Your First Published Novel: Part 4

With Death by Cliché released, our story starts accelerating rapidly. Not because things start taking off, but because of the opposite. Over the next years, not a lot happened.
In that first year, I was high on the hog, as it were. My downloads never completely took off, but they topped off at a respectable 5,000 downloads. I had something to talk about when I did the convention circuit. It gave me a little cred.

See, back around 2003 I was one of the winners in Writers of the Future. I was asked to be guest of honor at the local academic symposium, Life the Universe and Everything. Not for writer’s of the future (although they didn’t tell me that), but for my work in RPGs. I’m a pretty charming guy. I’m fairly reliable and you can put me on any panel. If I don’t know the subject, I’ll keep the audience laughing while the smart people dole out knowledge. I spoke of some of this back in Part 2.

Once I was well-liked at one convention, others in the area started asking me to speak or do panels. I ran workshops. I pressed flesh. But there was an unspoken clock over my head.

About the time I stated, I would hear about people who won Writer’s of the Future and never accomplished anything else. They would hang around the cons until they were quietly written out of the schedules. So I had gone, at that point, 5 years without a major achievement in fiction. RPGs, sure, but nothing in fiction. Part of that was that I had high standards. Part of it was that I was still learning my craft.

So the moderate success of Death by Cliché came as a welcome relief. A little cred, at last. Self-published, yes, but few podcast audiobooks hit those kind of numbers. I wasn’t Scott Siegler, but I’d done a second thing and found it relatively well received.

The next few years I had minor moments that brought me joy. Occasionally, I’d find a new review of the book. At one point I found it referenced a few times on tvtropes.org. The status of the book gave me joy from time to time, but my ability to record a new audiobook had withered away, so there wasn’t much more to do in the area. Also, mentioning it at conventions became less and less relevant as the years went by.

In there sits a long period of time where I didn’t write much, either. I worked on my RPG stuff, but I no longer had a writing group and without a writing group (or some other external deadline) I don’t write.

I eventually started another writer’s group with some local pros, but by then Death by Cliché was old news.

By 2014, I had moved on.

Your First Published Novel: Part 3

On the release of the second episode of the podcast audiobook of Death by Cliché, Howard Tayler’s fans brought my server to its knees. For hours, you couldn’t get the page to come up, much less actually download the episode. I had over ten thousand downloads in those first few hours and my little server wasn’t enough to handle it.
At the time I was working for the web hosting company that hosted the site. They sold processing power, but not actual bandwidth. Fortunately when you work at a company like that, you know other employees with servers of their own. By the time episode three came out, I had two mirrors set up to take the stress off the server. It worked well. For the rest of the run of the podcast, every time I released an episode, my server would have about half the downloads and the mirrors would divide the other half between them.

Things went well for the next few podcasts, although I realized right away that I’d made a terrible mistake. Somewhere around episode 2, people started demanding a way to buy the finished book. I had none. Of all the financial mistakes I’ve made in my life, this was probably the worst. If I had been thinking, I would have had e-book and lulu print on demand versions of the book already sitting in my store. Want to find out how the audiobook ends? No sweat, just click here to buy. But I had nothing. Stupid.

I don’t know if what happened next was a mistake exactly, because I don’t see a way to have avoided it, but the next hitch came around Christmas when Carolyn went on vacation. I believe other family issues cropped up at the same time. Obviously, there was no reason for her to vacation-proof the podcast, she wasn’t making any money off it, after all. So when she left, there was nothing we could do but wait for the next episode to come.

A podcast has momentum. Once you take the anomaly of Howard’s stress test for episode 2 into account, my downloads had been steadily building throughout the release. If things had continued, I probably would have hit that critical 10,000 download mark where people start noticing just how popular your audiobook really is. But I didn’t. It was a month before we released that next episode.

In that month, I lost it all.

My downloads dropped to almost nothing. People had walked away from the book. I was at the halfway point and everything I’d done that far had just evaporated with the month off.

I spent the rest of the podcast rebuilding those numbers. In the end, I was close to the numbers I’d had before the break, maybe even a little above them, but I’ll never know for sure how big the book could have gotten if I hadn’t missed a week.

