Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
Between a crash course in learning deep learning and full court press on THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, I'm far behind on far too many questions. So even though my good buddy Jim Davies just hit me with a comment on a post which I want to riff on in at least five blog posts, I'm afraid for the next few days I need to focus on getting caught up on THIRTY DAYS LATER.
Back to work.
-the Centaur 
Also on the note of resurrections, the latest version of JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE is winging its way back to the publisher. Apropos, that I sent this back at Easter: this book has been through so many drafts that I’m starting to feel dizzy. I expect there will be at least one more, though, so I’m prepared.
Lots more work to do. For now, though, back to SPECTRAL IRON.
-the Centaur
What was supposed to be a quick exercise to help me visualize a reinforcement learning problem has turned into a much larger project, one which I'm reluctantly calling a temporary halt to: a visualization of all the states of Tic-Tac-Toe.
What I found is that it's surprisingly hard to make this work: all the states want to pile on top of each other, and there are a few subtleties to representing it correctly. To make it work, I had to separately represent board positions - the typical X'es and Oh's used in play - from game states, such as Start, X Wins, O Wins, and Stalemate.
The Mathematica for this is gnarly and a total hack; it probably could be made more efficient to process all 17,000+ transitions of the game, and I definitely need to think of a way to make each state appear in its own, non-overlapping position. But that will require more thought than my crude jitter function above, the time it takes to run each render is way too long to quickly iterate, and I have a novel to finish. I don't want to get stuck in a grind against a game known for its stalemate.
Ugh. You can see the jumble there; it's hard to see which transitions lead to X's or O's victory and which lead to stalemate. I have ideas on how to fix this, but I want my novel done more and first, dag nab it. So let me give you all the transitions of Tic-Tac-Toe in their full glory (22.8mb). I could say more about this problem - or I can say what I have, call it victory, and move on.
On to the novel. It's going well.
-the Centaur 
So THIRTY DAYS LATER, Thinking Ink’s first and latest steampunk anthology, has been announced on the Hugo Award-winning blog SF Signal! The post details the table of contents, which I won’t duplicate here, so go check it out!
-the Centaur
Wow, the Vegan New Orleans and Vegan Las Vegas posts are taking a lot longer than expected - I didn’t get them out yesterday like I wanted. But that’s OK, because even more important stuff happened: Thinking Ink Press received the print proofs of THIRTY DAYS LATER, our first fiction anthology, which happens to feature Harry Turtledove. Woot! Here’s Betsy Miller, the author and publisher who did much of the work making the physical copy of this happen:
I’m normally a hermit, working on my projects, but this past week has been almost totally focused on people: coffee with my thesis advisor talking about the Google, interviews, office moves with my team, coffechats with friends about the mathematical underpinnings of deep learning, dinner with my buddy Nathan Vargas, dinner with my buddy Derek Reubish planning a friends and family trip, and dinner with Derek and our buddy autocross racer Fred Zust catching up after Fred’s wife participated in a big race. No pics of that - I let Derek and Fred handle that chore - so instead I give you pics of the farmer’s wrap I had at Barnes and Noble while waiting for the call that Fred had finally hit town.
Work is important - I spent the morning working on math and writing prior to meeting Betsy to talk about the page proofs, which itself was another kind of working; and as you see above, I worked while waiting for Fred to arrive.
But there’s more to life than work. As another buddy, Gene Forrer, just pointed out, THIRTY DAYS LATER wouldn’t exist except for the strong camaraderie of all the authors at Clockwork Alchemy, and as Belinda Messenger-Sikes pointed out, that level of camaraderie among writers is unusual for such a small genre convention.
But that camaraderie does more than just produce books; it also produces communities, long-lasting friendships, durable associations that pass the test of time. I’m happy to have all the friends I have, and even though I love being a hermit and just working on my work, I enjoy all the time I get to spend with all my friends building and building upon our friendships.
