Future plans

I seem to write a lot about my future. I have plans. I am going places. Well…  Not physically going places, but my career is.

My plan is to become a full-time author and I do have a plan.

The plan is simple on paper.

I could almost explain it in steps.

Step One.

Write a novel. Status: Done.

Step Two.

Write a second novel. Status: Done.

Okay. I’ll stop being funny and I’ll be serious.

The real plan, simply put, is to write and publish enough novels to earn a living from the sale of the books. I plan on publishing my books on Amazon as an indie publisher.

To break it down, it means that in order to generate enough sales is to write and publish a book every two to three months.

That is a tall order. Most people write a single book a year and I must write between 6 to 10 books each year.

To do that I am lowering down the length that I call a book. Most people consider a book 75k words and up. Just look at one of Sanderson’s bricks.

I disagree. I am of opinion that a book is 50k words or higher. And as an indie, I have little choice in the matter.

The reason is that the way Amazon works is that you need to keep a presence up on the new releases. You must keep a title there for as long as possible. Or you won’t get any traction and your books won’t sell. The constant release of titles is what will work.

So once I start getting to that level of production, I will be able to actually fulfill my goals. My goals are to make enough money to pay for my monthly expenses, plus I need to have enough money in the bank to be able to live for 6 to 12 months with no income.

Until that point, I am not able to go full time. I must keep my day job.

Are there more details in getting that goal? The answer is yes. And there are whole books written on the subject.  I will get into that in later posts.

Until next time.

New ideas.

So I hate my brain. In the dark, cold recesses of the night. When I should be doing something important like sleeping, my brain is at work.

Some people think about work, or the money troubles that we all seem to be in. But for me, I am thinking about a story idea. Not an old story idea, but it is usually a new story idea.

This time, I thought of a new story centered around the idea of writing a story in the early bronze age.

That was the catalyst of the story. I have talked more about that concept in previous blog posts.

So, then I created a character. Arn. He is a 16 year old son of a tribal Chief. His tribe has been enslaved and killed at the beginning of the story. He is the last of his people and now he must find some way to move forward when all he feels is despair and anger.

The world is a land of mythical beasts, God’s demon’s and demi-gods. They all walk on the earth and meddle in the affairs of the puny mortal humans.

I have created a mythos of the gods. I have created a break down on the land and the different peoples. Magic has been created. I have written the first chapter.

The worst part is that I am excited to write this story. My mind is plotting out the story even now as I type this. I want to write it and get in onto paper.

But I have so many different projects to do.

Why brain? Why!

A short one today.

Until next time.

Futurism: Part Two

In part one, I talked about how the first colonists got off of the Earth and some of the reason’s behind it. In this post, I am going to talk about more specifics on how a corporation could make money sending people to space.

The first question the inevitably comes up is the extraordinary cost of getting anything into space. I’ll leave the politics out, but that basics of it is that it will cost approximately $10,000 per kg to send anything into Low Earth Orbit and approximately $30,000 per kg to send anything into Geosynchronous Orbit. Please note that LEO is anything around 160km to 2000km above the surface of the earth, while Geosynchronous Orbit is 35,786km above the surface of the earth. That means that it currently costs $75,000 to send an average human into LEO and 2.25 million to send one to Geosynchronous Orbit.

That price tag is huge. Impossibly huge. It is a huge barrier to human space exploration that it is what is holding everything back. It is not the risks to humans or the technologies that have to be devolved in order to make it work. It is money alone that is the barrier to space exploration and if anyone says otherwise, they are lying.

The biggest part of the cost to space exploration is the insane amount of fuel and material that it takes to get the cargo out of the gravity well of earth. The cost of moving cargo around the solar system is far cheaper. I am sure that you noticed the difference of moving cargo to Geosynchronous is only three times the cost for 17 times the distance.

A company can make a huge amount of profit by mining ice asteroids and providing the clean drinking water to the ISS. And that is only the tip of the iceberg for the amount of opportunities out there.

