Just received the contributor copy in the mail of my story, “The Way the Rain Bends,” which was just published in The Los Angeles Review. It’s a provocative little short story I wrote while attending a workshop on the Oregon coast, set in Portland and told in second person, featuring the breakdown of a young marriage.  I read it the other day at a local reading and I still like it, very fun to read aloud, though it’s certainly dark and brooding.  Fitting for dark and brooding weather, I guess, which is what we’ve mostly been getting here lately.  I’ve been reading some of the other stories in the magazine, pieces by Natalie Goldberg and Ron Carlson, among others, really great stuff, and I encourage you to think about subscribing.

Just got word that Wooden Bones, my fantasy chronicling what happened to Pinocchio after he became a real boy, will be published in paperback next summer, which is welcome news.   My young adult novel, President Jock, Vice President Geek, was just released in audio, available for digital download from Audible.com and Amazon.com.  Plus my second mystery under my Jack Nolte pen name, A Desperate Place for Dying, featuring the curmudgeonly Garrison Gage, was also published in audio.

As for me, I carry on like usual, writing my four or five pages a day, reading good books, helping the kids with homework and piano, raking far too many leaves, and eagerly awaiting for each installment of The Walking Dead. I’ve also been extracting myself more and more from the Internet.  Went a little overboard during the election, which is usual for me, but I came out of it really questioning how engaged I want to be in general when it comes to the Internet.  I’ve already come to the conclusion that I want to be a minimalist promoting my work (believing, as I do, that the best way to increase your “discoverablity” as a writer, which is the latest buzzword in publishing, is to focus your energy on just writing more rather than trying to hype what you’ve already written, because more work means more gateways for people to find out about you as well as more for them to buy when they do — win, win), but I’ve also been feeling like I want to be a minimalst when it comes to how much time I spend reading online, too.

I already cut out all social media (Facebook, Twitter, and the like), and now I’ve been dramatically curtailing how much time I spend on listservs, blogs, and other things.  It’s a fine balancing act, because I like being informed, about publishing and the world at large, but I really, really like how I feel when I’m mostly disconnected from The Great and Powerful Digital Hive Mind.  The peace of mind is amazing.

This isn’t to say I want to give up the Internet completely.  It’s still the greatest tool for communication since the Gutenberg printing press.  But it is to say that I’m finding how to use it only when I need it (which isn’t nearly as often as I used to think) and not using it because I have this paranoid fear that Something Out There Is Happening And I Don’t Know About It.

First, the big news:  Wooden Bones, my dark children’s fantasy that chronicles the untold story of Pinocchio, is now available in both hardcover and ebook from Simon and Schuster.  What happened to Pino, as he came to be known, after he became a real boy?  The answer:  It turns out he can bring puppets to life himself, which gets him into a whole lot of trouble.  Giant hungry wolves?  Dead trees brought to life?  Life-size puppets that march about like zombies?  The book’s got all of that and more.  I hope you check it out.  It’s aimed at the 9-12 age group, but I think adults might like it as well.

It’s been a busy couple of months.  In late July, I co-taught the Think Like a Publisher Workshop with Dean Wesley Smith, where we helped another room full of professional writers learn how to take advantage of all the ways writers can now go direct to readers — even while continuing to work with large traditional publishers, as I am.  It was a great group and always fun to hang out with Dean and all my other writer friends on the Oregon coast.  Hard to believe, but I’ve known Dean over twenty years, ever since I walked into his writing workshop in Eugene, Oregon when I was a nineteen-year-old college student and realized, right away, what a goldmine that workshop was for a newer writer like me.

The first half of August, my wife and I took off for Europe, embarking on a five country, ten plus city Mediterranean cruise, tacking a few days on at the beginning and the end.  In all, we were gone 17 days, and it was quite a trip — Barcelona, Athens, Rome, Venice, Istanbul, I’m still mentally unpacking everything we did on the trip.  It was expensive, no doubt about it, but we have no regrets; it was something we’d been wanting to do for a long time.  And no, we didn’t take the kids.  They stayed with the grandparents (we took them to Disneyland last year, which was the family trip), and had a much better time  than if they’d been with us.  Somehow I don’t think they would have appreciated the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or the Parthenon in Athens quite as much as we did.

Other news?  Well, I’m buckling down into the writing, working on a dark paranormal suspense novel based loosely on one of my short stories.   More than that I won’t say until it’s finished, but the writing is going well.  I also have a number of new audio books out.  None of them are narrated by me (when I have more time, it’s something I plan to do, but not now), but they’re all excellent reads.  All of them are available for digital download at Audible.com and Amazon, and should be available at iTunes shortly.