-the Centaur
The small press I’m associated with, Thinking Ink Press, has just announced its first anthology, 30 DAYS LATER, edited by A.J. Sikes, B.J. Sikes, and Dover Whitecliff of the Treehouse Writers’ Group! Check out the Thinking Ink Press announcement for more details, but it should be coming out around the time of the Clockwork Alchemy conference this May.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A clock, image credit: Deutsche Fotothek, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license. Not the cover or anything, just something I liked - we’re saving the cover reveal.
Busy catching up on writing today, trying to get Chapter 1 of the rewrite of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE done, plus various small press tasks, plus writing documentation at work, plus getting new tires for my car … aaaa! So here’s a picture of a cat. Also, apropos, of a tire … but that made me think. I used to take a lot of notes - I still do, but I used to too - but a lot of the time a quick snapshot of something with your cell phone can do you one better.
I took a few pictures of tires and of the label on the inside of my door without having to write down any numbers. I then went back to my desk, found some highly rated tires on a web site, found a local tire store online, found the models they had in stock, looked up the old tires I bought for the car to confirm the numbers made sense, and made an appointment. Bam. No paper involved.
It’s amazing to me what can be done with storing information in the cloud, as much as I am a skeptic about it. (And even my complaints about how hard it is to take notes on computers are getting addressed - a fellow author just got a Windows 10 book and claims he now prefers its tablet mode for editing because he can use it like real paper).
But it amazes me even more that when I showed up early for my tire appointment, they fit me in so quickly I had my car and was on my way to work at essentially the time I would have normally have gotten in. As a colleague said, "how many times does THAT happen?" My answer? “ONCE. Just today.” America’s Tire, Mountain View, California. Go check them out.
-the Centaur
Hi, I’m Anthony! I love to write books and eat food, activities that I power by fiddling with computers. Welcome to 2016! It’s a year. I hope it’s a good one, but hope is not a strategy, so here’s what I’m going to do to make 2016 better for you.
First, I’m writing books. I’ve got a nearly-complete manuscript of a steampunk novel JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE which I’m wrangling with the very excellent editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books. God willing, you’ll see this come out this year. Jeremiah appears in a lot of short stories in the anthologies UnCONventional, 12 HOURS LATER, and 30 DAYS LATER - more on that one in a bit.
I also have completed drafts of the urban fantasy novels SPECTRAL IRON and HEX CODE, starring Dakota Frost and her adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost, respectively. If you like magical tattoos, precocious weretigers, and the trouble they can get into, look for these books coming soon - or check out FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE, the first three Dakota books. (They’re all still on sale, by the way).
Second, I’m publishing books. I and some author/artist friends in the Bay Area founded Thinking Ink Press, and we are publishing the steampunk anthology 30 DAYS LATER edited by Belinda Sikes, AJ Sikes and Dover Whitecliff. We’re hoping to also re-release their earlier anthology 12 HOURS LATER; both of these were done for the Clockwork Alchemy conference, and we’re proud to have them.
We’re also publishing a lot more - FlashCards and InstantBooks and SnapBooks and possibly even a reprint of a novel which recently went out of print. Go to Thinking Ink Press for more news; for things I’m an editor/author on I’ll also announce them here.
Third, I’m doing more computing. Cinnamon Frost is supposed to be a mathematical genius, so to simulate her thought process I write computer programs (no joke). I’ve written up some few articles on this for publication on this blog, and hope to do more over the year to come.
Fourth, I’m going to keep doing art. Most of my art is done in preparation for either book frontispieces or for 24-Hour Comics Day, but I’m going to step that up a bit this year - I have to, if I’m going to get (ulp) three frontispieces done over the next year. Must draw faster!
Finally, I’m going to blog more. I’m already doing it, right now, but one way I’m trying to get ahead is to write two blog posts at a time, publishing one and saving one in reserve. This way I can keep getting ahead, but if I fall behind I’ve got some backlog to fall back on. I feel hounded by all the ideas in my head, so I’m going to loose them on all of you.
As for New Year’s Resolutions? Fah. I could say “exercise more, blog every day, and clean up the piles of papers” but we all know New Year’s Resolution’s are a joke, unless your name is Jim Davies, in which case they’re performance art.