There are asteroids out there that are comprised of a large amount of rare earth metals. These metals are what make computers and modern life possible. But they are called rare earth metals because they are rare on earth. Out in space, however, they are not as rare as they are on earth. There is a nearby asteroid that has more platinum on it that has been mined from the earth since we knew of its existence.

That can be done by robots up to a point. At some point it becomes essential for humans to go and live in space. Only certain experiments can be done in a micro gravity and then there is the entire question of the asteroid of death issue that a multi-planet species will fix.

Once they get to space, human’s have a wide range of different needs that will need industries to meet. The best way to do that is to produce those goods in space. Where they don’t have to pay for the goods to be shipped out of the earth’s gravity well.

That means that the best way to develop long term space colony’s before we are able to build a space elevator is to cut the earth out of the equation for as many things as possible. No high prices of goods from Earth brings down the cost of living in space.

In my fictional world, that is what the corporations fight for and get. The ability to go space and the ability to ship materials back to Earth and to expect to make a profit of goods and services.

These corporations start by mining asteroids and building space stations in space. The develop Mars as a Space Colony and it is the private industry moving forward that prompts NASA to send a space mission cause heaven forbid a private industry getting to space before NASA.

That brings up a rather large amount of different issues as well, which will be talked about in a later blog post. Most of which aren’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things as the the story takes place in 2500 CE and not 2025 CE.

The story world changes from the time of the first explorers and settlers to the time of Des and the Jovian Empire. Just look at how life was like at 1525 CE to now in 2017 CE.

Next time I will go into more detail on what I think that brief history of what happens to each of the planets. Well, maybe one planet. We’ll see how it goes.

Rambling: Encouraging others to write.

In many ways I am an enabler. I enjoy having others find enjoyment in things that I find enjoyment in. That I have passion in. I enjoy it so much that I don’t shut up about it.

I have been criticized for obsessing about my passions and my interests.

Is that criticism justified? Warranted?

Probably.

I know that I obsess over things. It is how I am able to write about my books. Fix my house. Go to work or get out of bed. By obsessing over things, I am able to focus on something long enough to see results in that avenue.

Even if I wish that I can hit the snooze button again and go back to sleep.

My obsessions is what gets me into trouble and out of trouble. (Like watching 18 hours of a game on Let’s play and then buying it for way too much money.) I obsess with keeping a roof over my kids heads, which makes me go to work and take Overtime hours. I obsess with my half completed house renovation so that I can keep getting things done in it. Maybe one day I will finish it. I also obsess about my writing.

My writing is my passion in life. They say follow your passion and this is it.

Writing.

Writing novels, writing for my kids, writing for the complete stranger so he gets a kick out of my work. Every day I spend most of the hours thinking about some story. How to fix it, how to make it better, where to go with it. Or a new story idea that will distract me from my current work in progresses.

At the beginning, I said that I am an enabler.

What does that mean? Most people think of it as a bad thing. That I am a bad guy for encouraging someone to do something. And it can be. If I was a drug addict or a drunk.

But I am not. I cannot afford to do those things. I am a writer after all…

I enable people to follow there passions. Follow there enjoyments even if it is just as a hobby and part-time. Even if they only dabble and are not serious about completing it. I do, however, mainly encourage people to write books. Read above about my obsession.

And you may ask why? Why enable people to write books?

The answer to that question is selfish. I do it cause it is lonely over here in writing land by myself. Writing is considered a solitary affair. You sit in a room by yourself writing about make-believe people in make-believe lands doing impossible and crazy things. With no one to talk to but the people in your head…

I just realized how crazy that makes me sound…

Anyways, writing is mostly solitary. But there are times when a writer must talk to other people. Other writers. It gives encouragement and it can make you responsible for getting the work done. (Like trying to explain why your word count hasn’t moved in two weeks, but look at what you have done in that game you play.) It also helps you grow as a writer as you can learn from other people. Learn from there failures as well as there successes.

