Looking Back At Bridgetown

For those of you that remember 2013 you may recall that these were the days of the Tales From Bridgetown blog. This was a project occasioned by my acquisition of a set of fairy tale dice.

The guilty parties... Guilty of helping make something AWESOME, that is.

When I first looked at the dice the very first thing I thought was: "You know, it would be a shame if I never used these for anything." This was why I decided to take the dice out every Sunday, roll them, and write a story that included all the images I rolled.

I don't know what my intention was beyond that. I did think that one of the "rules" would be to only spend two hours on each story. That went out the window pretty quickly. I also imagined that there would be no continuity in the stories. This took a while to go out of the window. I wrote five stories before circling round in the sixth to deal with one of the characters a second time.

The process of producing the serial taught me a lot. Notably the difference between expectation and reality when it comes to "fun, creative projects". You expect that you will sit down at 1PM every Sunday, write for 2(ish) hours. Then you will read your work aloud once before publishing it. This is a happy fantasy (like a fairy tale, haha!).

Not every Sunday is free for such activity. What if you want to do Nano? Or do some kind of non-writing related activity? Heaven forfend that you should let down your audience. My audience, by the way, was me and Sue. I don't think I have ever met or talked to anyone who has followed the serial from beginning to end.

From talking to my father I have learned that this is how serials used to work back in the old days (by which I mean circa the 19th Century). It appears strange in the age of the word processor to think of a writer just banging something out for a daily newspaper. It's hard to imagine these days seeing work in print that you had barely enough time to think about, let alone craft.

The serial writer of a century ago would have to hand off his work to an editor. The editor would maybe have time to omit a few of those unnecessary words and then it would be off to the presses, out to the world.

Writers these days are encouraged to hone, hone, hone until their work is a polished jewel of magnificence.  We are quick to forget that such a process is the most decadent of luxuries.

I produced Bridgetown to a personal deadline. I am proud to say that I never missed it. Tea time every Sunday it was Bridgetown time again. This was a serial intended, at some level, for children. I did not want to disappoint a child and I didn't, to my knowledge.

I accomplished this by very early on writing up a "buffer" of eight stories. I would put the stories into the blog and schedule their release. Then if I happened not to be able to write one week a part of the buffer would be chewed away.

The other reason for doing this was that for a short while my good friend Justin Wyatt allowed himself to be pulled into this madness. He provided several truly beautiful illustrations for the blog.

One of Justin's Bridgetown illustrations.

If anything Justin is worse at the 2-hour limit thing than I am. Although I found myself surprised and delighted by the work he sent me I had to agree that it was never the result of two hour's work. Justin is a man who believes that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing really, really well. In the end we both agreed that it was better to leave the pictures until he could be paid for the amazing work he was doing.

I kept plugging away, because it was my stupid idea and I wanted to see it through. I would tell people the stories were there but I don't have any idea who read them outside of my own household. The blog has about 4000 lifetime views at the moment and I'm happy with that. Like so much other stuff I didn't undertake the project, in the first instance, to become famous. I had the mountaineer's philosophy, I wanted to see if I could.

2013 was a somewhat tiring year but it was one I'll never forget.

Apparently My Lance Is Free

Well, sort of.

It has to be said that I have not been busier than I have been in the last couple of weeks for a long while. The up side of this is that I am feeling really positive about the work that I am doing. The down side is that no one is, as yet, paying me for my work. But then it has only been about a week that I've engaged in such activity so early days yet.

I guess this does leave me with something of a quandary. I will need some income eventually, after all. The thing is I am finding that I have more energy and do more useful work when I'm not actually, you know, going to work.

I'm finding the removal of the salary safety net has had, paradoxically, the opposite effect than one would expect on my mood and outlook. I just hope that someone would like to retain my services before I have to return to the haven of being someone else's employee.

The other thing that's been really good is that I have met lots of other self-employed people who do a staggering number of different things and meeting these people is far more interesting than going into a work place and meeting people who are employed by the same employer as you. People, on the whole, are usually interesting for one reason or another, but people who are pulling their own weight and going their own way in life are just more interesting in and of themselves, or maybe it's just novelty.

