News for the Week of 6.12.13: Renaissance and The Craziest Summer

Greetings, dear friends and readers!

Ahh. It’s summertime, and I dunno about you, but I can feel it. Both in the ridiculously high temperatures outside and in the big jump in activity on Wattpad. Hello new followers and readers! Welcome to the party. I’m so glad you’ve come.

Soulwoven has experienced what is, for me, a very gratifying resurgence over the last couple of weeks, I assume as schools get out and people are looking for new things to read. It feels like a new lease on life for the book, and I’m thrilled that even seven months after I posted the full thing, new readers are finding it and loving it. Feedback and edits on the sequel are next on my to-do list, just as soon as I finish final revisions on Nadya, which should happen shortly (yay!).

Planning for the Kickstarter is going well also. The team and cost estimates are almost in place. The video should be shooting at the beginning of July. Shortly thereafter, as I move across the country, I’ll put it up.

Oh! That means it’s now time to line up PR for it. So if you have a blog, or you know someone who has a blog, or you’re a journalist or know someone who’s a journalist who covers these sorts of things, let me know. I’d love to send you/your acquaintances some information or do a guest post about just about anything you like.

In the meantime, I am working like a madman and the love of my life is thousands of miles away. So this is not my favorite summer of all time. But it has been an exciting one, and I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.

Cheers and summer fun,

Jeff

News for the Week of 5/31/13: Lateness and LOTS OF THINGS

Dear Friends and Readers,

Waagh! Sorry for the late update. Things have been a little crazy.

First, Soulwoven: Plans for the Kickstarter are coming along nicely. I’ve got a developmental and line editor in place (Rose Fox, who has an amazing eye and runs the speculative fiction reviews for Publisher’s Weekly---I have learned a lot from her just by reading her blog), and I’ve figured out the copy editor I want to work with as well. I just need to get in touch with him. I’ve also got a local company (F Stop Productions in Denver) lined up to do a killer video for it.

The survey to help design it is still open, and I could use more responses. Those of you who have responded already are awesome and I love you.

Second, Nadya: I’m working my way through final revisions now, and it’ll be out on submission by the end of next month barring any major setbacks. I’m very excited about it---it has love and loss and jokes and airships and fire spirits and science and lots of other fun things.

Third, Other Stuff: I had a very productive meeting with an agent last week when I should have been writing this update instead. We talked about a lot of things, but perhaps the most important is a collaborative project I want to do on Halloween this year. It’s going to involve a bunch of writers (pros and semipros and amateurs alike) staying up all night writing scary stories and Twittering, and it’s going to be awesome. More on that to come.

So that’s May in the life of Jeff. Hope your spring has sprung in a most lovely way.

-Jeff

News for the Week of 5.16.13: Kickstarter Survey, Homebuying, Soulwoven: Exile, and Nadya Revisions

Dear Friends and Readers,

It’s survey time! I’m building the skeleton of the Kickstarter for Soulwoven, and I want your help! I’ll talk more about it below, but for now, link here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XR6QC6G

Here’s the deal with the survey. Kickstarter lets people like me fund projects they don’t have the scratch to pay for themselves, like buying professional services for long books. It also lets people like you support the creation of art by pledging money to a project. In return, you get special, one-of-a-kind rewards. The survey is going to help me figure out what to offer as those rewards. I’m choosing to publish Soulwoven this way because I want to make you guys as big a part of the process as possible. And I want to make sure that there are backer rewards in the Kickstarter that you’ll get excited about.

So please drop in and share your opinions. It’s a four-question survey, and well worth your time if you want to help this thing get off the ground and get some awesome stuff in return.

In. Other. News!

My fiancee and I bought a house. The process of that has been taking up a great of deal of time that would have otherwise been spent writing. You have my apologies for that.

But!

I’ve finished a full draft of Soulwoven: Exile, the sequel to Soulwoven. It’s now waiting for me to finish some work revising Nadya so I can get Nadya back to an agent who showed some interest in it. Once I’ve done that, I’m going to take one last look at Exile and start sharing it with my trusty team of early readers. Hopefully it will be on its way to you guys by the end of the summer.

I’m extremely excited about the stories I have coming up for you guys. If you haven’t yet, check out Three Dances and buy a copy via the links on Wattpad or my website. The more books I sell, the more time I get to spend writing.

Cheers and springtime love,

Jeff

News for the Week of 4.26.13: Kickstartin', Gestatin', and Exhastio'in

Hello, Dear Friends and Readers!

