Why Wattpad?

I get a lot of questions from other authors about why I have work up on Wattpad. The most common is, "What do you get out of it?"

I've answered that in bits and pieces before. I get encouragement and feedback. I get to test stories before I decide what kind of a budget to set when I publish them. I get fans.

But Wattpad recently rolled out a new feature that will let me show you the primary thing I get in a way I haven't been able to before.

This is a map that shows where the Wattpad readers of Soulwoven are from. Darker countries have contributed a greater share of readers. White countries have contributed none.

And this is what I get.

Not the map. Bla bla business intelligence, yes, there's some information that's economically useful there, but it's not important.

The darkest country on this map is a place I can (and do) reach by self-publishing. But there are also a lot of countries on this map that I can't reach that way. Maybe most importantly, there aren't that many countries on this map with no shading.

Think about that for a second. Someone has read my writing in almost every country on Earth.

How many people in human history have ever been able to say that?

So the next time someone asks me, "Why Wattpad?" I will point them here with great happiness.

Soulwoven: Exile is Up for Pre-Order!

Hello, dearest readers!

tl;dr Soulwoven: Exile up for pre-order on Amazon, releases 12/12/14; Survey up about creating Soulwoven audiobook.

Two news items for you today folks, and they’re big ones!

FIRST!

Soulwoven: Exile is up on Amazon for pre-order! E-book only for now, but it will launch in that format on December 12, 2014. Hopefully the paper book will be available on the same day, but I won’t know for a little while longer.

Just in time for Christmas! Hope you guys enjoy. And for your pleasure below: cover, blurb, and sneak peek.

Blurb:

Darkness is falling.

The dragon Sherduan is free, and the fate of the world balances on its claws. The Jin brothers and their friends are separated. Alone, they face shadows deeper even than those in their dreams.

Litnig wrestles with his heritage. Cole and Dil cling to shards of happiness as the world crumbles. Quay finds that, in the end, his weakness may outweigh his determination. Ryse and Leramis find in their homecomings not solace but soul-crushing ordeal.

And others enter the stage. Len Heramsun’s daughter follows Tsu’min as he tries to summon a force to oppose Sherduan. A prophet offers guidance to those he can find. In Nutharion, a boy of great power plots to reunite those spared by the dragon. And elsewhere, a ghost and a necromancer contend with the wages of sin.

Those who stood before the black wall when Sherduan was summoned were chosen. But by whom? And for what?

And will their courage create enough light to break through the darkness?

Sneak Peak!

ONE

One hundred days before the destruction of Nutharion City

The black rocks rose.

The black rocks fell.

The black rocks rose.

The black rocks fell.

“It’s not working,” Cole muttered into his sleeves.

He leaned on the railing of an old Aleani fishing vessel. The sea frothed and heaved. A wide, taut sail snapped and creaked over his head. In front of him, a series of flat rocks bobbed in the waves.

His stomach tumbled and rolled and dropped until he could barely pick out which direction was up anymore.

“Just hang in there,” Dil said. Her hand rubbed slow, gentle circles on his back.

His stomach tried to throw up, but there was nothing in it. He dug his fingernails into the railing and grimaced.

The fit passed, and he let his head slump again.

“I thought they said we’d see land by now.”

“They did.” Dil’s fingers continued their circling. “It’s out beyond the rocks, hidden in the fog.”

Cole raised his head. There was a heavy bank of clouds beyond the flat-topped rocks. He couldn’t see anything inside it other than spots of lighter and darker gray.

“Ugh,” he said.

He put his back against the rail and slid down until he reached the deck. Aleani sailors bustled in front of him in flashes of blue and brown and white. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples.

“Do you want some water?” Dil asked.

He nodded, and her feet danced away.

The Aleani had sent a ship, but it hadn’t exactly been what he was hoping for.

The Skellup was maybe forty feet long and ten wide. It was crewed by seven tanned, bearded fishermen from some town in the Aleani borderlands that Cole had never heard of. The ship seemed seaworthy, but it was slow, the area belowdecks was crammed and stank of fish, and there almost always seemed to be somebody working its bilge pump.

Only the captain spoke any Eldanian. When Quay asked why the Skellup had been sent to find them, the red-capped Aleani had spit over the side of the ship and muttered about crimes and judgment.

Cole wondered what sort of welcome they’d get when they reached Du Fenlan.

The wind raced over his neck, and he shivered.

He felt squashed and adrift, as if all the months of pent-up change that had started with Litnig’s dream were crashing down on him all at once. He no longer had a mother, no longer had a home, no longer had the thieves who’d been his adopted family for so long.

All he had left was Litnig, Dil, and Quay, and Litnig was changing too. There were times that Cole looked in his eyes and couldn’t find the brother he’d grown up with.

Those times scared him.

A lot.

Thunder grumbled in the northern sky. Cole felt a storm coming, even over his pulsing nausea. The air was getting heavier. The wind ripped like a wild beast out of the endless ocean.

Dil’s footsteps returned.

“Here,” she said.

Cole took a cup of water from her and sipped it. He hadn’t been able to keep more than the thinnest broth down at sea, and his body was starting to feel weak and jittery.

The wind picked up again, and a curtain of frigid spray blew into his face.

“You sure you don’t want to head below?” Dil asked.

Cole stifled the urge to shake his head—doing that would set it spinning for minutes.

“No,” he said. “It’s better out here.”

He looked up. Dil’s eyes glowed golden against the gray river of clouds behind her. Her dark hair, matted and caked with sea salt and dirt, swirled in the wind.

“You know,” he said with a smile, “your head looks like a charging octopus.”

Dil grinned and rubbed his arm. “Yeah? Well your face looks like a dead one.”

Cole laughed. Behind Dil, three Aleani sailors and the captain broke into a shouting match. A gust of wind shook the sail and spattered him with water.

“How’re the others?” Cole asked.

Dil shrugged and settled down next to him. “Same as they’ve been. Litnig’s grumpy. Leramis and Ryse are whispering. Quay’s a million miles away. Tsu’min isn’t talking to anybody.”

Cole finished off the water in his cup and sighed. “How far are we from Du Nordt?”

“Still a few days, if the wind holds. Quay says we’re passing between Patch’s Fingers and the Bay of Reeds.”

Great, Cole thought. He’d heard stories about the Aleani expedition to colonize the Bay of Reeds. All lost but a few. Famine. Cannibalism. Disease. He shivered and stood up to look back over the rail. This time he spotted hazy strips of land swimming in the clouds—a stripe of light colors that might signify a beach, a darker line that was probably forest beyond, and mountains disappearing into the gray cotton of the sky to the southwest.

We’re too close, he thought.

As if he’d called it, a gust of wind hit the ship and knocked it toward the rocks. His stomach leaped into his throat. More shouting erupted from the Aleani.

Cole’s cup clattered to the deck, and he braced himself against the railing with both hands.

After a moment, the ship stopped pitching any more than usual. His stomach settled and he turned back around. Next to him, Dil peered into the wind, her nose high in the air like she was sniffing for something.

Cole thought he might be able to see the storm. A line of cloud darker than the rest masked the northern horizon. Rain, probably. Lots of it, falling hard. It was moving toward them.

“Yenor’s balls,” he muttered.

The wind got worse, and the ship rolled sickeningly to port. Cole clutched the railing and stared at the horizon, willing his guts to calm down.

Voices speaking Eldanian broke the air behind him.

“—don’t really care right now, Lit. I want to find out what the heck—”

“How long did you keep it from me, Ryse? Who else did you tell?”

