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.

I was writing on my computer. That is how I have written since university. At my job, I write a lot of reports, and doing that, I have found it is easier to compose my ideas with pen and paper, than type that in. It’s almost like an initial proofread, as during the data entry I catch grammar and logic errors, as well as realizing something isn’t flowing right.

I’m sure you can figure out what I did.

Switching to pen and paper allowed me to get the words out on the page. It was dialogue, a final exchange, and I was able to get that dialogue out and on the page. During data entry, I added actions and descriptions, rounding out the scene. Something that had foiled me for three nights in a row was sorted in a single night.

All this to say that if you’re hitting some kind of wall, be it writer’s block or finding the words on the page aren’t the words you had in your head, switch your tool. For me, it was moving from the computer to pen and paper. For you, it might be moving from pen and paper to speaking into a voice recorder (or trying to compose on the computer).

And, honestly, if you are someone who hasn’t faced this situation that really won’t make much

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 duellist in a dying city facing a weapon of fiery death, not to mention temptation.

Two fur trappers hunted by a spirit of hate that feeds on the very fear it engenders.

An arrogant apprentice to a vain wizard finds himself in a race to unlock secrets hidden for centuries.

MacBeth, beloved King of the Scots, faces his last day and learns his name will damned.

A cunning sorcerer has decided he will not be a victim, he would rather be a victor.

These are the wizards and warriors that populate Gifts of the Elder Gods. Join them in their adventures, touched by magic and the supernatural, with wits and weapons of mysticism or steel to overcome the snares of diabolical enemies.

Gifts of the Elder Gods is the new short fiction collection from Sword’s Edge Publishing. You can find it at RPG Now and Drive Thru RPG. It is available in PDF, ePub, and mobi formats, with print-on-demand coming soon.

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.

-ahem- This post is going to have language which may offend some. You have been warned.

Can you fucking believe it? One of my RPG products was plagiarized. For those of you who know me from my RPG stuff, you’ll like know Sword Noir. If you know me through my fiction, Sword Noir is an RPG based on a genre I try to write to, the same genre as “A Pound of Dead Flesh” in Black Gate #15.

Some jackhole plagiarized basically the entire text, threw in a few new paragraphs, wrapped it up in a shittily designed package, and had people pay him real cash money to own it.

People do this? There are seriously people who can sleep at night by stealing creative ideas and the expression of those ideas and passing them off as one’s own?

I rant about this to a greater extent over at the SEP website.

Still kind of in shock. Time to eat some apple cake and have an evening coffee.

You can buy Sword Noir here.

You can buy Black Gate # 15 here.

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.