My 2019 Hypericon Schedule

Ever since my debut Lovecraftian horror novel The Thing in the Woods premiered in 2017, I've been selling books (both Thing and the collection The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Vol. 2, in which I have a short story) at conventions in the Atlanta area. I feared I've been reaching the point of diminishing returns and so I started looking for conventions or events outside of Atlanta I could sell at until I've got more books available. Thanks to the Southern Fandom Resource Guide's calendar I found Hypericon, which is usually in Nashville but this year is in Murfreesboro. I've never done any authorial business in Tennessee, so this will hopefully be lucrative.

Here's my schedule for the convention, which will be July 5-7 this year. All events are in Central Time and will take place at the Clarion Inn in Murfreesboro.

Friday, 7 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "In The Cauldron Boil and Bake." This is a panel dedicated to mixing genres. Think The X-Files, in which we had a wider science fiction plot involving alien colonization mixed in with "monster of the week" horror plots, more conventional crimes, and fantasy plots like the episode involving voodoo to raise the dead and another one featuring the ghost of a charismatic preacher who set out to forgive the man who murdered him. On my end, although The Thing in the Woods is straight-up monster horror, I drop some hints about the creature's otherworldly origins in a scene from the creature's point of view. The sequel I've sent to the publisher (and will self-publish if he doesn't want it) gets into the Grey/UFO/MJ-12 mythology and the third novel I've just started writing is more "small town creature horror," only with an old-school nuclear-test monster instead of something from another world. We'll get back to the alien-invasion stuff in the planned fourth book.

Friday, 8 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "My History With Horror." This is an autobiographical one-man show in which I discuss my own history with the scary stuff. It goes waaay back, beginning with watching Earth vs. the Spider on TV in pre-school, not being allowed to see Gremlins 2 and Arachnophobia in theaters (probably a good idea on my parents' part), seeing Jurassic Park when it first came out, and those elementary school staples, the Crestwood Monsters books and Calvin and Hobbes. I'll also discuss my first attempts at publication in high school, my first sale (the short but gruesome "I am the Wendigo"), and ultimately Thing itself.

Saturday, 1 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "Building a Better Beast: Monsters and Other Things That Go Bump in the Night." Something I've realized recently with the rise of "torture porn" is that I don't necessarily like horror movies per se, but monster movies. "Monster" being defined broadly to include things like dinosaurs, aliens, etc. After all, serial killers and depraved pervert torture types are real and should be feared, but giant bugs, alien energy beings building bodies out of human technology, vampires, formerly human S&M monsters, etc. aren't. I've written a lot of monster stories, so I think I'll fit in nicely here.

Saturday, 5 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "World-Building." This is an area of writing where I'm very good, if I do say so myself. And members of the different writing groups I'v participated in have said the same thing. :)

Saturday, 7 PM, Oakland Panel Room: "Marketing and Social Media For Authors." This is where I can discuss things like blogging, Twitter, newsletters, etc. This is an area where I need to improve, so hopefully I'll be able to learn from this panel as well.

I'm also going to be allocated slots at the author table to sell my books. Those haven't been finalized yet, but when they are, I'll update this post with the times. I'll also bring some books with me to each panel for anybody who's interested.

My NaNoWriMo Autopsy

Just as I suspected earlier, I did not succeed at National Novel Writing Month this month. Based on the numbers in my Excel spreadsheet, I wrote approximately 7,660 words, around 15 percent of the 50,000 words those who set out to climb the NaNoWriMo mountain must write.

Now it's time to conduct an autopsy, to see why I did not succeed and what lessons can be learned:

*Work was one of the biggest causes. Although I've made some money with my personal writing, that which makes most of my money should take the top priority.

*For my NaNoWriMo project, I picked a hard SF novel I had already begun writing. That genre is more difficult to write and requires more pre-existing knowledge than, say, a sword-and-sorcery or "New Pulp" novel. My friend Jamie, who "made" NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row, said my not succeeding at NaNoWriMo was understandable if I chose hard SF. I'd written most of the first chapter of a pulp adventure novel in an hour or so at DragonCon this year and that would have been a better NaNoWriMo project.

*If you look at my November blog-posting list, I found a lot of stuff to comment on. Although some of that was very time-sensitive and necessary (like the Starcraft novel review), others perhaps could have been held off on. Part of the issue is that if I run into a block, I often find something easier to do, like post on the blog or message-board. Good for bringing in blog traffic (November was one of the most-trafficked months this year), but not good for finishing a novel.