Before I go I should draw your attention to the new link on the top right to my new freelance services page. I hope to expand this with case studies and examples shortly but it is there and available, that is the main thing.

(By the way, hope everyone is getting along with the new look. Let me know.)

Monkey Marketing Magic

So, fully APEd up I have begun to feel my way into the wacky world of marketing. The first thing I have learned is that, should I ever write a writer's manual it should probably be called "How To Write For Fun (And Profit?)".

I like writing, I like publishing, that is I actually get a kick of pushing my little babies into the world, but do I like selling them? I mean, yes, when people buy them it is a great feeling. But do I like selling them? I would have to respond in the ambivalent on that score.

Here is a quick run down of how I feel about marketing so far:

5 Things I Like About Marketing

1. Social networking is fun if approached right: If I am, in fact approaching it right. I am taking an interest in people, websites and all that jazz, I am hoping they take an interest in me. People are interesting.
2. Doing stuff is quite easy: I've filled in a lot of registration forms, retweeted items of interest, read a book, reviewed a book. It's all pretty good.
3. It feels like you're involved all of a sudden: People keep saying that writers are hermit-like, I never got that until the point where I started not being hermit like.
4. It moves pretty fast: It's kind of exhilarating sitting in a whirl of tweets, status updates, shelves and circles. You can feel the thrum of humanity swirling around you in digital form.
5. It's filled with opportunity: Taking a good look around feels like you are on the verge of seeing something remarkable, so much is going by that something good must be coming... right?

5 Things I Dislike About Marketing

1. It feels a bit never-ending: There comes a time when the punch is flat at the party and the buffet food is down to curly sandwiches and a weird bowl of sweaty looking potato chips. A sensible person would go home but nobody's sure if that's the right thing to do.
2. You have to properly mind your ps and qs: Not in a fake way but everyone's a bit naive, or at least I think that most people at the great social internet dance are not fully aware of the protocols until they get violated. It seems way too easy to be a bore, or inappropriate or to become a wallflower. Exhausting balancing act.
3. You question whether you're doing things for the right reasons: There's a purity about committing an act of artistic creation, unleashing it upon the world and then walking away trusting that people will discover it in their own time. The minute you start actually wanting to push it towards people you enter a state where you are a salesperson, rightly or wrongly. I think selling things is a skill, the right thing needs to be sold to the right person in the right way. Targeting the right people in the right way is super hard.
4. The curve is insane: Being socially polite is easy, being socially polite and somehow introducing a segue into "but my stuff" is really hard.
5. The agenda isn't clear but the consequences of wandering off it seem to be quite harsh: It would appear that the rules are as follows:
   
   -Rule Number One: Don't annoy people.
   -Rule Number Two: Skate pretty close to annoying people to get your point across.
   -Rule Number Three: If you skate over the line then you will be persona non grata.

After typing all that I have to wonder if maybe I'm too scared of being judged. I think you're not supposed to take the whole thing too seriously, but that's hard when I do take the writing and the publication processes seriously. I like my stuff I think it's worthy. The problem I am wrestling with at the moment is: How do I let everyone else know that in a sensible manner?

Free For All Invitations - The Stealthy Straw Man

Oh isn't it wonderful! Harper Voyager are accepting full manuscript unagented submissions for the first two weeks in October. They made the announcement in a press release on the 12th September. How amazing! That'll show the traditional publishing industry is ready to take risks and run the gauntlet! Yes, it will!

No.

It won't.

Let me tell you what would be a risk. Innovation. I've seen this particular dog and pony show at least twice before and it's just a bunch of disingenuous rubbish or blatant incompetence on the part of the organising publishing house. Why? Simple. If you announce this with two weeks to spare before the actual event then you will not be receiving new material you will be receiving material people are already sitting on. Either material that is currently in need of a good polish (and four weeks to polish with the aid of my manuscript tool would be pushing it, without polishing properly it is a nearly impossible task) or material which the author considers to be 'good to go' already.

