Just because I like lists and like to organize, here’s a list of all the various places that have to do with our online comic IN MAPS & LEGENDS:

• The In Maps & Legends Facebook page
• Artist Niki Smith’s announcement page at her site: “In Maps & Legends a Zuda.com Finalist!“
• My announcement page: “American Idol Meets Batman. Or… Zuda!“
• My In Maps & Legends page here at this site
• My announcement page over at the Fangs, Fur, & Fey online community

Fun stuff:

• A new contest running from noon 11/10 to 5 p.m. 11/13. [Coming Soon]
• An overview of how we put together the first four panels of the comic: “Building a comic, panel by panel“

Nuts and bolts about the competition:

• Niki’s How to Vote at Zuda page (with tips on how to help Maps win!)
• Zuda’s Frequently Asked Question: How do I help a comic win?
• Current standings for the November competition
• How to add an image to your web site or blog to show your support

Reviews:

• Hypergeek
• The Vault
• Lefty Films Blog
• Art Sequential

Please let me know if I missed anything, and I’ll add it to this list. And thank you, thank you, thank you for reading. It’s so amazing, getting our work out in front of so many people. It’s a huge rush.

I always like behind-the-scenes documentaries, so with the permission of artist Niki Smith, my collaborator on In Maps & Legends, I’m going to do a short how-to of the creation of the first four panels of our online comic.

Frankly, I’m amazed at how fast and how efficiently the comic came together. And the art is simply awesome. I take no credit — I just put down the words and some ideas for the pages. Starting with…

Step 1: The Script

I’ve never written a comic script before, so the format was pretty loose and non-standard. I’d had the idea for the comic for a while, and it actually started life as a novel that I’d never finished. So I did some tweaking, studied some comics scripts (thank you, Neil Gaiman, for Sandman!), and used an alternate version of my novel’s opening.

Here’s what I sent to Niki:

Panel 1: Close-up of X-Acto knife pointed at wall (can’t see details of wall yet, just vague smudges), light glinting off tip, though the room is full of shadows from the little lamp on the floor next to Kait. Show Kait’s dust-coated hand holding the knife, with a cool ring on one finger?

Caption (top): FIND THE HIDDEN PLACES FIRST.
Caption (bottom) THAT’S WHAT GRANDPA ALWAYS SAID.

Panel 2: Pull back more to show Kait’s finger delicately brushing away dust from the two-foot-long gouge she’s just cut into the wall, giving more hints of the rocks embedded into the wall around it, so it’s clear this isn’t the first time she’s hacked stuff into the wall of her spare room.

Sound Effect: BOM-BIDDY-BOOM. [Add sound effect for the cutting sound, too?]

Panel 3: Zoom out a bit from the first panel (or maybe vice versa?) as the knife cuts a long gouge into the off-gray sheetrock of her wall, with the cut section dangling in mid-air like the skin of a snake off the end of Kait’s knife. The gouge is a valley surrounded by what appear to be rocks representing mountains

Caption: AND HE’S BEEN LOST FOR ALMOST A DECADE. GUESS GRANDPA FOUND HIS OWN HIDDEN PLACE.

Panel 4: Kait’s face and the knife in front of her, her face full of shadows from the lone lamp sitting on the bare floor next to her (no overhead light in this room, or the light’s switched off). She’s totally into the flow of her work, concentrating. Show a hint of her breath steaming out in the cold room?  She’s wearing a sweatshirt and fingerless gloves, flannel pajama pants, thick socks.

Caption/special effect: BOM-BIDDY-BOOM, BOOM BOOM
Kait’s dialog: WOW. GRANDPA? HAVEN’T THOUGHT ABOUT HIM IN A WHILE.

I had a lot of suggestions and questions, and also sent her some photos of the setting. I didn’t want to insult her by over-explaining. I think we hit a good balance.

I emailed that off to Niki (we’ve never actually met in person — we actually got in touch via Twitter!), and she took the script and ran with it, starting with…

Step 2: The Thumbnails

As soon as I saw these, I knew I was in good hands… I tried doing some thumbnails myself, but gave up after panel two.