The second voice was his brother’s, and it sounded angry.

Cole followed the sound and found Litnig, Ryse, Quay, and Leramis exiting the staircase that led belowdecks. Quay strode to the aft castle of the ship, where the Aleani captain was standing next to his pilot at the wheel, looking nervously at the rocks to portside and the storm to starboard.

Ryse made to follow him, but Litnig held her back. “Who else knew, Ryse? Who else did you tell?” The wind picked up, but his voice cut through it. His face was getting flushed. His eyes flashed.

Nine-tailed, stepdancing hells, Cole thought. He stumbled his way across the deck.

“Did you tell him?” Litnig thundered. He jerked a thumb toward Leramis.

Ryse looked at her feet.

That seemed to say enough for Litnig.

“Yenor’s eyes, Ryse!” He ran a hand through his hair and grabbed a tuft of it. “Why didn’t you trust me? Why didn’t you—”

The ship rolled to port again, and Litnig stumbled into Cole.

Litnig outweighed him by a solid eighty pounds, but Cole had always been good at leveraging his weight. Even the sea couldn’t take that from him. He caught Litnig and wrapped his arms around him.

“Easy, Lit,” he said. The ship righted and his head tried to turn a somersault, but he controlled it. “Calm down, all right? Just calm…”

Litnig turned his head. His hair had grown long and shaggy, and his cloud-colored eyes were red-rimmed and underlined with shadows. “Cole,” he growled, “stay out of this.”

Cole squeezed. It was the same thing Litnig had done to their father at least a dozen times.

He hoped Lit would get the message.

“Cole—”

Cole squeezed tighter.

“I’m warning you, Cole. Don’t—”

A few fat drops of rain struck Cole across the face. The storm clouds were growing closer. The rain began to drum against the deck. The wind shoved them toward the rocks.

None of that mattered. He couldn’t control it. He couldn’t even affect it. All he could do was hold on to his brother, and if he was very lucky, make him listen. “Lit,” Cole said as quietly as he could, “do you remember when ’Ta would get mad?”

Litnig’s muscles bunched underneath Cole’s fingertips. “Don’t talk to me about ’Ta,” he growled. “You don’t understand, Cole. You don’t…”

“So tell me,” Cole said. His arms were starting to get tired.

Litnig mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said, ‘I can’t!’” Litnig roared. He lowered his hips and broke free of Cole’s grip. His elbow slammed into Cole’s gut and sent him stumbling backward.

As he did, the ship rolled to port again, deeper than it had before.

Cole scrambled to keep his balance. His arms wheeled. The ship rolled deeper, and he found himself staring upward and northward into the darkening sky. Litnig reached for him, but he was too far away, and Cole was falling toward the portside rail, falling toward the sea—

He crashed into something warm. Something just about his size. Something that grabbed at his arm and yelped as it was knocked into the ocean in his place.

The Skellup righted itself and began to climb another swell. The wind screamed. Cole turned in a slow circle.

Dil was gone.

It took a second for him to register the fact.

Dil was gone.

There was a warm place on his shoulder where he’d crashed into her. He craned his head over the side of the ship, but the swells were so high he couldn’t spot her.

Gone, he thought again. The word didn’t seem real.

He faced his brother. Litnig’s eyes shone wide and panicked. His face had gone from flushed to ghastly pale.

The Aleani shouted and heaved and pulled at things. The storm grew fiercer. Another wave struck the ship.

Cole shivered in the wind and the rain, and then he began to move.

He spotted a coil of unused rope hanging by the stairs to the aft castle. Not too heavy, not too light. Enough to hold his weight but not drag him down. He picked up one end. It felt old and coarse.

Everyone was talking, but he didn’t care.

Dil was gone.

He fumbled numbly to tie the rope around his waist.

He used good knots. Climbing knots that had borne his weight as he scrambled up stone walls in Thieves’ Rise. He handed Litnig the other end of the rope.

“Cole…” said Litnig.

Cole stepped toward the portside railing. His body still felt shaky and weak, but that hardly mattered anymore.

Litnig’s hand landed on his shoulder, pulling him back, keeping him on the ship, keeping him from Dil.

Something inside Cole snapped.

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” he shouted. He whirled around, elbow first, harder than he meant to, harder than he’d hit Lit since they were kids. There was a heavy crack. A dark red welt formed under Litnig’s left eye.

Litnig let go and reached for his injured cheek. Cole spun around. The ship rolled and heaved. His stomach tried to jump out of his throat.

Cole ran forward, planted one foot on top of the railing, and leaped into the sea.

It was an ugly dive, and his face hit the water with a cold, wet slap. His chest contracted, but he’d spent enough time in thrice-damned freezing water not to lose his breath or his head anymore. He didn’t sink too deep, and soon he was back on top of the salty swells, treading water and sucking in breath while the wind sent drops of spray skittering along the heaving ocean surface.

“Dil!” he screamed into the storm. The Skellup’s low, rolling gait had already taken it past him. He took a few strokes away from the ship, keeping the rocks to his right. The swells pulled at him more strongly than he’d expected them to. He bobbed six or eight feet up and down with every one. The cold sapped what strength was left in his arms and legs.

“Dil!” he screamed again.

The water churned in dark, angry mountains. The rope around his waist played out foot by foot. He kicked and pulled and spat and shouted.

“Dil!”

A voice called out in return, far to his right. Toward the rocks. The water swelled, and for a moment he was on top of everything.

He spotted a dot in the water near one of the rocks.

Cole’s legs scissored, and he swam as fast and as hard as his numbing body would take him. The line stretched out. The rock drew closer, even as his face lost feeling and the outsides of his arms and legs grew rubbery. When he was on the crests of the waves, he saw that the dot was coming out to meet him. It grew closer, closer, larger, larger. No longer a dot but a person. No longer a person but Dil.

He’d almost reached her when the line caught around his hips and dragged him backward.

He cursed and shoved down on the rope belt as it took him underwater. It didn’t budge. His knots were strong.

Cole rolled over. His head broke the surface again, but he was on his back, not swimming but trolling through the water like a worm on the end of a fishing line. The cold, briny sea filled his mouth. He spat it out and spotted Dil in front of him. She was just out of reach, struggling through the chop. She looked worried, and she was getting farther away. She wouldn’t catch him, couldn’t catch him—

His fingers closed around the handle of his knife.

Cold, confused calculations ran drunkenly through his brain. He pulled the knife.

He cut the rope.

It didn’t take much. He slid the blade back and forth twice, and then he was free—no longer being dragged anywhere but with the current. The frayed end of the rope skimmed across the tops of the waves and flew beyond his reach.

Arms grasped his shoulders. Legs kicked next to his in the waves. He turned to face them.

Dil wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes shone a bright, lustrous gold. “Cole—why?” she whispered.

Cole kicked to stay above the churning surf. The wind whipped sheets of spray into his eyes. A sheet of lightning forked across the bottoms of the clouds.

“I love you,” he mumbled into her shoulder.

As if it solved everything. As if it solved anything.

They floated together, a mile or more offshore, a mile or more from safety, surrounded by wind and water and black, jagged rocks.

And filled by desperate, flickering love.

Thanks for reading! Pre-order here!

SECOND bit of news!

I’m going to make an audiobook of Soulwoven. I’ve gotten a lot of interest from people I talk to at signings and conferences, but I also want to poll you the hardcore fans so that I can make sure you get what you want. To that end, I’ve put together a quick survey about your audiobook preferences. If you’ve got a minute, fill it out and let me know what you’re after!

