I’m in the home stretch to get Fester Descent edited and proofread ahead of the February 28 release date. It’s always a weird time during the revision of a book – trying to balance the desire to publish the best possible story with the fact that I’m sick unto death of reading it. The image above represents perhaps the fifth or sixth copy I’ve revised since the “final” draft was written.
I’ve also had a lot of good input, including from my wife NancyAnne and my Aunt Claudia who have graciously read the book with a sharp eye for spelling and punctuation errors – of which there is no shortage. I’m stiff finding plenty of errors as well. Most of those tabs are actually cutting the fat – removing excess and repetitive verbiage. Of which there is no shortage.
Now comes the most odious part of preparing the launch of a book – the marketing. Time to dive back into the sewer of algorithm necromancy and keyword conjuration. Also, I’ll be looking for beta readers, so if you’re interested, please drop me a line at crawford@sweetweaselwords.com.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and all similarly-oriented seasonal greetings. I hope that everyone has had an enjoyable holiday season and can find some time to rest, relax and generally get themselves ready for whatever 2026 is going to throw at us.
One thing coming at us in 2026 is my new novel Fester Descent, which is tentatively slated to be released at the end of February. I finished up the first draft of the MS earlier this year. Some timing miscues resulted in me sitting on it longer than I had intended, mainly because I had waited too long to get on the editor’s schedule. It was worth the wait to work with Paula Guran, though. She had edited the original Fester, and I learned a lot in the process. I was glad to be able to work with her again. I’ve spent most of the holiday so far reviewing her edits and getting the MS typeset. Now, it’s review time, where I read and re-read the novel to the point here I start to hate it.
But enough of that sorry action – here’s something much more interesting: the final cover design! I’ve actually beein sitting on this for over a month, but I wanted to wait until the MS came back from the editor and I had a clear idea of when the book will be available (2/28/26).
Here it is. Simple, but – I hope – intriguing. Who wouldn’t want to know what’s going on in a book with a tank, a monkey and a sexy leg on the cover?
Fester Descent cover
Happy rest of your holidays and a propitious New Year. Hang on to your hat – hang on to your hope!
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.
One of the things I’ve done this winter in lieu of writing, was to do something I haven’t done in about 45 years: build a model tank.
However, I wasn’t just acting like a 14-year-old, lurking in the basement, blasting Black Sabbath and gluing together squidgy little plastic parts of a tank replica. No, I was doing research.
This was in aid of the current work-in-progress, a sequel to Fester now using the working title Fester Descent. One of the initial mental images I had for this book was a column of tanks rolling through downtown Fester. (Pretty sure I copped this idea from the Book of the SubGenius, of which you should own several copies.)
Further consideration rendered the idea of a column of tanks too complicated, but a single tank should be much more manageable. And I already had a character to command that tank: Billy Snyder, the disgraced former Chief Constable of Fester. It had already been established that Billy had served with the Marines in Vietnam and that he was adept at procuring classified military hardware.
Then it became a matter of research: what type of tanks did the U.S. Marines use in Vietnam? There weren’t many choices, as that war did not see much in the way of armor battles. Then I hit upon the beauty seen at the top of the page: the M50 Ontos. The Ontos was used in Vietnam, and it was small, so it could conceivably be operated but just one whacked-out ex-cop. Best of all, it was weird.
The Ontos – Greek for thing – isn’t so much a tank as a mobile platform for a half-dozen recoilless rifles, with some sheet metal over top. That made the Ontos maneuverable and powerful – but also very vulnerable. It could go places other armored vehicles couldn’t, but was also vulnerable to any weapon more powerful than an assault rifle.
Of course, I had to also research under which circumstances the M50 was used in that war. It came down primarily to two engagements: the Battle of Khe Sanh and the Battle of Hue. The latter seemed more likely from a dramatic perspective, owing to the brutal building-to-building nature of that fight and the likelihood of using the Ontos to blow up buildings. After all, what do you think Billy Snyder is going to do with this piece of hardware? Hint: he’s not fixing it up for the Fester Veterans’ Day parade.
The research included a detailed investigation into the Battle of Hue in 1969. The research also stumbled across a plastic model of the Ontos. At 1:16 scale, it was large enough to boast a detailed interior. This was important, as I really wanted to know what it was like to ride around and fight in this thing.
The answer: awful. It was cramped, it must have been loud, and with the hatches closed, the only way to see or steer was through periscopes in the hatches. It also had to be difficult knowing that the armor was so paltry, to cut down on weight. One thing became apparent – the driver’s position (the one Billy had in the war) was the safest on the vehicle, since the engine compartment protected the driver’s right side.
It was an aggravatingly detailed model, and it took nearly three months to put together. After it was done, my wife asked if I was going to do any more. I said no way. One could be excused as research, but any more would just make it another pathetic middle-aged white-guy pastime, and I already have enough of those.
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.
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.
Who doesn’t love a good laugh? I’m sure there are people out there like that, but I sure wouldn’t want to spend any time with them. I’ve always loved a laugh, and the best way to get my chucks was through stand-up comedy.
My parents had a lot of comedy LPs in the house. Their tastes ran to 60s hipster/Laugh-In stuff: Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Smothers Brothers, Vaughn Meader (anyone remember him?). And Bill Cosby. I really loved Bill Cosby when I was a kid. The very first comedy show I ever went to was Bill Cosby playing at the local fairgrounds(!). We had front-row center seats too, which was great except for the opening act, which was the odious and terrifying Up With People. It was great to see my childhood comedy idol up close; shame he turned out to be such a scumbag. (It was almost as if he’d shot me in the face with pepper spray!*)
Laughingstock is my love-letter to standup comedy. There are a lot of stand-up comedy references in the book, some obvious, some pretty obscure. I’m sure some comedy fans will notice the parallel between the teen comedy duo of Chuck Marshall and Duckie Dunne to the careers of comedians Bill Hicks and Dwight Slade . Chuck, like Bill, made the big-time; Duckie, like Dwight, wound up in Portland. There’s lots more standup references for the hard-core comedy nerds out there.
To prepare for writing Laughingstock,I actually tried my hand at doing some standup. It’s hard! It takes a lot of time and effort to perfect that craft, and a lot of time hanging out at divey open-mics, swilling cheap beer and waiting for my turn to go on. I found myself regretting that I hadn’t tried it when I was in my 20s, since I spent a lot of time hanging out in divey bars swilling cheap beer then, anyway.
I managed to dredge up a video of one of the performances I did at a comedy club here in Portland. Not exactly A-list material, for sure – but I had a lot of fun doing it. Ironically, almost all of the content in Laughingstock that was based on my first-hand experience got cut for the sake of brevity. Most of this was in the form of Chuck and Duckie’s early stage experiences at a rickets telethon and the open mic for “Night Yuks.”
While I may not have wound up with a Netflix comedy special, and most likely won’t have a bestseller on my hands, I sure had a lot of fun researching and writing it; I hope you will enjoy reading it!