(Click any of the images to view a larger version)

Niki did thumbnails for all eight pages in a day or two, and emailed ‘em back to me. I was blown away. She nailed it. But that did nothing to prepare me for…

Step 3: The Pencils

Now it was getting fun. Niki’s art matched my imagined characters and settings, and then some. Let’s let Niki take over from here…

Niki: “I put together the panel layouts for all the screens in Photoshop first, with word balloons and caption boxes already dropped in, so I’d have an idea of how much space I had to work with. They were printed out in really light blue, and I did the sketch with a non-photo blue pencil.”

Step 4: The Inks

The inks. Holy cow. The inks…!

Niki: “The sketches were inked, and scanned back in. I drop out the blue channel in Photoshop to get rid of the sketch without having to erase. The panel borders were done digitally, along with the word balloons. At this point, we re-thought where our title should go, and ended up dropping out some inner monologue as a result.”

Step 5: The Colors (and the finished product!)

All I can say is this: the comic leaps off the screen now with color. How’d she do it?

Niki: “Colors and text! Everything is done in Photoshop from here on in. I layered photo textures and flats to get the look I wanted. The first page of a project is always a matter of experimentation for me, as I figure out what works best. The map layers were the last step of the process, so I could make sure that it was all coherent together.”

And that’s the process, in a nutshell. All told, I think it took us maybe five weeks this past summer to get the comic in shape, from script to finished version. We submitted it for the competition on August 25th, and got the news that we’d made it into the competition on October 26th.

We really hope to continue the story, soon (so don’t forget to read, vote, favorite, etc.). Can’t wait to show you what’s through that door on page 8…

At the end of week one, our comic In Maps & Legends is in the lead! Thanks to everyone for reading and voting!

Woo hoo!

Now that the dust has settled a bit for me with the launch of the first eight pages of our comic over at Zuda, and we’re doing pretty well in the competition, if I say so myself, it’s time to start working on some new projects.

I think I’ve finally finished up all the “marketing” work of submitting stories (got an even dozen stories out there right now, which is the most I’ve had in years!) and then polishing up proposals and cover letters so I can submit a novel or two to publishers. Got those done and out of the way as well.

I also created and updated and edited the heck out of my new Publishers Marketplace page. And I even added some “covers” to some stories available on the Kindle on my Amazon.com page. All good stuff to have done, but time-consuming!

I also went through all my notes from the Master Class, at last, and have a list of tasks yet to do. There’s always more books to read and related work to finish up.

But first… I’m itching to WRITE something. I’ve been doing all the business-related stuff for a couple weeks, and while that’s a necessary evil, I want to get back into regular word-wrangling.

So. I’m still fiddling with some ideas for the next 52 pages of the comic, in case we win (and even if we didn’t, I think we’d continue it and submit it elsewhere). I have a bunch of ideas mapped out, and feeling good about it.

I’m also diving into the fixes for the end of my baseball novel, The All Nations Team. I got some great ideas for the book at my workshop, but more than anything, something clicked for me there, and I know exactly what I want to do to fix up the ending.

So now I just have to get used to getting up at 4:30 a.m. again to get my two hours of uninterrupted writing time… Piece of cake, right?

I can hardly believe I’m making this journal entry. If I go all fanboy on you, feel free to smack me down. But…

I’m writing for DC Comics!

Okay, allow me to ’splain.

Back in July, I worked with author Niki Smith on a comic script to be entered into the monthly competition for Zuda Comics. I took an old novel idea and cranked out a rough script. Never wrote a comic script before, but it was fun. I got to think like a film director, with a limitless set and endless special effects. It was an awesome learning experience.

Niki then took my script and created first some amazing character sketches. Then thumbnails. Then pencils. Then some amazingly crisp inks. Followed by the colored versions, which knocked me out of my chair.

Then we entered them into the contest. And waited. And waited. And now, at last, here’s the big news:

Our comic, “In Maps and Legends,” is live on the Zuda Comics site!

Zuda is the online comics line from DC Comics, the same folks who brought us Batman, Superman, the Sandman, Justice League, Wonder Woman, and countless other amazing characters and stories.