Ph-ew! Another exhausting week behind me, and glad of it. Sales are petering out for Three Dances, which is what I expected. Now we’re in what I like to think of as the gestation period. The initial buyers of the book are reading it. If they love it, they’ll start telling other people and sales will pick up. If they don’t, well, then I suppose I should have written a better book.

In the meantime, work has been going well on Soulwoven: Exile. I’m down to the last few chapters, and then it’s time to let it sit and marinate for a bit before it goes out to early readers. I apologize for taking so long to get it to you. I have no excuse but the fact that I want to do a good job, and that there are only 24 and a bit hours in the day.

I think it’s turning out well though, and that you’ll like it.

Speaking of Soulwoven: I’ve been mulling over the Kickstarter idea, and the more I think, the more I like it. I’ve started pricing out the services I’d like to contract for it, and I’m starting to get a sense of how I’m going to structure the campaign. Basically, the more funding the book gets, the better the help I’ll be able to buy for it, and the better the rewards will be for the people who help fund it.

Sound cool? Let me know. I’m going to draft up a survey next week to get an idea of what sorts of bonuses and swag and extras people would be interested in getting in return for funding. The ideas I’ve got range from full editing on their own books (which, since I do it for a living, is pretty pricy to buy a la carte), to signed editions, to personalized notes-in-the-margins editions, to extra novellas and short stories, to gear like t-shirts and mugs and pens and what-have-you.

But what I really want are YOUR ideas. What’s the thing you want most in the world from me? Let me know, and I might just be able to offer it up as a Kickstarter reward.

If you’ve never participated in a Kickstarter campaign before, you should go check some out. They’re heaps of fun.

So that’s what’s up with me. Oh, and I’m buying a house. And moving to Indiana. And getting married. And still managing to get up and work every day.

Hope all’s well with you, too, gentle readers.

-Jeff

Three Dances Launch Party Speechifying, Part 3: The Reading

As promised: the reading! I read the first few pages of "The Jazz Festival" at the launch party. You can hear them below.


There's a lot more in the book---the rest of the story, for one thing. Plus illustrations and the story behind the story, which can be just as interesting.

You can buy it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

One for the Locker: Austin Grossman on Video Games and Writing

If any of you have ever taken the time to peruse my old blog, you'll see that I've learned a lot of things about storytelling from playing video games. I now no longer have so much time to do that (sad! Although I have a smashing idea that will give me an excuse to play for 24 hours straight next Fall, so stay tuned), but I still think often about the writing in video games and what an amazing playground it looks like to me from the outside.

Anyway, this article is about what it looks like from the inside, and its author reminded me a bit of myself. Except that I applied for jobs writing video games and got one in publishing instead.

Funny ol' world, innit?

http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/18/4231940/opinion-video-games-taught-me-how-to-write

News for the Week of 4.18.13: Fall-Down Tiredness, Three Dances' Warm Reception, and Potential Kickstarting

Hello, Dear Friends and Readers!

I write to you today completely and utterly exhausted. It’s been a heck of a week. The Three Dances launch party went off well last weekend; I’ve been posting snippets from my speech there up on my blog all week, if you’re interested. Tomorrow I’ll post a reading from “The Jazz Festival” as well.

Three Dances itself is getting a much warmer reception than I expected. I thought of it as quite a weird book, but people are saying wonderful things about it on Goodreads, and Amazon, and Wattpad, and also in private messages to me. And that makes me wonderfully happy.

Meanwhile it’s off to the next book! I’m finishing up revisions on Soulwoven: Exile---just ten chapters left, and I’m getting into the real meaty, pulse-racy, everything-changes-forever sort of material. I feel sort of like I’m dancing drunk, because by the time I get to the book every night I’m so tired I feel like falling over, and then I have to try to put words on the page in a way that makes sense and tells a story, and that’s hard.

But I learned in college that sometimes I dance pretty well when I’m drunk.

Anyway, the wonderful reception that Three Dances has gotten has me thinking more about Soulwoven and how to best launch it this summer. I’m thinking about a Kickstarter, because the book is long enough and serious enough that I’d love to buy some professional help for it (copy editing, developmental editing, and line editing, in that order), but I have nowhere near the funds I need in order to do so. And I like the idea of letting fans fund the book in return for little treats like signed copies and marked up manuscript pages and doodles in the margins and critiques or edits or phone calls or visits from me. I want to reach out and make you guys a bigger part of my writing and my life, and that seems like a great way to do it.

Oh, and as I’m finishing up on Exile, I’m noodling final revisions for Nadya. I think it’s going to be good. I was a little rushed getting it out to agents last month, and I think giving it another pass or two will do good things for it.

So that’s me, so tired that I forget to feel excited some days.

Hope all’s well with you, too.

-Jeff