Blog Archives
The Cover Of “One More For The Road” — A New S.A. Barton Novelette Coming Soon!
This novelette is a story I’ve been tinkering with for quite a while, and I’ll be ready to let it go out into the world pretty soon — a week or so for my Patreon peeps who get to see my stories first as a thankyou for contributing to my financial wellbeing as a creator, and thirty days after that for everyone else.
It ties together a lot of my imagination in regard to the near future of life in the United States and elsewhere in the developed and developing world. The biggie is the future of the self-driving car. The protagonist of OMFTR, Angela, has never learned to drive, although she owns a car. She has never needed to, nor is it a useful skill for the average person in her world. Cars drive themselves, and there’s no more an option to drive them by hand than there is an option to control an elevator’s movement by hand — which, if you didn’t know, used to be how they worked. An attendant used to be paid to stand in each elevator and control which floors it moved to with a lever control, and to open and close the doors with a second lever.
Later, these functions were automated because it was possible and economical to do so, and nobody even thinks about controlling the elevator by hand. Which is how people will think of automobiles in 50 or maybe 100 years.
Angela’s worldview, however, is challenged when she discovers she and her boyfriend Buddy have inherited a real, honest-to-goodness manual-drive car. One which has not a single computer in it, not anywhere.
When she decides to learn to operate it on her own, the process will challenge her personally — but more than that, it will lead her to question the world she lives in, how it came to be the way it is, her relationship with Buddy, and even the most bedrock of assumptions for us all, how she lives her very own life.
I love this yarn, and I believe you will too.
I’ll get it into your hands soon.
Rewriting In Action — “In Real Life” (Plus an unexpected conclusion)
[This post appeared on my Patreon page on 3/29 — become a patron, see my work before anyone else!]
I’ve begun rewriting that early story of mine, “In Real Life”.
(The new cover is better than the old, don’t you think?)
It was published in 2012, but it was written, to the best of my recollection, in late 2010. Maybe I’m wrong and it was early 2011, but it’s no more recent than that. That wasn’t too long after I took up writing again – by that time I had worked the most egregious bugs out of my writing, I think – but I temper that thinking with the fact that it’s something of a yearly affair to look back at what I have written and think, oh, I wouldn’t have written it that way now. I could have improved on that. Go ahead and read it with a critical eye, see what you think.
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I’m helping the last customer of the day pick out a low-end cosmetic skin for his personal Heads Up Display when my PayDayFeed blinks three times and turns yellow. That’s the signal that I’ve gone into overtime. The dollar counter speeds up, reflecting time and a half, and the HUD Gear corporate overlay adds a digital countdown to the icon population floating in my view. I’ve got half an hour before I get a disciplinary notice; the company is very serious about limiting overtime outside of major shopping holidays. I perk up my tone as I list the features of the skin the lean pimple-faced boy seems most enthusiastic about, guiding him to a quick decision. We ShareSpace our HUDs through the retail interface, and I nudge his skin’s icon over to his side. He double clicks it to accept, and his account transfers the $119.95 to the store account. The receipt icon appears and I move it over for him to acknowledge. I’m loading my closing checklist at the same time I’m walking him to the door. It’s going to be close, the counter is down to 00:24:36 when the lock clicks shut.
It clicks shut again, behind me this time, freezing the countdown at 00:04:09. Good. I still have 42:21:55 working time until my last OT warning goes inactive. I really don’t want a second one. I smile as I slide behind the controls of my aging Honda/soft three wheeler…
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As I read over that, making mental notes about where to make changes, I thought, this is not going to be a cosmetic rewrite. I am going to rework this sucker bigtime. I haven’t developed just in terms of story mechanics or of smoothly communicating the story and scene to the reader. My style has changed. I have (I hope) a better feel for what needs to be explained overtly and what can be left to the imagination or assumption. Yeah, this story is going to change a lot. And that affirms my idea that the original text will be included after the rewritten story when I create the ebook. The reader ought to have the opportunity to see what the new edition sprang from.
Picking out details as I tackled the rewriting, the first thing that caught my eye wasn’t a miss in terms of writing, but in terminology. “Heads Up Display” (HUD) isn’t the worst way to describe “augmented reality,” but it’s not really very good, either. I hadn’t yet encountered the term “augmented reality” to describe the species of virtual reality in which the user sees the physical reality around himself, but with a visual overlay or modification added. A “skin,” to borrow a term from videogaming. HUD usually refers to a similar idea in which the augmented reality is projected on a transparent surface like the windshield of a car. So one of my first changes is to replace HUD with augmented reality and introduce my own take on the inevitable slangification of technical terms with “augreal.”