I encourage people to write as there is a lack of a strong writing community where I live and the only writers that I talk is through a Facebook group. Most are from the U.S. and I will probably never meet in person. I hope that by encouraging people to write that I can build a small writing community of my own.

Or I am a crazy obsessive compulsive who can’t stop shutting up about my make-believe characters in my make-believe world who all live in my head. You decide.

Productivity

I have a dream. (Enter rest of song from Tangled here.)

Anyways. My 5 year goal consists of me making my living from writing novels and other creative pursuits. To do that I have a plan. And you have to have a plan. There is no way to get a to a goal other than to have a plan.

So what is my plan.

Easy.

Well. Kinda.

It is to be able to write six novels a year. That means writing everyday. No stopping. No days off. No fun.

Kidding. Kinda. Days off are fine. As long as the work gets done. As long as the projects get completed and published.

The way to do that is to vary the length of the projects. I have ideas for longer works as well as shorter works. By varying lengths I am able to complete more publishable works than if  I did one long work. Writing a 500k word novel is good if your last name is Sanderson and have huge advances to keep fed.

Me, however, I don’t get huge advances. I don’t have the capability of writing those long works. I also feel that the market for indie books is not for the doorstops. The people that buy indie books want smaller fiction that costs less and that they are able to get through faster.

So that means pulling back the scope of the books from 150k novels to 70k novels and making two novels. I also want to write even shorter length works. I like writing my 6 yr old middle grade sci fi book.

What does this mean?

That means that I must be writing for half the year. I must be be editing novels for the other half of the year. I must be writing between 1ooo to 3000 words a day. This is assuming that my editing takes half the time. If I can get my editing time down that means that I can spread the writing out between other days.

How do you do that?

Cleaner first drafts. Do I mean less spelling mistakes? Kinda. I mean less developmental edits. I mean that I am going to have to do more outlining. I have to plan my stories. Plan the work better. Get the story right the first time.

But this is not an over night thing. It will take time to build up to that. It will take time to get the productivity up to a point where I am writing enough. I do, however, have planned projects to get me to that part.

That is 4 projects under development. The 4 projects is translated into multiple planned novels. I have one current stand alone being beta read. One trilogy with the first novel being edited. My middle grade has the first book out of six being edited. The last project is a pair of novels. I might change it to a trilogy by cutting the same length of book into three parts.

But I will have to figure out how to add a projected 50k words into the ‘first’ part of the project. My wife says that I need to take a page out of the TV version of game of thrones. Add more sex scenes. I am not sure if she is joking or not…

That means that if I get the current projects completed that I will have thirteen novels. If I can get that done it will be amazing.

But this brings up the question of the night. How can writing and publishing works regularly mean that I can eventually quit my day job and write novels for a job?

By writing and publishing work, on Amazon, builds up a library of work that people can buy. As more books are published, means that more people will see the books and buy the books. They may go back and buy other books in your library. People do that.

Well. I rambled enough. More later.

Cheers.

Nathan Pedde

Outline vs Discovery Writing: The Battle Continues

It is time to enter the battle. The epic battle between Outliners and Discovery Writers.

Both sides are frothing at the mouth and ready to fight it out. Ink will fly. Paper will ripe.

Okay that metaphor died on arrival.

My thoughts on Outliners and Discovery writers. Notice that I called it Discovery Writing and not Pantsers. I find that the term Pantsers doesn’t do the writing method justice. I think that it is a little bit of a low blow in the epic fight.

Well. It makes you think that you have no idea what you are doing. That you are just winging it and have no idea what you are doing. That your inability to want to create an outline means that you are somehow incompetent in writing.

The discovery writers, however, don’t like to feel confined in an outline. They don’t want to miss the spontaniousness that comes with discovery writing.

What does this mean for me and my opinion in this issue? I see the good in both sides of the argument.

Outliners like to plan there stories. They go into the griddy details on what needs to happen and when. They look into the little pieces of info that a discovery writer may miss until the 2nd or 3rd draft. The are better at writing more complicated stories that involve multiple viewpoints or time frames.