And now, Niki and I are working for them!

Zuda offers an interesting twist on how comics are chosen to be published.

Sort of like “American Idol,” readers get to choose their favorite. So over the course of November, anyone can read “In Maps and Legends” and VOTE. Just log into the site after you create a user ID, read all ten comics (we have some amazing competition), and click the VOTE button for just one comic — the one you think is the best.

Here’s a quick tutorial on voting at the Zuda site  (the site’s a little daunting the first few times you visit). You can also add an image for our comic to your own website, like this one:

So yeah, please check it out, read some great, free comics, and decide which one you like best for this month. The winner gets to continue writing their comic.

Because if you read to page 8 of our comic, we totally leave you with one doozy of a cliffhanger!

Enjoy!

Final run-through of A Sudden Outbreak of Magic:

Sweet!

Just a quick journal to note that I made it back home early Monday morning, around 1 a.m. Ouch.

But it was all worth it to get home to see Elizabeth again, and then see Drew and Mitch again the following morning. Holy cow, those kids grow fast! Mitch didn’t know what to think of me at first, but he got over that fast.

At least the flights were all on time — it was a full day of traveling. We left Lincoln City at about 7:30 a.m., got to PDX by 10, then onto the plane for about six hours…

Fortunately, I’d printed out (single-spaced and double-sided) copies of both my YA novel and my baseball novel, so I could skim them both and scribble notes all over them on the long flight from Portland, Oregon, to Atlanta. Now that was a long flight, but I had a great time working on those two books. Between naps, that is.

Here’s a shot of the Pacific from one of the early mornings of the Master Class:

Yep, that’s the full moon up there. Very cool. Pretty soon I’d be too busy to take a short walk on the beach. It was 15 of the most intense, creative, analytical, and fun days I’ve ever had.

We had 2-3 daily writing assignments, 3 stories to write (and those all in the first week!), 4 novel proposals and endless novel pitches to slap together, fast; 6-8 hours of lecture or discussion every day (including weekends), and a whole lot more that I’m too brain-fried to remember.

I sorta felt like a big piece of driftwood by the end of it. Like this:

I ended up writing about 75 pages of fiction, and that’s not counting all the pitches and proposals and assignments. My little Dell laptop was smoking by the end of it. I even had to create a couple spreadsheets to cover all the various financial stuff we were covering.

I also met a baker’s dozen of the finest writers you could ask for — people who made me think, made me laugh, and made me push myself. And the teacher, of course, were simply amazing. Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch lead the lectures, giving us an amazing perspective on both editing and writing (they’ve each done both, extensively). And Loren Coleman lent a huge hand with the marketing side of the workshop, and providing us some much needed comic relief from our stress-filled days.

Big thanks to all the teachers and other folks who lent a hand. Thanks for kicking our butts for 2 weeks.

As I’ve told everyone I’ve talked to about this workshop, I felt like my head exploded about 10 times. New ways of thinking, myth-busting, and simply new knowledge. All in my little, tired brain…

So, was it worth it?

Hell, yes! I’ve got 9 stories out to editors right now, and hoping to start a new one soon. And I’m putting the final touches on a couple novels, and plan to get those out into the mix soon. Then, it’s more stories and novels. Getting out of my way and just WRITING. What a great feeling.

The clock’s ticking down to the last few days before I’ll be getting up at the crack of dawn once more. But on this Saturday, the third of October, I won’t be traveling down the steps and walking the twenty feet or so to my office. I’ll be heading off to Oregon for two weeks and a day for a fiction Master Class taught by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and other fine authors and editors.

For a great explanation of the Master Class, check out this entry from Dean’s blog. I think the title says it all.

And, just re-reading that entry by Dean again myself — oog. 400,000 words in two weeks? That’s about 25,000 words per person, or about 100 pages of writing. Per person. Wow. Along with classes for about 8 hours a day, I don’t see much sleep in my future…

And I can’t. Frickin’. Wait!