I also thought I leaned a little too hard on the details of how the transaction was navigated. Other things I changed were based on subjective feelings – I felt the flow of the original was a little choppy. I think I paid more attention to describing the action and being linear and chronological, and less to how the language sounds – I bet I didn’t read the first version to myself out loud. Now I pay more attention to that aspect. Prose may not be poetry, but it should be good storytelling, and good storytelling engages as much through the feel of the words and sentences as it does through definitional means of describing the setting and action the writer is imagining. At its best good storytelling prose feels a bit poetic in a way, transmitting something emotional and subjective, not just a dry description. Did I hit that mark? I don’t know, it’s notoriously hard for a writer to judge his or her own work. Did I at least get closer? I’m pretty sure I have.
These kinds of conversations with myself (is this good storytelling?) remind me that it’s easy to be a perfectionist in theory. I’d love my writing to be “perfect,” whateverthehell that is. In reality, indulging perfectionism kills productivity. No writer is perfect. Every writer misses the mark sometimes. No writing is ever loved by everyone who reads it. So I have to set myself a limit – I’ve tinkered with this enough, now I’m no longer improving the prose I’m delivering. I’m just tweaking the arrangement a bit, changing for the sake of changing.
Perfection is an illusion. Always strive to improve, never expect to be perfect.
Here’s the rewritten opening:
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I’m already trying to hurry the last customer of the day through his purchase when the world grows a blinking yellow border – I’m now trespassing upon the dread domain of overtime pay. My bank balance, always present in the lower left of my augmented reality, ticks over faster with time-and-a-half. Glowing red digits appear in the center of my vision, ghost-translucent over the face of my customer – the Worktime corporate skin on my augreal counting down the half-hour of OT I’m allowed before I’m written up.
I resist the urge to talk faster – nothing turns a customer off like feeling he’s being rushed – and pour on the persuasion. He’s a kid, pimple-faced and gawky, self-consciously coolish, browsing first person shooter skins for his augreal and avoiding the ones with the highest user counts. But he skips past the lowest, too, and I get it: the key to hurry him out the door. He’s a safe player, looking for the middle ground between Popular Fanboy and Ironically Uncool. I lean in, tipping my forehead toward his, the universal gesture: merge our augmented realities? He nods and I zip through the advanced search options too fast for him to follow – I’ve been here ten years; jobs for humans are rare and precious; nobody leaves one on purpose. I flip through three skins like the ones he’s been lingering on, heavy on reds and flamethrower effects, and repeat the magic words to death: you can exchange it within seventy-two hours, FREE, if you don’t love it. Finally he taps one of the skins. I pass him the TOS icon and he taps agree without reading just like everyone else, even me. Nobody reads the TOS. He passes over his $119.95 – cheap skin, lousy commission, but you don’t try to sell a cheapskate a rich skin. I give him the exchange period countdown widget and open it for him in his augreal. I’m already opening my closedown checklist as I give him the thank-you-come-again. Time is slipping away fast and I don’t need another OT writeup – a quick peek at that widget tells me I’m still three workdays away from the last one dropping off. I rush through the closedown and freeze the OT countdown at 04:09 by locking the steel security gate over the store’s door on my way out. Victory.
#
My impressions:
One: This immediately became a complete rework of the whole text. It’s basically as time-intensive as writing a brand new story. I may not do this again because I’d rather be writing something new. If I wanted to revisit this particular story, I could do just as well coming up with a sequel or a second story set in the same universe.
Two: I do like the new copy more than the old. And of course I do. I’m taking something that 2011 S.A. Barton liked and making it into something that 2016 S.A. Barton likes. People change, likes and dislikes change; this is just another illustration of this.
Three: I’m going to keep going on with this exercise, but it’s going on the back burner. It will be a fine thing to tinker with when I’m feeling otherwise uninspired. And it has inspired me to critically look at myself as a writer – that’s almost always a good thing. Also, I said I’d rewrite the whole thing, and followthrough is good – mostly. If I find it’s eating new work, it’s going to have to go in the trunk. Sure followthrough is good – but on the other hand there’s no need to go down with a sinking ship but pride, and if life as a poorish person has taught me anything its that you must choose what you take pride in with care because pride is a luxury in most cases and luxuries are simply not in the budget.
