Yeah, you might have heard of it. It’s been sitting around on various computers, and I guess Dropbox employees have been able to access it this whole time–but if they’re sitting around reading the thing, they haven’t told me about it. Other than that it might as well not exist. Which is sort of a shame. Maybe. But I’m going with “yes” on that one.
‘Cause, you know what? I really like the book. And initial feedback has tended toward the positive. I’ve been in a sort of publishing funk, though: putting something like this out there, in a standalone way, doesn’t do me much good in this world where writers so-desperately seek digital happy endings and sparking algorithmic love-bumps from cold, vast, pseudo-intelligences that simply don’t give a shit. Which reminds me suddenly of a scene from Not Another Teen Movie, but let’s keep the discourse a bit more elevated than is strictly reasonable to expect if I’m gonna be involved, eh? Show some class. See if anyone salutes.
I guess what I’m saying is that I haven’t seen a lot of point in putting the novel out there unless I also know how to follow it with another one within a month or two. Which kinda makes sense, because that’s how things work these days.
Plus I’ve been in a semi-related funk: it’s hard to work on my Shiver sequel, because Shiver is old and somewhat dated by now (that whole NSA thing). And it would be so easy for damn near anything I do in the sequel’s plot to date it damn near as obviously.
I guess I’m finally ready to ask the obvious question: So what? Do I really want to let my very slim chances of reaching a large number of readers in the near future keep me from putting stuff out there for the folks who actually do seem to enjoy my fiction right now? Sounds sort of stupid. Maybe I need to do what the software world calls “shipping” and just get stuff out there. Let it do whatever it does.
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m pretty excited about this weekly-story notion of mine. But I’m far more excited to finally get The Secret out of the fucking closet. If you’ll excuse my Lithuanian. (That guy sure has a foul mouth, doesn’t he? But if I don’t let him do some of the typing he gets upset. It ain’t purty when that happens. Nope, not at all. Are you ready for me to get on with the damn blog post yet? Let’s try that next.)
Here’s my plan: on Wednesday I’m going to post Chapter One of the novel right here on the blog. Feedback will be very much appreciated. I’ve considered all sorts of approaches to publication, including just posting a chapter a week till it’s all out there, but that would get in the way of creating new stuff, so it’s not happening. Instead, in the fairly near future, I’ll publish the thing on Amazon and make it free for five days (probably starting on a Wednesday). Prior to that, I’ll be making a bunch of my other stuff free for the five days the Zon allows every three months, maybe staggering it a bit, so if any freebie downloads can jazz my digital rep? That’ll be nice. So if there’s stuff of mine you’d like to read in an ebook format, well, it’ll be free. ‘Cause I do have ways to make actual money, but this writing thing probably isn’t one of ’em–at least not this year–so the hell with it. I’ll just get my stuff into as many hands as possible. Which may not be very many hands, but it’ll be more at Amazon than anywhere else.
I might try a more sophisticated launch scheme with some future novel. But not this one. This one’s getting shoved out the door and thus out of my hair, which is a bit confusing but let’s just get it done and kinda gloss over those details, ’cause this ain’t rocket science, though if it were a launch would be a bit more literal, unless maybe it turned out badly and left flaming debris and potentially dead onlookers, not to mention how sad it would be if they brought their puppies along or maybe a really cool restored VW bus and parked it too close, but damnit I’m gonna move on this–in, say, a month? Yeah, that sounds good to me too.
I’m really hoping you guys like the first chapter when you see it. Even better would be if you like it enough to tell your friends about it. But, either way? The damn thing’s going to get out of my way, so I can work on something else.
Hope that’s fun for you guys. Out there, you know, where you have fun.
Let me know?
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