So what does this Master Class mean to me? Allow me to explain…

These next two weeks represent my launching pad for the next level. I was gonna say “stepping stone,” but that’s not a big enough jump. I’ve heard writers talk about going to one of these Master Classes (they don’t happen that often, maybe twice a year, and this October’s class just may be the last one) for over seven years, and I’ve always wanted to go. Those Master Class vets all raved about it, all the while reminding me of how grueling it was (one person described it as being broken down, and then built up again, in the right way).

In the past few years, I’ve felt like I’ve been sitting on a plateau. Early on in my career, I’d figured out how to write a publishable story — a skill I feel like I’ve lost since, as I’ve turned my focus on novels. And I in those past five years or so, I figured out how to write a novel or two that haven’t been “breakout” novels by any stretch of the word, but publishable.

I want to get out of that “publishable,” just-barely-acceptable world of fiction-writing and push myself to write novels (and the occasional story, even) with staying power. Fiction that knocks your socks off. That makes you grin and nod along as you’re reading, late into the night. With characters who feel real as your spouse and best friend. With plots that surprise and shock and bother the reader. Fiction that haunts your thoughts and invades your dreams.

I’m not there yet.

I try to look at all this philosophically and put things in perspective.

I’ve been doing this fiction-writing thing seriously since the fall of 1995, when I went to N.C. State to get my Master’s in English with an emphasis on creative writing. Those first few years were all about figuring how to tell a story, how to create characters that weren’t basically different versions of me (I’m not into writing my memoirs), and all the fundamentals. Which I’m still learning, of course.

During those first few years after grad school, I wrote my first novel. And then stuck it back in the trunk, where it belongs (though I may pull it out one day and completely overhaul it. Maybe).

I also got married, and we bought a house and got going on our careers. Oh, those glorious late 20s. Things were so easy back then!

Then I went to the Writers of the Future workshop in 2000, where I got to see my first professionally paying story in print. And I wrote a pretty kick-ass story during that time, which was workshopped and eventually published in Asimov’s. Ironically, at that workshop was where I first met Dean Wesley Smith, along with a bunch of other pro writers who were in town for the end-of-workshop awards ceremony, and Dean explained how getting published wasn’t like winning the lottery. You make your own luck by writing a story or novel that an editor can’t refuse.

So I spent the next few years feverishly doing that. And I probably burned myself out in the process, just a bit. I also had some — well, let’s call them “issues” with my various day jobs, and did some job-jumping for a while. Part of the reason for that was that I was starting to fall into my holding pattern with writing, and wasn’t able to get to the next level. During those years, I started wrestling with novel-writing, and also had to be the sole bread-winner of the household, as Elizabeth went back to school to get her Master’s in Occupational Therapy.

Stressful times, but nothing like what was to come. Because it was just the two of us then. When we had kids, the stress level ratched up exponentially. I wouldn’t change any of it for the world — well, maybe I’d change Mitch’s horrible first year of reflux, where the poor kid was just miserable all the time — because our two sons Drew and Mitch mean the world to us. I can’t imagine a life without them.

And I was okay with not going great guns with my writing in the years from 2005 to this year, because I wanted to be there for Drew and Mitch, and Elizabeth as well. I put some stuff on the back burner and focused on work and family for while. I know my writing chops got rusty, but kids are only little once. No way was I going to miss out on that — it’s hard enough having to work 40 hours a week and not see them much during the week other than at breakfast and supper and bath time and reading at bedtime.

But now that the boys are older and getting more independent, and Elizabeth and I are more settled into our jobs and in a good place with each other (those years of her grad school and my job-jumping were rocky, as was the past year and a half when Mitch was so sick and we weren’t getting much sleep), I feel like I’m ready to truly push myself. I want to get to the next level as a writer.

I try not to look back at the past few years and think that I was spinning my wheels. That I was stuck on that plateau, looking up but unable to comprehend how to climb any higher.

Instead, I’ve got to put things in perspective, as I said earlier, and think of that “fallow” time as part of the process. Sure, I’d love to be ten years younger and not just be getting going at 39 instead of 29, but that’s life. Can’t change the past and all that. And 40’s not that old, is it? :)

So I’ll be pretty much out of pocket and gloriously offline starting Saturday, October 3rd, through Sunday, October 18, when I come limping back home after my flight arrives in RDU around midnight (ow). I have really high hopes for this workshop, and I know that the only thing that could hold me back is myself.