Four: Rewriting those couple of paragraphs led to this (longer!) post PLUS a few clarifications of my priorities when it comes to writing. Part of my slow progress as a writer is due to the volume of other things that occupy my attention: life in general, children, mundane chores like cooking and, soon, moving household, online classes because grad school loans are part of what supports me having a home and internet access with which to pursue matters of education, family, and self-publishing. Interruptions of writing, unless you’re a monomanac, are going to happen, and many of those “interruptions” are GOOD THINGS. I don’t want to miss playing with my kids and private time with my wife because writing. But part of my interruptions spring from lack of focus. I’m especially prone to defocus because I’m worrying about X, Y, and Z current things going on in my life. The usuals, like keeping vehicles running and people fed and what if a hurricane or tornado comes this year and what if there’s a bureucratic snafu or something and we can’t pay rent and what if my last story sucked and, and, and… and I’m guessing plenty of you reading this can identify with worry as an enemy of focus to one degree or another. I worry about things, it’s what I do – and I remember being a small child and my grandmother saying “we are a family of worry-warts.” Worrying about things is apparently genetic. But I worry, worry, worry. I worry that slow sales of my work stems from older, less attractive stories that turn readers off, for example – rather than the idea that short story singles are limited sellers and novels, or at least novellas, are where the sales are at in self-publishing 999 times out of 1000. Actually, is that the figure? I’m not sure I’ve EVER heard of an author, self-published or other, making a self-supporting income out of solely short stories. At other times, I glom on to other ideas. I’m pissing readers off with my tweets or my blog posts (and I’m sure I have, because having ANY opinion will piss SOMEONE off – you can’t please everyone, ever), but most readers look past differences of opinion with authors and save “I’m not reading that person anymore” for REALLY HUGE UNFORGIVABLE stuff like kitten-eating.
Still on point four: so it turns out this rewriting exercise wasn’t as much about rewriting and getting a few blog posts about the process of rewriting as I thought it was.
It turned out to be about settling some of my internal conflict over my successes, failures, and in-betweens as a writer and self-publisher. Just taking action on the start of this old story plus the thought behind writing this post led to what I hope are some positive conclusions. Writing new things is more important than rewriting old things.I recently wrote a post in which I said unpublishing is a giant pain in the butt and you should consider everything else, including rewriting, before doing it.
Well, I may be best off unpublishing a few things. I don’t know yet – it IS a pain in the ass – but it’s on the table for those stories of mine that aren’t my favorites. We’ll see. Having some short freebies, as I do, remains a good idea – the free story has been the centerpiece of self-publishing marketing/selling strategy for a long while (comparatively long in this young current and extensive incarnation of self-publishing). Keeping my longer novelette and novella singles is a good idea – long stories are more likely to sell. Shorter stories that are neither freebie or novelette, neither the fish nor fowl of the world of self-publishing – I need to take a close look at those. If they’re already in a collection, maybe that needs to be their home instead of living a dual existence as a 99 cent single AND part of a collection. If I drop the unpublishing axe at all, it’s going to be on some of those awkward short stories that are not also flash fiction, novelette, or novella.
I have a lot of thinking to do as a result of this exercise. That makes it already successful, in my book. Some of the points above are me thinking ‘aloud’ on the page – and I’m inviting all of you who have read this far to tell me what you think.
This post has been as long as some of my short stories. If you read it all, you are definitely one of the people I’d love to hear a comment from – you were interested enough to stick with me and my thoughts for quite a while, in reading-on-the-internet terms.
See you in the comments section.
Familiar Adversary: More Adventures In Cover Design
This post has happened before, with different examples. It happens often enough that it has its own tag, “cover art”.
This familiar old story is about self-publishing on a shoestring. Self-publishing when the often reasonable prices of people who design covers for a living are out of practical reach. And trust me, paying someone else to make covers would be nice, and I might have found a way to make it work if I was writing novels. But, as of this writing, I have 71 distinct titles out, because I’m silly enough to write a bunch of short stories instead of just a few longer works.
Trust me when I say that paying for 71 professionally designed covers is beyond my means.
