I hate doing that. I hate it when horrible things happen to people at all. When they are characters I have created, characters that I also love, that I have built, I just have a really hard time doing nasty things to them. In short fiction, I can usually throw enough curves to make it through without doing really shitty things to them. In long-form fiction, I tend to create reversals, but nothing too major. Nothing really horrific.

I need to work on that. I need to become a real bastard.

Just like life.

I’m here to tell you what I’ve been doing.

I’ve been busy with a bunch of things, but I’ve also made sure to continue submitting stories and writing.

I’ve been following the Heinlein method of submissions. This is possibly totally untrue, but that’s immaterial – if one of Heinlein’s stories got rejected, he allegedly didn’t bother re-reading it or trying to touch it up, he just sent it out again, immediately. Now, Heinlein was so good, he likely didn’t need to re-read or proof his stuff. Me? I do. But I’ve done that before it gets sent out the first time, so I’ve been following Heinlein’s technique. If the story is out long enough (as in over two months), I will give it a re-read, because I will have grown unfamiliar enough with it to maybe catch problems or mistakes. Otherwise, I just find a new market and send it right back out.

I have four stories that are making the rounds. If I don’t find any takers for 3 cents per word or more, I’ll just pull them. I’m not willing to sell my stuff for 1 cent per word, or the $10 or even $5 that some places offer. Call me arrogant or vain. I likely am. I also know my price, and that ain’t it.

The writing I’ve been doing is a revision of a novel I already wrote. It’s rather short for a modern novel, so I’m fleshing it out. It was also written with an incomplete knowledge of where it was going, so it needs a little tinkering to make all the pieces fit better.

I have no intention of trying to get an agent or a publisher with this particular work. I have other plans for it, plans which will only come to fruition if I can actually finish the overhaul. At the speed I’m working, that may take a while. A long, long while.

Don’t hold your breath!

It’s incredibly difficult, given that I’m used to writing from a character’s PoV. I usually spend a fair amount of time in a character’s mind. I expect this will cut out about one-third of my usual narration. It’s an interesting exercise, but I wonder if what I complete will be any good.

We shall see.

Look for the story “The Crane Horror.” As you can see, lots of competition, but read Bruce’s story and let that help guide your voting.

You can find the poll here.

You can find the story for which Bruce is nominated here.

I’m not presenting this as a rule, but for me I need discipline when I write. That used to be choosing a time of day and setting that aside for writing. I cannot, unfortunately, do that with two kids and lots of chores around the house. I write when my other responsibilities have been met.

What I can do, and I have done, is sit my butt down and bull through the stories when I have the time to do so. With kids in bed and dishes done by 8:30 PM, if I ignore everything else – emails, my RSS feeds, Twitter, Google+ – I can get an hour of writing. I still need to “spool up,” get into the voice of the story, remind myself how the story was to move forward, get into gear. That can sometimes take 15 minutes as I read a few paragraphs and check notes. Most nights, I don’t get an hour, so sometimes by the time I’ve “spooled up,” it’s 15 or 20 minutes before bed.

And bed is important. It’s important that I get enough sleep so I can be patient and involved with my kids, helpful and interested for my wife, on the ball and in focus at work, and – importantly for this post – so that I can be creative in those minutes I get to actually write.

Listen, you might be different, but unless I get as close to eight hours of sleep as possible*, the bulling through is going to produce little of value. It still has to be done. It has to be done because once I’m out of practice, it’s that much harder to maintain discipline. Take a few nights to read Google+ or catch up with really interesting posts found through “The Browser,” and I won’t have the discipline to keep sitting down and writing. Too many nights giving writing a pass was what got me to the place where I have all these unfinished stories just lying around.

Too many night giving writing a pass and I stop calling myself a writer.

*preferably more, but that doesn’t really matter, because I’ve been told we never really ‘catch up’ when we have a massive sleep deficit

You can find “The Browser” here, but be prepared to lose time to lots of interesting articles.

What’s next? A sequel to “For Simple Coin,” which was in On Spec and is included in the eponymous Sword Noir short story collection. What will give it some traction in my creative brain? I’m making it even a little bit more hardboiled by changing it to first person narrative. I know, I know, lots of submission guidelines say “no first person,” and maybe it’s going to make it un-publishable, but it makes sense to me to mimic Raymond Chandler.

Stay tuned for regular submission updates. Fingers crossed I’ll have some good news in 2012.

You can get information on Black Gate # 15 here.

You can find On Spec here.

You can find For Simple Coin here.

A lot of my creative energies recently have been focused on RPGs rather than writing fiction. I’ve been asked why. It’s not something for which I had a ready answer. It was one of those things that just happened; you know, bright shiny object and all that.

Giving it some thought, I can think of three reasons why I end up writing RPGs instead of fiction: control, accomplishment, and reaction. There’s money as well, but while I’ve always been open about my mercenary inclinations, it’s not a large factor in this decision.

I am a control freak, it is true. In much of my life, it’s not an issue, because that particular idiosyncrasy only affects my creative output. And it isn’t a fear of losing copyright (doesn’t happen) or someone stealing my ideas (also doesn’t happen, besides, it is the execution rather than the idea that sells fiction), it’s control over when and if my stuff gets released. When I work on an RPG, because I self-publish, I know it is going to get out there. I don’t know how well it will be received, but I know that—some process complications aside—it will get out there in a particular quarter of a particular year. When I sell a story, it just kind of disappears for a while. Sometimes that’s a number of months, sometimes that’s a number of years. In the lead up to release, sometimes I worry something will happen and my story will never see print. I still have the money for it, but that’s not the entire equation, is it?