And possibly more critically, although I’d been building an ebook version, it became obvious I wasn’t going to finish it in time to capitalize on people wanting to know how the book would end. So when the podcast ended, it was over. There was very little left to do but note the numbers I did get and move them into my query letters.

It was over. For a second time.

Your First Published Novel: Part 2

My friend W Dan Willis has the theory that any given road to publication works once, because they plug up the hole after you get through. It’s certainly true that most writer’s I know have some unique aspect to their story. I, for instance, have never been rejected by a publishing house, only by Agents and Magazines. That isn’t to say that I haven’t submitted to a house. It also doesn’t mean I have a half dozen novels out. It means that historically, if I submit I’m either accepted or they never reply at all. Everyone has a twist to their story.
Mine came shortly after I gave up on Death by Cliché. A member of my writer’s group, Carolyn Nicita, decided that she wanted to build herself a portfolio of audio work. So she offered to record and edit for free if I read. Traditionally, I haven’t been big on self publishing. Even when I have gone the self publishing route, it involved starting my own game company and soliciting licenses from at least one company where I already had a fan base. I would not normally even consider this, but in the end I decided why not Death by Cliché. People seemed to enjoy it and it was unsaleable. If anything it gets funnier when read aloud. If there was ever a book for the experiment, this was it.

So late in 2008, we began recording Death by Cliché. I believe that was the same year that I moved, but I seemed to recall all the recording sessions happening in the old house, to we must have done all the sessions relatively closely together in a big push. Just about the time I actually moved, we were pushing out the first episode.

Howard Tayler has a panel he does called it “Charisma is Not a Dump Stat.” One point of the panel is to make sure writers know that while writing is a solitary task, marketing is not. I’ve always believed this myself. In fact, when I go to conventions, I only attend panels when I’m flying the colors for some topic or another. I do the panels where I’m speaking, and otherwise I spend my time in the green room, networking. I have been accused of holding court, but I like to believe that has more to do with the fact that my back injury makes getting up and sitting down fairly painful, so I spend a great deal of time ensconced in a chair. The more throne-like the better.

At any rate, I didn’t know Howard before I started conventions. I didn’t know any of my writing friends before that. Brandon Sanderson once told me that the first year we met, before he’d published, he hung out with Dan Willis and I in the halls because we were the “real writers.” In retrospect, that’s pretty funny.

At this point I’d been doing the local convention circuit pretty heavily since LTUE made me a guest of honor through a wacky set of hijinks and misunderstanding. I’ve been told that the way I handled that convention has a lot to do with my popularity with the LTUE staff. For instance, at the banquet after I was sitting at the table with the con committee when I won a child’s toy tiara in a giveaway. I don’t know what kind of guests they had in the past, but they were all terrified that giving me a little girl’s toy would insult me, and I was still Guest of Honor for about another two hours. I claimed the prize, put it on my head, and in my deepest and most manly voice declared, “I’m a pretty pretty princess.”

The point is, a great deal of my success can be attributed to the fact that I take great pains to make certain that people WANT to be around me.

So it isn’t terribly surprising that when we released the first episode, Howard Tayler wanted to talk about it on his blog. I believe at the time he had about 50k unique hits a day. The first episode saw a large amount of downloads. The next week, for the second episode, he asked his crowd, “Let’s break Bob’s server.”

And break it they did.

Your First Published Novel: Part 1

In 2006 I began writing Death by Cliché. The book started with a few conceits. I’d written a couple comedic short stories and felt they turned out fairly well, so I wanted to try my hand at a novel-length comedy. I had years of experience writing as a game designer at that point and I wanted to embrace every bad cliché, both in gaming and in bad fantasy fiction. So it had to be a secondary world fantasy where the main character was from our world. I had to write my own chapter quotes and call great attention to the fact. The main character had to look like a complete Marty Stu. Most of all, I wanted a high joke density so that I didn’t have to worry how many people got any one joke. I could write as obscurely as I wanted, knowing that if one out of three jokes landed with any given reader, it would still be a funny book. I call this “The Dennis Miller Quotient.” Because I’m old.
The book worked out well. There were some scenes that were hilarious when read allowed that were merely amusing on the page. Conversely, there are jokes on the page that don’t translate at all to a live reading. For instance, I wrote a chapter where I make a meta joke about the spelling of its and it’s. Still, I was happy with the result. Damico, the main character, was funny and engaging. A little bit more of a “bro” than I am, but while I used a lot of my own experiences in the book (I was called by the Todd McGovern of ICE marketing once to go hijack a demo…Todd was completely correct in reading the warning signs), Damico isn’t actually me. I chose the name because it sounded like I had just slightly changed my own name. Damico was actually the name of my Father’s best friend in College. I called him Uncle Jack.