So I’ve been making covers for a while now. I keep them simple, believe me. I’ve seen some of the videos and blog posts that professional designers make, showing them making covers with (a slight exaggeration, perhaps) 849 layers and who knows how many cool ‘shop effects.
I’ve kept it simple, and cheap. When in unfamiliar waters, stick to the basics and learn them very well. So around the beginning of 2012, I downloaded GIMP, free image-manipulating software that is a distant cousin to Photoshop, and started figuring this cover design thing out.
Through practice, I’ve gotten better since January 2012. Above, the cover on the right represents my skills in October of that same year. I’d gotten slightly better — some of my earlier covers were even less appealing — but not much better. The left/top/better-looking cover is one I made tonight, because I had done a bit of writing and hit a point where I had to put the story I was working on down and do something else. So I made dinner, and then I decided that poor old Adversary, long burdened by one of my early cover attempts, deserved better.
It does deserve better, it’s a good story. Of course, I always say that, because I wrote the thing. Nevertheless, I think it’s good and it deserved some new ‘clothes’.
I could, maybe, have gotten away with keeping the base art. Or — wait — no. It’s too monotone. Too ‘someone stirred the tomato sauce a bit too hard and got froth in it’. But even worse than that, those white fuzzy drop shadows. Ugh. I can’t believe I thought that looked good.
Perhaps worse is the tagline in front of my byline. “A short story by,” I have come to understand, is shorthand for “I am very new at this.”
There are worse things than being a n00b. But it puts some people off; despite the old saying we really do judge a book by its cover, even those of us who say we don’t. We do, we definitely do. It’s just that some of us have realized that a cover is not always the whole story and make it a point to check out the contents. In a perfect world, nobody would have to bother with learning how to make a prettier book cover. But this isnt’ a perfect world, and for every person who says ‘even though that cover is ugly, I’m going to read the blurb and see if it sounds like a good book’, twenty scroll right past looking for a prettier cover.
So that “A short Story by” tagline had to go. You’ll note that I did the one-word-title-in-giant-stacked-letters thing. I’ve seen that style knocking around on a few recent books, so I thought I’d give it a go, too. Maybe it’ll fall out of fashion and I’ll find myself redoing this cover again in a few years because that style will have become cliche by then. Or maybe not.
In any event, I think the title, and the whole cover, look much better now. It’s still a very simple cover, but I think that it has a bit more impact and just plain looks more appealing. And the top-heavy layout of byline and title left me with a blank at the bottom that was a nice place to put a little one-line teaser tagline, which I like to do once in a while.
That might be a n00b move, but I don’t care. As long as it doesn’t say “A short story by” anymore.
Among Apple Trees — A Thankyou For Patreon Patrons; Others Will Just Have To Wait 90 Days
But everyone can see the cover, at least!
This story is Patreon-exclusive for 90 days as thanks for helping me reach my $60/month funding milestone!
As I wrote for the folks on Patreon: This is one of my less common pieces — mainstream fiction (magical realism at most) rather than science fiction or fantasy. I wrote this one shortly after the passing of an elder friend of the family. It’s not his story or mine, but it carries truth regardless.
It’s the story of an old man, a young one, and a lot of memories.
A Pledge of one measley dollar grants access to read this while it’s still exclusive to Patreon, rather than 90 days later. I also post a piece of microfiction (or longer, if I feel like it and/or am inspired) before the end of each month as a thankyou for contributing to keeping the S.A. Barton household running, so I can continue to prise precious writing time from the joyously greedy fingers of my 2 year old, 4 year old, 17 year old, wife, and (less joyously) my own worries.
Those of you who read what I write here at Seriously Eclectic — especially those of you who take a moment to comment or hit ‘like’ or say hello on Twitter or elsewhere:
You help, too. Don’t think you don’t. Yes, this particular story is for the Patreon crowd for now — but don’t I give you plenty to read here, too? And pretty cover art to look at? Sure I do.
Looking forward to hearing from you all.
Coming Soon: Garbage Music
I wrote this one a while back, and posted a few choice paragraphs from it. It’s a story from a future Australia scarred by a disaster, changed, different, perhaps stronger in some ways. But more than that, it is a tale of music, of communication, of growing up, and of finding wisdom by finding what — and who — speaks to you.
It’s almost time to publish it. With a little luck, I should have it to you by the weekend. As usual, I think you’ll like it. Click the link in the paragraph above and see if you agree.
