News for the Week of 1.15.13: Montana, Nadya, and Many Reads

Greetings, Friends and Readers!

I am overdue for a newsletter. I hope you’ll forgive me. New and interesting things have been happening on several fronts. Work on Nadya continues. Its second draft (which I call the Cass draft, in honor of the wonderful woman to whom it is read during this stage of drafting) is nearly finished. I have had no luck whatsoever in finding cover artwork for it, which means I may soon have to resort to doing something for it myself---always a risky proposition.

Speaking of artwork, Three Dances is still stuck at the copy editing stage. I may soon employ drastic measures to get it finished.

And Soulwoven has been clipping along fantastically! You all, with your votes and your reads and your comments, are doing amazing things with it. I’ve been busy with other projects (mostly work and/or life-related, to be honest), and in my relative absence it has been flying. It crossed 100,000 reads on Christmas day. Three short weeks later, it has crossed 126,000. Nearly 1,700 people have read it in its entirety.

I am awed and humbled. Thank you for your support.

I spent the weekend in Montana, where Cass investigated a graduate program that involves placing GPS equipment on 6,000-meter peaks in Central Asia, and I investigated several varieties of beer, a mountain, the local bus system, and other sundries.

It was fun.

Soulwoven bonus content to come soon. It’s long overdue, and I am remiss in not posting it.

Love in the time of cold snap,

Jeff

News for the Week of 1.3.13: Soulwoven Crosses Six Figures, Incoming Red-Headed Sass Bomb, and an Interview to Check Out

Greetings, friends and readers!

Thanks for bearing with me while I took the holidays off. I’m happy to share that my head is feeling mostly better, and I’m writing again. It feels GREAT to be back behind the keyboard. I’ll be putting the first few chapters of Nadya up on Wattpad as soon as I can mock up up a cover for them (ping me if you’re interested in helping), just as a teaser to tide you over until I can get the final thing whipped into shape. I can’t wait to hear what you think of it.

In Soulwoven-related news, we’ve crossed the 100,000 reads mark! This is a big moment for me, as (in my head, anyway) it marks a boundary between “Should I publish this or not?” My relationship with Soulwoven has evolved significantly since I started writing it. It’s my first novel, and the things I’m trying to do in it (creating a complete secondary world, telling eight different sides of a complicated story in alternating points of view, and working in a pretty saturated genre) are wildly ambitious, given that. I’ve gone from seeing it as my ticket to the big-time to seeing it as a sort of off-beat, interesting, arty project that, if it finds great success, will find it through the love of a few dedicated fans and word of mouth, rather than through the enormous, heart-and-soul-powered mechanism that is the publishing industry.

Thanks again for being a part of it.

Three Dances is coming as soon as I can get these copy edits finished. You may also have noticed that I posted an interview with Gytha Lodge, author of The Fragile Tower. I plan to do more of these with some of Wattpad’s top-ranked authors, and they’re worth checking out. Gytha’s got a very interesting personal story involving a literary agency, a theatre award, and a stationery company.

And, of course, Happy New Year! All the best to you and yours, and thank you for bringing a little bit of your light to my world in 2012.

-Jeff

News for the Week of 12.19.12: Continuing Fuzziness, Holiday Travels, and Interviews!

Hello Friends and Readers!

As always, welcome welcome to those of you who are new. Soulwoven has been clipping along nicely, given the time of year. Many thanks to those of you who have been going through and voting for every chapter you liked. It’s made a big difference in the number of votes overall and in Soulwoven’s story ranking. You guys are awesome!

In other news, my head is still fuzzy from getting kicked at Muay Thai. Let that be a lesson to you all: concussions (and even near-concussions) are no joke. I’ve been able to get a little writing done, however, and I’m hoping that by next week I’ll be back to full functionality (although I think I said that last week, too…).

In other news, I’m also kicking off a new series of Wattpad interviews with authors! The first one, conducted with soon-to-be-featured, Curtis Brown (a big U.K. literary agency)-represented Gytha Lodge, will go up on Friday. Sometime shortly thereafter (it was meant to be the next week, but then I got kicked in the head…), the second will go up with Wattpad-featured, independently published author David Alastair Hayden. I’m always open to new interview ideas, so if there’s anyone you’d particularly like to hear from, let me know who and I’ll get in touch with them. :-)

That’s all for now. I’m writing from Boston today, and then tomorrow I get on a bus to Albany, where I meet a car that’s going to drive me to a small town in the Adirondack mountains, where I’ll spend Christmas with my girlfriend and her family. It’s supposed to snow six to eight inches the day after I get in.

I’m quite looking forward to it. :-)

I hope you all have enjoyable holidays of your own, wherever in the world you may be, and whatever you may be celebrating. The solstice is in a few short (or long, in the southern hemisphere) days. Enjoy it!

Season’s greetings, happy thoughts, and fond wishes,

Jeff

News for the week of 12.12.12: Head injuries and subsequent lack of production

Greetings friends and readers!

Less to relate this week than usual, unfortunately. Last week, not too long after I sent out my last newsletter to you all, I went to kickboxing training, as is my wont. During said training, I was struck in the head several times, not particularly hard. Later that night, I developed a headache, dizziness, and nausea.

After several worried phone calls in the middle of the night to ascertain that my brain was not going to swell up and kill me in my sleep, I went to the doctor the next day. He told me that I have suffered a “head injury” (not a concussion, though it sure feels like one). I discovered on my own that that meant that trying to read or write for long periods made my brain think it had gotten on an amusement park ride.