The massive problem with the latter category is that this material isn't already with an agent for one of three reasons, 1. has already been rejected by dozens of agents, 2. was just about to go to an agent but author saw press release and decided to skip the middle man 3. just isn't. Only manuscripts in category 2 or 3 stand a chance of actually being decent and then only the same chance as that submitted to an agent i.e. apparently not much.

So Harper Voyager are proposing to allow the filth gates to groan open for two weeks and then to send some lowly peons to scrub through the fetid literary detritus and report back if they find the Hope Diamond in amongst the slurry. The peons, of course, probably won't. Then Harper Voyager can say: "See, agents are the only way". Or, if the Hope Diamond appears they can say: "Great, a sucker to bilk on a publishing deal because they're not represented by an agent".

I have also seen a scheme run by another publishing house in which they turned the preparation of 30k of opening into a six month event and delivered a full, tight requirements list for the type of material they would consider. Now, that's a plan.

This, this is just a meaningless and mean-spirited publicity stunt engineered by people who are either cynical or ignorant and are probably both. To attempt to save everybody a little bit of time and trouble: if you have just finished and you have an agent in mind, submit to the agent, if you have been rejected a number of times already there is probably a reason why. This is just a cruel chimera and you should direct your energies elsewhere.

The Crowdfunding Dilemma

Back to The Huffington Post for this tidbit. Authors now have their very own crowdfunding platform: pubslush (catchy, n'est pas?). And therein lies something of a problem.

Look at it this way. You are a penniless dreamer with a great idea for a blockbuster movie about hamsters from the fifth dimension invading earth via portals they beam into bowls of trifle. Oh, the humanity as an ordinary birthday party turns into a blood soaked rodentine massacre. Awesome concept, I think you'll agree.

However the only feasible way to generate the big bucks necessary to make it happen is through some sort of crowdfunding (or get the attention of a wealthy tycoon who has a deep seated mistrust of hamsters). This the theory of evolution applied to the world of culture.

Now imagine you are a penniless author with the same idea but the modest ambition of turning it into a gripping novel for e-readers. As you pen your pubslush entry demanding that people stump up the cash to allow you to pen your opus that little bit faster and maybe hire an editor and a cover artist and whatnot you realise that what you're essentially doing is kidnapping your own genius concept and holding it ransom to a world that has proven itself time and time again to be uncaring.

So now you face the dilemma. Do you go ahead with your pubslush campaign and risk your gnius being quashed by the jaded cynicism of the masses? Or do you just hang it all and squeeze in authorship round the day job? You know, like everyone else who's starting out has to.

I guess that the pubslush author has grand designs on a promotion package with their work. Essentially what donators will be giving money for is so that the author can not just write the damn thing but organise a signing tour and an advert in the margin of facebook and a billboard next to every Waterstones and whatnot.

I'm not down on the idea. I think it's kind of fun. But honestly when I put up my pubslush idea it will be for something that, without the funding, I probably would never get around to writing anyway. Otherwise people can just not donate and be sure that one day my idea will find its way into the general domain anyway.

Happy Sunday folks, I'm off to crack out Manuscript and boost the percentage of The Silent Majority that is edited from 2% to something a bit higher.

If You Say "Self-Publishing" Often Enough It Ceases To Have Any Meaning.

It's a brave new world. A world in which a budding author no longer need be beholden to the capricious whims of the big publishers, the tilt-a-whirl merry-go-round of agent and editor. It's a candy land of straight to public offerings where dreams are bought and sold on the e-reader chart of choice.

In fact I can't go anywhere without someone jotting down thoughts about the age of the self-published hack. We're fuddled with figures, battered by banter, prescribed to peruse puff pieces and generally told that this is the new hot topic.

Self-published authors are ruffling feathers, provoking debates, some are earning a living, others would be lucky to see a pittance.

The central issue is always the surprise of the whole world that the quality of some self-published fare is comparable to the more expensive big house offerings. This is always accompanied by the surprise of those "in" the arena of self-publishing at the low quality that some people are willing to lend their names to and the meagre rewards for most would-be writers in both markets.

