Journey

Journey came out some time ago, to great acclaim, but it was Playstation 3 exclusive, and I had an X-Box.  It's now been released for Playstation 4, and I have one of those, so I've finally had a chance to try it.

And, yes, it is just as wonderful as all the reviews claim.

You start as a cloaked figure in a desert.  On the horizon you can see a mountain with a light.  And so, with bare instruction and no understanding, you start toward it.

Journey is a combination of evocative music and visual beauty and a story stripped of any language that you understand.  It is very short, but I think is the sort of precious jewel of a game that you keep by for the grey days, when you want to be uplifted.

Well recommended.

Five-year financial report

I've been doing my taxes!  What fun!  Since it's my fifth tax return that features an entry (somewhat erroneously) called "royalties", I figure this is a good time to share some stats.

In December 2010, I published Champion of the Rose and The Silence of Medair on Smashwords.  I didn't tell anyone I knew, or do anything particularly resembling meaningful advertising.  Stained Glass Monsters followed in January 2011, Stray in March 2011 and Lab Rat One in June 2011.  My gross earnings up to 30 June 2011 were $76.24 AUD:

It's important to note that Smashwords pays quarterly and Amazon after 3 months, so the above doesn't reflect royalties earned in this period, but royalties paid.  [Smashwords also covers Barnes & Noble, Apple, and a myriad smaller vendors.]

In the 2011-2012 financial year I published Voice of the Lost, Caszandra, and Gratuitous Epilogue.  My gross earnings between 1 July 2011 to 30 June 2012 were $10,160.67 AUD:

In the 2012-2013 financial year I published And All the Stars and Hunting. My gross earnings between 1 July 2012 and 30 June 2013 were $16,645.97 AUD:

In the 2013-2014 financial year I published Bones of the Fair.   I also put a stop on my payments from Amazon for a while so that I would have more money for my overseas holiday (putting off my tax payments).  My gross earnings between 1 July 2013 and 30 June 2014 were $9,300.89 AUD:

You can see that the non-Amazon percentage is creeping up (though a little distorted by my deferring some of the Amazon payment).  This in turn distorts the next year of earnings.

In the 2014-2015 financial year I published The Pyramids of London.   My gross earnings between 1 July 2014 and 30 June 2015 were $57,204.78 AUD:

My tax bill this year is going to be hefty.

As you can see the number of vendors has increased (Popcorn Press is the fee for the Touchstone RPG Source Book), but the bulk is still by far coming from Amazon (and by far coming from the Touchstone Trilogy, for that matter, with two rather successful Bookbub promos further distorting this year's royalties).  A further point of distortion is the plunging Australian dollar, which means I get more AUD for any USD these days (and very nice that is from my POV too).

Overall, my earnings look like this:

And, really, woohoo!  That's a lot of money!  A pity it's going to drop by about $20,000 in the current financial year (gauging from current sales/publication rates), but this is still a good deal better than I expected from my five-year check-in on the state of my self-publishing career.

If I were all about the money I'd just spend my time publishing Touchstone sequels, but as ever I'm writing what has my attention at the moment, dividing my time between the quiet and very unlikely to be very profitable The Sleeping Life and the tremendously entertaining and likely to get me my first hate mail Snug Ship.  (Gaming is such a touchy area.)  There are some mild similarities between Snug Ship and Stray (first person voice for a start, though Taia is more mildly snarky rather than self-deprecating and consistently humorous), but it doesn't have a strong romantic plotline, so it will be interesting to see how it's received.

Anyway, this is a post for the stat-collectors.  Sooner or later I will have to get around to the more formidible task of doing charts for the sales numbers.

Interview with me at R L Martinez's blog

There's an interview with me up at R L Martinez's blog (where there's a whole series of interesting author interviews).  In this interview I go through writing process, cover creation, offer gratuitous publishing advice and (almost inevitably) weigh into the current Hugo Awards controversy.

Occasionally self-publishing isn't fun

As I mentioned in my previous post, while I really love self-publishing, there are some negatives that anyone considering the route should be prepared for.  Obviously not selling or bad reviews sting, but that's a common experience for many authors.  Not having as many promotional opportunities (and some people simply refusing to read self-pub work) isn't fun either, but I'm pretty good at shrugging that off.