Through 2006 and 2008 I drafted the novel. I often feel good about a novel somewhere around the third draft. At least I did with this one. In 2008 I started shopping the manuscript around to agents. The reactions were generally positive. Many sent me form rejections, of course, but the ones who didn’t basically came down to a single criticism. The criticism matched the notes of pretty much every critique I received while drafting the book:

“Well I liked it, but no one else will.”

There is an very specific skill that any author must have, but many writers can’t develop. You must be absolutely, head over heels in love with whatever you’re working on, but ready to walk away from it at a moments notice. The main need for this skill is when you write a book, unless you’ve sold a sequel, you can’t just write the sequel. Also, I’ve found that if you do a draft of a book too soon after the last draft, you aren’t objective enough to see the flaws. You see what you had in your head, not what you put on the page. (The amount of time you need to leave a draft fallow probably has a lot to do with you as a writer. Also, I expect it shrinks with experience). I don’t know how many writing groups I’ve been in where a thirty year old writer was beating a dead horse he’d given birth to in high school.

So when you finish a draft, you have to be ready to put it completely aside and work on something else. When I’m writing a book, I spend the last two months plotting my next book. When you’re drafting, though, you have to be so passionate that you’re ready to work and rework the book until you have the best thing you can possibly write. When you’re shopping it you have to be completely passionate about what you’re selling, but the second the query is out, you have to suddenly be passionate about the project you’re actually working on. (Because you aren’t querying books you’re still writing, correct?)

But worst of all, you need to know when to walk away from a book. This book resonated with the readers (at least those who gave me notes). But in the eyes of the business people, it was unsaleable. It didn’t matter whether they were correct or not. Writing is a business and the businessman in me saw the writing on the wall, as it were.

So in 2008 and walked away from Death by Cliché.

My Conduit 2015 Schedule

Greetings!
This weekend I’ll be on several panels for Conduit 2015. This appears to be my schedule:
Friday
3:00 (Zion) There and Back again – the Hobbit Trilogy

Saturday
10:00 (Snow) The Dungeon Escape
12:00 (Arches) What do we know about Star Wars 7
1:00 (Snow) Discworld – Farewell Sir Terry
2:00 (Snow) The Marvel Movie Universe
3:00 (Zion) Choose Your Own Apocalypse

Sunday
12:00 (Zion) Working as a Collaborator

It looks to be a lot of fun. Hope to see you there.

Your First Published Novel: Prologue

When I published my first RPG book, the experience was full of highs and lows. I’m sure a lot of great stories came from that time, but I wouldn’t know because I can’t remember any of them. Lets face it, that oft painful four-year process was a long time ago. I mostly remember the ironic and sad stories, such as the fact that I calculated my hourly after the company in question collapsed and realized that I had made .36 cents per hour.
When I started Final Redoubt Press, I posted a series of blogs about the experience. The posts were popular and I enjoyed them, so it’s occurred to me to do it again.

Last week I finalized my contract with Curiosity Quills to publish my (formerly) podcast audiobook Death by Cliché. So starting with this post, I’ll describe my experience. Many of you are probably interested in the foibles of your first novel. Others might just be interested in what it takes to convert a modest podcast audiobook success into a traditional novel (spoiler, it started as a novel, so it isn’t hard). Either way, these posts are for you.

Here are the rules. I will not lie to you. I will not hold back information that is mine to reveal. I will probably be cagey about actual numbers and checks, because there are others who DON’T want to reveal that sort of thing, and if I reveal my numbers it becomes easier (maybe trivial) to figure out the numbers of others. That’s not my secret to tell. Other than that, I’ll give it to you straight. If something is painful, I’ll tell you. If it delights me, I’ll tell you. When I’m inevitably stupid, I’ll tell you.

