02/17/12 – State of the Union

Hmm.  Thought I posted on here three days ago.  Whoops.

Print Book

The paperback edition of Coincidence has been approved and is available at http://amzn.com/1470032511.  The proof amused me as it’s similar in size and feel to my philosophy books from Penguin.  Maybe I’ll make it some kind of prize for something in the future.  I’m rather underwhelmed with the Createspace book process.  I used their services before to produce a CD and found the cover to be pretty customizable.  The customization doesn’t transfer to their book covers, however.

Smashwords

Smashwords finally approved the ebook after two weeks.  Their servers had some difficulties this week, so I’ll give them that.  Coincidence should be available in their affiliates’ stores soon.  There’s something somewhat telling, though, about the fact that the site went down for nearly twenty-four hours and no one seemed to say anything about it.  I was searching for comments on the social networks, but the only mention I found of a system failure was one back in July.  Podiobooks.com got DOS’d within the past couple months and everyone was alarmed.  Don’t know what to make of these facts.  Just sayin’.

Podiobook

I finished editing episode six of twenty-nine last night.  That one was a doozie as it was the end of section one (2000).  One of my beta readers told me the story really gets into its groove in the next section (2003), so maybe that’ll translate to the audio.  I’m still finding a learning curve in the differences between the written and spoken words.  With writing, we’re told to have variations in sentence length, clauses, etc.  Try speaking those longer sentences, though, and see where it gets you.  If I had planned to do a podiobook from the beginning, I think there would’ve been more instances of alliteration, onomatopoeia, and other forms of sixth grade English tactics.

What’s Next?

I haven’t written anything since “The End” in Coincidence.  I’ve taken an extraordinarily long time to cool down from that particular narrative.  But I’m starting to see flickers of short stories, mostly answers to questions like “What happened to Ziggy after he left the hospital?”  or “What kind of villainy did Ty try before she got her hands on Chris?”  Maybe even some more abstract, indirect stories that kinda sorta in a Coincidence-esque way eventually affect someone.  Too early to tell, I guess.  The only thing I know for certain is that these would be placed on the Kindle store for free with mention of Coincidence in the back.

“This pretty speckled length of twin that’s wrapped around your neck is mine” – Ruby’s “Salt Water Fish”