New eBook Cover, A Bit Retro, Unlikely to be Used Soon
This is for a story I have recently finished editing. I probably won’t be publishing it as an ebook any time this year; I’m waiting to hear back from a beta reader on it, and then I plan on submitting it… somewhere, I’ll work that out… when it comes back (after I consider the reader’s advice, of course).
It’s mainstream/literary, modern day, focused on social issues, inspired by recent headlines. Since I’m trying to get it published, I shouldn’t say more.
But I really like the way the cover came out, and that, I can share. It strikes me as very retro-minimalist, and I’m pleased to have composed it.
A Year Ago Tomorrow: Isolation
Time flies. I remember working on these stories and it doesn’t seem possible that it was so long ago. On the other hand, my mind is full of the stories I’m working on now, so I wasn’t even really thinking of them before I realized the anniversary of my publishing Isolation and Other Stories was coming up. I only noticed because I decided to poke around in my blog archives for the heck of it.
Isolation and Other Stories contains my longest work to date. Most of my stories weigh in shy of 7500 words; I’m very much a short story writer. I have given thought to producing something at novel length. I have a couple of stories sitting partially completed that could probably work as novels. Some that I’ve produced in the past might be expanded to that length. The title story of this collection, in fact, could probably become a novel if I were so inclined. As Isolation stands, it is the longest thing I’ve ever written, at 20,000 words. (Down on the Farm, also in this collection, is the second longest at 18,000 words.) While I’m happy with the ending, it is one of those endings that looks forward to an uncertain future and invites the reader to think about what is possible. It leaves room for a continuation.
Maybe I will, one day, sit down and write that continuation. But for now, I still have the feeling I had when I first sat down to write with the idea that I might produce a story that others would read. I have the feeling of a psychic backlog of ideas unvoiced. From grade school through my early twenties, I occasionally produced short stories for my own satisfaction. I had the creative urge, but did not think what I created could be worthy of the interest of others. After my early twenties I gave up on writing and let my creative urge express itself through the medium of role playing games.
I like role playing games. I think they’re a worthwhile exercise in cooperative storytelling for most participants. But they weren’t ultimately satisfying to me, and I misused them as an escape from reality. I won’t say I’ll never participate in one again, but I have no plans to. It feels, to me, as if it would be too easy to use them to squander the hours and days I need for writing and for raising my children and for all of the other things in my life. That’s not a problem with the games; it is my problem with them.
The writing is satisfying in a way the games never managed to be for me. And there is three decades, give or take, of creative pressure behind me, urging me to voice all those backed up story ideas.
So I produce short stories, and I gather them into collections like Isolation and Other Stories once in a while. And I hope that others will read and enjoy. It is probably poor form for an author to have favorites, but this is my favorite collection so far. I think someone who has never read me before would be well served to start here; it feels like my best foot forward.
It also doesn’t hurt that the cover art was contributed by my talented stepson, Erik Elliott. That gives it a certain sentimental element in my thoughts and feelings beyond my fondness for the stories.
You can see the blurbs for all of the stories from clicking through here, on this sentence.
The first five thousand words are previewed here, so you can enjoy a sample of Isolation.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading this. I certainly enjoyed writing it for you.
Patreon Exclusive Short Story: Waiting For
Thanks to supportive friends and family, I’ve reached (over) $20/month in patronage on Patreon. Every dollar makes it a little easier to remain a full-time writer — many thanks!
I promised that when I reached $20/month I would post a short story that would remain exclusive to Patreon for 90 days. I posted that story today. If you want to read it, you’ll have to head over and look: click here.
Adventure Club is Now Available on Smashwords — Ebook or Just Read It Online
Here it is! It’s free, and at 1249 words it’s a quick read. Click ‘read online’ to read it directly, or download the ebook format you prefer.
It will also be showing up on iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Amazon (links in the right sidebar to all of my titles — look!) within the next two weeks. Possibly sooner, Smashwords’ distribution has been getting a bit quicker lately.
Enjoy!
Coming Soon: Adventure Club — A Free Short-Short
In the next few days, I’ll transcribe this one over to my ebook template and publish. It’s going to be free, and it weighs in at about 1200 words. There’s a little more about it over on my Patreon page — but the long and the short of it is, it’s science fiction, set in a very peaceful world where a naive man meets someone who is a bit more in touch with the ancient animalistic side of human nature. I think you’ll like it. Keep your eyes peeled.