My most negative experience as a self-publisher was an innocuous twitter conversation.

This followed a guest post I'd contributed to the Book Smugglers' web site, where I'd listed 99 female authors.  The post was a response to the usual nonsense about how women don't write SFF.  Instead of producing a list of the same half dozen luminaries whose names seem to turn up on every list (perhaps contributing to the perception that there are few female SFF authors), I simply listed authors I had on my physical book shelves.

An Australian author* asked me why so few Australian authors (there were four) and I explained that most of my Australian books were in e-format, and thus not on the list.  [Though a lot of Australian fantasy is big-book multi-volume epic fantasy, which isn't to my taste.]

I thought nothing of the exchange until a month or so later when I noticed the same author talking about sources of information about Australian SFF authors, and speculating that there were so few Australian authors on my list due to cultural cringe.  She offered up her own list of Australian (adult SFF) authors, one she'd prepared some time before tracking Australian authors put out by mid-range and large publishers.

I suggested that the Aurealis Award nominees listed on Wikipedia would be a good source (a list I happen to be on, as a multiple finalist).  I was told that she'd started with that list, and then left off the YA and the self-publishers.

She'd taken the Aurealis Award list, and removed me from it.

This was a fantastically minor conversation, with no malice whatsoever involved, but it really brought home to me that self-publishers continue to be thought about in a separate category.  To not only be left off lists, but removed from them.

Sometimes it's the tiny comments, the smallest things, that are hardest to shrug off.


* Identity not important - this was an entirely innocuous exchange. Please no trawling through my twitter history playing detective.

On Writing, the 2015 AKH edition

I gotta say, I just love my writing situation.

I love writing, of course.  Making up worlds, putting people in them, adding unfortunate circumstances and then spinning out the consequences.  So. Much. Fun.

And I love being read.

I love that other people can walk into worlds that I have created.  I get a huge kick out of watching readers react to certain twists, or seeing which characters they fall for, or whether they spotted the clever thing.  Fan mail is awesome, and I'm an inveterate ego-searcher on Google, and really enjoy the discussions about my books.  Even the negative ones can be enlightening, though I often read them with a raised eyebrow or a 'well, all that went over your head didn't it?' expression.

I'm more mindful of probable reader response now, when I write, though I usually write the things I want to write anyway.

For that reason (among others), I love self-publishing.

I particularly love being able to write whatever the fuck I want, even YA including swear words.  I'll take the occasional one star review for swearing if I think it's character-appropriate. :D

Being able to write non-commercial stories (which, frankly, most of mine are when you look at what is popular and what I choose to write) is a big bonus for me.  I'm happy not to have to fret about not being able to sell the next book in a series, even if it has, say,  a...subdued critical response like Pyramids, or really low sales numbers like Stained Glass Monsters.  I can still happily work on The Sleeping Life, which is the kind of 'quiet' novel without a big hook that would struggle to get accepted at any publisher.

And I can embark on something off-the-wall, like Snug Ship (first in the Singularity Game series), which has a ton of wish fulfilment and a complete over-indulgence in my addiction to MMOs (and, uh, an ending that will make readers want to strangle me, if only for the pun in the final sentence), and choose exactly how much explanation of gaming terms I stick in.  Readers who are gamers will find it effortless, and there's a glossary for everyone else.  I get to make that call.

Self-pub isn't without its down sides (I'll have to get around to writing up my most negative self-pub experience one day), and I've got plenty of ground to cover before I can hope to be a full-time writer - in part because I choose to always prioritise the fun over tedious things like marketing, but also because I live in Sydney.  But every so often I look at how my life is going because of self-publishing, and can only stop and appreciate the moment.

I'm getting paid to have fun, and people randomly email me compliments.

^^

Jurassic World (Spoilgrrs)

There's been some debate, leading up to this release, as to Jurassic World's treatment of women, given that the trailers made it look like an "uptight Smurfette gets lesson in loosening up" narrative.

This is and isn't true.  In fact, it's a little worse than that.

Jurassic World is pretending the second and third movies in the series don't exist, and thus spends a lot of time making direct references and call-backs to the first movie, including mixing and matching a large similar set of main characters.

