• My Life

    Rewards and Incentives…

    When I left BioWare, several years ago, I thought my time best spent pursuing a writing career and so most of my “deliverables” were writing related. Each year end I planned what projects I wanted to work on over the course of the next year. For the most part I exceeded my productivity goals. I wrote dozens of stories and several novels. But I did not hit my milestones however. Time and again I failed to sell the number of stories I needed to. After winning a place in the Writers of the Future Contest I became even more aggressive with the milestones I wanted to achieve but after the…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Waiting

    I hate waiting. What I’ve enjoyed best with working on the game prototype is that I’m seeing immediate results. This is important to me. The problem with the whole writing career thing, is that it involves plenty of waiting. Waiting for editors or agents to reply, waiting for accepted stories to appear (and sometimes, after a few years, finding out the magazine that bought them has folded), waiting for money and contributor copies to be sent to me (and sometimes having to follow up to get these things). Then there are the missed replies — stories/novels rejected without my receiving a reply and time spent waiting and never receiving the…

  • Writing Resources

    Stories and Amazon Sales

    So something strange happened this week… one of my stories was priced ‘free’ on Amazon (I mentioned it briefly last post). So far my publishing short story reprints to Amazon… Smashwords… AnthologyBuilder has been mostly an experiment in ePublishing, testing the waters so to speak. Sales have been far from brisk :) But with ‘The Prophet‘ being free several thousand readers downloaded it in the span of a few days. And in those same two days I’ve had more sales of other stories than in the couple years I’ve been on Amazon. No, please, don’t be too happy for me. The sales are still rather puny and I wouldn’t be…

  • Writing Resources

    Self Publishing – Joe Konrath

    Been doing a lot of catch up reading over at Joe Konrath’s blog. In case you don’t know he has had tremendous success selling his novels on his own. For years he counseled writers not to self-publish but recently he has changed his stance on this. Very interesting is one mock question and answer he put into that post: Q: You’re such a hypocrite. You’ve got several print deals. A: I signed those deals before I came to this conclusion. I highly doubt I’ll ever sign another print deal. Another great post to review is his most recent one, in response to an earlier post by Richard Curtis. Does this…