That’s all for now, friends and readers. Thanks as always for being the wind in my sails. I am so, so excited about Exile. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written, hands-down. It’s tighter, deeper, darker, and more beautiful than the first book was. Early readers have been excited about it, and I hope you will be too. I can’t wait to get it to you. :-)

Yours in sweat and ink as always,

Jeff

Soulwoven Audiobook?

Okay guys, it's going to be a busy week here in Soulwoven land. Lots of news to relate, and we're starting with this:

I'm going to make a Soulwoven audiobook.

I've been going to conferences and talking to readers this summer, and two trends have emerged in my conversations:

1.) People love audiobooks. People who read lots of books love them even more.

2.) People like the way I read my own work. A lot. Every time I do a reading, I get lots of love afterward.

So I'm putting those two things together and thinking, "Alright, let's do an audiobook."

I've put a lot of time into researching how to do it, and I have a basic plan in place. I also fully expect there'll be lots of experimenting and failing and fun things to share along the way.

But before I do any of that, I want to hear from you.

I've put together a real quick survey for my readers about their interest in an audiobook version of Soulwoven. I want to make sure I give you guys what you want. And I have to decide how to much to invest in the project in terms of time and money.

So if you've got a few minutes, I'd be everlastingly appreciative if you filled it out. You can find it here.

Cheers, and come back tomorrow for bigger, better news.

Sale! New Story! SO MANY THINGS!!!

Okay you guys, I've been pretty pathetic about keeping up on the blog lately. I apologize for that. But I've been busy, and now there's news that cannot possibly ignored, meaning I'm back here again to share it.

Said news is on three fronts:

First! SOULWOVEN is on sale! Today through 8/31 it’s available for $.99, and on 9/1 and 9/2 it’s available for $1.99. If you don’t have your copy yet, now’s a great time to get one, and if you’ve got friends who might be interested in reading it, now’s a great time for them to get one too!

Second! The e-book version of SOULWOVEN has been updated to include a teaser for Soulwoven: Exile, the next book in the series, which will be out on December 5 or 6 (see how I snuck that announcement in there?). I’m working on getting Amazon to update it for people who’ve already bought the book, and I’ll post again once I have that done.

Third! You may remember that I wrote a short story for All Hallow's Write last year called WHAT LIES IN DARKNESS. Well, I read it to some people at InConJunction this year and they loved it so much I decided I ought to clean it up and put it on Amazon. So now I have. It’s just $.99, and it’s a hell of a spooky read. If you like scary stories, click through and check it out. If it doesn’t hook you, I’ve done something wrong. Description and opening chapter at bottom, for the click-shy.

Also, it's currently sitting at #62 on Amazon's Horror Short Stories bestseller list. Feel free to join the crowd on this one. It's a good crowd.

Finally, as always, thanks for reading. Readers are the wind in my sails and the reason I do this thing. I hope you enjoy what I’ve got on tap for you this weekend. Let me know if you do! I always love to hear from you.

Yours in blood, sweat, and ink,

Jeff

Ellie Mailer can’t sleep. When she tries, the darkness over her bed sticks its fingers down her throat and squeezes. Her uncle’s footsteps rock the floorboards above her head. And there are bad storms coming through every night.

All these things she can handle. But when a man with darkness where his face should be comes to her door, she enters a world of shadows and secrets and death, where she’ll be all that lies between her little sister Georgie and a creature that enters homes and eats the hearts of those who live within.

This is the story of the summer Ellie cut off her uncle’s fingers and heard her best friend die. This is how she learned what lies in darkness.

Excerpt:

Chapter One

Fingers in the Dark

I DIDN’T SLEEP A LOT when I was fourteen.

It was the darkness above my bed. Not the lack of light but what was in it, lying there, waiting for me. Every night it dripped down from the ceiling and into my mouth, seeped into my shirt and over my chest and my stomach and thighs. Squeezed.

The school psychologist told me it was just night terrors, but it wasn’t. I know that now. I was never asleep before the darkness came.

The summer storms were especially bad that year, and that didn’t help. They were big rollers that came crashing across the plains and broke on our little suburb like it was a rock out on the ocean. The rain drummed on the roof like an army of gnomes with gnarled fingers, and the wind pushed against the side of the house as though it wanted nothing more than to roll it over and crack open its belly to get at the good stuff inside.

Me and my little sister Georgie, we were the good stuff.

My uncle stayed with us that summer. His bedroom was right above mine, and he didn’t sleep much either. Even when the storms were going on, I heard his feet on the floor. Pacing. Turning. Pacing. Turning.

That’s all the setup you need. The rest I’ll tell like it happened.

You asked me about darkness. About what’s inside it.

I’m going to tell you about the summer I found out, and I cut my uncle’s fingers off, and my best friend died.

***

I’M TRYING TO BREATHE.

The darkness is in my mouth, and it feels like a handful of fingers. It’s pulling my cheeks out, pinching my tongue and trying to push it to the side so that it can go deeper. It feels so real—like there’s a man wrapped in it, floating up in the dark spaces near the ceiling, and his arm’s behind the fingers, pushing. If he gets them to the back of my tongue, he’s gonna tear it out and eat it, and then he’s gonna stick his arm down my throat, rip a hole in my esophagus, and yank out my heart through my mouth.

So I grab the sides of my bed and I fight it.

Creak.

Uncle George is still awake, somewhere up above me. The red lights of the clock by my bed read 2:30 a.m. My parents have been asleep for hours; I heard them stop arguing around midnight.

Creak.

There’s a storm outside too—a real rager by the sound of it. The gnome fingers are hammering, hammering, hammering on the roof. Even in the basement, I can hear it. The house feels like it’s about ready to give up the ghost, and me and Georgie with it.

Georgie’s the reason I can’t let the darkness win, even though sometimes I want to.’Cause if it gets me, it’ll go for Georgie next, and I won’t let that happen.

Our daughters, Frank. It’s not right… Mom said before Dad hushed her for the last time.

Most nights I beat the darkness. The man and his fingers get weaker, and then he goes away, and I can breathe and sleep.

Creak.

Uncle George must be pacing real slow. There’s only one board in his room that creaks: the one by the door.

Some nights it feels like the darkness is gonna beat me, and I give up on trying to sleep and go stand in the living room to watch the storms roll through ’til dawn. This is gonna be one of those nights, I think, and I might as well just admit it.

The fingers have got hold of my tongue pretty good now. One of them grazes the dangler in the back of my throat, and I choke.

I roll over and slip off the bed, spit out the darkness’s fingers. They try to work their way back in right up ’til I walk away, the bottom cuffs of my pajamas dragging on the cold wood floor.

Creak.

Uncle George rattles the door upstairs, and I freeze. My heart jumps into my throat.

Creak.

The door doesn’t open.

I sigh in relief.

GEORGIE’S NOT IN HER ROOM across the hall. I can tell ’cause her door’s cracked. She’s only five, and half the time when she thinks she’s got the door closed she doesn’t.

She gets up in the middle of the night sometimes too. It must run in the family, ’cause my mom and dad take pills for it.

Our house is a split-level, and the living room’s on the middle floor. I bet that’s where Georgie is. She likes watching the storms too. My heart’s still pounding from my fight with the darkness, so I take my time walking down the hall, let my toes squish in the brand-new carpet Mom made Dad put in last winter. It’s the nicest thing in the house. I’ve heard her say so.

The new carpet ends at the bottom of the stairs. I sigh and put my toes on the old stuff. It’s rough. Feels like a cat’s tongue. I hate that feeling. Like the stairs are tasting you, trying to decide whether to eat you or not.

