Archive for the 'Career' Category
January 7th, 2012 by jdsawyer
Being that it’s the beginning of the year, I’ve been a busy boy laying my evil plans. Since some of you have asked on twitter what’s looming on the horizon for the next few month, here’s a tentative schedule (subject to change if I work faster or get bogged down):
Audio
January:
Launch a Kickstarter campaign in concert with Gail Carriger. Yup, we’re gonna be working together on something audio-oriented (this will happen toward the end of the month).
Recording Free Will (big project) and the first 3 Lantham audiobooks
February:
Free Will podcast re-launches (probably. If not Feb, then early March, as I’ll be travelling in late Feb).
March:
Commercial release of the first (or more) Lantham audiobooks
April:
MAYBE the DF10 soundtrack, if the timing works out with me and Schadey
Ebooks
January:
Throwing Lead (the long-awaited “Gun Book”) will see the light of day this month.
Silent Victor (Clarke Lantham #4) will also show up late this month.
Chicken Noodle Gravity (Lombard Alchemist #2, featured last month on Escape Pod) will release as an ebook
There are two other short stories as well that will release, assuming I can find time to do the cover art.
February:
The Auto Motive (Motives, book 1–a steampunk urban fantasy YA adventure series–might release after I get back from my travels in March)
He Ain’t Heavy (Lantham #5, again, this is a maybe)
March or April:
The Summer Town (standalone Southern Gothic romance/horror)
Sunday Morning Giraffe (Lombard Alchemist #3, short story)
Several other short stories, perhaps as many as five
April or May:
Probably either Student Culture or The Last Uploader (both standalone SF novels, both currently in progress)
Paperbacks:
Janurary:
Down From Ten
Predestination (re-release–we had problems with the printer that have dogged us for months on this one)
Sculpting God, Vol. 1
A Ghostly Christmas Present/Smoke Rings (Lantham #2 and #3 in a single ace-double style volume)
February or March:
Throwing Lead
Free Will
Silent Victor
April or May
The Auto Motive
He Ain’t Heavy (assuming it winds up being long enough for a solo paperback release)
The Summer Town
The Last Uploader or Student Culture
— —
Projects that might jump to the front:
The book version of Principles of Contracts (with lots more content and a better title)
A podcast to accompany Throwing Lead
— — —
Like I said, this is all tentative and subject to change at my imperious whim. The stuff slated for January is basically a lock, the stuff further out is less certain. There’s also more going on behind the scenes here that is not directly tied to writing output, some of which will produce results that you’ll see on the blog and in other places around the ‘net.
And if you’re an Antithesis fan, don’t worry. I start work in earnest on Avarice (Antithesis #3) in April.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet 
December 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Last April, Mur Lafferty was the subject of a fan-driven firestorm around at Escape Pod. The prevalence of lesbians in her magazine was raising a few eyebrows among both people who don’t like lesbians and people who wanted to see more gay men. As is the case with Internet controversies, the point at issue was more or less just an excuse for a good old-fashioned flame war, and in a frustration-inspired bid at surrealism Mur posted to twitter something along the lines of “Escape Pod is now soliciting stories containing gay men, soup cans, and singularities.”
I ask you, how could I pass up a challenge like that? I sent back to her “You’ll have it next week.” Not only did she have it next week, but she liked it, and she bought it. The result is this week’s Escape Pod episode, Chicken Noodle Gravity.
Read by Paul Haring, Chicken Noodle Gravity is the second of The Lombard Alchemist Tales, a series of short stories I kicked off earlier this year with At The Edge of Nowhere. The Lombard Alchemist Tales are stories of mystery, and darkness, and wonder. At the borders of society, around the next quarter, lurking in the shadows, all around us are dark and comic stories fit to unmake our darkest dreams. My job? Find them, bring them to you, and let you figure out how to survive them. Centered around a spooky pawn shop run by a devilish shopkeeper in a broken-down gambling boomtown where some people go there for salvation, some for curiosity, and some to scrape up a little bit of money to buy a few more cans of soup. And sometimes, they get more than they bargain for.
So, with that said, I hope you enjoy Chicken Noodle Gravity. Stay tuned for more fun news coming to this space in the days leading up to Christmas.
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October 14th, 2011 by jdsawyer
You met him in 
And Then She Was Gone, you got to know his family in A Ghostly Christmas Present. Now, the hard-boiled snarkfest continues as Clarke Lantham tackles the two most perplexing mysteries of the universe: FBI fugitives, and romance.