One thing's for certain, nobody disputes that "quality" sells. Although how quality is to be defined is sometimes moot. One thing's for certain, the editor is certainly a subject for emotional outpouring. Publishing houses are celebrating that they have them, self-publishers lament they have to pay for one, and that they are quite the expense. Not only that, but when you give your precious baby to one of these insensitive clods they have the temerity to return said brain child saying they don't care for the colour of its eyes, or they think its ears stick out too much.

I haven't reviewed the work of a peer in a long time. The more things I see asking for feedback the more I feel myself biting my tongue because it's rare that I see anything past mediocre competence. I have to remind myself that I am possibly no better. Certainly the first few entries in my canon never trouble anyone with more than mediocre competence.

I think what writers have to accept is that it takes a long long time to become any good (10,000 hours, I heard) and too many writers are too akin to those people we laugh at in the X Factor auditions. Just with less laughter and far more painful and poignant heartbreak. Reading some poorly told half-grammatical, incoherent verbal slurry is both tedious and sad. That is why there will never be an X Factor for writers.

However, the spectrum of talent on display if there were would be about the same, in fact, is about the same, in this new market that has democratised the writer's right to make no money from the uncaring masses.

Viva La Revolucion...

Chance Would Be A Fine Thing

Visited London at the weekend to stay with gamer Mike. I got the double pleasure of playing his Tron lightcycle tabletop game, which is a real toy experience, and running a PULP game for Mike, Nick, Rob and Vicky.

They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.

We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.

On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.

I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.

The Happy Writer

Way back in the mists of time (2006 actually) I wrote a pithy series of writing tutorials aimed at getting a chunk of writing just... you know... done. Hang the quality, hang the need for editing, hang everything, just get it done.

The series was, of course, occasioned by the advent of that year's Nanowrimo. People seemed, continue to seem, to view the production of 50k words of novel something of a burden and a trial. For myself it's only a burden and a trial if my other life commitments physically prevent me from partaking. The actual production of 50k words is a matter of sitting down and opening the floodgates until they're all finished. This year I had a bit of a sudden sprint to the finish slapping down 15k last Sunday to fall panting and exhausted at the finish line with something like a reasonable rough draft. I had another book to proof and put the final touches on, events to host and a regular life to live around this. Probably why I found it quite such a trial.

The point is that I at no point found the actual writing difficult. As I get older getting through the writing is the least difficult part in the production of work. I see questions from aspiring writers on Q&A sites like this asking which bell and whistle laden "writer's word processor" to use to keep track of what's going on. I use notepad. Just me and the words, baby, locked in a continual stream.

The use of notepad to draft a novel is, in some ways, the most hardcore possible way to write with a keyboard, or indeed in any way. You see a sheet of paper can only be so large, a dedicated word processor document quickly becomes unwieldy, with a text editor you just keep on writing, until you're done. No muss, no fuss. If you never find yourself in a position where you're not "in the groove" then any faffing around with notes and formatting and saving chapter files and so on and so forth is just time wasted.

Yet, curiously, in all the world I seem to be alone in this. I do not know of one other writer in the world who can just turn it on and write. Possibly my father, he always kept impeccable office hours and wrote everything in LocoScript which is quite a lot like a text editor. He never discussed how he wrote with us, he just did.

Now, unless I'm some kind of superhuman mutant I can't see why it would be that I can discipline myself to write "on tap" and no one else could. If  I were going to look for obvious differences between me and almost every other living person who considers themselves to be some kind of writer I can see a few that may contribute:

• Absence of illusions. I'm not doing what I'm doing to woo big publishers or to make the Times Bestseller List. I'm doing it because it's what I do.
• Sense of fun. Because I have no illusions the business of writing stories and story games has become a fun hobby, I know of no other hobbyist writers, all writers I have ever encountered are limbering up for an encounter with the big leagues that likely will never come.
• Lack of social pressure or cultural targets. Because I am purely in this to have a bit of fun I am not constrained to squash novels into a commercially viable length, or to worry about whether the thing I'm writing fits under a generic banner in a massive bookstore. I don't need to think about whether there's too much emotional content in an action story, or too much action in a love story. I tell the story the way I think it should be told and hang everyone else's opinion.

