I'm am currently in the middle of a heart wrenching, pulse pounding, f'ing writer's block from hell. Halfway through my latest M/M Romance novel and I've stalled. I've tried going back and editing, I've tried power writing through it, I've even allowed myself to take a break -- nothing.
But then, when you've hit the wall, there's always your blog waiting to be updated.
The motivating factor to having a blog is that I hate updating my blog even more than I hate working on the middle of a novel. Does anybody even read these things? Is there anybody out there?
I tell you what, the first person to send an email to brianjjaxn@yahoo.com saying that they read this blog post gets a free eBook of their choice (one of mine ;-).
There. I've done it. I updated my blog. Now, back to my writer's block (Sigh).
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Self-Publishing and Getting Paid
Well, I finally get paid this week. With Amazon paying 60 days after the close of each month, it's been 90 days that I've been publishing without getting paid. Smashwords is ever worse. With Smashwords paying 30 days after the close of the quarter, and distributors taking their time to post sales, it won't be until early February that I receive any money from my Apple or Sony sales.
Add to that the fact that First Son seems to have run its course causing October to be a less than stellar month.
It's time to get product out there. Fortunately, Melanie is almost finished with the fourth Chloe Boston book, I'm halfway through my next M/M Romance book, and Melanie sent and official letter to Dorchester asking for a reversion of rights on three of her early books. That means we should have some material coming out soon.
In addition, we're still waiting for The Book of Dreams Series to catch on. We've sold very few books in the series. Once/If it catches on, we should see it and the Chloe Boston Series carry us for a few months.
Happy Halloween all.
Add to that the fact that First Son seems to have run its course causing October to be a less than stellar month.
It's time to get product out there. Fortunately, Melanie is almost finished with the fourth Chloe Boston book, I'm halfway through my next M/M Romance book, and Melanie sent and official letter to Dorchester asking for a reversion of rights on three of her early books. That means we should have some material coming out soon.
In addition, we're still waiting for The Book of Dreams Series to catch on. We've sold very few books in the series. Once/If it catches on, we should see it and the Chloe Boston Series carry us for a few months.
Happy Halloween all.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Book of Dreams
My wife and I have just released a new fantasy series that we're both excited about. The series is called "Book of Dreams" and follows a dream retrieval expert into the dreamscape. We collaborated on the books which was a fun process. The covers for the books are quite cool. We bought them from iStockPhoto.Kindle: Amazon, Nook: Barnes & Noble, All Formats: Smashwords.
Anyway, if you get a chance, check out the new series. Meantime, I'm back to writing a new M/M Romance for release sometime next month.Kindle: Amazon, Nook: Barnes & Noble, All Formats: Smashwords.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Computers New and Old
Well, my wife just received her new computer today. It's a Dell portable and she's very excited. However, we've had to spend the entire day configuring it and trying to transfer files from the old computer and I'm sick of it. Besides that, it runs Windows 7 with which I'm less than impressed.
Meanwhile, I continue to trundle along on my 6 year old Dell portable running Windows XP. The computer is so old that I've worn most of the letters off the keyboard. Now my wife can't use it because she doesn't touch type. I don't care since I'm in trouble if I try to think out where a key is. It's either in my hand or it's nowhere. Who needs to look?
Funny the way that we've become such a disposable society. I like to hang on to things. They become comfortable. I don't like change. But at the pace that technology keeps changing around us we're almost required to throw away all our existing technology and upgrade every few years. Me, I'm sticking with my old computer. My wife keeps threatening me with an upgrade, complaining that I don't value myself. But that's not true. I just like my old comfortable world and will fight to hold onto it until my poor little portable is a smoking puddle on my desk.
By the way, my computer has one of those pencil erasers in the center of the keyboard for controlling the mouse. I love the thing. I've become so good with it that I can use it to do artwork on my computer. This form of mouse control has gone out of style. I don't want to lose my little nub.
Anyone else with me on this?
Meanwhile, I continue to trundle along on my 6 year old Dell portable running Windows XP. The computer is so old that I've worn most of the letters off the keyboard. Now my wife can't use it because she doesn't touch type. I don't care since I'm in trouble if I try to think out where a key is. It's either in my hand or it's nowhere. Who needs to look?
Funny the way that we've become such a disposable society. I like to hang on to things. They become comfortable. I don't like change. But at the pace that technology keeps changing around us we're almost required to throw away all our existing technology and upgrade every few years. Me, I'm sticking with my old computer. My wife keeps threatening me with an upgrade, complaining that I don't value myself. But that's not true. I just like my old comfortable world and will fight to hold onto it until my poor little portable is a smoking puddle on my desk.
By the way, my computer has one of those pencil erasers in the center of the keyboard for controlling the mouse. I love the thing. I've become so good with it that I can use it to do artwork on my computer. This form of mouse control has gone out of style. I don't want to lose my little nub.
Anyone else with me on this?
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Web Pages and Such
I just spent the last several days performing a massive design update to my wife's home page. This is pretty amusing considering that I don't even have my own home page. Anyway, I'm pretty proud of it. You can checkout the results at:
Melanie Jackson's Home Page
I got the inspiration from a sample of a friends home page and then took it to the n'th degree. I'm particularly proud of the embedded blog at the end of the page that took me days to get right. Of course, my wife likes the mouse in the baseboard at the bottom of the page.
One could spend a lot of time working on web pages. Of course, with the number of people I know in need of a serious web page uplift, one could also make a series amount of money doing this work.
I leave it to you, should I continue to write poor selling books or switch over to selling my web services? Post your opinion as a comment to this blog (after all, I have no comments yet).
Thanks
Melanie Jackson's Home Page
I got the inspiration from a sample of a friends home page and then took it to the n'th degree. I'm particularly proud of the embedded blog at the end of the page that took me days to get right. Of course, my wife likes the mouse in the baseboard at the bottom of the page.
