fact, Astoria has some geographical similarities to my mental picture of Fester – save the three-mile-wide river mouth and the Pacific Ocean. I’ll save the story of the Flavels for another time, though.
I’m about 50 pages into the manuscript, which isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it is enough to give me a broad view of how the story is progressing. And I’m not particularly surprised to discover that the vaunted Flavel narrative is not the watertight outline I’d originally (and unrealistically) expected, but more of a loose framework.
I guess that is to be expected of an inveterate pantser. To Hades with the outline; we pantsers are allergic to them. However, what I do have, 50 pages in, is a number of narrative threads that will weave themselves together in ways I can’t predict and may not even want. Even better, I have a number of characters in interesting situations that have yet to reveal themselves. This is the best part of being a pantser: winding up the characters and observing what they do.
Seriously, I frequently have no conscious intention about a characters actions. I just watch and report. It’s like having a movie projector that only works when I hammer on the keyboard. Entertaining as hell, and also a little spooky sometimes.
Here’s how things are shaping up right now. Normally, I would be hesitant to give too much of the narrative away this early in the process. However, since this is the Shitty First Draft, what’s going on now may have absolutely no resemblance to the final product, so what the hell. Here are the threads that have manifested themselves so far:
Martin Prieboy has now been the Chief Constable of Fester for nearly twenty years. He has just lost his spouse to cancer, and finds himself bonding with a police informant.
Billy Snyder served several years in the state pen for his part in the events in Fester. Now he lives in the boondocks outside of town, where he sells military antiques – and plots revenge.
The land once known as the Wizard’s Woods has been developed into a mall. However, in 2014, malls aren’t doing too well, and Harold Todd, the mall’s owner, is starting to get worried about its financial viability. And there are some strange things going on at the mall after hours…
Michael “Bolly” Bollinger has successfully taken over his father’s automotive repair shop. His landlord, the Schmidt family, is once again hiking the rent on the shop, making Bolly concerned about his financial future.
What happens next? OK. I’ve got a pretty good idea what Bolly’s going to do now, and maybe some ideas about the mall, but that’s it. The rest will reveal itself as I pound the keyboard. That’s part of the fun of being an indie writer. That and the money. Woo-hoo!
ITEM! It’s official! Work has begun on the sequel to Fester. Granted, it’s not a lot of work, and there is no title as of yet. As I am a pantser when it comes to writing, I don’t even have a clear idea of exactly what’s going to happen. There are a number of things I can share of which I am fairly certain:
The timeline of the new story is set 20 years after Fester, which puts it around 2014.
Martin Prieboy is still Chief Constable of Fester, but is struggling with the recent loss of his spouse.
Billy Snyder is out of prison and living in a secluded house in the hills, where he spends his time plotting revenge.
Michael “Bolly” Bollinger has taken over his dad’s automotive repair shop and is a respected local businessman -but his business is in trouble.
The Schmidt family now teeters on the brink of destruction, their huge mansion looming over the town of Fester like something really, really symbolic.
Cynthia Hoegenbloeven is still running around somewhere with the remnants of the money she ran off with. Presumably she has now gotten some clothes.
There are other characters who we probably won’t see: the Plummer family moved out of town shortly after the events of Fester, and haven’t been heard from, ditto Janie Simpson. Roscoe Dirkschneider has died in prison, and Randall “Cowboy Bob” Warnke never recovered from his injuries sustained at the hands of the parishioners of Calvary Lutheran. Of course, the Top Hat families are still around, although most of the characters from Fester have gone to that Great Country Club in the Sky.
That’s what I’ve got for now. I’ll keep you posted as the story develops, although it usually takes me several years to actually write, edit and publish these books. You patience will be rewarded.
ITEM! In the course of marketing Laughingstock, I had the fortune to encounter a new book promo site called Shepherd. It’s a fascinating premise: authors are asked to list their five favorite books related to a theme of their choosing – which is presumably related to one of their own books. Then they write a short review of those books.
The theme I chose was “hilarious high weirdness,” which is a fairly regular theme in my writing. This allowed my literary eclecticism to really stretch – it was a great deal of fun! Here are the books I chose:
Wilt by Tom Sharpe
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
The Book of the SubGenius by the SubGenius Foundation
Noir by Christopher Moore
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
My reviews can be found at THIS LINK. Give the page – and the whole site – a good going-over – it’s a lot of fun!
