Back at it (Finally)!

Logging into the admin site of the blog felt like opening an old, neglected storage shed. I could almost see dust motes dancing in the air as I browsed through pages, comments that I hadn’t checked on, posts I forgot I had posted. Damn, it’s really been over a year since my last post.

I live a fairly isolated life, so I can forget quite easily there are people in different corners of the world that are actually checking for my content. So lemme catch you all up on the goings on of the writer in the trenches. First and foremost, I finally finished the Pendulum Heroes series. Hold on… before you go checking Amazon for the fourth installment, finished writing it isn’t the same as finally published it! I’m still waiting on cover artwork, beta reader feedback, and making meaningful edits that will make this whole journey pop with resonance. No, I meant RESONANCE. Yes, the tone that just kinda echoes with completeness. Don’t worry, I’ll send notice when it’s live, since I’m actively active now and all.

That was the main reason for my absence. Investing that much time in a story is a far different cry than writing a flash piece. After three books, this thing had to finish right… I couldn’t just cliffhang characters in someplace awesome like the last books. The whole thing was riding on this wrap up. The ending’s critically important… anyone who still feels the sour taste left by the Game of Thrones ending knows what I’m talking about. So, I obsessed about my own series ending for months as I wrote and stalled and abandoned it to come back and write more.

I think the obsessing and self-derived pressure paid off. I love how it wraps up. And now that the heavy load of writing out a fantasy series has wrapped it’s probably a good time to return to the business of writing, to tell the world I wrote a thing and that I’m still out here. I’ve always been a bit neglectful of the business side of writing, preferring the actual writing over things like promo, making ad campaigns, sending out mailers, etc. Luckily, the blog’s like this nexus space where I’m just being me in between beats where I’m trying to make characters and plot threads renting a room in my head make better sense or getting the folks out there in the webz to know that I got juicy story content for them to check out.

I don’t even know if I updated the bibliography over here. While I was obsessing over FINAL BOOK I did move a short story or two. I’ll likely spend some time on it, letting you all know which stories out there are free to view and separating them by genre and things like that. Before now it was kinda of a running list/active count with me trying to collect new pro publishing sites as I show off my bona fides. The unintended consequence of having written out four novels is a sense that I’m kinda over proving the worth via publishing creds and I just want my previous works accessible.

Basically, what I’m saying is that after all the hard work that went into the series, it’s nice to be standing tall at the end of it. It feels like a new day breaking.

Your favorite writer in the trenches is out.

Finally effin’ done.

My Monkeys on Attack in the Year’s Best SF!

I’ve been a bit busy promoting my fantasy novels because one was temporarily free, the other had just come out, and both by most folks accounts are pretty awesome, so I’ve been a bit behind on my sci-fi.  But NO MORE!!  You guys remember my steampunk cyborg attack monkey story, “A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds?”  Well it’s been included in Baen Books’ Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF Volume 5.  For those of you who don’t remember because you never read it, here’s what the discerning folks over at Tangent had to say about it:

Even among the more restricted form of military SF there are some unconventional pieces. I thought James Beamon‘s “A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds” was one of the best stories of the year and was amazed that this “year’s best” was the only one to select it. No one should miss this alternate history tale of the Crimean War with a street urchin press-ganged into combat aboard an airship crewed in part by vampire attack monkeys.

No one should miss this, their words not mine, meaning you, meaning definitely check out the book.  The Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF Volume 5 is available directly on the Baen site and other online retailers (Personally I’d go to Amazon.  There’s a crazy amount of price disparity among sites, which I find both strange and perplexing).  You’ll not only get a chance to check out my story but eleven other stories such as the widely acclaimed “Thirty-three Percent Joe” by Suzanne Palmer.

Plus there’s a VOTE!  Readers get to decide which of these stories is the best of this year’s best.  The BESTIEST!  Once you check out the book, head over to the Baen site to vote on your favorite.  I’m hoping it involves killer steampunk attack monkeys…

 

The Impact of Your Work

This humble post is about a story and a song, neither of them mine.

Let’s start with the story. Back in 2009, when I began my first foray into real writing and couldn’t get published to save self-esteem, I’d do market research at all the top magazines. Not only did I want to know what kind of stories they were looking for, I wanted to see what successful writers put in their stories, maybe get a glimpse at their secret sauce. Eventually I ran across Sock Heroes over at Strange Horizons. The first paragraph is a mere two words and from reading those words I was instantly hooked. Unlike some characters who come with built in empathy–the plucky orphan, the hooker with a heart of gold, the starry eyed youth–the protagonist was one I couldn’t care less about BEFORE I read those two words. And just like that, I cared. The author M. Thomas skillfully built on that empathy and by the time I was done I was simply amazed. I realized in no uncertain terms you could write about ANYTHING and it will make for an awesome story, if done right.