Georgie’s not in the living room.

There are two big picture windows in the front wall. Just as I get up the stairs, the lightning flashes and the street lights up behind them. Everything’s stark white and black for a split-second—the crabapple tree in the yard, the Dawsons’ house across the street, everything. The sheets of rain are so thick I can see them.

When the lightning’s gone, I catch a flash of something white near the front door.

Georgie’s nightgown, I think.

The floors up here are hardwood. Better than the licking cats on the stairs, but cold at night, even in the summer.

Thunder rattles the windows. I flinch, close my eyes, take a deep breath. I’m old enough I should be used to the storms by now.

When I open my eyes, I see Georgie.

She’s standing by the front door. Two little windows run up next to it, and she’s pulled the gauzy curtain that covers one of them aside and is peeking out at the rain. I join her.

“Whatcha doin’, Georgie?” I whisper.

My parents wouldn’t hear a freight train come through, but I don’t want Uncle George to know we’re up if I can help it.

“Watchin’,” she says. Her voice sounds like it’s coming out of a toy or a cartoon.

“Watchin’ what?”

Her hair’s brown, and it curves down around her ears. Mom gave her a bowl cut last week, and she loves it. Georgie giggled while Mom tickled her neck with one hand and worked the scissors with the other.

“Nothin’.”

I squat next to her, ruffle her hair, and plant a kiss on her cheek, like Mom does. She squirms when I do it, but I don’t care. It’s more for me than for her.

The street looks pretty much the same through the little window as it does through the big ones, ’cept you can’t see the Dawsons’. You can see the long shadows from their porch light though. I’ve watched them from the living room. They sort of look like people, if you catch ’em from the wrong angle.

They’re sort of doing it now.

One of the shadows is moving. Coming toward us, strolling across the street like a human being.

“Georgie,” I whisper, “get away from the door.”

It’s just a feeling, but Georgie’s only five, and she doesn’t care if what I tell her to do doesn’t make sense. Thank God for that.

She moves away from the door.

Creak.

Uncle George’s door opens, down the hall that leads to my parents’ room.

“Ellie?” he whispers. “That you? You girls need something?”

My heart jumps into my throat. My tongue sticks when I try to answer him, and for a second I feel the fingers again, pinching, trying to reach inside me and pull something out.

I open my mouth and croak out nothing.

“Ellie?”

Creak. The other foot. He’s about to leave his room and come into the hallway. Our space, mine and Georgie’s.

“No.” The word comes out in a gasp. “We’re fine. Just getting some water.”

Uncle George stays silent for a second.

“Okay,” he says.

Creak. Creak. The door shuts.

The fingers in my mouth float away.

I stalk back to Georgie, grab her by the arm, and yank her toward the living room and the stairs. We’ll spend the night in her room, and I’ll sit in the rocking chair and read while she sleeps. I don’t want to watch the storm, and I don’t want to be upstairs with Uncle George.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

I freeze. Something cold cracks open on the top of my head and oozes down my neck. The feeling’s so real I touch my skin. My fingers come up a little clammy, but it’s just from sweat.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Before I can tighten my grip on Georgie’s arm, she snatches it away.

“I’ll get it!” she sings.

Mom taught her to answer the door last week. It’s her new favorite game.

“Georgie, no!” I whisper.

But she’s fast as hell when she wants to be. She gets to the door before I’m even all the way turned around. Flicks the deadbolt over while I’m closing the three feet between us. Opens the door.

The chain stops it. It’s too high for her to reach.

There’s a man outside, wearing a black double-breasted suit and a hat. I can’t see his face. I’m looking straight at it, but I can’t see it. All I see is darkness.

“Hello,” he whispers. The sound feels like the edge of a knife in my ears. “Can I come in?”

My palm hits the door and slams it. I flick the deadbolt back and tug the curtain over the windows. I bundle Georgie up in my arms, and I run like hell back downstairs. When we get behind her door, I prop the rocking chair against the knob—We don’t have locks we don’t have locks why the hell don’t we have locks?—and drag her dresser over, and then I sit cross-legged on the ground and listen.

No footsteps.

No one coming.

No one trying to get in.

Just Georgie crying because she doesn’t understand and the storm thundering away outside.

And the feeling of fingers, trying to rip out my tongue and get down my throat.

Thanks for reading. Get the rest here!

The Coolest Thing

This is mostly just a chance to be happy, which I don't do often enough on this blog. Because writing really does make me happy. Sharing stories makes me happy. Touching lives makes me happy. Moving people makes me happy. That's why I do this instead of something else.

Yesterday I found out that people have been sharing a quote from Soulwoven:

"And of all the futures she could have, she didn't want a single one that didn't have him in it."

It's from the end of chapter thirty-seven, and it means a lot to me.

And I am absolutely beside myself with joy that other people feel the same way.

Wattpad, at some point, made a graphic of it. You can see it here. And now it's turning up on Instagram and elsewhere, and I'm just absolutely tickled.

This is why I write, plain and simple.

Thank you to whoever at Wattpad made that graphic and put it up on Pinterest. And thank you to everyone who's shared it, and everyone who's read the book and been touched by it. You guys are wonderful.

News for the Week of 5.23.14: Sometimes I Write Things That Aren't Novels

Greetings, dearest readers!

Time for another post full of news and updates!

FIRST! The fire sale for Soulwoven went pretty darn well. The book sold more copies than it ever has in a day before, sending it up the Amazon bestseller rankings and, more importantly, giving a bunch of people a chance to check it out on the cheapies. Many thanks to everybody who boosted the signal—you were a huge part of making that happen. It’s still on sale for$2.99 on Amazon through 5/28, so if you missed the fire sale, you can still get in on the water sale (or something).

SECOND! I’m splashing around in the waters of short fiction and it feels SO GOOD. I’ve got two stories that are just about ready to head out on submission, and I’m being more active about pushing some others. One-sentence summaries, just to whet your appetites!

- A look at what the future of mixed martial arts might look like if we decide to replace the bodies in the cage with remote-controlled android replicas.

- A loving, tongue-in-cheek sendup of fantasy gaming tropes wherein a goblin officeworker with midlife ennui and a heart of gold discovers just how much you can find at the bottom of a Bottomless Bag.

- A postapocalyptic reimagining of the Icarus myth involving a walking Colossus and finger-wings of wax.

- A somewhat modernist take on fairy tales, art, and what one does with the gifts one receives in childhood.

So if you know anybody who publishes a magazine that pays pro or semi-pro rates and might be interested, hit me up.

THIRD! I’m writing essays. There are some Big Things that come up in Soulwoven: Exile, and I want to talk about them because they’re important. I won’t be publishing anything until the book’s out because spoilers, but I’m scouting out markets for them as well.

Thanks again to everybody who’s left stars or a review for Soulwoven, especially if it was on Amazon (which, sadly, seems to have more clout than anybody else these days). You guys are the wind in my sails.

Yours in excited ink,

Jeff

It's SALE DAY! Watch Me Get My Promotion On

Just a reminder, SOULWOVEN is on sale today for $.99 at Amazon.com, and for corresponding prices worldwide. Look at all the nice things people have had to say about it!