With the summer winding down toward fall — I was stunned to realize that the kids go back to school in two weeks — I’m hoping to have a nice, productive stretch of writing for the rest of the year.  Traveling is great, but I truly am a creature of habit, and it feels good to get back in a creative groove.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately:

• The Hunger Games Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins.  Fantastic read, and fully deserving of all the attention it’s gotten.  Felt a little like Ender’s Game meets The Princess Diaries, in the sense that it’s very much told in the voice of a teenage girl (complete with a makeover!)   but the action and war-heavy themes are there in abundance at the same time.  I’d say the third book was the weakest of the three, but it was also the most ambitious in scope.
• Now and Then by Robert B. Parker.  Another great book in the Spenser series, touching on infidelity, the meaning of marriage, and what makes two people stick it out through thick and thin.  Not his best book, but then it’s Robert B. Parker, and even a run of the mill Parker is superb.

For those of you who prefer reading books the old fashioned way, The Care and Feeding of Rubber Chickens: A Novel is now available in trade paperback.  The printed book also includes something the ebook doesn’t — excerpts from The Care and Feeding of Rubber Chickens:  A Manual. Here’s a shot of the cover flat (click it for a larger image):

It’s a handsome book and I’m quite proud of it.  Right now you can only buy it from Amazon.com, but it should be available at other online retailers in the next few weeks.  The ebook is already available everywhere.

Writing has been going well lately, though making sure I spend my time on the most productive things has been increasingly challenging.  Since I both work with traditional publishers (like Simon and Schuster, who will be publishing Wooden Bones in a couple of months), and help run Flying Raven Press, I’m busier than ever.

Battling a bit of a cold doesn’t help, but that comes with the territory of having two kids in school.  Teaching the “Indie Publishing” workshop a couple weeks ago was a lot of fun.  Not only did I get to hang out with old friends and meet new ones, I also got to pay it forward a bit.  (Since I really can’t pay back all the people who have helped me over the years with my writing, the best thing I can do is help other writers any way I can.)  The modern publishing world is dramatically different than it was even three years ago, and the skill set that a writer needs to survive and thrive in the coming years is also different.  Writing blurbs, cover design, understanding how to promote and how not to — these are vital skills.   At one point, I summed up everything we talked about all weekend by saying that there were three primary ways you could sell better and make more money as a writer working today:

1. Produce more products.
2. Produce better products.
3. Sell in more places.
   

That’s it.  That’s the key.  It means being prolific (I have little doubt that the prolific writers of today will be the ones doing the best in five or ten years) but also mastering the storyteller’s art.  It means not only writing better books, but learning how to craft catchy blurbs and design snazzy book covers — if you decide to combine traditional publishing with indie publishing, which is exactly what the smart writers are doing now.  (Self-publishing, though it got something of a dirty reputation recently, has always been the most common way for writers to reach their audience.  Charles Dickens, Ben Franklin, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the list goes on and on. )  It means making sure your books are available in as many places as possible and in as many formats as possible — paperback, ebook, audio, etc. It also means — and this is probably the hardest part — making sure you’re spending your time wisely.  This is one of the reasons I’ve given up all social media, why I attend few writing workshops or conferences, and why I seldom blog.  Usually these things don’t pass what I’ve taken to calling the W.I.B.B.O.W. test, an ugly acronym which is short for Would I Be Better Off Writing?  And for me, writing means fiction writing, since that’s the guiding passion of my life.

I have nothing against writers who enjoy conferences, Facebook, blogging, or Twitter.  It’s just, for me, I mostly prefer to spend that time writing fiction.  It’s nice that I now live in a publishing era where the smartest business decision for a fiction writer, at least in my opinion, is to do exactly that.  We’ll see if time proves me right.

Flying Raven Press has just released the audio book version of  Lincoln and the Dragon, a short novel of just under 100 pages at print length.  It’s now available at Amazon.com, Audible.com, and iTunes.com.  Listening time is just under two hours.  Special thanks to Gary L Willprecht for his excellent narration.  Here’s more about the book:

The fateful first of January. That’s how Abraham Lincoln described New Year’s Day in 1841, the day he temporarily broke off his engagement with Mary Todd.

Although this fact is well known among historians, what is not known is what else happened that day – when a deranged, dimension-hopping descendant of a Confederate general attempted to assassinate Lincoln long before he became the 16th President of the United States.

When the madman’s plan goes awry, Lincoln finds himself stranded in the land of Howander, a world populated by brave knights, drafty castles, and a princess terribly scarred by a one-eyed dragon who’s promised to return for her on her upcoming birthday. As he finds himself falling for the princess, Lincoln must make a choice: stay and fight the dragon, or heed the call of his dark dreams, which offer him tantalizing glimpses of his native country’s future – a country which may need a hero even more than this one.

Dear Fiction Writer:

I don’t read your blog.

Seriously, I don’t.  I’m an avid reader.  I read a lot of novels.  I couldn’t care less about your blog.  Look, I’m trying to be nice, if you love blogging, great, but it’s not going to make me buy your book.  Only your book will do that.  I try out new authors all the time.  I read a few pages and if I like it, I buy it.  Whether I’m standing in a bookstore or downloading a sample on my e-reader, it’s always the same.