One could spend a lot of time working on web pages. Of course, with the number of people I know in need of a serious web page uplift, one could also make a series amount of money doing this work.
I leave it to you, should I continue to write poor selling books or switch over to selling my web services? Post your opinion as a comment to this blog (after all, I have no comments yet).
Thanks
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The First Negative Review
Well, I woke this morning to find that there was a new review on Goodreads. And it was a bad one. A 1 star review that pointed out typos, thought my book silly, the sex scenes were nothing but purple prose, ... In short, the person hated First Son.
My initial reaction to the review was feeling sick to my stomach after which a black cloud fell over me. It's the first time I've received a truly scathing review. I wanted to climb back into bed and pull the covers over my head. Then I decided to suck it up.
After further thought I realized that you can learn a lot more from a negative review than from a positive one. The review provided a lot of things to consider, which I will in future writing. Besides, taking one to the chops now and then is all part of being a writer.
Still, now I need to write again but I find that I do so with a little less spring in the old key press.
More to follow...
My initial reaction to the review was feeling sick to my stomach after which a black cloud fell over me. It's the first time I've received a truly scathing review. I wanted to climb back into bed and pull the covers over my head. Then I decided to suck it up.
After further thought I realized that you can learn a lot more from a negative review than from a positive one. The review provided a lot of things to consider, which I will in future writing. Besides, taking one to the chops now and then is all part of being a writer.
Still, now I need to write again but I find that I do so with a little less spring in the old key press.
More to follow...
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Birth of a Novel (First Son)
We'll take one as an example, although all five of them (currently available) have taken similar paths.
I wrote First Son specifically for Loose-Id. This is a popular publisher of erotic ebooks. Instead of writing M/F Erotica, I decided to try M/M Erotica since I had already written several M/F Romances.
Examples of my previous romances include Drained, my latest which sat on an editor's desk and never got read, but dammit I like it, Travel Logged, a great idea for a novel and my biggest seller until my recent publishing blitzkrieg, and Remote Control, another clever idea that is probably a weak romance since it was rejected by Dorchester Publishing after waiting months for a friend/editor to read it.
Several months after submitting a query letter and sample for First Son to Loose-Id, I received an email indicating that the editor loved it and I should submit the entire manuscript. I was off and running... until I received another email indicating that the manuscript was rejected by upper management. Too silly and improbable they said. After bragging to everyone that I was about to be published, I was heart broken at the receipt of the rejection email. This was the closest I had come to being published. First Son went onto the heap along with the rest of my rejected manuscripts.
At the beginning of August 2010, I was bored and thought I'd try publishing all the detritus littering my computer. One by one I submitted my manuscripts to Amazon and Smashwords, along with several rejected manuscripts by my wife, published author Melanie Jackson. Then I waited, kinda.
A post somewhere led me to Goodreads. There my wife and I promoted our books and First Son started to sell on Amazon. Initial indications, as with Blood Reich, my horror novel that lost Dorechester's First Blood competition, was that the book contained a lot of typo's. Of course it did, it had never really gone through the editing phase. It was published at the whim of a bored and frustrated computer software developer.
I read First Son and found many typos. I've since corrected them and committed new revisions of the book to Amazon and Smashwords. As I read the book, I found that I liked it. It may actually be my strongest work. Silly and improbable, definitely. But it's a decent book. I plan on writing future M/M Romances (in fact I've already started one which should be a stunner).
I'm thankful to those who have supported First Son. I'm grateful to those who have bought it. The greatest thing that can ever happen for an author is to have someone read their work. This has finally happened for me. At least to one extent, I can now die content. Now for the rest of my confusing life ;-).
Good night, all.
I wrote First Son specifically for Loose-Id. This is a popular publisher of erotic ebooks. Instead of writing M/F Erotica, I decided to try M/M Erotica since I had already written several M/F Romances.
Examples of my previous romances include Drained, my latest which sat on an editor's desk and never got read, but dammit I like it, Travel Logged, a great idea for a novel and my biggest seller until my recent publishing blitzkrieg, and Remote Control, another clever idea that is probably a weak romance since it was rejected by Dorchester Publishing after waiting months for a friend/editor to read it.
Several months after submitting a query letter and sample for First Son to Loose-Id, I received an email indicating that the editor loved it and I should submit the entire manuscript. I was off and running... until I received another email indicating that the manuscript was rejected by upper management. Too silly and improbable they said. After bragging to everyone that I was about to be published, I was heart broken at the receipt of the rejection email. This was the closest I had come to being published. First Son went onto the heap along with the rest of my rejected manuscripts.
At the beginning of August 2010, I was bored and thought I'd try publishing all the detritus littering my computer. One by one I submitted my manuscripts to Amazon and Smashwords, along with several rejected manuscripts by my wife, published author Melanie Jackson. Then I waited, kinda.
A post somewhere led me to Goodreads. There my wife and I promoted our books and First Son started to sell on Amazon. Initial indications, as with Blood Reich, my horror novel that lost Dorechester's First Blood competition, was that the book contained a lot of typo's. Of course it did, it had never really gone through the editing phase. It was published at the whim of a bored and frustrated computer software developer.
I read First Son and found many typos. I've since corrected them and committed new revisions of the book to Amazon and Smashwords. As I read the book, I found that I liked it. It may actually be my strongest work. Silly and improbable, definitely. But it's a decent book. I plan on writing future M/M Romances (in fact I've already started one which should be a stunner).
I'm thankful to those who have supported First Son. I'm grateful to those who have bought it. The greatest thing that can ever happen for an author is to have someone read their work. This has finally happened for me. At least to one extent, I can now die content. Now for the rest of my confusing life ;-).
Good night, all.
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