"Seymour lets these characters--and their private struggles--command the narrative...Seymour's artful perfectionism will have readers clamoring for the sequel." - Kirkus Reviews

"Soulwoven is a call back to the classic Epic Fantasy of Tolkien, or Weis and Hickman, with fantastic, believable characters that grow and change... A great read and a great time." - The Speculative Post

"This book is a comfort read. A world inspired by the medieval ages perhaps - castles, farm boys, magic and an ancient evil. For us having grown up on traditional high fantasy, it's sort of coming back to the centre of our worlds. But the verdict is, that Jeff can spin an alluring tale of magic and dragons. And spin it so well that we're willing to let the tropes lie by the roadside while we enjoy this old-fashioned tale thoroughly. And be hungry for more." - Smorgasbord Fantasia

"I am one of the original backers of this book, and I would say that was money well invested." - Goodreads review

"This is one intense fantasy world." - Goodreads review

"I found this to be a quick and enjoyable read, and wish I had the next one in hand so I could read on" - Amazon.com review

"I picked this up and found that I couldn't put the book down until I was finished." - Amazon.com review

"Very, very like a piece of steak." - Wattpad review

All that goodness can be yours for $.99. Grab it now!

Soulwoven's First Sale! $.99 - $2.99 on Amazon for the Next Week!

Okay, friends and readers---big and exciting news about Soulwoven's first sale!

In honor of the book's three-month anniversary (can't believe it's been so long already), it's going on sale on Amazon.com for a week. The sale will start Wednesday 5/21 and run through Wednesday 5/28, and it'll look like this:

Wednesday 5/21: $.99 for the e-book.

Thursday 5/22 - Wednesday 5/28: $2.99 for the e-book

Thursday 5/29 forward: Back to the regular $5.99 price

So if you're interested in reading the book but have been put off by the price, or if you've been needling your friends about it but they haven't done anything, now (or rather Wednesday)'s the time to strike!

Enjoy!

Marketing Soulwoven Part 3: Running the Kickstarter

This is part the third of a series of posts on how I've marketed Soulwoven. Part the first and part the second provide useful background.

Running a successful Kickstarter has a lot of facets. On the one hand, you're working to create the book, and it needs to be your first priority. On the other hand, you've also promised your backers a fly's-eye seat on the wall while you do it, and there's no question in my mind that fulfilling the second part of that equation is smart marketing.

So I consider a lot of the way I interacted with my backers during the Kickstarter a part of Soulwoven's marketing plan, even though I did most of those things to be good to my backers, and not because I wanted to do a good job of marketing (it's always about what you can do for them, remember?).

I started off with a long update a few days after the Kickstarter funded, explaining my thoughts on the whole process, what it meant to me, and why I was so grateful to my backers and how incredible what they did in funding the book was. You can read an adaptation of it here, but the full thing will only ever be available to the backers, as will the other Kickstarter updates I wrote. That was part of the deal I made with them; they got access to me as a creator that nobody else did.

And I did my best to be as accessible as possible.

I started before the Kickstarter even ended. I'd noticed as I backed other projects that I got much more excited about projects while they were still going on when the creators were excited and getting in touch with me about what was happening (excitement is one of the things you give backers in return for their money, or at least it should be). So I wrote about the editing that I was going to get, and I posted an example of the revision notes I was making as I worked through Soulwoven that month (I was getting in one last cover-to-cover revision before sending it off to my developmental editor). I wrote seven updates during the month the Kickstarter ran. Some of my backers were excitedly messaging me as I did it. Others upped their pledges. So that was good marketing, in addition to being A Thing That I Did Because It Was Right.

Once the Kickstarter finished, I kept up the updates---again, I knew from being a backer that having regular (not too often, but when milestones occurred) updates really helped make a person feel like they were a part of the process. I shared my budget, once I had all the final numbers hammered out. I let backers vote on the cover, then shared the final version when it came in. I shared the map when it came in. I tried to post at least once a month about where the book was in the publishing process, and I tried to anticipate questions and answer them (like "What's a galley copy?"). I made some videos and shared some photos as well.

Not everybody responded. Only about half of the backers voted on the cover choice. But that was totally fine; again, it wasn't about what they could do for me, it was about what I could do for them. If all they wanted was the finished product, or even just the momentary satisfaction of clicking the "Pledge" button, I was still absolutely thrilled to have them on board.

But overall, people really seemed to enjoy the process. When I talk to backers (the ones who interact with me, anyway), I get the feeling they really felt like they got their money's worth before the book even came out. Making that happen to me was very important as a creator, but it was also good marketing. Because happy readers are happy customers, and happy customers come back to you again.

And if there's an overall takeaway from this marketing post, it should be that. Make your readers happy. That's always been an imperative for most kinds of authors, but it's more important than ever in today's publishing environment. I've seen it over and over again in the indie world; the most successful authors aren't just the ones who can turn a phrase and crack a plot and build amazing worlds and characters. Their fans also love interacting with them.

I dealt with plenty of moments of panic as I was producing Soulwoven. I still have them now that I'm learning how to sell it. But during one of them, I happened upon a truth that has helped me keep perspective, and I'm going to share it with you because it's important.

You can't control whether\people will like your book. But you can control how you treat the people who do.

News for the Week of 5.9.14 - Signin', Writin', and Discountin'

Hello, dear readers!

Time for a newsy update blog post. First off, things related to SOULWOVEN:

I finished a getting-closer-to-final draft of Soulwoven: Exile this week and sent it off to a very excited batch of first readers! They’ll be going over it for the next month or so and getting me comments back about what’s working and what isn’t. This is a hugely important step in the writing process for me, and it’s always extremely nerve-racking. But my readers are awesome and helpful and big fans, and I’m very glad to have hit this point in the writing process.

Second, SOULWOVEN will be going on sale later this month. I don’t have all the details yet, but the most likely scenario is that the e-book edition will drop to $.99 on May 21, the three-month anniversary of the launch. So if you’ve been interested in reading it but $5.99 felt too steep, get your clicking finger ready and circle the date.

Third, tomorrow I’ll be signing copies of SOULWOVEN at Robots & Rogues, my local indie SF/F specialty bookstore, in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, during an event called the Mosey Down Main Street. I’ve been told the Mosey is a blast, with music, food, and beer galore, and I couldn’t be more excited to have a good excuse to go join in and call it work. Come hang out, if you’re in the area.

Phew! That’s it for Soulwoven news for now. I’m going to be working on short fiction while my first readers crunch Exile for me, and I’m quite excited for that. I’ve got three projects to polish and a couple more ideas lined up. I also have a pending request from a very important person to write something happy, and I’m becoming more and more interested in doing so.

Cheers, and thanks for following along. If you’ve read Soulwoven, please take the time to review it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Goodreads.

Yours in rain and ink,

Jeff

Marketing Soulwoven Part Two: The Kickstarter Launch

Okay, time for part two of the ongoing series of posts on how I'm marketing Soulwoven (you can read part one here).

The second stage of marketing Soulwoven came with the Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter, like Wattpad, was a thing I found out about via the news. I started backing projects on it in 2012, with Amanda Palmer's album Theatre is Evil. Over the next year or so, I backed several projects and got a chance to see firsthand how they worked---what was exciting about the process, what wasn't, what other people did well and poorly, etc.

Kickstarter, for those who don't know it, lets people pledge money to support a creative endeavor. For authors, it's a way of funding all of the many expenses related to publishing a book, like editing, marketing, and cover design. In the traditional publishing world, your publisher foots those expenses in return for a large slice of the profits of the book. When you Kickstart, your audience foots those expenses in return for various backer rewards and the fun of being a part of your creative process.

Launching the Kickstarter was the first time I began actively marketing Soulwoven to anyone. I knew from backing other projects and from reading up on it that having a good video was extremely important, so I turned to a friend of mine from high school who runs a small video production company in Denver. He did a bang-up job on the video, which more than paid for itself.