Her story spoke to me, and I wanted more from her.  Strange Horizons hosted another story called Beguiling Mona. I don’t have to sell you on how good it was; anyone familiar with my work can see how this story inspired me. Even hungrier now, and pretty much a fan at this point, I looked for more of her stuff.

And that’s where it all went dry. She had written from 2002 and stopped at 2006. By the time I had discovered her, a great many of the magazines and sites she had been published in were defunct.  Googling M. Thomas is probably the worst Google search I’ve ever had to conduct. Thomas can be a first name, a middle name and a last name and M. is just M. I literally could put M. Thomas with the name of the story with the name of the publication it was in into Google and have to damn near scroll to the bottom of the page to find a hint at the right person and oftentimes that was the SFF database ISFDB and not her actual work.

I’ve never figured out what happened to M. Thomas. I don’t know if she just gave up on writing, if life got in the way, or if she’s no longer with us.  I’d like to tell her that I learned much from her examples, especially with character development. Perhaps I’ll share those lessons with my fellow aspiring writers out there in a Creative Combat Arms section sometime in the future. Mostly, I’d like to thank her for enriching my life with her stories.

Her website never worked. It was ironically called www.found-things.com.

Let’s move on to the song. Much more recently, a couple months back, I stumbled across “The Last Laugh” on Netflix. Starring Richard Dreyfuss and Chevy Chase, it’s about an old comedian and his even older manager who decide to do one last comedy tour. So Chevy’s on a date with Andie MacDowell and they stop at a singer performing at a street corner. The song took over, this was at 53 minutes in, and it was bigger than the movie.

I’m ok with folk music and really not much for country… I think I can count on one hand the number of country songs I like and I’d still have enough fingers left to gouge some eyes in a bar fight. This song sat squarely  in the middle of those two genres and it absolutely spoke to my soul.

I tried to Shazam it and it failed. I ran it back, played it again and Shazam failed again. And again. I waited for the end of the movie, got her name, Jessie Payo, from the credits, did some Googling and still couldn’t find her.  And when I say Googling, I mean her name + fractions of song lyrics, maybe add the movie when that didn’t work, maybe change the lyrics to something else in case I misheard it with all that movie dialogue going on around it. Still nothing. In this day and age it’s like she wasn’t trying to be found or something!

Today I woke up, watched a show and afterwards decided I wanted to hear the song again. It still moved me and I realized why. It’s like a flash fiction story. The song encapsulates this brief span of time after you’ve gotten to know someone enough to be comfortable and trusting but before you and that other person are in a relationship and building it.  It’s not about love but rather the journey of discovery towards something that could be love, something neither of you’ll know until you go on the journey. For me, it brings me square back to over twenty years ago, to warm Louisville summer nights and two people who both knew whatever the hell they were doing made no sense but still took that journey together. So when I hear this song, it’s like my wife’s singing it to me.  And I recall a time that was pure magic and become joyful we decided to take that journey that didn’t make any damn sense together.

I decided to try to find Jessie Payo and her song again. And I found both. This is Jessie Payo’s website and this is her song Dance Real Close as I heard it on the movie. When you go to the comments section of the song’s page, you’ll see troves of folks pouring in, saying the movie brought them there and they searched and searched and searched and they were so glad to finally find it.

It’s amazing, the impact your work has had or will have on people. Scores of die-hards may find you and tell you or you may never know the extent.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a household name. It only matters that you put your skill of craft and passion into it.  That piece of your soul will speak to others in a language all its own and enrich them for having discovered it.

New Year Contributions to Gaming Fiction

My first post of 2019 is one of triumphant fashion.  For those of you who still haven’t succumbed to your that growing, gnawing, ghastly curiosity and gotten yourselves a copy of my novel Pendulum Heroes, featuring gamers stuck in their avatars, it’s now available on NetGalley.  Some of you may remember my last post where I mentioned the extreme expense of NetGalley… fortunately my active membership in SFWA not only proves I can write stories that are entertaining to someone other than me, but also affords me the opportunity to feature my novel on their NetGalley page for a fraction of the cost.  I think this is one of the best perks available for indie novelists like me.

And for those of you who want a teaser, a small taste of my brand of gamer fic, my flash fiction story The Familiar Monsters recently dropped over at Daily Science Fiction.  This makes my eighth time appearing over at DSF and it’s always  a pleasure to see my story debut over there.  They make little fanfare about it, so I kinda know as it hits my inbox or people come from all over the webz to tell me they dug it.  This one’s my first gamer fic to appear on the site and you can see that, just like in the vein of Stephen King when he says it’s never about the monster,  with me it’s never about the game.

So if you’re new to this sub-subgenre, try it out on me.  But hurry on the NetGalley thing… it’s only on there for a limited time.  Sometime next month it’ll go away, I dunno when exactly and February’s a short month, so act now or act now-ish, just as long as you don’t act crazy in the DMV… don’t be that person.

And of course, you can always just drop over to your favorite distributor and buy a fun new novel.