Clarke Lantham has a checkered relationship with holidays, and this New Year’s Eve is no different. His space is cramped, his personal life is on the skids, and his business is once again under assault from lawyers and bill collectors.
But it’s not all bad. The year from hell is ending tonight, and he has his office to himself, and when an old girlfriend shows up with a chance for a $50,000 reward and a New Year’s Eve reconciliation, he jumps at the chance. After all, things can only get better, right?
Yeah, right.
Read the first chapter here.
Or, buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.
September 1st, 2011 by jdsawyer
So, you want to make your work–book, movie, sculpture, whatever–perfect, don’t you? You want it to shine. And you’re going to polish it, rewrite it, re-imagine it, and retcon it every chance you get? Or maybe you just can’t resist adding those few last-minute flourishes?
Well, you’re in good company. The impulse to tinker is universal. So universal, that some people make vast fortunes just so they’ll have the ability to tinker endlessly. People like, for example, George Lucas.
Continue reading ‘Tinker, Tailor, Topple, Die’
August 17th, 2011 by jdsawyer
The following is the text of an email I sent this evening to the Parsec Awards Committee. If you agree, please chime in in the comments.
Dear Committee–
A couple years ago, the categories surround podcast novels were modified so that single reader podcast novels were given their own category, while full-cast productions were transferred in to the long form audio drama category. While this did solve the persistent issue that had excellent novelists like Nathan Lowell losing to full-cast productions on the basis of production lushness rather than writing merit, it has introduced a more basic, and more intractable, problem.
Continue reading ‘Parsec Committee: Recognize Full-Cast’
July 15th, 2011 by jdsawyer
You hear a lot of talk of “discovery writers” and “outliners” in the writing world. The “pantsers” and the “plotters,” respectively. It’s true that there are a lot of people that fall into both categories–including many of my friends–and human nature loves dichotomies, but I’ve never fit comfortably either, and I suspect I’m not alone.
Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.
Continue reading ‘Playing Jazz With Words’
June 21st, 2011 by jdsawyer
Writing fiction in the age of the Internet can be fraught for the author who values authenticity–particularly if you write historical or technical fiction. Since the glorious thing about writing fiction is that you essentially make shit up to entertain other people, there are a range of opinions about the technical rigor to which writers should aspire.
I’m one of those poor tortured souls who is a stickler for detail, to the point where I’m rarely able to meet my own standards when I write–but, let’s face it. If anyone wrote like that, they’d either write only in their area of historical specialty or after years of research. The trick with writing is to create a successful illusion, not a master’s thesis. Besides, the vast majority of readers aren’t the kind of obsessive compulsive pain in the ass that I am–a lucky thing!–so there’s a certain amount we authors can count on getting away with.
Still, I can’t help but think there’s some level of rigor that one ought to aspire to. Some minimal standard–particularly since the stories we professional liars tell often form people’s view of the past long after their high school and college history classes are long-forgotten–must surely be in order. Something that we can at least hold up to keep ourselves from being embarrassed at conventions when a fan calls us out on an obvious boneheaded anachronism?
There might just be one. Let’s call it “The Wikipedia Test.” Continue reading ‘Failing the Wikipedia Test’
June 11th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Disclaimer: What follows is a rant about something that can screw up the creative process. This post is more esoteric than is normal for this blog. It contains a lot of jargon, and talks a lot about academic politics and social history, and it won’t interest everybody. Don’t worry, though. It doesn’t signal a change of direction for the blog. I’ll be back on Monday with more stuff about contracts, stories, podcasting, and my general flavor of nutiness.
Last night on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog I made a snarky comment about the deleterious effect of a Literary Studies degree (or, in my case, 90% of a Lit degree) on creativity. The comment went something like this:
A Literary Studies course is the worst thing you can do for your creativity, other than bashing your skull in with a mallet while reciting the lyrics to “The Song That Never Ends”
Needless to say, this caused a minor row in the twitterverse among my fellow literati, and I received a few demands to justify myself (which is not easy to do on the best of days, let alone in 140 characters or less), so, in the name of entertainment, here goes, in no particular order:
Continue reading ‘Literary Studies, Anyone?’
June 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
A funny thing happens during times of great industrial upheaval: Everyone wants a piece of the new deal, but nobody wants to take what they perceive to be a risk. Most established players retrench, hold on to what’s familiar, and try to shout down anyone with a contravening opinion. It’s human nature to get defensive when one perceives a threat to one’s view of the universe.