So my last week has been very unproductive, as I’ve been reduced to working in 10-minute stints for a few hours a day while I recover. Trying to push the envelope on that, which I have done several times, has proven unwise.

In short, everything’s on hold except for paid work, until my brain sorts itself out.

Which is too bad, because there are still a lot of exciting things on the horizon. I’ve almost finished the first bit of Soulwoven bonus content for you (an Aleani language primer) and am pondering how best to launch it, and revisions on Nadya and design work on Three Dances were going very well until my injury.

Next week, I travel to the East Coast of the U.S. to spend the Christmas holidays with my girlfriend’s family. Hopefully, by then, I will be back to writing again.

Until then, dear friends, I remain,

Your wounded, dizzy writer,

Jeff

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News for the week of 12.5.12: Falling off the Front Page, Switching Gears on Revisions, and Trying New Things on Wattpad

I've started writing weekly newsletters to my fans on Wattpad, of whom there are now 92. So that those of you without Wattpad accounts can get in on the action, I'm also going post similar updates on my blog. You can also sign up to receive them via e-mail here.

Evening all!

Less than three weeks to the solstice, and in my part of the world, you can sure tell. But the Christmas tree is cut and put up, and I only broke one bulb when putting out the lights this year, and eggnog and peppermint ice cream are freely available in the grocery store, so I figure on the whole, it’s all worthwhile. :-)

Right. News.

I wrote a blog post on NaNoWriMo for the publisher I work for this week. You can find it here. I also put up some advice for college writers on my blog.

Soulwoven notched another 19,000 reads and 60 votes last week, but yesterday, it fell off the front page of Wattpad’s Featured books, where a lot of my readers were finding it. There was a corresponding massive drop-off in the number of reads it’s getting.

So to keep things moving with it, I need some help.

Right now it’s ranked #127 in Fantasy. I think it can hang in the Top 25. Maybe even the Top 10. If those of you with Wattpad accounts can take the time go to through and vote for every chapter you liked, and you share the book with your friends and fans and get them to do the same, I bet we can get it there.

Thanks in advance. :-)

In other news, I experimented this week with doing first-page critiques for people in the Share Your Story club on Wattpad. It was fun, and people seemed to enjoy it, so I plan to do it again. In the future, I’ll reserve some critiques for my Wattpad fans, so if you're interested, fan me there and stay tuned for messages from me announcing upcoming opportunities.

Finally, sequel talk! If you got last week’s newsletter, you know that I finished my NaNoWriMo book, Nadya Skylung and the Cloud Pirates. And despite my advice on the Carina Press blog, I can’t tear myself away from it. I’m going to revise it before I revise Soulwoven: Exile. It’s short, so it shouldn’t take too long, and I’ll still do my best to get up the first chapter of Exile sooner rather than later, but I wanted to be upfront with you guys about what I’m working on.

Thanks for reading, dear friends. Until next week!

-Jeff

Letter to a Younger Me

Lately, I've been trying to respond to as many Wattpad readers of mine as possible about Soulwoven, and to interact with them however I can. I do it in part because it's "best practice," whatever that means, and in larger part because I genuinely enjoying connecting with readers. It's the first time in my career I've had a chance to do so, and I'm really having a good time with it.

Yesterday, I ran across a reader of mine who's a college student. He was asking for advice on writing from the Wattpad community. There are several things I would really like to be able to go back in time and say to my college self on the subject, so I told him so and let him know what they were.

It occurred to me later that the advice might be useful to more college writers than just him, so I am now posting it here:

Write every day. Make it a priority. You may have a lot of excuses not to, like classes and college life and trying to remain sane in a high stress environment. You may even tell yourself it will be better to wait until after college to start writing seriously, because you'll be better then. You would be wrong to do so. Write now. Write often. Write whenever you can, on top of everything else you're doing. It will never get any easier to do it, and you will kick yourself down the road if you don't.

Signed,
An Older Jeff

Guested! Flash Fic on Chris Devlin's Blog

So my friend Chris Devlin is doing a guest blog thing in honor of Halloween, for which she has collected pieces of creepy, very short fiction from other writers to be displayed on her blog. I contributed a little chunk of a dark fantasy story I'm working on in a boundless, formless fantasy universe I'm quite coming to enjoy. I think, eventually, it will become my Dark Tower.

Anyway, the little chunk is from a story called The Chirugeon, and it can be found here.

There is formatting that has been stripped from it by her website, but it looks almost like poetry in the form in which she has posted it, and that's interesting, too. ;-)

Sorry for not updating on The Grand Experiment in a while. Quick stats rundown:

Soulwoven has just over 15,000 reads on Wattpad. It goes featured in a little less than a month. I have learned from reading the success stories of others that there's really a great deal of luck involved in cracking the tops of the rankings. For now, I feel good about the success I've had, and I'm still focusing on making the manuscript as amazing as my hands can make it. It has been difficult, because I have run out of money and had to begin writing part-time and late at night again. It feels like working through touch and muscle memory alone, because my brain is not at its best by then. I am hoping very much that it doesn't show in the final product.

Three Dances is progressing as well. The manuscript is in and I am waiting for copy edits and artwork so that we can move on to the layout stage. I am hoping to have it done by Christmas, but I fear it's going to be a close thing. Everything will have to move as quickly as possible and nothing will be allowed to go wrong, and I'm not betting on that happening.