SO ANYWAY, 2016. It’s going to be a year. I hope we can make it a great one!
-the Centaur
Pictured: The bookshelves of Cafe Intermezzo in the Atlanta airport, one place where I like to write books and eat food.
So I'll be at Dragon Con this year, the convention I've attended the longest. It's where I sold my first book, it's where I've served on endless panels, it's where I'm an Eternal Member, of course, but this year, I'm a bit more: I'm an attending professional, which means I finally rate my own tiny, tiny little space in the program:
By day, Anthony Francis works on search engines and robots; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. He's the author of the Dakota Frost, Skindancer series including Frost Moon, Blood Rock, and Liquid Fire, and is the co-author of the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide.
And the really good news is, I'll be having a reading to celebrate the release of my latest novel, LIQUID FIRE, on Friday at 2:30PM! If you're a fan of Dakota Frost, you should definitely come by, because I'll read selections from LIQUID FIRE, answer questions, give away swag, and read preview versions of other future books in the series!
Title: Reading: Anthony Francis
Time: Fri 02:30 pm Location: Edgewood - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
From my perspective, however, what's even more important is that because I'm an attending professional, I actually get to know my schedule in advance! (At least most of it!) That means I can not only show up at my panels with more than a minute's preparation, I can actually, like, tell you all about them! I'm tentatively scheduled to appear on three panels:
Title: Steampunk/Magepunk/Dieselpunk?
Description: Steampunk branches out! Tips for the market for the Punk genres.
Time: Sat 08:30 pm Location: Embassy D-F - Hyatt (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Lisa Mantchev, Stephen L. Antczak, Gail Z. Martin, Anthony Francis)
Title: Steampunk and the TARDIS
Description: Victoriana and retrofuturist Steampunk themes are popular in Doctor Who.
Time: Sun 05:30 pm Location: Augusta 1-2 - Westin (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Dr. Scott Viguié, Anthony Francis, That Darling DJ Duo, Ken Spivey)
Title: World Building, Part 2: The Multicultural Multiverse
Description: This Q&A covers the wide world beyond Britannia.
Time: Sun 07:00 pm Location: Augusta 3 - Westin (Length: 1 Hour)
(Tentative Panelists: Michael J. Martinez, Milton J Davis, Anthony Francis)
There's a chance I may be on a few more, but for that, stay tuned. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you at my reading!
-the Centaur
It's amazing how things come together! Several of the Instant Books created by Thinking Ink Press, the small press of which I'm a part, are now on display as part of the local book section of the Arsenal artist-owned art store in San Jose!
One of the great things about Instant Books is that they seem to be opening new doors. I really enjoy working with traditional publishers and editors like Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books, and all my novels are published that way, but working with the writers and artists at the Write to the End group has really opened my eyes to the physical joy of handmade books.
Sure, I've done a couple printed chapbooks for my own amusement, but author and paper artist Keiko O'Leary introduced us to this folded format. Fellow flash fiction author Betsy Miller and I started thinking about the stories we had that fit the format. Writer and editor Liza Olmsted helped us prepare them for publication. Keiko, my wife Sandi, and I provided the art. And creative barrier-buster Nathan Vargas gave us important feedback that helped us push the project home - telling us how the prototype books had an awesome feel, like "snack books" that you can read in a single sitting but still get the feel of reading a traditional book.
Except on much, much nicer paper. It matters. It really matters.
My two titles are the flash fiction collection "Jagged Fragments" and the steampunk chapbook "Jeremiah Willstone and the Sorting of the Secret Post", and Betsy has the flash short "Bees.
So drop in on the Arsenal and check them out, or stay tuned to Thinking Ink Press for more awesome books!
-Anthony
No time to blog this proper - things are moving too fast. But here's a flyover of Clockwork Alchemy in pictures.
There's an awesome dealer's room … with droolworthy clothes (not my size, or it would be mine):
There's an awesome art show, with epic props and artwork:
And I do mean epic:
There are amazing costumes of all kinds ...