Discovery Writers enjoy a certain spice in the stories that they write. A well written discovery written story feels more natural and tends to flow better. Discovery written books tend to have less view point characters or time frames.

They both have issues and the issues with the methods need to be mentioned too.

Outlined stories can be stale and the characters may have a motivational problems. It is usually when the story makes a left when the outline goes right. Or that the outline says that a character must do something that the written story doesn’t allow for.

The problems with discovery written books is simple. Plot holes. As the author doesn’t have a plan on what is happening, there can be un-foreshadowed scenes, and plot holes through out the story. Discovery written stories tend to need more revisions that there counterpart.

So what do I do?

It depends on the story. I do both.

I will leave a pause for the reader to freak out at the political statement.

Done?

Good.

I write both. as it depends on the story. I have written some where I have done complete outlines to them. I have written others where I Discovery Wrote it. I have done some where I have gotten part way through a Discovery Written book to discover that I had gotten lost and I need to outline my way out of the mess that I was in.

What was better? It depends.

The Outlined one was a collaboration with my 6 yr old and we did an outline as it is his story that I am writing. He just have the grammar of a six year old.

The Discovery written one was a NaNoWriMo challenge that I didn’t have enough time to get an outline done, but I had a fairly good idea on where I was going. The one that I needed to outline my way out of it was that I was writing a book, then I decided that the backstory was just as entertaining as the story and needed to be part of the story.

My conclusion. Don’t worry about how you write the book. Just write it. Decide how you want to write it and get those words on a page. getting word count every day is much more important than worrying about how you are writing it.

Until next time.

Nathan Pedde

Ramblings: A story of how I manage to write novels while living with children

So I am a dad. More specifically, I am a father of two. I have a six year old boy named [REDACTED] and a five year old girl named [REDACTED].

My kids are great. I am not sure how it happened, but these kids are nothing like I was as a child. I was the child playing in the mud, ALL the time. I didn’t want to be inside the classroom, I wanted to be outside playing. I had multiple run ins with the Special Needs Teacher because they thought that I had a learning disability. It was just that I didn’t care, I knew the stuff, and I passed all the tests that they threw at me.

What can I say… I wanted to be outside.

My kids, however, love learning. They love doing things that expand their minds. My son, [REDACTED], loves science, math, and reading. He plays the piano and he practices for a couple hours a day. He is in grade one and is currently reading the 2nd book of Harry Bloody Potter. My daughter is a dancer and loves reading and drawing. She is the arty one out of the two of them.

Me? I have been writing for as long as I can remember and  I am pretty prolific. Not to brag…but I have a pretty high word count (more than some writers that I know). I manage the word count by writing whenever that I can. I  don’t have an office… I write my works in the middle of the living room  (which acts more like a study).

Often I find myself writing to the sound of Paw Patrol. (If you are a parent, you know what I am talking about. If you are not. Google is your friend. Watch a bit of it.) Thank God it is not Cailliou.

Now that you know the back story, I can tell you what is going on with my writing.

My son loves watching me write. He’ll sit beside me on the couch and watch me hack away at the words appearing on the screen. Now that he is reading Harry Potter, he is able to read what I am writing.

Word for word.

That makes writing sex scenes a little harder at times…

About 3 months ago, my son approached my with a bundle of printer paper, folded in half and stapled together. He was going to make a book. I encouraged him, and told him to write away. It didn’t last long. He got bored with it. He is six.

A couple weeks later, I caught him sitting on my laptop, on Scrivener trying to open a new project. He still wanted to write a book. He wanted to write with the keys as it looked easier.

He wanted to do what I do. I write novels, so he should too.

At that point I knew that there was nothing that I could do to get him not to write something. That’s not my way as a parent. I don’t believe in putting up road blocks to get my kids not to do something that I may find annoying, but isn’t harmful to anything but my sanity. (Sanity abandoned me on the roadside ages ago. It went on strike due to poor working conditions.)