So next week we’ll start with backstory. I’ll talk about writing and shopping the book, why I made the choice to go the audiobook route, and how we generated interest in the book years later. I’ll then move on to the contracts and negotiations and everything that came before this point. I’m not sure how many weeks that will take. From there, it will be nothing but tears and agony, I’m sure.

I’m sure it will be a ride. Thanks for reading. I look forward to seeing you again next week.

Death by Cliché is Coming to Print

Hello all!
For all you Death by Cliché fans out there I have a great announcement. I have signed a contract with Curiosity Quills to bring it to print.

I’m very excited to work with such a great company. I’m delighted to see the book published. I want to thank everyone who’s encouraged me and told me how much they love the book.

Thank you!

Regards,

Bob

A Site Adjustment and Upcoming News

Hello all!
I’ve moved the Death by Cliche files audio aside so that they can’t be downloaded any longer. I hope to be able to say why in a few days. Thank you for your patience.

Regards,

Bob

Product 6 Release Eminent

Greetings!I just wanted everyone to know that product 6 in The Echoes of Heaven is just about complete. There won’t be a sourcebook included with this product, but the adventure stands well by itself. This will be part 6 in The Moving Shadow Campaign. We are set to release on New Year’s Eve.
Thanks for your patience and have a great holiday season!
Bob

The Echoes of Heaven Product 5 Released (with special offer)!

Greetings. Final Redoubt Press would like to thank you for your patience and announce the long-awaited release of our 5th Echoes of Heaven Product: In His Name/The Last Hallowed Place. We’re very proud of this product and hope you gain as much enjoyment from its use as we did producing it.
Skip to the end for details on a special release-day discount.

In His Name details the churches of The Echoes of Heaven setting, with mechanical write ups, politics, NPCs, and dozens upon dozens of adventure seeds. It also details the great holy city of the Human church and it inhabitants and special sites. A must for any Echoes of Heaven player or GM.

The Last Hallowed Place is the 5th adventure in The Moving Shadow Campaign. Now that the characters have escaped from the trap set for them in The Tainted Tears, Morthorn has almost completed his plan to end the world. Can our intrepid adventurers stop him in time, or is this the end of the Mortal Realm as we know it?

For those who have waited so long, we’ve provided a special release day sale. Use the link below to purchase the bundle version of the product including the OGL, Rolemaster, and HARP rules for the price of a single version. Get three times the content and help us at Final Redoubt Press return with a bang. It’s our gift to you and your gift to us all at the same time.

http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?discount=73358

Thanks, and good gaming!

Cover Hell Continues

In my last post I said that I made a pass at all the covers. I was hoping I was mostly done but dreading, honestly, that I was anything but. Many, many hours of work later, and I have finished a second pass on all the covers and turned them over for copy editing. How much more work is necessary depends on how many errors the copy-editor finds.
In addition to that I’ve started updating the internal text (including the preview download) to include updated information about the licenses. At the same time I’m upgrading the interior of the preview to full color, like the 4e version of the products. I don’t want to delay the other existing copies with large-scale interior updates, so I’ll restrain myself and only handle the licensing issues in those.

On the Death by Cliche front, I’ve finished an output of the e-pub version with a table of contents. I did this while gaming at a friend’s house, however, so it hasn’t been tested yet. The Kindle version is still pending. I don’t have news on a cover, there.

That’s the major news, the covers are just dozens and dozens of hours of work. With them receding, however, I hope to get updated copies online over the next weeks.

Regards,

Bob

Back in the Saddle.

Just a quick update on the week’s progress. On the Echoes front I’ve been working on bringing the existing books into compliance with the new license situation. That means editing covers and interiors to meet the requirements of the new ICE license. I also need to update the text describing the licenses and the other versions of the products. This is a time-consuming task and I’ve finished my first pass on all the existing covers.
As I mentioned in my recent post on Playtesting.net (this post will be showing up in both locations), it looks like my HERO System license won’t be renewing. Since I’ve started releasing small conversions for 4e, I’m adding that as my fourth system, although the actual 4e conversions won’t have a place in my schedule I finish getting Death by Cliché up and released. Essentially, I only have time to work on two Final Redoubt projects at once.