I also don’t follow you on Twitter.  I don’t hang out in online forums.  If you create a book trailer, I probably won’t watch it, because come on, why does a book need a trailer?  If you friend me on Facebook, great, I might think that’s neat, but I won’t pay attention to what you post there.  Why would I?  I use Facebook to socialize with friends, and let’s be honest, you’re not my friend.  You probably don’t even want to be my friend, and I won’t take offense to that.  How can you be friends with all the hundreds or thousands of people who read your book?  You can’t.  I didn’t buy your novel because I wanted to be your friend. I bought your novel because I wanted to be entertained.  It was either your book or reruns of Seinfeld.

And Myspace?  I don’t even remember what that is.  You might want to have a website, sure, that way I can find out what else you’ve written if I’m motivated enough to type your name in Google.  But I probably won’t be.  I’m lazy that way.  If I like your book enough, I’ll see what else you have on Amazon.com – but if there’s nothing there, I’ll move onto somebody else.

Because, again, I just want a good story.

And platform?  I couldn’t care less about your platform.  You could be a hermit living under a bridge for all I care.  You want my advice?  Work on writing better books.  You write books that I’ll remember a week after I’ve read them – because, honestly, most books I don’t remember any more than I remember what I ate for dinner– and I’ll want more books from you.

But I still won’t read your blog.

Honest.

Sincerely,

A. Wreeder

Merry Christmas, everybody.  Hope you’re spending it with family and friends, as I am.  Here’s a little treat, a personal favorite:  “White Wine in the Sun” by Tim Minchin.  And if you haven’t listened to Minchin before, check out the rest of his songs on YouTube.  Great stuff.

Note to Self: Accidentally sleeping with your contacts on may result in scratchy eyes and a bit of a headache, but it doesn’t help you remember your dreams more clearly as you might have hoped.

I got one of those Social Security summary statements in the mail yesterday. You know the ones: They tell you your monthly benefits depending on which age you retire — 72, 65, or early retirement at 62.

I saw the 62 and a thought popped into my head: Hey, I’m nearly 37, that’s what . . . only 25 years and I could cash some of those checks.

It wasn’t the 25 years that set off warning bells in my mind. It was my use of the word only.

Only? Only 25 years? When did two and a half decades merit being described as only? While all the normal panicked thoughts raged through my mind — I haven’t done anything yet, what about my goals, I’m old and I’m still just treading water — I realized that the reason I can say only is because I can actually envision twenty-five years. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. It was just a number that didn’t mean anything. But now, I can look ahead and see those years passing.

So the moral of the story? Well, naturally I’ve decided to be more careful about opening the mail. You never know what you’ll read in there that’ll make you feel old.

And to be careful with the world only. Obviously, it can be a dangerous word.

Washington — In a little noticed provision in the new budget released by the White House, President Obama has proposed eliminating Republicans from both houses of Congress.  Press secretary Robert Gibbs had this to say:

“The President believes that American families are tightening their belts, so the government should do the same.  Eliminating Republicans will save millions in payroll expenses, not to mention their generous health care and pension benefits.  It may not seem like much — and I’m sure Republicans will complain that it’s just a tiny fraction of the overall budget — but every lit bit does help.”

When pressed for details, Gibbs would only say that President Obama would be releasing a statement later in the day explaining his reasoning behind this decision.

Late Update: President Obama’s full statement is below.

-

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release  -  February 03, 2010

By now most of you have heard about a provision in the new budget which proposes to eliminate Republicans from both houses of Congress.  Since this has caused a little stir in our conflict-driven media, I wanted to set the record straight about what this provision will and won’t do.

It is true that this provision will eliminate all Republican persons in Congress, thereby saving American taxpayers millions in wasteful spending.  However, we are not proposing eliminating Republican votes – which would be a violation of the very Constitution I’ve sworn to protect.  We will be replacing Republicans with life-size cardboard cutouts that will be placed behind their desks in the Senate and the House, which to the casual viewer on CSPAN will look no different than the real flesh and blood Senator or Representative.

Since Republicans have consistently voted no on every piece of legislation since I took office — even those traditional areas of Republican concern like fiscal responsibility (GOP Senators voted 40-0 against reinstituting PAYGO procedures) — then it’s become apparent that we don’t need real Republicans to cast these votes.  Instead, Congress will be hereby instructed to assume that all Republicans in either chamber will be voting no on all bills going forward.

As I said recently, I’m not an ideologue.  I’m pragmatic.  This provision will not by itself turn around our economy, but it’s one in a series steps that we are taking to return to an era of fiscal responsibility.  When such a time occurs that we again see budget surpluses — last seen during the Clinton presidency — we will review this policy to see if the economy can sustain having physical GOP representatives again in Congress.

Sincerely,

President Barack Obama

P.S.  To oversee this effort, I’ve created The Political Reinvestment in Real Ideas Commission , or what is now be calling PRRIC for short.