And having [REDACTED] work on creative pursuits is not harmful in anyway. He isn’t climbing and jumping out of trees. Or eating mud. Or hitting his sister with sticks.

Like I did at his age. (Although, all but the hitting are still good past times)

So there was no way (in good conscience) that I could tell him no. He is too young. Or whatever lame excuse that I could come up with to get him to leave me alone so I can get another thousand words down.

My solution to this problem: Encourage him more. That’s right, I kept encouraging him, The same thing that got him wanting to write a book in the first place.

Now…My son, being six, has the writing skills of a six year old. He is advanced in sentence structure, but not that advanced… He is six…So I decided to do a collaboration with him. I sat him down and we started to brainstorm a story…

He decided the genre.

The setting.

The plot.

He named all of the characters.

All I did was be a guiding hand to keep it somewhat logical. I am the one that does all of the writing, but my son is the one that is in charge of the plot. We are constantly brainstorming ideas.

The book, temporarily named ‘Space Courier’ is now being written as a serial. Each book will be 25k in length, and we plan on 6 books for the first season.

That’s right. He wants multiple seasons.

In conclusion. I have created a monster.

May God have mercy on us all…

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Late night blurb: Work stopages

So every writer experiences this. Times when it is hard to get any word count down. Times when it feels like you are trying to squeeze water out of a sponge. Well, today was one of those days.

I still managed to get 500 words on my Space Courier book and I edited 30 pages of my Culture Shock book. Not bad for a night that I managed to get writing at 10pm.

What happened?

At 6pm, for some reason I got grumpy. I am not sure 100% why, but I did. Maybe it was my two kids not listening, or maybe the house was too hot. But then once I got grumpy, I stayed grumpy cause I was grumpy that I had gotten grumpy in the first place. Not a good cycle to be in. Once I was grumpy, I couldn’t write. I was too grumpy.

How did I get out of it?

I relaxed. I stopped worrying about writing down words. I had a snack, some tea. And then I managed to pick up work once more.

Was it that easy?

No. I also decided that I wasn’t going to be grumpy anymore. I made a choice in my mind and then I made it happen. I took back control of emotions and I went with it.

Will this work for you?

Maybe. The big thing to remember is to remind yourself that you are the boss of your emotions. Not the other way around. You get angry when you need to be and you are inspired when you need to be. Sometimes really strong emotions, like anger, will interrupt you and take you for a ride. They will run wild and not let you off.

As an adult and a productive creativeblo person, it is up to you to take control. Figure out what sends you into those grumpy spells and what makes you inspired. Then do more of it.

No one is going to write that book but you and if you don’t keep at it, then it won’t get done and we need that fiction. If you send it to me, I will beta read it and put a review on the website of your choice. Just saying.

Ramblings: New writers, help, and old writers

So I am apart of a couple Facebook writing groups and I have been apart of other groups in the past. From what I have seen there are two types of group out there. The ones that help out new writers and those that don’t. This generally goes along for other creative things like photography and drawing etc.

I am not sure what the differences are between the different groups as a lot of time they have the same members in the groups. But the good groups give real help to those that need help. The bad ones troll the newbies and make them feel bad for not knowing things that only time, experience and burning through a shit ton of words will get the author.

I think that helping new writers is all well and good, but is it something that an experienced author should worry about? Is it something that I should worry about? Is it something that I should spend my time on those Facebook groups helping noobs with there questions?

There is arguments that can be made against helping out new writers. The argument goes that the amount of money to be made is finite and by encouraging new writers, you are taking the potential amount from your piece of that and making that smaller. More writers equal less money. So if you are going to try to do that for a living, then why would you spend the time helping someone out that can take money from your pocket?

Years ago I used to work in the film industry in Vancouver before I got a family and got a job that paid the bills better. (That is a story for a later date.) Anyways, in that industry the film crew is very departmentalized. The sound guys are separate from the lighting guys. The grips are separate from the set decorators. Some departments, like sound, do not like training up new people.