In the midst of the upheaval in the publishing industry, I’m seeing this a lot. As agents are conning their clients into unethical business arrangements (and kudos to Peter Cox and Kristen Nelson for going on record about the danger this represents to writers), editors with excellent reputations are getting kicked off writing forums for providing data on the change, publishers are defrauding their authors and engaging in massive rights grabs, breaking the rules can earn you some pretty serious grief from other writers who are following the rules and hoping they’ll get reputation points for it.
Trouble is, this isn’t first grade. There are no gold stars for following the rules. And a lot of people are breaking the rules.
And they’re winning.
Continue reading ‘Who’s an Outlier, Again?’
May 22nd, 2011 by jdsawyer
And the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, saying “It is done.”
All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really is now all over but the shouting.
New equipment for the studio arrives this week, and I’ll be resuming production on everything in two weeks after I give things a proper shakedown and take a day or two off.
What does this mean for you?
Predestination and Free Will paperbacks (and Free Will ebook) in June. New episodes of Sculpting God in June. New episodes of Free Will starting in July, and continuing through to the end of the book.
It’s been a marathon–two years of work plotting and researching, and four solid months of aggregated writing time over those two years.. Final count: 212k words. Manuscript page count: 848. (Don’t worry, that will shrink as I shake out the continuity).
Time to crack the champagne!
April 4th, 2011 by jdsawyer
When I started writing The Antithesis Progression, I had a nice, tidy three-book series in mind. Then I wrote it, and discovered that what I thought was book 1 was actually 2 books cleverly hiding inside my head under a single title.
Well, no problem there. Turns out there was an excellent break point where book 1 could end naturally–and on a very nice cliffhanger–so I could move on to the new book 2 (which was originally the planned second half of book 1). I’d just sit down and write book 2 as soon as the time afforded.
Yeah.
If you’ve been following my progress with this book, you already know how that bright idea turned out. I’ve gotten four other books written in the meantime, and I’m quick on the way to finishing a further two, and still Free Will mocks me with its recalcitrance. And it’s not because I haven’t kicked ass on writing it either: Predestination rang in at 122,000 words after some serious cutting post-podcast and only had to cope with four major storylines. That’s a healthy sized book–it’s fantasy-novel length. Free Will is…well…bigger.
Continue reading ‘The Great Cull (Free Will Update)’
January 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Jan 10, 2011′
January 7th, 2011 by jdsawyer
A new year. Time for resolutions, right?
Right. Except that a few years back I resolved to no longer make resolutions. Ironically, it’s one of the few I ever wound up keeping. Instead, I use this wonderfully arbitrary and booze-infused time of year to make plans. Because, really, is there a better time to make serious plans than when you’re halfway through a bottle of scotch?
This coming year, I’ve got a very aggressive schedule for podcasting, writing, and producing trans-media projects (and yes, I know I haven’t dropped a podcast episode in six weeks — but they are coming, and what’s coming is pretty big).
Underlying all of the goals is the word count. I’m aiming to make at least a thousand words a day for the year, for a total of 365k words for the year. Marathon pace, but everything else depends on it. To that end, I’m going to be installing word count meters and updating them daily (at least on weekdays), so that, should I fall behind, I can at least do it in public where my humility can entertain others.
And, for those that might be interested, I’ll post little tidbits that I discover along the way, and updates on what’s coming out for public consumption in the near future.
So, here’s the metrics as of this evening:
Malice Aforementioned (short)
Free Will (Antithesis, book 2)
The Auto Motive
December 27th, 2010 by jdsawyer
Time for your vegetables again — these are some of the highlights of my research journeys hither and yon in the great wasteland of cyberspace. Hope you enjoy!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad 12/27/10′
December 6th, 2010 by jdsawyer
The following is intended for other writers working to find their stride. I hope something in the following meanderings is useful to you as you hash out your process.
Fall is crazy, right? Halloween, Thanksgiving, School restarting, Christmas, RenFaire, Dickens Faire, conventions, festivities, and all those bleeding birds nesting in my trees and eating my pears, it’s enough to make one want to accept exile to an obscure Italian island.
After my writing binge this summer, I’ve been caught perpetually in the feeling that I’m wading through treacle, and it’s been driving me bonkers. Too much time on the road, too much Real Life ™ getting in the way, not enough time podcasting, or writing, or doing any of the half dozen other things that are in the top five of life priorities.
Continue reading ‘That Plateau Feeling is an Illusion’