... with bleedover from Fanime and Baycon:
There's an awesome Author's Salon organized by the redoubtable volcano lady, T.E. MacArthur …
... and featuring alternate historian Harry Turtledove, Madeline Holly-Rosing of the Boston Metaphysical Society, Kaja & Phil Foglio of Girl Genius ...
... and me!
Many people at Thinking Ink Press helped out, either getting materials together prior to the con or helping out at the table ...
… and we managed to make many fans happy by bringing them LIQUID FIRE!
… and much more! For the very first time … someone bought the first Skindancer trilogy as a bundle!
Let's end on that happy note, and I'll have more tales of the con soon! One more day to go...
-the Centaur
If you love steampunk, flash fiction, or cool things printed on paper, come by Clockwork Alchemy this weekend. I'm pleased to announce that Thinking Ink Press is printing two pieces of ephemera for the con - the flash fiction Instant Book "Jagged Fragments" and the short story Snapbook "Jeremiah Willstone and the Sorting of the Secret Post."
I had hoped we'd have JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE ready for Clockwork Alchemy, but Debra, my editor at Bell Bridge Books, thought we should focus on getting Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE, out first - and she was right. That's out right now, in fact, just in time for the con - I got the books early this week.
But Betsy Miller of Thinking Ink Press suggested that I put something together for the con, thinking of three pieces I already had - the flash fiction pieces "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms" and "If Looks Could Kill" and the essay "The Rules Disease". Not to be daunted by taking on too much, I decided I wanted a piece teasing THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.
So I wrote a brand new short story just for the occasion, "The Sorting of the Secret Post".
Hand-printed copies of these books will be available at the con. We aren't sure what we'll do with these in the future - the beauty of instant books (books printed on a single sheet of paper) and snap books (chapbooks printed on conventional printers) is that they can be printed on demand for an event. We call them "ephemera" and they enable us to experiment with the printed word.
Here you see Keiko O'Leary of TIP folding instant books (and Liza Olmsted of TIP scowling at a tax form). The editions we've produced this time just came together in time for the con. You can't even have the first ones - Nathan Vargas of TIP bought the very first copies of both books, one-of-a-kinds that will never come around again.
"The Sorting of the Secret Post" in particular is a direct prequel to THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but it isn't clear whether we'll reprint it once the book from Bell Bridge is out (though I hope we will, we haven't decided). So come on down and get your copies … because whatever they become in the future, they'll be something different.
-the Centaur
This Memorial Day weekend, I'll be at the Clockwork Alchemy conference in the Author's Salon. I'll have on hand the new steampunk anthology TWELVE HOURS LATER, plus of course the newly released third Dakota Frost, Skindancer book LIQUID FIRE, which, despite the presence of an airship, is firmly an urban fantasy novel.
If I'm not at my table, I will likely be appearing at:
In addition to TWELVE HOURS LATER and LIQUID FIRE … I may have something else at the table. Stay tuned.
-the Centaur
I think I'll be posting this everywhere for a while … LIQUID FIRE, my third novel, is now available for preorder on Amazon. I talk a bit more about this on the Dakota Frost blog, but after a lot of work with beta readers, editing, and my editor, I'm very proud of this book, which takes Dakota out of her comfort zone in Atlanta and brings her to the San Francisco Bay, where she encounters romance, danger, magic, science, art, mathematics, vampires, werewolves, and the fae. It comes out May 22, but you can preorder it now on Amazon! Go get it! You'll have a blast.
And, almost at the same time, I found out this is coming out on May 22 as well…
TWELVE HOURS LATER is also available for preorder on Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace. Put together by the Treehouse Writers, TWELVE HOURS LATER is a collection of 24 steampunk stories, one for every hour in the day - many of them in linked pairs, half a day apart … hence "Twelve Hours Later". My two stories in the anthology, "The Hour of the Wolf" and "The Time of Ghosts", feature Jeremiah Willstone, the protagonist of "Steampunk Fairy Chick" in the UnCONventional anthology … and also the protagonist of the forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE from Bell Bridge Books. (It's also set in the same universe as "The Doorway to Extra Time" from the anthology of the almost identical name).