ITEM! There will be an eBook promo for Fester, starting this Wednesday, June 5, running through Sunday, June 9. For this time, the eBook version of Fester will be available for a measly $0.99. Of course, it’s still too early to promote the sequel (coming Summer 2027 if I really work at it), but I wanted to take another run at the Amazon Bestseller ranking as I did with Laughingstock. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that these promos are the best way to get people to read what I’ve written, and that investing heavily in advertising profits nobody but the advertising platform. We’ll see how it goes!
I almost called this post “We’re Number 2!” but decided that the wording was a little too ambiguous. I want to tell you of my adventures with a run at bestseller status.
Keep in mind that I’m referring to Amazon bestseller status. This is quite different from, say, New York Times bestseller status. To put it into an athletic context, getting your book on the NYT bestseller list is like winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Getting a book on the Amazon bestseller list is like beating a marginally athletic second-grader in a foot race. Sure, you might not make it, but it wouldn’t be that hard to achieve.
In retrospect, the second-grader gave me a run for the money.
The NYT has ten slots for fiction in its bestseller list, which is updated weekly. Amazon literally has thousands of slots – or categories – under which a book might be considered a bestseller, and these results are updated hourly. For Amazon Kindle, there are several thousand categories of fiction, and with updates 24 times a day, there are close to 100,000 opportunities to make a bestseller list every single day.
Of course, choosing a category is key to success here. One needs to choose a category that doesn’t have a lot of competition. However, the category also has to be relevant to the content of the book. If you list a book under a completely inappropriate category to boost your ranking, the Amazon Police will be banging on your door soon enough, or so it is said. However, I found an appropriate category (you get to choose three) called Humorous Dark Comedy that was a great fit for Laughingstock, and low-competition.
Back when Fester came out, I’d gotten my mitts on a document called the “Bestseller Launch Blueprint.” I was rushed at the time, and didn’t have the time or inclination to follow through on the instructions, which seemed a little hokey to me at the time.
After Fester was published, I spent a fair amount of time and effort attempting to promote the book, with not a lot to show for it. As Laughingstock was ramping up for publication. I had a little more time and a little more inclination to see what came of applying this formula.
The formula itself is pretty simple: wait a few weeks after publication, then drop the price of the eBook to $0.99 and advertise the hell out of it. There are a number of websites and services that have subscribers who are on the prod for cheap-as-free eBooks, and they will gallantly allow authors to pay to advertise their book specials. The 800-pound gorilla of these services is BookBub, which has a huge subscriber base and is definitely an important outlet for indie authors looking to get the word out about their books.
So I went all-in on BookBub and a number of other similar services, and scheduled an advertising blitz for two weeks after the book was published. I had followed all the steps in the Blueprint, and was ready to see what would happen.
Damned if it didn’t work! Sales shot up immediately, and it wasn’t long before Laughingstock had cracked the top ten in the Humorous Dark Comedy category. I was pretty chuffed when the book first landed at #7, although I was still several slots behind a book of Great Memes of 2023, by a “Mr. DANK DANK.”
In a day I had climbed even higher, and on the afternoon of the second day, I had reached #2 in the category. “Suck it, Mr. DANK DANK,” I told the wall. Surely, I would soon crack the number one spot and brag my ass off.
Then I took a look at the book occupying the #1 slot, and knew I was boned. The book was called Shorts, by Caimh McDonnell. A closer look showed that the book had been published on the same day I had launched my ad blitz. Further, a quick look at Goodreads indicated that Mr. McDonnell had upwards of thirty titles, each of which had thousands of 4- and 5-star ratings. There’s no way I could compete with a brand-new book from this author. The guy absolutely dominates the Humorous Dark fiction category for Kindle: of the top 50 books in that category, McDonnell’s books currently occupy 12 of those slots. (Mr. DANK DANK’s meme book is #50; Laughingstock is #129. DAMN YOU MR. DANK DANK!)
Well, it was a good run, and my takeaway is to check your competition’s publishing schedule before starting your launch This overall worked out well in that I sold more copies of Laughingstock in a week than I did for Fester in the three years since it was published! I will wait a month or two and try the same Formula with Fester to see if I can claim the top spot.
I think I can still claim bragging rights. I’ve a friend in publishing who considers making the Top 10 good enough to put “Amazon bestseller” on the resume. Plus, I had this little recognition of being the #1 New Release in Comedy. For about an hour, true – but I’ll take it! It’s a dog-eat-dog world in indie publishing, and you have to grab whatever accolades you can.