I also reached out to my Wattpad followers, of which there were several thousand at the time, and asked them what they'd be interested in getting as rewards from a Kickstarter. I built a survey using Survey Monkey and asked them to rank my ideas in order from most exciting to least exciting, and then to write in any ideas of their own. I didn't get a ton of responses, but I got enough to correct some misconceptions I'd had about what would be the most exciting. I also realized that I wasn't likely to have people from Wattpad pouring thousands of dollars into the Kickstarter.

So I set my goals low. I knew I couldn't adequately copy edit a book of Soulwoven's length (because I'd already copy edited Three Dances myself, and it was a bear of a job even for a book so short). So I told myself I needed $550 to hire a copy editor I'd worked with through my freelancing for Carina Press, and I set up my reward tiers pretty aggressively to hit that goal. I was reasonably certain I could convince 25 people to pledge $25 each to back to the book, and I filled the $25 reward tier with all the goodies my survey respondents said they wanted most. I also set a number of stretch goals for the campaign, which would add interior artwork and additional editing to the publishing process if they were reached.

It worked well beyond my wildest dreams. My core fans were extremely excited to back the book, and I hit my funding goal about 12 hours after the Kickstarter went live. I eventually received 660% of my goal, allowing me to bring on an interior artist and developmental editor, as well as to launch with a pretty significant marketing budget.

There were a few other marketing tricks I pulled out for the Kickstarter that are worth mentioning. I noticed that being part of a successful Kickstarter was a lot more fun than being part of one that wasn't going very well. I also knew that if the book funded quickly, I'd have another flashy hook I could dangle in my marketing copy. So I set my funding floor low with that in mind. I also set up my reward tiers in a way that encouraged interaction between me and my backers. I wanted to get to know these people, who were making my dream a reality. I also knew that the more contact we had, the more likely they were to remember me.

This is getting long, so I'm going to break it off here and talk more about the process of fulfilling the Kickstarter in another post. But first I want to mention another marketing caveat. It's true of anything you do marketing-wise on the Internet, but it's especially true of Kickstarter:

It's never about what they can do for you. It's always about what you can do for them.

Marketing actively to people can make you come off as a sleazeball at relativistic speeds. The world is full of people and companies trying to separate readers from their money. Don't do that. Don't be desperate. Don't be needy. Don't be pushy. Your needs are unimportant to people who have never met you, and if you put your needs above the needs of the people who have met you, you'll start to push them away pretty quickly.

So find out what your readers want and what you can give them. Then offer it to them. When you ask for something back, do it humbly and with a smile on your face that says, "I'll still like you whether you help me out or not." Let the money question ride quietly and unobtrusively in the backseat of your relationships with readers and fans, because that's where it belongs.

And watch Amanda Palmer's TED talk. It will help you put things in perspective.

Stephen Deas on Dragons

You may have realized by this point that I spend a lot of time crawling over Fantasy Faction these days. It's a good website, if you're into fantasy.

And today I want to bring you, care of Fantasy Faction, some thoughts about dragons from Stephen Deas, who apparently has been sipping from my cup of tea despite the thousands of miles that separate us geographically.

In his article, Stephen takes the time to break down a few definitions of dragons and ends up with the following:

dragon, n, Something very formidable or dangerous.

That sounds about right to me. He goes on to explain how when fantasists go too far in explaining where their dragons come from, when they humanize them too much, they take the power away from them. I couldn't agree more. Don't get me wrong, I loved How to Train Your Dragon, and I cut my teeth on the shapeshifting, human-loving dragons of Dragonlance, but to me a dragon...a real dragon, one worthy of the word, is one so alien and terrifying that it cannot be understood. The primary purpose of the dragon myth is to put a face on the horrible unknown. And the further your dragons stray from that, the more watered-down they become.

If you've read Soulwoven, you know that's the direction I took with the dragon in the book. But there are people out there who do this even better than I do. One of the authors I edit, John Tristan, has a book coming out that has the most primal, awful (in every sense of that word), alien dragons I've ever seen. If you can imagine what it might be like for a preindustrial civilization to encounter a star destroyer from Star Wars---well, that's more or less what I envisioned when I read his dragons. I'll follow up on this post once we've got a shareable release date on that book, but if you love dragons of the Old Testament sort, keep an eye out for it.

Marketing Soulwoven Part One: Wattpad

I realized after I promised another marketing post on Friday that talking about the commercialization strategy for Soulwoven was going to take up several posts' worth of space. Figuring out how to share this book with the world has taken, literally, years. Not as long as it took to write it, but a long time.

The story starts in 2012.

If you've read any of the promo material for Soulwoven, you've seen me trumpeting the success it's had on Wattpad. For those of you who don't know, Wattpad is a story-sharing site. You sign up for an account, and you can post stories on there and read the stories that other people post. The whole thing is free. I'm not sure how they make money, or if they are making money (it's a tech startup; they often go a long time without making any money).

I heard about Wattpad through Publisher's Weekly, a trade publication I used to read every day and wish I still had time to read every day. They ran an article about an author with a huge Wattpad following in late 2011. Shortly thereafter, she got a huge deal. I took notice, signed up for a Wattpad account, and started lurking and thinking and thinking and lurking.

At the time, I wasn't sure how to use it. I still wanted to publish Soulwoven traditionally, and I was afraid that putting it on Wattpad might trounce its chances. So I started asking around. Six months later, after I asked several literary agents about Wattpad and they asked me back, "What's that?" I decided that this was going to be The Next Big Thing and I ought to get involved before it hit that point (I was partially right; it's bigger now, and I think it's much harder to catch their attention).

So I started revising Soulwoven and posting chapters of it on Wattpad. I had enormously high hopes, as I always tend to. The results didn't live up to them. People read it. People liked it. But it didn't go gangbusters and generate huge word of mouth and suddenly shoot to the top of Wattpad's rankings (it did crack the top 25 at one point, but it dropped off from there pretty quickly).

I blogged about the experience though, and my blog posts caught the eye of a Wattpad community manager, and she contacted me and asked if I was interested in having Soulwoven featured on the site.

One of the principles of book marketing (and writing, for that matter, because it enters into how you construct your first page) I cottoned on to pretty early on in the process was the importance of setting reader expectations. I noticed that I gave authors extra slack if I had seen their work before or it came with laudatory quotes from authors or reviewers I trusted (or best yet, from friends). Neil Gaiman's American Gods took most of the book to hook me, but I stuck with it because it was Neil Gaiman, and I had faith it would get there. I put A Game of Thrones down after the first chapter because I didn't like it, only to pick it up later, read farther, and fall in love with it after it was recommended to me repeatedly by friends.

Marketing a first novel, especially if you're self-publishing, is difficult because you don't have any of that credit with readers. They bring no positive preconceptions to your book, which means you get very little slack from them. I wanted to do as much as I could to set readers up to enjoy the book before they even opened it, and having Soulwoven featured on Wattpad let me do that.

It worked in two ways: first, I could plug the fact that it was featured. A lot of readers haven't heard of Wattpad, but they know the word "featured" and that it's a good thing. Second, before I launched Soulwoven, it generated over 500,000 reads on Wattpad (Wattpad's "reads" are essentially page views; Wattpad is cagey about how it calculates things, but as far as I can tell, it counts a read anytime a user opens a new chapter of the book). Again, you don't have to know Wattpad to see "half a million" and think "good thing." When it came time for the Kickstarter campaign, I could point to my success on Wattpad and say, "You should fund this book because people already love it," and that was immensely helpful.