As for Death by Cliché, I’ve done my initial page making pass and it is finished. I’ve also done a proof of concept export for Kindle and e-pub and some subsequent exports to handle formatting issues. They all look good now. I’ll need to add a table of contents to the e-book versions for navigation purposes. That’s next on my list. I also need to get a cover. It looks like I’m not going to be able to get a piece of reuse art for the cover—my first choice—so I’m going to need to commission an actual piece. We’ll see how that develops. I’ve found some artists I think would do a good job but I haven’t contacted them yet.

We’re within a few weeks of starting the Rolemaster playtest of the final adventure, O What a Hell Would Heaven Be. I’m very excited about it. I’m halfway through the RM/HARP conversion of the final bonded weapon of the campaign and I’m VERY glad that bit will soon be done. There is only one major NPC in this one, so the statting of the adventure itself should proceed apace. I should be able to keep ahead of the playtest group handily enough once the NPC is statted.

So that’s where we are. I’ll try to keep you posted on events and thanks for your patience.

Regards,

Bob

Rallying Cry

So its been some time since I’ve been truly active in posting.  First a quick update.  As you probably remember, my mother had cancer, a double mastectomy, and a course of chemo.  Shortly after that began, I was laid off from my last job.  I did find a new job and that’s involved a lot of schedule updates and quite a bit of overtime.  Also, there was a major change over at Iron Crown Enterprises that made all my licenses with them invalid.  That has been remedied now, and the time that took was completely my fault, not theirs (they in fact told me I could continue selling while we worked out the terms, but I knew I wasn’t going to be as responsive as I’d like during that period).  Things have settled enough that I’ve started writing again and I feel that I’ve proven to myself that I can work regularly enough that I can take up publishing tasks again.
So what does this mean to you?

If you’re a fan of my game products, it means I’ve begun working on them again.  Unfortunately, I think I’m going to have to drop the HERO System portion of the line, at least for the time being.  I haven’t been able to work out a new license on that front.  Over the next weeks, you should see Echoes trickling back into the stores as I update their covers and adjust the legal text to comply with the new licensing.

If you’re a fan of my fiction, I’ve spoken with my trusted consultants and we’ve decided that the e-book industry has taken enough of a hold for me to begin producing non-PDF e-books.  In that vein, I will be releasing Death by Cliché for purchase.  You’ve enjoyed it for free and there is, of course, no obligation to buy, but if the book brought you joy, I’d like to invite you to buy a copy.  I intend to release it for Kindle and in e-pub.  I haven’t determined for sure yet if it will only be available for e-pub in my store or if you will be able to buy it through iBooks and Barnes and Noble.  I intend the latter, but we are in the preliminary stages.  I also intend to release a print version on Lulu for those of you who are e-reader adverse, but this is just as a service to you.  While I’ll probably make more money per book with Lulu, that won’t likely help grow my business.

So here’s the rallying cry.  Sometime in the next months, I’ll be officially releasing these books.  I know that many of you are probably in either the Nook, iPad, or Kindle camps.  That’s fine.  We’ll probably try to hit all of those more or less at once.  The crux is this, we’ll want to hit them with purchases all on the same day.  The more of you that buy at once, the more the features of these stores should take notice.  Amazon, for instance, ranks the sales position of each book in the store.  If we can crank that high in one day, we might be able to get the store to take notice and if we can get it to begin offering the book to new customers, and if you give me plenty of thoughtful reviews, we might just be able to accomplish something here.

If not, then at least you have a copy of a book you enjoyed.

I’ll be talking about this over the coming weeks, and because of my full-disclosure policy, I’ll probably be blogging about or answering questions on the business considerations.  But Chime in if you want to buy a copy and let us know the format of your choice.  I’d like to know what the level of enthusiasm is here.  I know that it’s asking something to expect you to give money for something I’ve already given you for free, especially so long after the date.  So let me know.  Do you want to purchase a copy of Death by Cliché for your very own?

Bob

Stay Tuned!

I know I’ve said this before, but stay tuned. I’ve fought my way back into the light of day and I intend to make an announcement today or tomorrow. If you loved Death by Cliche or you just want to help give me the excuse to start producing again, you’ll want to be a part of this.
So stay tuned. Look for my rallying cry.