Jurassic Park was about:

John Hammond - wealthy guy and dinosaur fan, due for a lesson in hubris.
Dr Grant - paleontologist and dinosaur fan, there to save the day and learn that kids can be okay.
Dr Sattler - paleobotonist and dinosaur fan, there to save the day and make direct feminist points.
Dr Malcolm - chaos theorist, there to snark and be shirtless.
Lex - grandchild, computer fan, with a sibling relationship to work out.
Tim - grandchild, dinosaur fan, looking for a dino-loving friend.
Muldoon - manly man doing manly thing.
The Lawyer - there to be wrong.
Samuel L Jackson - as himself.
Nedry - greedy bad guy, there to get his just desserts.
Scientists of debatable morals.

In Jurassic World we get :

Aunt Claire - Park operations manager, brittle control freak, due to get in touch with her inner Ripley.
Grady - Velociraptor trainer, nature fan, there to save the day.
Zach - nephew, fan of girls, there to remember he should care about his younger brother.
Gray - nephew, fan of dinosaurs, there to tremble and be unhappy about his family.
Hoskins - there to be wrong, and to get his just desserts.
Cruthers - there to snark and to wish he could look half as good as Dr Malcolm shirtless.
Masrani - wealthy guy and dinosaur fan, due for a lesson in hubris.
Barry - there to be somewhat luckier than Samuel L Jackson.
Vivian - there so Claire isn't (practically) the only woman with a speaking role in the park.
Karen - busy guilting Claire about not caring enough about her nephews or about having kids of her own.
Scientists of debatable morals.

Grady is clearly Grant + Muldoon, but Aunt Claire (it was hard to catch her surname at all) is definitely not in the position of Hammond or Dr Sattler.  She is not a fan of anything except control, for a start, and spends her time reciting statistics (ah, KPIs and deliverables, how I dislike corporate-speak).  She's also not ultimately in charge, is answering to people of higher authority, has had vital information kept from her, is never shown to be respected, and is operating two beats behind competency.  Her story arc is about how she should lighten up, spare more time for her family, and maybe think about having kids.

In other words, Claire is an essay on work/life balance.

[Strange timing - I just finished a review over on Goodreads about how Dragonsbane is an essay on magely work/life balance.]

While Claire does morph into Ripley toward the end of the movie - and is given two separate crowning moments of awesome - this story would have been so much more powerful if Claire had started out as effortlessly competent and respected, lauded for the Park's safety record.  Instead, we have someone constantly being lectured on how wrong wrong wrong she is.

A poor foundation for any character arc.

Cover reveal: Tangleways

This (Australian financial) year, a couple of Bookbub promos have seen a spike in my royalties that I suspect won't be repeated next year, so I have been busily upping my expenses (and thus lowering my taxes) by commissioning covers well in advance.

No-one is going to be surprised to discover that the Cwn Annwn are a factor in Tangleways after this cover. :D  I asked Julie to use salukis as the model - and this hound of death is just as gorgeous and strange as I hoped.  [DWJ's Dogsbody was one of the major inspirations for the Trifold world.]

The font layout was HARD for this one, because the background curves aren't symmetrical, but I think this works.  [I've taken to designing an ebook cover with larger fonts, and then a TPB later - where the edges will be cropped.]

WIP-wise, I've been bouncing around.  I've written one of three planned short stories for the trip to France that sits between Pyramids and Tangleways.  Actually, at around 7,500 words, it might just creep into novelette status - a first for me, and the next will probably be a little longer, though the third is just a shortish scene that could helpfully be titled "Ned's First Kiss".

Primarily, though, I've been working on The Sleeping Life and still expect it to be my next release, out toward the end of the year.

I've also been straying a little into my MMO game series, and have commissioned two covers for it (as part of my "OMG, I don't want to pay that much tax I'd rather buy covers" splurge).  After TSL has been released, I'll be working concurrently on both the Trifold and Singularity Game series, working my way through them.  Singularity is an open-ended series - no fixed end point.  I'm finding its worldbuilding endlessly entertaining, especially since people have been talking lately about utopias and the game in Snugships would probably qualify for one - though humanity is kinda on the level of chocobos in that universe.  [For those who don't get the Final Fantasy reference, that means we make great pets. ;) ]