But on top of giving me some means with which to make myself sound good, having the book up on Wattpad gave me a wealth of useful information about it. I got to see who was reading it and liking it (at least as much as they shared with me), and I got to see what people were saying about it and what they liked about it. I learned that about half of people who were starting the book weren't reading past the first chapter, and I could compare that to the numbers of other successful books on Wattpad and see that it stacked up pretty well. I could also see that Soulwoven wasn't the kind of book that people JUST HAD TO SHARE OMG. I eventually concluded that it was a middling success on Wattpad and was likely to be a middling success commercially. So far, that's exactly what it's been.

I still have the book up on Wattpad. The sanity of that decision has been questioned, but I'll talk more about that when I get to the pricing part of this series (much in the future). But put shortly, all the evidence I've seen shows that Wattpad users aren't big book buyers, and that big book buyers aren't Wattpad users. The ecosystems exist more or less independently, and I benefit immensely from having Soulwoven up. It crossed 750,000 reads this weekend. When it hits a million, I'll update my promo info with the new, flashier number.

Plus, people are reading it who otherwise wouldn't be, and in the end, that's more important than anything else. I don't write fiction solely to make money. I make a hell of a lot more money writing things that aren't fiction. I write fiction to move people and make a positive influence on the world, and the only reason I'm after money for it at all is because if I can make a living at it, I can do more of it and do it better.

And that's worth keeping in mind whenever we talk marketing. There are dueling goals of art and commerce for every author, and I do my best to privilege the artistic over the commercial whenever I can.

Sales Rankings

Hello, dearest readers.

Sorry this is a day late! Yesterday went far, far off the rails and blogging slipped my mind. Anyhoo, today it's time for a BUSINESS post. How exciting. Because my head is back on straight and I'm back to working on Soulwoven: Exile again and it's all very hush-hush, big secret, oh my God the things I wish I could tell you, etc., etc.

Also because people are asking me how Soulwoven is doing, and because at times I have absolute, panicky, mind-crushing anxiety about that very thing. This post about Amazon and its sales rankings has helped me put that into perspective. Come Monday, I'll crack the door open a little more about what my marketing and sales strategy has been with Soulwoven, what's worked, what hasn't, and what the next step is. It'll be a long one, or possibly a series, so consider this the primer.

And then enjoy your weekend. It's springtime in Indiana, and whatever else I may say about this state when it's -50F after wind chill and I haven't seen the sun in days, this place has beautiful, beautiful springs.

News for the Week of 3.28.14: Back at Work!

Greetings, gentle readers!

It's been a while since I've given you an update on what I'm writing. That's because, well, I haven't been writing. Handling all the launch whatnot for Soulwoven, plus all the work I put off while I was making it ready for publication, has had me absolutely overwhelmed. It hasn't felt good, honestly.

But this week I got back on the horse! I've been cruising through the current draft of Soulwoven: Exile, which continues the story, and making revision notes. I should be finished with that in a few days and on to actually making the revisions, which is where the real magic happens.

It feels really, really good to be writing again. Exile is a darker and more mature beast than the first book was. It's been fascinating for me to read the reviews of Soulwoven as they come in. I've noticed in particular how many people are pointing out how the structure of the book---the heroic quest---is a bit, well, old-fashioned. Authors With Big Names aren't really writing those anymore.

Well, Exile's not a heroic quest. It's the aftermath. One of my reviewers compared Soulwoven to Lord of the Rings (we're talking broad strokes here, not enduring literary merit). If you take that comparison to the next book, Exile's what you might've gotten if Tolkien had spent a whole book exploring what happened to everyone on their way home, and if what happened was a little more frightening and difficult than chasing a defanged Saruman out of the Shire.

So that's what's on my mind. It feels like I'm sailing again after a month in port. The wind's in my hair and the sun is shining, and I've let the sheets out as far as they'll go. I hope to have bits of Exile to start sharing with you in the next few months.

Yours always,
Jeff

Easter Eggs

When I was a kid, I used to hunt for Easter eggs a lot.

Not just the plastic kind my parents used to stuff with jelly beans and chocolate (though I did that too, and loved it). I hunted for the kind that video game developers left in their games. I hunted for them in books too, though I didn't know to call them that at the time.

The term "Easter egg" in that context refers to a little prize or extra feature hidden in a book or game (or other form of media). Wikipedia's got a pretty good definition going. The hunt for Easter eggs in games with vibrant communities tends to be a pretty exhaustive affair, with players combing the game en masse and compiling lists for others. People do it in books too.

Soulwoven has a few. Not a ton, but they're in there. I won't spoil them all, but I'll give you one to start out with in case you're a dedicated egg hunter. Turn to page 341 (about halfway through Chapter 47 for those of you with the e-book). Read this poem, which I did while writing the book. Ta-da!

More interesting ones have to do with hints at what's coming in the next book. Once you've read Exile, come back and have a look at Chapter 24. It's stacked with 'em.

Y'know, it occurs to me that with the advent of e-books, we could be doing a lot more in terms of Easter eggs with the application of a little clever HTML. In fact, someone cleverer than me probably already is.

Hmm. Food for the mysterious machine in my brain that crunches ideas and turns them into books. Wonder what I can do with it.

Anyway, happy spring! And if you celebrate Easter, either with church or with bunnies and jelly beans, I hope you enjoy it. A month from now, which you wouldn't know from the displays in my grocery store.

Hubris and Its Wages

I put the last of the hand-annotated copies of Soulwoven for domestic Founder's Circle backers in the mail today. Still a few more copies to go overall, but for the most part, the mad sprint around the book's launch is now over, and I've got a few thoughts to share on hubris.

One of the wonderful things about creating these hand-annotated copies was that doing so let me go over the book again and again and again, moving through it at a pretty good clip and picking out themes and relationships between scenes and characters and chapters that I hadn't put in there consciously (there were also things I did put in there consciously, and I saw those too, but they were less interesting to me because I expected them).

In several copies, I found myself making the following note, or one very much like it:

A lot of the stories in the book are about hubris and its consequences.

This is quite true. Quay, the prince who leads his friends out of their homes without fully understanding his own limitations, is a lesson in hubris. Len, the Aleani who's spent his life hunting a necromancer and who continues that hunt in the face of everyone important in his life telling him to abandon it, is another. Leramis gets his own brief, painful lesson partway through the book.

I got my own lesson in hubris with these hand-annotated copies. I knew I could do them. But I'd never done them before, and in light of that, I probably ought to have set my sights a little lower than 26 copies for my first go. Today was the first day in about a month that I haven't had to spend three or four hours after work making one of those copies. I laughed aloud when five o'clock rolled around and I set down my normal work for the day, because I realized I felt like I was on vacation because I didn't have any work to do tonight.

I don't want to make it sound like I didn't enjoy making these books; I did. They're works of art (their quality is up for debate, but they're art nonetheless) in and of themselves, and each one's unique. I did about as many line drawings in the last month as I have in the rest of my life combined, and some of them turned out really beautifully. There's a depiction of the gull's feather in chapter 41 in someone's book that's among the best visual art I've ever made. I got to know the story I told more intimately as well; I realized that Dil's decisions shape the narrative perhaps more than any other character's and that hers is the only full hero's journey in the book, and I absolutely love that.

But I also got a lesson in my limitations while working on a book in which several characters receive painful lessons in their limitations. There's a certain irony in that that doesn't escape me.

Writer, beware thyself.