*I brought the first four chapters to my writing group and spent time revising them rather than simply writing new content. I have reason for this--one of my writing group's more active members is a former petty officer on a submarine who knows significantly more about the Navy than I do and his comments lead to large re-writes. It's better to get problems in earlier chapters fixed to minimize the amount of rewriting later. However good that might be more for the novel as a whole, that contributed to my not making the 50,000.

Oh well. Better luck next year.

First NaNoWriMo Update

Now begins Day Five of National Novel-Writing Month and I will update you with my progress, or lack thereof.

In the first four days, I wrote a grand total of 1,956 words. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing--except in order to meet the "50,000 words in a month" challenge of NaNoWriMo, I would need to write just under 1,700 words per day. This means I should have written 6,700 words so far. In order to be on-track for five days in, I would need to write in the neighborhood of 8,400 words today.

(I have some legitimate justifications here, but excuses buy no yams. I'm still very behind. Meanwhile, I have a friend who is not only meeting his goals, he is actually exceeding them.)

At this rate, I do not think I will be able to make the 50,000 word count. I am not giving up five days into the project--I will still try to write a lot more on what will hopefully be my second completed original novel (and an easier sale, since it will probably be shorter than my first). However, I am being realistic.

On the bright side, those 1,956 words have been rather useful. The first chapter is now complete and I've made significant progress on the second and third. I have committed to bring something to my Lawrenceville writing group for the 11/18 meeting. Since the deadline to submit something is 11/11, I might be able to bring the first three "real" chapters (as opposed to the prologue, which consists of a bunch of future news articles for world-building purposes) before the writing group.

Do novel titles count toward the word count goal? Several thousand words in, and I still don't have a title.

World-Building Tip: Daily Life In...

I was listening to the Writing Excuses podcast on non-traditional settings at the gym the other night and they brought in author Saladin Ahmed, an Arab fantasy writer who writes stories set in a fantasy version of the Middle East (the main example being Throne of the Crescent Moon), not the standard fantasy version of medieval Europe that most high fantasy or epic fantasy stories are set in.

Saladin discussed world-building with the hosts and one thing he said had been very helpful to him was a series of books entitled Daily Life In... that dealt with different historical eras.  I made a note to myself to find these books and then forgot about it until this morning.

I just requested several books from my local library system, including Daily Life in Civil War America and Daily Life in Victorian England, which are part of a series on daily life in different historical periods.  Given how Andrew Sutter's environment is more like the Civil War U.S. or the Western frontier, books on that topic will be appropriate, while Grendel's capital of Norridge and the advanced civilizations Andrew will encounter in the later books after he crosses the Iron Desert are steampunk and therefore books on Victorian England will be appropriate.

It might even be a good idea to buy some of these books, although the actual Greenwood Press Daily Life series does not appear to have had a large print run and the average price of these books is $30+.  Still, if I was willing to shell out $50 for the BattleTech codex Clans: Warriors of Kerensky for research purposes (and at some point I need to write some more BattleTech fiction, since I got paid $196 for my story "Skirmish at the Vale's Edge"), these books might be worthy investments.

Luckily the local public library has a lot of them, so I can just request them whenever I need them.  For those of you who have access to good public libraries and are interested in improving your world-building, I'd check these out.

In addition to books dealing with daily life in the time period you're interested in writing about, primary sources from that time would also be a good idea.  I also requested The Civil War Notebook of Daniel Chisholm: A Chronicle of Daily Life in the Union Army 1864 to research what life in a more organized army would be like--it will be useful to improve the Merrill-army sections of Battle for the Wastelands and will be especially useful in the later books of the series where we see Grendel commanding troops in the field and Andrew rising through the ranks of another army. 

Bernard Cornwell based a lot of the Sharpe novels on The Recollections of Rifleman Harris, the memoir of an enlisted man in the British Army of the Napoleonic Wars.  I might try to get hold of that one as well--even though the technology in the world of Wastelands is around 50-60 years ahead of the Napoleonic Era, the two Sharpe books I have read (Sharpe's Tiger and Sharpe's Triumph) provided me with lots of useful bits of information, including stuff on the use of bulls for transporting heavy goods and how Napoleonic-era armies actually had smoke-bombs for infantry use (to mask advances under fire).

I hope you all find this useful.