Well, that and lack of sleep. But I’m used to that!

I just couldn’t resist — here’s Whit, recently returned from his adventures in being lost, followed by his day at the Doggy Spa (note the sporty new bandanna!): Aaaahhh…

And now, back to reading mystery stories for my upcoming anthology and worrying about the bleak state of human nature from those stories… There’s a reason I waited ’til last to read these. (Some good stuff in there, just a little overwhelming to read ‘em all at once).

Life sure is funny sometimes. Just a few weeks back, I had just finished a story about a guy who helps his private eye buddy find lost people. His first “find” was the school bully’s pet dog, when our hero was about 11 years old. I wrote a journal entry about it here, called Lost and Found. Mostly Found.

And in a interesting twist — if you could call it that — our own dog went missing late Saturday night.

A little setup: we were helping to host a party for our friends Holly and Tammy, who are getting married in two weeks in Massachusetts, so we gathered Mitch and Drew as well as our friends’ daughter, along with our dog Whit, over at our friends house in north Durham. Our niece Beth babysat the three kiddoes and the critter. And we went to the party.

While we were gone, Whit was whining to go outside, and he got all discombobulated (he’s 12 years old and doesn’t see so well, which is bad for a greyhound, because they’re sight hounds and rely on their vision). He wandered off, got lost in the unfamiliar surroundings, and didn’t come back. So when we got back from the party, we walked up and down the streets, calling for him, at about one in the morning. No Whit.

This is the 2nd time he’s gone missing — the first time was about 10 years ago, when we’d had him for a year or so, and he’d gotten out of the car and got lost down off Capital Blvd in Raleigh, which is a crazy-busy road, six lanes wide. He spent the night in the woods nearby, until some kind soul found him — still wearing his leash and collar! — on the shoulder of the road and took him to his vet. Good thing for the chip in his back. We were reunited again, much to Elizabeth’s huge relief. She was convinced he was a goner, but I had a feeling he’d turn up, and be okay.

This time, though, I didn’t feel so confident. I walked up and down the tree-lined streets where our friends live, jangling his leash and calling for him and whistling, and got no response. I figured either he was gone, or somebody had taken him in for the night. We gave up the search and went to bed around 1:30 a.m.

And then, at about 6:30 a.m., I woke up and went out looking for him one last time. I guess I had a hunch. At the end of the driveway, I turned left, trusting my instincts, and walked down the road again, jangling his leash and whistling for Whit once more. I’d made it to the end of the road and the cul de sac at the end of the road before I just resigned myself to the fact that he was gone. I turned around, already thinking of ways to explain what happened to Drew and Mitch.

On my way up the hill back to our friends’ house, though, on the front lawn of the corner house, I spied a skinny, fawn-colored dog.

“You stupid dog,” I said, and then started calling out to him.

And Whit promptly turned and ran into the backyard.

I charged after him in my flipflops, over some stranger’s yard, and caught up to him in the backyard looking all confused. I snapped the leash to his collar and brought his shaky-legged self back up the road.

And the crazy thing was, he wasn’t even cold — the temps had been down in the 50s at night. So I think Whit made a new friend Saturday night, and they either heard me outside calling for him or they just happened to let him out of their garage or something at just the right time. I’m actually a little freaked out that I was able to find him. Not five minutes earlier, I’d given up and started thinking about what to put on his Lost Dog poster.

I knew he’d turn up eventually, but I honestly wasn’t sure if he’d be in good shape when he did. Or if he’d even be alive. Luckily, our friends live in a quiet neighborhood without much traffic, so his chances of getting hit by a car were pretty small.

Ironically, as I was walking Whit back to the house after finding (we were walking VERY slowly), we saw Elizabeth coming toward us. She was going out looking for him as well, and when she finished loving on Whit, she told him something I’d already told him — “You’re going to the doggie spa on Monday!”