And, believe it or not, I may have something else coming out soon … stay tuned. :-)
-the Centaur
I've felt quite harried over the past few weeks … and talking with another author, I realized why.
In April, I finally finished my part of Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE - sending comments to the publisher Bell Bridge Books on the galley proofs, reviewing cover ideas, contributing to the back cover copy, writing blogposts. I also as part of Camp Nanowrimo finished a rough rough draft of Dakota Frost #4, SPECTRAL IRON. But at the same time, I had recently finished a short story, "Vogler's Garden", and have been sending it out to quite a few places.
In May, we expect LIQUID FIRE will be out, I have two stories in the anthology TWELVE HOURS LATER, and I have three guest blog posts coming out, one on "Science is Story: Science, Magic, and the Thin Line Between" on the National Novel Writing Month blog which has gotten some traction. And I'll be speaking at the Clockwork Alchemy conference. Oh, and I'm about to start responding to Bell Bridge's feedback on my fourth novel, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.
Holy cow. No wonder I feel so harried! But it's all for a good cause.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a friend at work shattered his monitor and inadvertently made art.
I recently was talking with Debra Dixon, my editor for the Dakota Frost series, and we realized that if we wanted SPECTRAL IRON, Dakota Frost #4, to come out next year, we needed to get a final book (from me) in her hands by January to have time to edit it before year was out.
Given that when we had this conversation we had not yet finished LIQUID FIRE (book 3) and I have yet to edit THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, this caused some understandable panic.
So, rather than keeping to my schedule to work on part 2 of PHANTOM SILVER (book 5) during this April, I decided to bump up my schedule and work on part 3 of SPECTRAL IRON so I'd have a draft done early this year.
I think it's working - the story is coalescing - but as you can see from above, the copyediting and page proofing of LIQUID FIRE ate up a lot of my time to write SPECTRAL IRON.
So I'm scrambling. Probably few blog posts until this month's 50,000 added words are done.
Onward!
-Anthony
I'm super stoked to announce that Jeremiah Willstone, my favorite steampunk heroine and protagonist of my forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, will be appearing in two stories in the TWELVE HOURS LATER anthology!
Created by the wonderful folks at the Clockwork Alchemy writer's track, this anthology features twenty four short stories each focusing on a single hour of the day. My two stories are 3AM - "The Hour of the Wolf" - and 3PM - "The Time of Ghosts".
Here's a taste of what happened on Halloween of 1897 … at 3AM, the hour of the wolf:
Jeremiah Willstone ran full tilt down the alley, the clockwork wolf nipping at her heels.
Her weekend had started pleasantly enough: an evening’s liberty from the cloisters of Liberation Academy, a rattling ride into the city on a battered old mechanical caterpillar—and eluding the proctors for a walking tour of Edinburgh with a dish of an underclassman.
Late that night—or, more properly early Halloween morning—the couple had thrown themselves down on the lawn of the park, and his sweet-talk had promised far more than this ersatz picnic of woven candies and braided sweets; but before they’d found a better use for their Victoria blanket … Jeremiah’s eyes got them in trouble.
“Whatever is that?” she asked, sighting a glint running along the edge of the park.
“Just a rat,” Erskine said, proferring her another twisted cinnamon scone.
“Of brass?” Jeremiah asked, sitting up. “With glowing eyes, I note—”
Uh-oh! What have our heroes found? And what will happen later … at 3PM, the time of ghosts?
Half a mile under Edinburgh Castle, lost in a damp warren of ancient masonry lit only by his guttering candle, Navid Singhal-Croft, Dean of Applied Philosophy at Liberation Academy, wished he’d paid more attention to the ghost stories his cadets whispered about the tunnels.
Of course, that was his own fault: he led the college of sciences at the premiere military academy in the Liberated Territories of Victoriana, and he’d always thought it his duty to drum ghost stories out of the young men and women who were his charges, not to memorize them.
