Tim Pratt's Blog, page 16

I've sold about 50 copies of the 99-cent e-book of The Nex in the past couple of days, which is five times as many as it sells in an average month. Nice to be reaching a lot of new readers (though it needs to sell another 50 copies at this price point to match the royalties I made selling those ten copies at $4.99). I'll be keeping my eye on it, but this is promising.

The Nex is now available for 99 cents at the B&N store, too, for you nook users.

If you bought it: thanks! Hope you like it!

It's Wednesday, which means: A new story in the Alphabet Quartet! This time it's "J is for Junk." (And subscribers have already gotten "K is for Kinky" in their e-mail inboxes.)

Signed a couple of short story contracts this week. My horror piece "Hell's Lottery" should be in the next issue of Bull Spec, due out in mid-April. This story has been sold twice before to magazines that folded before it could be published, so let's hope the curse doesn't continue, hmm? (And, yes: I told the editor about the story's magazine-killing properties, and he boldly chose to accept it anyway.)

Wrote about 2600 words yesterday on the novel in progress. Total stands at around 85,000 words and the end is so very much in sight. And once it's turned in, I won't have another novel due until August! Why, that's months away! In fact, that sounds like a problem for Future Tim.

I was going to take it easy in April to let my brain recharge, but I have about three short stories promised to people that I need to write, so I guess my brain will just have to switch to reserve power. (Actually, writing short stories is sufficiently different from writing a novel that it'll feel like a refreshing change.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

The Kindle e-book of my science fantasy adventure novel The Nex is now 99 cents. (I'm continuing to experiment with price points. The book went from being my worst seller of the month so far to my bestseller of the month overnight. Though we're still only talking a couple dozen sales. Most months I sell a couple hundred copies across all four titles I have for sale, the vast majority for the two Marla Mason books.)

I'm hoping the low low prices! will lead more people to try my work, and that some small percentage of them will become raging Pratt addicts. If you try it, and like it, tell your friends.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I went to bed last night well past midnight, after watching images of the horrible disaster in Japan, and was awakened at 6:30 by a robo-call about the west coast tsunami warning. Donating to the Red Cross is probably a good idea today, and you can give $10 by texting REDCROSS to 90999.

Everything else seems a bit trivial in comparison, but I may as well post the bits of this blog post I wrote yesterday.

My story "Shark's Teeth" appeared in Daily Science Fiction today, for subscribers. It should be available for everyone to read on the website in a week. This is the chronologically-latest (so far) Marla Mason story, set after the events of Broken Mirrors. (But it should stand alone fine even if you've never read a word about Marla; in some ways, it's a reboot for the series.) I sent the story as a chapbook to readers who donated to the serial of Broken Mirrors, but it should be new to most of you.

The Alphabet Quartet continues — we're up to "I is for Inertia" on the website!

Looks like I'll be going to Fogcon tonight. See some of you there. I might possibly drop in on the bar tomorrow as well, but I think I'll just stay home and work on my novel instead, as the end is increasingly in sight. (I'd be more likely to go if the hotel were near a BART station, but since it requires transfers to get there on public transit and I hate driving, I probably won't make the journey twice.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

That census thing!

2011: I'm 34, living in a south Berkeley CA apartment with my wife and son, approaching my tenth year working as an editor at a trade publishing magazine, with a thriving career as a story writer and a cobbled-together career as a novelist.

2001: I was 24, recently relocated to Santa Cruz CA, sharing a house on Maple Street with my friend Scott and an astronomer of our acquaintance. I worked as an admin and copywriter for a disability advocacy company. I was in a long-distance relationship with a lovely young woman from back home in North Carolina. But on St. Patrick's day I met Heather Shaw at an event held at her house, and promptly fell for her, courted her, and eventually moved from Santa Cruz to Oakland to live with her in a shared house, and got a job at the magazine where I still work.