So that’s where Whit the (Formerly Lost) Wonder Pup is today: getting primped and pampered at the veterinarian’s, with a toe-nail-clipping, a bath, and a teeth-cleaning as part of the deal. And we have a whole new appreciation for our elder statesman, our wise old canine, our big dog with the big heart and bad eyes. Welcome back home, old man!

While I’m between writing projects and finishing up my reading, I’ve been doing a bit of surfing around the Web. Maybe I’m woolgathering, picking up odd bits and pieces of stuff I can use in my writing later. Maybe I’m just wasting time. I dunno.

But what I have come across in the past few weeks are a trio of cool applications I’ve started using to help stay on top of all the data on the Net, as well as how to easier read and manage it all. And also, a way to manage my own data, since I work on three computers on a regular basis.

1. Read It Later: Like the name says, this tool helps me stay on top of all the interesting articles or blog posts I come across every day so I can check it out later. I want to save ‘em in one place, instead of bookmarking and then forgetting them. I never seem to keep up with my bookmarks. This app saves ‘em for you, and also syncs those pages you want to read to your iPhone and other computers, so you’ll always have reading material handy. It took me a couple attempts to get the three computers I use and my iPhone synched up, but I think I’ve got it now.
2. Readability: And now that you’ve got stuff to read later, this nifty tool makes that material much easier  on your eyes to read. Just drag the Readability button to your toolbar, and click it whenever you want to read something onscreen. It clears away the images and puts all the relevant text into a format and font of your own choosing. Not only is it easier to read, but if you’re at work, it looks like you’re reading Important Stuff and not a flashy web page full of graphics. Very cool tool.
3. Dropbox: This online application is like a great big memory stick, but a virtual one, so you don’t have to carry around anything. It’s basically a virtual folder that’s available on multiple computers. It’s also a great way to back up important files — you have 2 GB for free. You can keep up with all your files in one place, and always have the most recent version. No more typing a new scene on a chapter you’d revised yesterday on the other computer! Now, I just hope that they don’t start charging when they come out with version 1.0…

All of the above applications are free, too. How sweet is that? Hope you try ‘em out. A tip of the hat to fellow writer and PR guy Jeff Rutherford for pointing out Readability to me on his twitter stream, and author Ryan Williams for clueing me in on Dropbox. Not sure where I came across Read It Later, but thanks, whoever linked to it first!

If you use any of these apps, let me know! And if you’ve found some cool ones of your own, let me know ’bout ‘em too, please.

Finally, I have to mention one more application that’s for iPhone users only. It’s mainly of interest to authors and poets and writers — anyone submitting work for publication where you want to track where you sent a story or poem or article. The application is called Story Tracker, and it’s available on iTunes.

This tidy little app lets you track your submissions, when you sent ‘em, to whom, and other details — it’s a nice little database, right on your iPhone. Best part about is it the developer, Andrew Nicolle, has been really open to making fixes and improving it, and the newly updated version is coming soon.

I’ve been REALLY bad about keeping up with my story submissions in the past few years — just a few week ago I almost sent a story to two different magazines that rejected it last year! — so this app came along at just the right time. Looking forward to the update! The app even has its own Facebook page. That means it has arrived. :)

Now, to stop tooliong around and get to work on that science-fiction story I need to write before my workshop!

I’ve been reading (and yeah, doing some skimming of) a bunch of science fiction stories and novellas lately. It’s interesting, because I’ve sort of been out of the loop with SF for a while, even though it was just last year — was it really only last year? Seems like a decade ago! — that my own SF novel came out.

I’ve come across some really good stories, but I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about a lot of these stories that have been throwing me for a loop. I find myself skimming or losing interest in a lot of the stories that either 1) have a far-future or utterly alien setting or 2) are filled with a ton of gadgetry and tech. In those stories, I lose touch with the characters. I feel like I can see the author in the background, just making up stuff. Waving his hands. Showing off her imaginational skills.

At that point, I turn the page and move on to another story. And I start to look longingly at that anthology of wizard stories that I’ve been itching to read. Or that book about magicians I just bought.

I think science fiction is kinda sorta dead to me. At least right now.