Now was the time, but where was the place? A scream echoed in the dark, very close—and eerily familiar. Shielding his candle with one hand, Navid ran through crumbling brick and flickering light, desperate to find his father before the “ghost” claimed another victim.
If he couldn’t rescue his father … Navid might never be born.
DUN DUN DUNNN! What's going to happen? You'll have to buy the anthology to find out!
Stay tuned to find out where to purchase it! I'm assuming that will be "everywhere".
Prevail, Victoriana!
-Anthony
At long last, LIQUID FIRE is on its way to production at Bell Bridge Books!
This was a particularly difficult copyedit - not because the copyeditor was demanding anything particularly weird, but because a misunderstanding on the style guide led to an edit with five thousand annotations.
At one point working with the PDF, I was zooming in the text 200% to try to see what the copyeditors did, and even when what they were suggesting was clear, the number of edits caused everything to jump around crazily.
Finally I had to ask Bell Bridge to send me a .DOC file, so I could use Microsoft Word's superior tools. I was quickly able to identify 2,500 of the edits as being completely correctable - ellipses and spellings and such - and started a style guide.
Many of the rest were simple things like the Oxford comma, which we had a style change on. Counting these took us down to about a thousand edits.
Most of those thousand were minor changes which I readily accepted. The copyeditors had different suggestions than me on things like the use of the colon, which I often accepted, and paragraph breaks, which I generally did not.
But there was one particular thing - a replacement of the colon with the dash in sentences that already had the dash, which irked me intuitively, and which also turned out to violate the very Chicago Manual of Style rule the CE was citing.
Because we'd gone back and forth on this so much, what I finally sent back to Bell Bridge was a document with 200 tracked changes - mostly, the copyeditor's comments with extensive responses from me on what CMOS rules I was citing.
(We also had changes to Cinnamon Frost's broken English, contributed by the linguist Keiko O'Leary who helped me develop Cinnamon's dialect; but these were largely nonproblematic).
Debra and the copyeditors accepted these with few changes - but still sent a document back with over forty comments. At this point, even if I didn't agree with them, I took the changes very seriously.
A lot of their remaining suggestions violated some of the "rules" that I write by. But those are not hard and fast rules - and the fact that Debra critiqued them told me that, regardless of my "rules", the particular text at hand simply wasn't doing the job.
I accepted most of these comments. I rejected a small handful of others. And in a few cases, I took Debra's suggestions and solved them a different way, with a larger rewrite which just made the whole problem she saw just go away.
The manuscript I sent back to them had 30 comments or changes. By my count, it was close to the 130th distinct numbered version of the LIQUID FIRE manuscript that I've worked on.
Debra accepted it and sent it on to production on Thursday.
That was a good day.
Now on to the edit of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE!
-the Centaur
One of the roles conferences fulfill in my life is a chance to recharge. I'm driven to pursue writing, art, comics, software, entrepreneurship, publishing, movies - but I was raised to be responsible, so I have an equally demanding day job that pays the bills for all these activities until such time that they can pay for themselves.
Sometimes I describe this as having four jobs - my employment (search engines and robots), writing (primarily the Dakota Frost and Jeremiah Willstone series), comics (mostly related to 24 Hour Comic Day through Blitz Comics), and publishing (Thinking Ink Press, a new niche publisher trying to get awesome things into your hands).
Having four jobs means that you sometimes want to take a break.
That's really difficult if you don't have an excuse. There are literally hundreds of items on my to-do list that I could work on right now, all day and all night. If I finish one, a dozen more are clamoring for my attention - and that's not counting the time I want to spend with my wife, friends, and cats, or the time I need to spend on exercise, bills and laundry.
But a few oases exist.
Layovers in airports are one of those: I deliberately arrange for long layovers, because between plane flights you have nothing else to do other than grab a bite and a drink in an airport restaurant, chill out, and read something. True, I often work on writing during layovers, but it's big-picture stuff, researchy, looking at the picture on a scale larger than I normally do.
Conferences are even better. Whether it's GDC, AAAI, Dragon Con, Comic Con or Clockwork Alchemy, conferences are filled with new information, interesting books, even more interesting people, which spark my imagination - right at the time that I'm in an enforced multi-day or even week-long break from my schedule.