Bob

I'm Employed Again

BTW, I tweet more than I blog. @robertjdefendi :)
So someone just mentioned in a tweet that I haven’t updated this in a while. I’ll take a quick break to do so now.

I’m employed. I work for a wonderful company, upgrading client software. It’s a lot of overtime, and I haven’t figured out how to meld all my scheduling needs together. I bought a new laptop. I’m hoping that will help me use those inefficient parts of my time better.

Anyway, I just thought you should all know.

Bob

Still Unemployed

Still unemployed. My mother had a couple surgeries last week, related to the cancer. They went well, but took a long time. They removed half her thyroid and a tumor. Both turned out to be benign.
I’m nearing the end of my edit for the novel I’ll probably record after the Echoes short stories. It feels good to be in the climax. I’m writing a book that will either be the next major novel podcast or the one after that. It’s going well. I’m in a writing group with Howard Taylor (schlockmercenary.com) and Dan Willis of Dragonlance, among other worthies, and it seems to be going well.

More next week.

Bob

New Job Lead

One bit of good news this week. Friday I found out that my old employer has a job opening for a tech support supervisor. I’m not sure if there’s any layoff stigma attached to me, but if there isn’t, I think I have a pretty good shot at that job. My last job there had a great deal of overlap with the supervisors. I don’t think that anyone could be applying with as much relative experience as I have, not even the other people who had my job (I had the shift that needed to sup for supervisors most often.)
Anyway, I applied Friday night when I got home. Obviously, they haven’t even seen the application yet, but it’s in. We’ll see how that develops.

Bob

This Week

The job hunt continues. No big news on that front. We’ve (Howard Tayler, Dan Willis, and I, plus friends and Sandra Tayler) started a writers group that meets on Wednesdays. I’ve started running the Echoes of Heaven novel through the group. It’s nice to have something that will force me to write something new.
Anyway, not a whole lot to report on this end right now.

Bob

Birthday

My birthday was Tuesday. Monday night I received a call about a job interview, so I scheduled it for Tuesday morning. It was the only birthday present I was expecting on my birthday, so I thought that was a nice little present to myself. I was up nights at that point (I guess I still am), but it was at 9 am, so I figured, hey, I’ll go to the interview, then come home and go to bed. Howard Tayler (www.schlockmercenary.com) and I planned on going out to eat that day, and I had a date that night, so I planned on getting to bed about 10:30 am, sleep until 3:30, get up, meet Howard, then head up to my date.
All in all, a good plan.

I took a little nap that night because I’d only had about 4 hours sleep the night before. Woke up at 6am after two hours. Enough to get me by.

Left at 8 am. It’s about a 40 minute drive, but I’ve never done it at 8am and I didn’t know how bad rush hour would be. I knew it was TERRIBLE coming back in the evening.

Pulling out onto the main road, lights flashed behind me. Evidently I saw my opportunity to merge with traffic and didn’t come to a complete stop at the stop sign, then merged in front of a sheriff. The stop put me about 15 minutes behind, but I thought I still had time.

Then, about a half a mile away from the interview, I blew my right front tire. Pulling over, I realized that when my key bent we made four copies from the bent key, but none of them opened all the locks on my car. The one I had on my keyring opened only the driver’s side door, and I didn’t think any of them had opened the trunk. It was 8:55. Cursing, I called my mother to see if she was willing to go find the other keys, then come meet me. Then I threw out a thumb and caught a ride going to a building one away from the building where I was interviewed.

I got there at 8:59. I went to the bathroom after checking in the the receptionist.  As I walked out of the bathroom, I heard her telling the interviewer that I had just arrived. I told him about my trip and he seemed impressed that I still made it on time. Whew.

I didn’t feel like calling my mother back during the interview. I thought that would be a bad move, so I waited until it was over. She doesn’t have a cell phone so she couldn’t really leave until we knew I would be ready to go. So I settled in and read a book on my iPod while I waited for her to do the 45 minutes or so of driving.