Unexpected Influences

I'm presently about halfway through doing the hand-annotated copies for early Soulwoven backers. Doing them has forced me to look at the book in a different way than I have before. Among other things, it's meant scanning for influences and spotting broad trends, because I jump around from page to page and sort of skim, which isn't a normal part of my writing or revising process.

One of the trends I've spotted is an unexpected influence.

I've never been a huge consumer of stories in the horror genre. When I was a kid, they terrified me. Like, seeing movie trailers for scary movies would give me nightmares, never mind the movies themselves.

And yet horror has its fingerprints all over key moments in Soulwoven.

It starts with the descriptions. When things get dark, really dark, the characters begin to see the world in the way that characters in horror stories do, where everything is out to get them. And their descriptions reflect that fact. There's a character with sharpened, yellowed teeth. There are undead crawling out of the ground and terrorizing people. And there's the dragon itself, floating in their minds and taunting, taunting, taunting them.

Soulwoven is a fantasy novel. There's no doubt in my mind about that. But if you wanted to, you could plot it against the structure of a horror novel and find a surprisingly high correlation. There's one (short) chapter, in particular, that's more ghost story than anything else in terms of structure.

So apparently, even though I didn't enjoy horror stories much growing up, and I still don't read a ton of them, they left a strong imprint on me. Maybe it's because they resonated so strongly with me that I didn't enjoy them. Or maybe it's because they terrorized me so much that their elements burned themselves so deeply into my brain. I can't really be sure.

But they're there nonetheless, and I don't think they're going anywhere. I suspect all writers have these sneaky little influences. There are things we're aware of that shape us (for me, Tolkien, Martin, Kay, Gaiman, Mieville, Hickman and Weis, the teams who wrote the Final Fantasy games, and much more), and there are influences we're not aware of until after the fact. With all the hours I've spent staring at and analyzing and fine-tuning this book, it's amazing to me that I continue to find things inside it I didn't know were there.

Incidentally, I think "What Lies in Darkness," the horror novellette I wrote for All Hallow's Write last year, is one of the best pieces of short fiction I've ever put together. It's up for free here on the blog as well as on Wattpad, and if you've got the stomach for horror, you might want to check it out.

What Fulfilling the Soulwoven Kickstarter Looked Like

Continuing with these week's theme of spreading the Kickstarter love out to the broader world today. When the print books arrived for Kickstarter backers, I was about a week behind schedule on them. So in order to get them out to people as quickly as possible, I had a signing and packaging marathon. I thought it might make for an interesting time-lapse video, so I shot one.

Enjoy! And then go buy the book. S'il vous plait.

Thoughts on Kickstarter

So let me be perfectly honest here: I'm cheating a little bit with this blog post. Shortly after my Kickstarter finished, I wrote a short essay on some lessons the process taught me about publishing, writing, and life, and how everything came together to make Soulwoven a reality. I shared it with my backers. What follows is adapted from that.

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Several Big Thoughts occurred to me while the Kickstarter was up. I’ll try to get through them all here.

The first, and probably the most powerful, is what it means to say “yes.”

I have made a habit, in life, of going where the doors are open. I did not expect to enter publishing through the doors of a midlist romance publisher. But they said “yes” to me, and there I went. I did not expect to become a freelance writer and editor, but freelance clients said “yes” to me, and there I went.

I did not expect to become an indie author, but readers said “yes” to me, and there I went.

Publishing is organized around saying no. It has to be. As an editor, I get more submissions than I could possibly publish, even if I loved every one of them. As it happens, I don’t love every one of them. So I say no to the ones I don’t love, or I pass them on to others (who will also probably say no to them) if I think they’re very good but I still don’t love them.

This is a terrible thing to do to authors. We ask people to pour their hearts and souls into learning a craft and creating art with it, and then we ask them to come and seek our approval. Then we tell them “no” again and again until they reach the minuscule cross-section of people who would love their book and people in the publishing industry with the power to publish their book.

And then we wonder why some authors are unbearably arrogant or unbearably neurotic.

At any rate, I spent the first decade or so of my writing life being told “no,” over and over and over again. In the face of that, there comes a point where you honestly stop expecting to hear yes.

The first day of my Kickstarter was incredibly emotional for me. I was reasonably certain that, over the course of a month, I could get 25 people to pledge $25 each and get the book funded.

But the number of people who came right out of the gate not just to pledge, but to pledge big, absolutely astonished me. After ten years of being told I wasn’t good enough (or sometimes that I just wasn’t a good fit), I discovered in half a day that people believed in me who I didn’t even know were paying attention to me.

That was an incredible feeling, and it has kept me going for a long, long time.

Second, the Kickstarter taught me that there really is a revolution occurring in the world of arts and music and letters, and that it’s an honor to be a part of it.

I’ve read lots of articles proclaiming that digital publishing is ushering in a new era of something or another. I’ve always taken them with a grain of salt. Every prophet of the new seems to have something to gain from ensuring that it comes to pass. So I never drank the Kool-Aid.

And then, as I started to answer questions about the Soulwoven Kickstarter, I realized something.

The best music I bought in 2013 was all independently produced.

To be sure, I bought some good albums from music labels too. But the best? The most striking? The most inspiring? The most unusual and artistic? Indie. Or at worst, started indie and got picked up by a label after.

I’m not a part of indie music fandom. I know very little about bands, or scenes, or music in general. I have next to no sense of what I should like and what I shouldn’t. I just hear songs (usually on the radio), and then go buy the album if I like them enough.

So if the best songs I was hearing on the radio, which were succeeding against all odds in the land of Clear Channel and label dominance, were indie, that meant something.

I’ve long contended that music is about five years ahead of publishing. Up to now, indie publishing has largely been the breeding ground of the most commercial of commercial fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, etc. Not authors who claim to be making great art.

But that’s going to change, and I’m excited to watch that wave hit the shore from the inside rather than the outside.

My third and perhaps most contentious Big Thought came about because of who my backers were. I know, personally, 51 of them. And those 51 contributed the lion’s share of the book’s funding.

In my head, I have a voice that tells me my success is therefore invalid. That my book was a pity case. That it was only what personal popularity I possess that motivated anyone to back me. The voice began speaking to me before my Kickstarter even launched.

And you know what? It’s full of it.

On the day the Kickstarter went up, another voice spoke up in my head, and it said, quite clearly: Who did you think your first fans were going to be? The staff of the New York Times Book Review?

That voice knows what it’s talking about. To be an author requires a certain amount of arrogance. You have to believe that you can write something worth reading. If you want to make a living at it, you have to believe that you can do it better than almost everyone else who’s trying the same thing.

That’s enough arrogance. You don’t have to believe you’ll be so good at it that you won’t need the help of your friends and family to succeed.

A lot of success stories start with “Using money borrowed from family and friends.” I didn’t even have to borrow. I’m giving things back, and they’re experiences and objects, for the most part, that no one else will ever get to have.

My fourth, and by far my most important and far-reaching Big Thought, involves the proving of an idea I had two years ago.

In early 2012, I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, and I realized as I watched people fail and fail and fail trying to put up new climbing routes or face death on 8,000-meter peaks that I was jealous of them. Because they weren’t worrying about marketing or careers or star makers or success. They were doing what they thought was awesome. And success, if it came, came later.

That, to me, is what being indie is all about. More importantly, it’s what leads to good art and a sustainable career no matter how you publish.

So I decided not to worry about how I was going to succeed. I decided to just do things I thought were awesome and to trust that, if other people agreed with me, success would follow.

Now it has, and I am immensely honored to have had the support of so many wonderful people in making it happen.