For a long time, conferences have been a great time to pull out the laptop and/or notebook to write or sketch. The idea for the Jeremiah Willstone series started after I saw some great steampunk costumes at Dragon Con; I sold the Dakota Frost series after Nancy Knight saw me writing at Dragon Con and pointed me to my editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books.
More recently, I've been adding to this the power of ruts. This is something that I need to expand at greater length, but suffice it to say I used to think I simply had to do something different every day, every week, every month. I used to keep lists of restaurants and tried to make sure that I never went to the same one two days in a row, trying new ones periodically.
But then I noticed that I really enjoyed certain things, but didn't always fully take advantage of them because of this strategy - great places to eat, cool coffee houses, and nice bookstores that I simply didn't visit often enough. Often, on top of this strategy, my schedule would change, making it hard to visit them - or worse, they'd go out of business, and those opportunities were lost.
So I've started cultivating habits - ruts - to do the things that I like. Not too frequently - you don't want to burn out on them - but if you do the same thing all the time, then you can be free to miss it any time. Even better, if you find a great thing that's efficient - like a place to eat near work, with a late night coffee house conducive to writing - take advantage of it regularly.
Because one day it may be gone.
At conferences, I employ this strategy with a series of life hacks - go to breakfast before the conference to up your energy level and organize your thoughts, pick the best breakfast place for writing and reading, break for lunch at 11:30 to 11:45 to miss the lunch rush, and also find the best place where there are no lines and concentration can be had.
At GDC, I've found a good set of hotels near the conference, a few good breakfast joints on the walk to the Moscone Center and a few places to eat slightly off the beaten path that are pretty empty just before noon - and I hit these places again and again, pulling out my notebook and tackling problems which are really big picture for me, mostly related to future game projects.
At Dragon Con I do similar things - hitting the Flying Biscuit breakfast joint that appears in Dakota Frost, getting coffee at the Starbucks in the Georgia Tech Bookstore, hitting the Willy's lunch counter that inspired the Jeremiah Willstone story "Steampunk Fairy Chick," et cetera, et cetera; and at each one I pull out the notebook and work on big picture story ideas.
These places are real oases for me: a break within a break, a special place set aside for thinking within a special time already set aside for recharging. Because of how human memory works, sometimes I can even pull out a notebook (or an older notebook), find my place from last year, and pick up where I left off, plotting my future in an oasis of creative contentment.
This, of course, is my strategy, that works for me - but it works so well, I encourage you to find a strategy that works for you too.
-the Centaur
Seems like I need to post these once in a while … I am, indeed, not dead.
Since finishing National Novel Writing Month last year, I've all but disappeared from this blog. Those who follow Dakota Frost on social media know at least part of the story: I've been working on LIQUID FIRE, Skindancer #3, and have just sent it off to copyedits after several rounds with my editor, Debra Dixon (who helped me make it a much better book).
That's not the only thing going on - I was also working on two stories for an unannounced project in the Jeremiah Willstone universe, desperately trying to finish a novella in the same universe, and working my ass off at the Search Engine That Starts with A G on a new project which I can't talk about at all other than that it's awesome.
Add to that working with Thinking Ink Press on the upcoming release of The Parent's Guide to Perthes, with the Write to the End group on various other projects, with my friend Nathan Vargas on his M-Theory system, and my wife on her art projects, and it's been a hell of a busy time.
But, yes, there were a few rounds of illness: more than one cold from air travel and food poisoning and some general bouts of the blehs - a week-long vacation is a GREAT time to catch up on that illness you've been putting off. A hell of a lot of that has been going around this year - I can think of a probably ten people who were out over the last few months.
I do worry about winter illnesses: my father used to get sick around the end of each year, and we thought it would eventually kill him. But it never did. And he stopped exercising from back pain, heart disease and long before the end. In contrast, I'm fine, healthy, exercising, recently taking in four hours of hiking with my wife in Monterey:
So, to recap: not dead, just busy.
-the Centaur