It was then I realized there was no way I could go out with Howard. If I did NOTHING else, it would be 1 pm before I got to bed. I’d have to be awake by 5:30 to get to my date on time (it was 50 minutes away . . . everything is 45 minutes away from my house), which meant 4 and a half hours sleep at the most, and we all know you never get to bed immediately upon getting home. So I called Howard and rescheduled, mad at my day for another thing going wrong.

My mother found me and one of the keys opened my trunk (and the other doors, BTW). She’s never changed a tire herself, and she had a hip replacement surgery that’s set an upper limit on her applying force to anything, so she sat in the car and watched.

Then I had to change a tire. I have had two rear-impact car accidents that have damaged my lower back. I can think of NOTHING more painful, that I have actually done, than changing a tire. I was literally on the verge of tears from the agony by the time I was done. My mother came out toward the end and found that there was something she could do. Every time the wrench fell off a lug it was an excruciating processes for me to move from the position where I could turn the lugs to a position where I could reset the wrench, and then another excruciating move back. She just stood next to me and reset the wrench when it slid off. When my back finally gave out completely and I just couldn’t possibly be in position one moment longer, I said I needed a break. She turned the jack twice at that point (it was basically finger loose) and pulled it out.  I hadn’t realized I was basically done.

I called a couple tire places on the way because you usually save about 30-50 dollars if you call in a head of time. Tire places will often cut you a deal if you’re shopping different places by phone (they want you to come in), but they give you their normal prices if you walk in the door. I found a decent deal and drove there.

By the time I got home, I could barely move from the pain. I ate dinner, went to sleep, woke up after 4 hours, and went on my date. Saw Clash of the Titans. The author did some interesting things with that movie that I don’t think anyone but I noticed. :) Then I came home, napped, and Called the day dead.

It seemed like a bad day. Let’s list the bad:

1) Got pulled over on the way to a job interview.
2) Blew a tire on the way to the same interview.
3) Didn’t have a way to get into my trunk to fix the tire.
4) Had to wait a long time for a ride.
5) Had to cancel the only thing anyone was planning on doing for ME on my birthday (Dinner with Howard).
6) Had to make my mother drive out to save me.
7) Had to change a tire.
8) Had to buy a tire when I’m unemployed, using up the money I’d intended to spend on myself for my birthday present.
9) Had to go on a date with 4 hours sleep.

But I’d like to point out:

1) Didn’t GET a ticket despite being pulled over.
2) Blew the tire in a high traffic area instead of in the middle of nowhere on my fifty minute drive to my date.
3) Still made it to the interview.
4) Interview went well enough that I’m cautiously optimistic.
5) Got picked up by the first car when hitchhiking. (That has NEVER happened to me before. People NEVER pick me up. I’m large and sometimes I frighten people).
6) Found out I DID have a key that opened all the locks.
7) Had a pleasant date.

So I still didn’t get much in the way of any birthday presents (my mother produced a pair of dockers for my interview that she told me after the fact would be my birthday present . . . she’d bought them months or even years ago) I call the day an interesting series of good luck rather than bad. Let’s call that a win.

Bob

Still Laid Off

So we’re now past the third week of me being laid off. I’ve received my severance check, but if I get rehired by the same company within 60 days, I have to pay 75% of it back. Since my best lead right now is a job that opened up there the same day I was laid off, I have to be VERY careful with money.
So updates: Carolyn told me I didn’t have to pay her for the recording stuff I’ve already done, considering my situation, and she’s not charging for the Jake Black Benefit Story. But I can’t pay her for anything else, obviously. In addition, now that I don’t work there, I have to pay for this hosting. In the meanwhile, I’ve been hitting my daily deadlines for prepping ahead on the fiction. Right now I’m working on what I THINK is going to be the first novel after all the Echoes short stories (probably starting about 4 months into the schedule after I start releasing again.) It’s one of my earlier works, and I thought about rewriting it from scratch, but I think it might be funner to analyze it a bit as I put it out, for all the other writers out there. Let me know if you think that would be something you’d find entertaining. Either way, Josh passed it off as not too embarrassing to release. :)

As for cancer and chemo, this Thursday is my mother’s last chemo infusion. It will almost certainly be the worst, and I’ve cleared my weekend for it, but after Sunday, every day should be better than the last. Hopefully, forever.

Bob