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WIP Thursday 2/18 Identities

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To celebrate ‘Side Hustle Tango’ going off to beta readers this Monday I wanted to share a little more of it. Jax and Noami’s partnership is still being fleshed out. As you might expect it’s a lot of learning on the run.

“So… who are you?” The man with the spray bottle asked, his hand lowering, the spray bottle resting in his lap. They’re in a room that’s about three meters square, empty except for the two currently occupied chairs. No table or anything else.
 “No one.” Jax replied.
 The other man cocked his head, “No one? That’s not good. Nobody misses no one’s when they don’t come home.”
 Jax nodded, “Fair enough. My name is Michael Keaton, I’m—” He didn’t finish because a stream of water hit him in the face.
 “We have your gPhone.” Spray bottle man reminded Jax, withdrawing the device from his jacket with his free hand.
 Jax thought hard about the ident he had last used. He was sure it wasn’t his real one. “Fine, fine. My name is Leonard McGarry.”
 “From?” The other man a go on motion.
 “Here. I live down—” More water. Jax rubbed his face, “Cut that out!”

I really like the spray bottle to get to the truth… trope, almost. It adds playfulness to a serious situation. Bonus points to you if you can identify Jax’s alias.

‘Side Hustle Tango’ comes out in May. The first book in the Grand Human Empire series, ‘Any Job Will Do‘ comes out next week. You can pre-order it now, and if you order from me directly, you get it a few days early as a bonus for buying direct. I hope you’ll take a look, I’m really excited to tell this new set of stories. This series is a mix of some of the same (Space Opera) and something new, (no aliens, a diverse cast, and more) stuff you (I hope) you like in my writing.

Let It Snow 2020

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Audiobook fan? This is your chance to stock up (or at least try). I stumbled onto this awesome industry-wide, cross genre audiobook giveaway. It goes all month and is just getting started (as of my posting this)

All you have to do is search for #snowaudio2020 on instagram, twitter, facebook, tiktok (Guessing) to find hundreds of authors offering free copies of their audiobooks.

I’m giving away ten copies of The Adventures of Wil Calder as my entry into this giveaway/raffle.

Just enter here.

Best of luck! May the odds be forever in your favor.

An Update on Audio

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You’d think ACX (the back end of audible, owned by Amazon) would be solid, fast, reliable, somewhat user friendly, etc. You’d be wrong. It’s a bit of a mess, and with everything going on this year, has more or less ground to a halt.

Space Rogues 1 has been live on audible since mid-April 2019.

We finally got everything done for Space Rogues 2 only to realize I had set it up against a version of Space Rogues 2 that I pulled from production, replacing it with a new edition. Think ACX could just move the audio production from one entry to another? Nope, I’d have to re-submit and re-contract with my narrator. Because, you know, why have a system that works well?

That was the final straw.

I’ve been eyeing taking my audio wide for a while. Until recently Audible was it, they were on Amazon and iTunes. Now there’s a lot of other options.

So I pulled the trigger. I’ve bought out my Narrator, the awesome KC Johnston for Space Rogues 1 & 2 and we’ll be producing the rest of the series free of Amazon/Audible nonsense and making the series available on all audiobook platforms!

I’m STOKED!

Space Rogues 2 Audio cover

Space Rogues 1 and 2 are now in Findaway voices system, working through quality control.

Sadly, in the end I had pull Space Rogues 1 from Audible to re-upload because they don’t have a clause to get out of exclusivity early if you did royalty share. All reviews lost :(

Such is life and lesson learned (again), Amazon is not your friend if you’re a business person. I cannot wait! to share the wide availability of Space Rogues 1 &2 with everyone!

Finish a Book, Get Free Beer

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Space Rogues 8 WIP – Done

So, this is a new one, and I have ZERO objections :)

Given that we’re moving into winter, and that Denver (and CO, and most of America) are racing towards new COVID-19 surges, Nicole and I went to one of our favorite breweries to do some “work from a patio, with beer,” work.

I was almost done with the first draft of “Here There Be Monsters” the 8th book in the Space Rogues series. An hour or so after we sat down, I typed “The End” and so took the above picture to celebrate, posting it to my instagram feed. Of course, being the good social media citizen I was I tagged my location, Empourium Brewing.

A few minutes later one of the staff comes out to offer virtual high fives and elbow bumps. It took me a second to realize she’d already seen my post!

We hung out for a bit more (hours and beers) then headed to our next stop (another brewery that was doing a sushi pairing!).

When the crew brought our bill out, they also gifted us a 4-pack of the beer Nicole and I were drinking!

A first for sure, and a trend I have no complaints with continuing forever. Might have to have the crew visit if they make it back to Earth again.

So anyway, that made my weekend!

Scrivener for iOS (NOT iPadOS) needs some love

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I get it. Software is hard and takes time. I’ve never begrudged developers taking the time to release good software and good updates.

Scrivener might be the exception to my “Don’t complain” policy.

Scrivener is still an iOS app, with an iPad interface. We’ve had iPadOS now for over a year. iPadOS 14 came out last month. In that time, Literature & Latte has released 2 updates to Scrivener iOS, the last being 9 months ago.

I get it, Scrivener isn’t the only application they have, and I don’t know if it’s even their most lucrative. I also don’t know if it’s trivial or not to recompile as an iPadOS app. Maybe if L&L was a bit more transparent I’d know.

What I also know is that now that I’ve moved to a more iPad Pro centered workflow, for my writing, Scrivener is becoming more annoying than not. Especially it’s antiquated way of viewing files in your project.

Have a document in your research folder? You have to back all the way up to the top level of your project, then go down from there to your research file. Find what you need, then reverse those steps to get back to the scene you’re writing.

The pain of looking up your research when writing in Scrivener

I’m normally very very pro Scrivener. If someone asked me today, I wouldn’t recommend the iOS version. The Mac version, yes, it’s great.

I use it daily. There have been times where I’ve needed to move things around and rather than deal with the clunky mobile interface, I come back to my office, wake up my computer, open scrivener after Dropbox has synced, and move things. Then I close it all down and go back to my iPad. It’s tedious, to say the least.

More and more DabbleWriter which I love overall, is looking more attractive as my main writing project app for iPad and desktop. I tend to move back and forth right now between the two tools, but maybe I’ll take a break on Scrivener and go all-in on Dabble for a bit.

Oh, by the way, I write Thrillers too.

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Island of Secrets Cover

Lesson learned, release two books really close to each other, while also running conferences, means something will not get the love it deserves.

In this case, it’s my action/adventure thriller ‘Island of Secrets‘

I decided to branch out a bit from science fiction to write something a little more down to Earth. A team of treasure hunters going where they’re paid to go to find treasures and secrets long lost.

It came out last week, go grab it if you’re a can of Clive Cussler style adventures

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