1991: I was 14. Living in Dudley NC with my mom, dad, brother, and sister in a doublewide trailer. In, what, eighth grade and then ninth grade? So maybe hanging out with my friend Scott, watching TV, running around in the woods behind my house, and writing extremely bad stories about zombies, along with Twilight Zone and The Dark Side pastiches. I think that was the year I got my first ever rejection from Weird Tales.

1981: I was four. Living in, maybe, West Virginia? I'm not entirely sure. My mom moved around a lot with me until I was 5 or so.

1971: I was not even a glimmer. Heck, my mom was only 13 at the time…

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

On Tuesday I spent nearly four hours at Aquatic Park with the kid. A good time, but it's a strange park.

On one hand, it has the best free play structures in the East Bay: a huge complex of wooden, castle-shaped climbing areas, with lots of slides, bars, bridges, etc. Also swings, sandbox, and so on. The play area is mostly fenced-in, so the kid can run pretty free while I, say, sit on one of the many benches and read a book. It's also got lovely views of San Francisco, lots of water, ducks you can feed, cool trees, plank bridges across streams, a pier, and other things a pre-schooler finds endlessly fascinating. (Some of it even stirs up my own worn-down sense of wonder: the trees with branches so thick they block the view of the sky, and so long they bend down until they touch the water, creating a sort of evergreen room you can sit in.)

On the other hand, it's also the area's major park for anonymous gay in-the-bushes hook-ups, so you have to keep an eye on your kid and make sure he doesn't run unattended into said bushes, and make damn sure the men's room is unoccupied before you take your potty-training child in to pee. (The Yelp reviews give a good sense of the park's, shall we say, complex nature.) Honestly, most of the hook-up stuff is at the south end, while the playground is at the north end, so the worlds needn't intersect, but I do find it an odd combo.

It was a good morning out, though. The weather kept threatening rain, but the rain didn't materialize, and eventually the sun came out and it was very pretty for a while. We walked the whole length of the park and back and generally had a grand time. The kid even entertained himself enough at home in the afternoon for me to write a bit. And I actually refrained from playing video games at all. My restraint and self-control are incredible!

Of course, I played video games Wednesday. I'm not some kind of virtuous robot.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Now it can be told: Last Call Pictures has an option to make a (probably short) film based on my story "Morris and the Machine". (The story can be listened to at Drabblecast if you're interested.) Indie filmmaker Johnny Priest is very passionate (and articulate in his passion) about making a film from this story, so I'm hopeful the project might actually make it to the screen. Check out the trailers for their other films.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Events of eventfulness in recent days include:

Getting our taxes back from the tax guy. The terror I feel holding that envelope is unlike any I've felt since, oh, applying for colleges, or my first two or three ever rejection letters . (Or, well, last year, holding the envelope from the tax guy. Or the year before that. Or…) But in the end, the damage wasn't too extensive. We owe a bit less than my own best-case-scenario back-of-an-envelope calculation suggested, which means we can actually afford to pay taxes without going to a guy named Slick Eddie and taking out a loan with kneecap collateral. (Because as bad as it is to owe Slick Eddie, it's better than owing the government. The government doesn't screw around.) Don't get me wrong, paying what we owe pretty well wipes out my savings, but that's fine. Having no money in the bank is pretty typical. And now that's done for another year, at least. For once I'm not paying last year's taxes with this year's income, which is a nice change.

I wrote: only about 8,000 words over the weekend instead of the 10K I'd hoped for, but it's fine. They're good words, and I should still finish the first draft in a week or so. I think the book's structure is solid, so revision should be limited to cleaning up character stuff, seeding in some foreshadowing, line-editing, etc.

I played video games: still playing Oblivion, a game which contains vastnesses. I did the Mage Guild quest-line this weekend, and am now the Arch-Mage. Nothing like shooting necromancers in the back with arrows and blasting liches in the face with magical fire. Quite satisfying.