They argue that they don’t want more people stealing there work. And I understand there point of view. I was in the lighting department, well a permittee. And during one of the mad rushes of insane amount of work, they brought in members from affiliated unions to help fill the positions. It kept me from getting my hours needed to become a full member. The way I understand it is if they didn’t bring in those other members, I could have gotten my hours needed. I would have gotten work. By making it harder for new workers to get in, they protect the workers that they have. It kinda makes sense. Kinda.

Does that make any sense in the writing context? The answer is no. There isn’t a finite number of units sold each month. The number fluctuates wildly and a single consumer is going to buy multiple books from a wide ranging authors. And ebooks are so cheap in comparison to traditional books. Today the consumer is able to buy 3 or 4 ebooks per traditional book bought just 10 years before. He is more likely to splurge on another book because of the price.

So now that I have shot down the argument of finite book sales, is there a reason that you should help new authors?

The answer is simple. As you develop as an author, you get tunnel vision. If you look at some of the main stream, household name authors, they can get to the point where they are able to publish anything. Doesn’t matter what it is about or how good it is. There name alone will sell it like hot cakes. They can get away with stuff that most indies cannot. (I am sure you know the authors that I am talking about.)

As an author who has been writing for a decade, I know that I still have a lot to learn. Hell, I am not even published yet. Helping out new authors is a step on that learning process. Teaching noobs, even if it is only by blog posts and Facebook replies, can help you from getting tunnel vision. They get you to think outside of the box and look at your craft in different ways. Those ways can help you learn in more ways than you know.

As a final point, my 6 year old is interested in everything space, and science. I like looking at space, but it wasn’t and isn’t as big of interest as it is to my son. He loves it so much that he is asking questions about everything. He knows what a bloody black hole is. I had to look it up to get the non-movie version of it. He is like a sponge.

To help him learn, as a good parent, it is up to me to make sure that if his able to ask the question, than I need to be able to give him a sufficient answer for his intelligence level. (Some things will confuse him. He is 6 after all.) But in order to do that, sometimes (more than I care to admit to him yet) I have to spend some time on Wikipedia to learn it first so I can teach him.

That is what teaching new people does to the older ones. It helps the older ones learn more as they teach them. And I think that it is a good thing. I think that all authors, no matter what the experience level is at should be willing to help others as they ask for it. It is also of my opinion that those troll writing groups should be shut down from lack of members.

Ramblings: Writing for a living, Debt management, and You

So I have been thinking a lot about becoming a full time author and the things that I need to accomplish to get to that point.

At the moment I make all of my money from my day job. That is what pays the bills. I spent 40 plus hours there working to be able to keep my roof over my head and food on my table.

In the future I want to be able to make all of my money from my writing. That means that I am going to have to sell a lot of books to be able to do that. The problem is debt load.

Everyone has some sort of debt. If you are lucky that you don’t have any debt, then you are a lucky one, and not the norm. Me, I have lots. Credit cards, mortgage, car payments. I also have bills that come with owning my own home. House insurance, utility payments, property taxes. Throw life insurance, cell phone bills and internet payments and my expenses are quiet high.

And the home owner stuff isn’t that bad. It is the debt part that throws me off. I have a plan to get rid of my bad debt, but it’ll take the sale of my house to do it. Don’t worry, I bought a fixer upper and I have been fixing it up. The sale should be good enough to not only get rid of my debt load, but to be able to have a down-payment for another house as well.

As someone that is seeking to become self employed, I believe that it is imperative that getting rid of the bad debt and unwanted expenses is necessary. Imagine how many books that you must sell to cover the credit card payments of $500. That is a lot of units per month. Easiest way is to get rid of the payments.

So, to all of those that seek to become self-employed like me. Get a financial planner. Get a plan. Get your expenses down. The less units of books that you must sell to be able to live off of your creative outlets the better.

Figure out a way to spend less with still having the same standard of living. I am not advocating you to live in a cardboard box to be able to be self-employed. But I am sure that your family will think that you are when you tell them that you are self-employed.