By accomplishment I don’t feel a greater sense of accomplishment for RPGs than I do for fiction, what I mean is that RPGs get accomplished—they get finished. I’ve got three stories right now that are either incomplete, or completed yet problematic. I cannot say the same for RPGs. For whatever reason, it’s easier for me to finish the 75 pages of Sword Noir and the 63 pages of Kiss My Axe—not to mention about 40 pages of adventures published or ready for publishing—than the combined 30 pages of fiction. I can’t say why that is, but it is so. I need more discipline in my fiction writing—that’s part of it. I also recognize that when inspired, I can fire through RPGs much quicker than I can fiction—again, can’t say why, but it is so.

Given my ego, public reaction is probably a big component of my focus on RPGs. Check out RPG Now, and you will see a large number of reviews for my stuff. There are also other reviews out there, most linked though the SEP Reviews page (I really need to update that). I have maybe two (more like one very short review and one mention) reviews of my fiction. Also, I have received much more correspondence related to my RPG work than my fiction. I love feedback—positive and negative—so it seems pretty logical that I would continue to put efforts into the work that gets the most reaction.

But which has greater cachet? That would be writing fiction. I get a heck of a lot respect as a published author of fiction. People, even those within the RPG community, are far more impressed by a short story in a magazine/journal than an RPG game or supplement credit.

And then there’s money. Yeah, in some respects this dictated a lot of my previous work. Mundus Novit was about getting paid. Not to say that I was not enthusiastic about the project or even that I’m not proud of the work I did, just that this was a company’s proposal and I worked within their strictures rather than something that came fully formed out of my forehead.

The work I am doing now is more about ideas and enthusiasm than about making money. Sword Noir likely won’t turn a profit for at least another year, and Kiss My Axe likely longer. I’ve done a playtest document for Centurion: Soldiers of Rome, but I am going no further because I honestly don’t see profit in it. I am now chasing the cachet again, and working on fiction. But I had to get that playtest document done first. I had to get those RPG ideas out. That’s the inspiration part. But now that’s done. I have three novels plotted and three stories that won’t finish themselves.

Time to write some fiction.

Listen, there are very few professional venues for heroic fiction, let alone something like Sword Noir fiction, so when John O’Neill—Black Gate’s editor—bought one of my stories, I was thrilled. Now that story has seen the light of day in Black Gate 15, a copy of which arrived in my mailbox today.

Here’s the thing about Black Gate—it’s much more a short story collection or anthology than a fiction journal. By that I mean it’s big, huge in fact—issue 15 clocks in at 384 pages and boasts 21 stories plus regular features. That’s a lot of heroic fiction. Unfortunately, it looks like Black Gate might be moving to an annual format, as the note with issue 15 indicated the next issue would be Spring 2012. Issue 15, as one might guess, is the Spring 2011 issue.

Still, annual is better than never! And that just gives all of you a little extra time to go buy Black Gate 15. The story “A Pound of Dead Flesh” was consciously a Sword Noir story, so pretty cool that it’s coming out a couple of months after the game it helped to inspire.

By way of introduction to the story, imagine Vorenus and Pullo from HBO’s Rome caught up in criminal machinations in my version of the Roman Empire—let’s call it the Aeolean Empire. An old “friend” hooks them into an easy gig that turns out—surprise surprise—to be not so easy.

I guess you could call it Sword & Sandal Noir. And yet a new genre emerges!

—

Check out Sword Noir: A Role-playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery.

Go buy more Sword Noir fiction with For Simple Coin: Four Tales of Sword Noir.

You really should watch HBO’s Rome.

Oh, and in case you didn’t get the hint up there . . . go buy Black Gate 15.

In any case, apparently I didn’t do something well enough. I’ve carefully considered the comments of editors, but—of course—the wants and desires of one venue does not necessarily translate well to all venues.

If anyone wants the story, I’m looking for a minimum of 1.5 cents US per word. That’s about as low as I’ll go as I can publish it myself in some other format and get as much for it. Sorry, anthology and magazines that offer $25 or even $50 just aren’t worth it for me. I’m not saying they are bad or are ripping off authors, but I have a very mercenary viewpoint in regards to allowing others to publish my work, and $50 for over 7k words doesn’t interest me.

If you are interested, you can read the opening three paragraphs here.

Even by trying to rig the system by sending in two stories (what can I say? I had to lines of inspiration and followed them both!) I only tied for second in the Jennisodes Golden Panda contest.

If I had a vote—and had not entered, ‘cause then you KNOW I would have voted for myself—I would have gone with the haiku. Sure, it was short, but it was a haiku! For an animal native to China! There’s so much meta there it’s awesome.

Thanks to the Jennisodes for getting me to finish two short little stories. It was a fun exercise. Now, I must plan out how I shall acquire a hardcopy of Fiasco without paying 18 ga-jillion dollars in shipping.

You can read the entries here

All the entries are titled “the Golden Panda,” but if you are interested in mine, let’s subtitle them “Death and Life in the Jade Empire” and “He of the Knife.”

Thanks Jennisodes.