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Go · Fiction · Finance
Jul 16, 2017
I buckled down this summer and finished Snapback Volume 2! It ended up about 5,000 words longer than the first volume, and I think it's considerably better. But you'll have to wait for September to decide for yourself. I'll have copies at Hal-Con.
Writing one novella per year, I've found, is a manageable task. Even with a full-time job, I've been able to muster up the motivation, two years in a row, to produce something that's 20-25k words. It's not a lot, and in years past, I've produced far, far more.
Ghostcrime was different. I really got going in 2009, when I was unemployed, and I wrote about 40k before burning out and putting it away for half a decade. When my life stabilized, I picked it up again and wrote the second half in 6 months, producing the masterpiece that we all love. But it was a considerable effort that drained me, and in the ~7 years it took to fully produce, I had nothing to show for it until the end.
The idea with Snapback is to produce and release consistently. To always have something new to sell at the conventions, and keep improving my writing and publishing process with faster iterations. So far, it's been working. And in a few years, I'll even have something I can push together into a single volume.
What would it take me to write another novel? Money and time, probably, in large quantities. But even if I devoted all my energy to producing a novel, I don't see why I wouldn't release it in serial. There were complaints when the seventh Harry Potter film would be split up into two parts, but does anyone care that they're not a single work now? If you can watch them one after another, what's the difference?
So those are my thoughts on big writing projects. But who knows -- maybe you're more productive than me and more disciplined, and you can write a novel without having your life fall apart as you do it.
I look forward to reading it.
Jun 18, 2016
I've been sitting on a novella for years, so long now that the technology the characters use seem dated. It's never been perfect, though it gets better every year, and it's always needed some art, which I am not qualified to do. The book is called Snapback , and it's about some Go-playing friends who get wrapped up in an international board game conspiracy.
Bruce Delo loved the draft I sent him, and we thought he might be able to do the images, but he's going to be pretty busy on the next volume of Kobra Stallion. If he's going to get it out for Hal-Con 2016, I can't take him away from production. It is huge. And from the script and the first 50-60 pages, there's no doubt it's going to be amazing.
Recently, though, I've been working with Dawn Davis, and she's going to illustrate! This is very exciting news because Dawn is mega-talented and I think her style really works for the story.
So, at long last, Snapback will be released. It's going to the first in a series of 3 or 4 short novellas, all hopefully adding up to the bulk of one regular-sized novel. This lets me release faster and experiment with episodic structure.
Can't wait to see you all at Hal-Con.