I played with my kid: he is awesome. He actually spontaneously apologized to his mother after he had a tantrumy tired freak-out meltdown. He was all screams and kicking, and after he calmed down, he said, "I'm sorry I yelled mommy," and went on to specifically apologize for the specific things he'd yelled at her about. We were stunned. We always try to tell him we're sorry if we do mean loud things, and apparently that's made an impression on him.

So, really, another wonderful weekend. Library books were acquired, and brunch was eaten (at La Note — yum), and the kid and I dug in the muddy back yard and discussed the beneficial qualities of earthworms, and generally enjoyed life.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday I wrote 10,200 words on my novel-in-progress. So, you know — a ninth of the novel in a single day. Not bad. (Clearly, this means I should be able to write a novel in nine days, right? I mean, that's just MATH, people.)

I usually have one or two 8K or 10K days on any given novel, generally as the end approaches and I start to generate momentum. I'm still about 25 or 30K short of the end here, though. I've got 29 days before the book's due. Should be doable, though it won't be the most thoroughly revised book I've ever turned in. I can clean it up a bit in the editorial process as necessary, though. I've gotten to the point where I'm enjoying it, which is nice. The dominoes I've been setting up are all starting to topple.

Obviously with that much writing I didn't do a lot else yesterday. Took a walk to the library. Did a bit of grocery shopping. Read the first couple of trade collections of the Scalped comic (how had I never heard of that series before?). Played some Oblivion, where I did a fair bit of thieving and murdering and pillaging. Had dinner with my wife and kid.

Pretty much a perfect day, really.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Another Wednesday — another Alphabet Quartet story! "H is for Horse" can be read at Daily Science Fiction today.

I'm taking a vacation day from A Certain Magazine today, so I can… work a lot. There's just a month left before my deadline on the current novel, which is still a good 35 or 40K words short of being finished. I spent two days bogged down and unable to get through what seemed like a simple, straightforward scene, but while taking a walk with the kid yesterday, something clicked in my brain and I figured out why — the scene as planned was all wrong. Fortunately, my brain knew how to fix it. My subconscious was unwilling to let me move forward and write the wrong version of the scene. Very considerate, really. Wish the old undermind always kept me from doing stupid things, but I'll take what I can get. I managed to get a couple thousand words done yesterday, and hope to get many more done today. Wish me luck. And coffee.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Got a bit of writing done over the weekend — a couple thousand words — but mostly enjoyed myself. I'm taking another vacation day (Wednesday) to do nothing but write, so I could afford a bit of goofing off. So goof I did.

Heather bought a jumbo fun ball at CostCo. (Wow, it gets crappy reviews there. Huh. Ours is fine so far, though most of the kids who played in it were well under the weight limit, which may be why.) It is essentially a giant hollow faceted spheroid you can cram full of children. We took it over to the park on Sunday and I spent half an hour or so pumping it up — it has a zillion different nozzles, which is annoying, but I guess it means if one cell pops, the structure doesn't collapse. River looooved it, and rolled around inside for hours. It was like the pied piper for all the kids in the park, too, and for most of the afternoon he had a flock of insta-friends taking turns spinning around inside, helping to roll it, etc. (Mostly I ran alongside to make sure they didn't run over any picnickers.) Pain in the ass to blow up, and equally a pain in the ass to deflate, but he enjoyed it enough to make the annoyance worthwhile.

Also: we had a picnic with good sodas and chips and mac & cheese and chicken fingers and such. Immensely pleasant.

I did a bit of reading, too — the Witches volume of Fables (good), and the Crown of Shadows trade of Locke and Key (awesome). I went to a comic shop — Dr. Comics, in our old neighborhood, since Comic Relief has closed and not yet been reborn in its new incarnation — and picked up the first few issues of the Keys to the Kingdom arc of Lock and Key, because I love it so madly. I'm almost through the wonderful A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files; can't believe I waited so long to read it.

I played some Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (because the joy of getting an Xbox 360 years later than anyone else is having awesome older games available for cheap), and I like it a lot. I seem to be tending toward thievery and skullduggery in my play style, which comes as no surprise at all.

Life is good.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.