It’s the focus on world-building that often throws me out. I feel like the author is so eager to show me all of his or her research, or to pack as many wild “eyeball kicks” of weirdness and creativity into the story (usually in huge blocks of paragraphs that stop the narrative cold) that the characters get lost.

May 1950 Astounding Science Fiction (not the stories I was reading!)

Or worse (and this is a weakness of mine, so maybe I’m just projecting my own insecurities here), the authors see their characters only as pawns, to move around on the fancy-ass chessboard they’ve created to fully show off their artistry.

I know this is a common complaint about SF, but for some reason, maybe ’cause I’m reading them FAST, a lot of these stories just never took off for me. Or I gave up ten pages in; due to the world-building and exposition, many of these stories were quite LONG.

I’m kind of sad that not many of the SF stories I read did much for me. I think it’s indicative of the state of our high-tech world — to really make a story SFnal, you have to go over the top with your world and concepts. Why? Because our world has become a science-fiction world, with handheld computers and space shuttles and electric cars (but still no jetpacks!) and more.

So to set a story apart, seems like many SF authors feel they have to just go over the top with the details of their created world — a lot of stories felt more grounded in the fantasy world than the real world –  often at the expense of characters and, ultimately, at the expense of telling a good story. Some stories just never got started — they were simply a travelogue of the author’s imagination. Which usually put me to sleep, eventually.

Of course, you know what this means — I’m gonna have to go write a science fiction story, the kind of story I’d like to read. There’s no way around it. Me and my big mouth.

So while I’m working on that — please let me know in the comments which science fiction authors you’ve been loving lately, and why. And point me to some good character-driven SF stories, if you please!

After doing some research, checking out some other writers’ pages, and re-reading contracts (bleah), I finally got around to setting up my online Store.

It’s not much right now — mostly a collection of links for my books and some reprints of my stories — but once things get rolling, I hope to be able to let interested readers buy more than just older stories and regular books directly from Amazon.com. I’m trying to get more of my work available on the Kindle so that you can download it and start reading Right Away.

My short-story collection, Gunning for the Buddha, will soon be available on the Kindle, once the Amazon elves finish doing their magic to the files I sent them. But you can find some of the stories from that collection at my Amazon page or some other places as individual downloads.

So instead of getting the whole album, you can download a single, for now, just like music on iTunes (though buying the whole collection in the Kindle version is WAY cheaper).

In the meantime, check out the links, and if you want something free, go here. Enjoy!

This morning I put the finishing touches on a brand-new story called “Finder.” This is a momentous occasion, because that means I’ve written two new stories this year, which is equal to my total story output from the past three years, I think. Guess I’ve been busy working on novels. Or something.

This one was a challenge to myself to write something completely different from anything I’ve done before. I had a handful of stories ideas to choose from, but all of the other ideas I had were related to my novels, somehow. I really wanted to write something new and unconnected.

So I wrote a mystery. I don’t read a ton of mysteries, mainly because I don’t want to read about fictionalized crimes in a world chock full of real, heinous crimes. And it seems like most mysteries deal with a death. I didn’t want to write about anyone dying. So I figured out a way around it.

And in the process, I created two very fun characters that I’d kinda like to see again. One’s a private eye, and the other one is… someone very, very unique. For one, he tends to eat. A lot.

And on his first “case,” our guy eats some of this:

Ewww. And that’s not the worst thing that happens in the story. But it’s definitely the grossest. Well, except for the vomiting. There is that…

Needless to say, I had a lot of fun with this one. Now, I gotta run to the PO to mail it off (can I just reiterate how much paper submissions suck? Email subs are the way to go, man!). And I owe a great big beer to fellow author Lee Capps for his speedy and insightful feedback. Thanks, dude.

Happy reading, and happy eating!

I almost forgot to share this link to my collaborator’s website, where she posted a teaser picture from the Secret Project, “Maps and Legends.”

Okay, I can’t just link to it — I’ve got to share:

Sweet! I’m looking forward to working with Niki some more, so we can tell what happens after those 1st 8 pages. More on this as it progresses!