To summarise, I just don't actually care about the concerns others may have about whether my stuff "works". Hell if I could, should I put my mind to it, breeze through over half a million words in a year and still live a completely other life that has nothing to do with writing then it's not really much of a loss if something doesn't come off the way I planned. This year alone I've written two role playing systems and a novel.

One of the role playing systems is typeset and ready to roll Monday of next week in time for Christmas. The potential number of productions I could roll out next year is mind-boggling. I am creatively fecund, prolific and master of my own destiny thanks to POD services.

From a typesetting point of view, production of the role playing systems has proven so challenging that the idea of publishing a novel now seems like something I would undertake in a weekend. For me personally, the act of writing and producing works of fiction this way has been so immensely rewarding and personally satisfying I can't imagine having done things any other way.

If I have one complaint it is the common one that the world has not, thus far, seen fit to shower me with sufficient personal largesse for my efforts to dedicate my life to these projects full time. On the other hand, how many people discover the same things through the bitterly frustrating and unfair process of the traditional publishing markets? How many people are left twisted and broken in the ruins of their dreams and ambitions because they can't just let it go? Hey I haven't gained a bank balance that could buy me my own personal island, but I don't hate the thought of warming up the word processor (or notepad) and bashing out a couple of thousand words either.

If you are a writer, look at what you do and ask. Am I having fun? Is this really what I wanted? Am I pleasing myself or some impossible commercial dream state? What do I really want to get out of writing? How many people need to engage with my work before I am happy?

You may find that the answers to those questions lead you down a different path to the one you imagined. One with far fewer riches and launch parties but one with a great deal of personal achievement and a pleasant feeling of stability unattainable by many other methods.

Frantic Preparation Abounds

Those of you champing at the bit to get a copy of the Core Book will be pleased to hear that the final few bits and pieces are coming together nicely. We've had tentative conversations speculating about what kind of business it might do.

When I published my novels I knew how badly they would do. I am a very harsh reader and rarely read any novels unless they really grab my attention. I am apt to view my own work in the same light. Sure it's a good novel, I might think, but there are thousands of good novels that don't sell well.

But a game?

The scope of a game is different. If you're Harry Potter you can sell yourself to millions of people world wide, no role playing game will ever outsell you not even a Harry Potter RPG. But if you are an unknown but pretty decent novel you could go through a print run of 600 copies 550 of which will get remaindered and no one will ever know who the hell you were.

RPGs are far more narrow band. If an RPG is decent it will shift a few units no matter what. Or at least that's the way it seems. Of course if you write a rubbish RPG it fares about as well as the unknown decent novel. But there is some kind of meritocracy in the world of the RPG. Good stuff makes a mark, bad stuff makes a different kind of mark. The community is communicative and keen.

It's a world I understand. While I'd never really be able to sell a novel to someone without resorting to "it might give you an idea for an RPG session" I can tell every role player who ever lived that they need to look at No Dice.

In the latest podcast (#5 up this weekend) Justin talks about the appraisal of D&D 4e which states that it's a game that does an epic job of removing all the RP. Well No Dice is almost the polar opposite it's a Role Play tool that hacks the game down to a minimum.

Thus if people want to mix their game complexity with some RP fun it might be best to buy both. One's a game, the other supports you in Role Play, together they might just make beautiful musics... or they might just make a terrible hideous carnage filled mess.

The point is valid. I have always looked on No Dice as an addendum to crunchier systems because if I want crunch I can easily get myself stocked up. If I want to examine parts of the RP experience that don't involve crunch there's limited resource available. And what is there isn't terribly well organised.

So I'm keeping my phylanges crossed that people see things the way the No Dice Crew do. I guess we'll find out come June 1st and thereafter.

My own personal ambition that we've done something really good is when we sell around 1000 copies of the printed book. My target to know it wasn't a complete waste of time and energy is at a more conservative 50 copies.

There's a hell of a lot of legroom inbetween for stuff to evolve.