Any Hints?

 So research for the new (new) WIP is ongoing. There's a lot of it to do, paradoxically because the Heian period of Japan isn't well understood. We only have a sketchy idea of those times, and almost none of life away from the Temples and nobles. That means I can give myself free rein on a lot of things - make it up, really. But it also means I really have to get the basic points right, because those are the hooks that the rest hang on. If the reader is going to understand where the story is set, he needs those hooks.

 So, I'm very busy not writing. (Doesn't help that we've been a House of Plague for a week. When the girls get sick, they really go to town, and soon everyone else is sick too.) But anyway, I've been working out a social structure, including ranks and offices, sifting through various versions of Buddhism to pick the schism that divides the two main sects, and learning about Japanese mythology. Boy, that last is complex. Their gods are sometimes referred to as the Ten Thousand, and they all apologise for being gods, apparently. I haven't figured out why yet, so any hints.... But that gives you an idea of how time-consuming this is. Research is always tedious. This time it's extreme, but still, it hasn't changed its nature.

 So that makes me wonder, again, how some people manage to write, edit and publish a novel every six weeks.

 I could not do it. Not with the nature of what I do. If I took a cocktail of drugs to keep me awake and functioning 24 hours a day, if I abandoned my family, gave up my job, shut myself in a shack to work and did nothing else, I would still struggle. It's only possible if I abandon research and do no background work at all. But that changes my work beyond what I will accept. Imagine if Tolkien had written LOTR but not bothered to devise an Elvish language and culture, or a pantheon of gods, or any of the history of Middle-Earth. Would the story be as strong? Of course it wouldn't. It would be more like something by David Gemmell, where history is covered in two sentences and then someone gets killed again.

 In a way I admire those prolific writers. But there has to be a trade-off, speed in favour of quality and depth. I think they've chosen to make money rather than to make something of quality. Or to try; god knows I'm no Tolkien or Guy Kay, but I do my best to make something meaningful. I want to write books that people will come back to five years later and read again, and maybe find something new inside.

 I don't write for money. I write for the thrill of it, for the ideas and discoveries, some of which are found in the black pits of research. I'll stick with it.

Pip pip.

Patterns of Faces

 Hi all.

 I was researching online the other day, wiffling about as I often do - twelve windows open, you know, and for some reason I'm reading about the nocturnal call of the Mongolian Scented Bat. Not what I set out to do, but so it goes. Anyway, I came across a reference to a battle in ancient Japan in 1185 AD, which ended with many warriors of the beaten side throwing themselves into the sea. All very dramatic, eh?

 Crabs from that coast have the pattern of a human face on their shells. Go on, look it up. They're the Heikegani Crabs and they're a bit creepy.

 If you're a Fantasy author, you can't read something like that without a hundred lights going off in your mind, like filaments burning out in a power surge. The crabs are said to protect the souls of those dead warriors, until they can right the ancient wrong. I had a torrent of ideas about evil rising again, or maybe a force of good trying to return and dispose of the darkness that triumphed that day. Five minutes later I had a secondary culture which knows more of this than the main one, and a band of renegade warriors whose existence has never been proved. Then came the MC, a misfit warrior from one of the military temples, and the one concubine he can afford, who's the brains of the outfit and who harbours a secret she's never dared tell him. That secret relates to the renegades and the ancient battle, and it will change everything.

(Because women do change everything, don't they?)

 All that in less than half an hour. Which is great, I love it when my brain pops and fizzes like that, there's no feeling like it. Except I've been working on a new WIP for a few weeks now, blocking out and researching - which is actually what I was doing when I stumbled on a reference to the battle and these weird crabs. I started to write chapter one just last week. And now I can't stop thinking about the black and freezing water of the bay, the secrets it hides, and the forces which radiate out from it to change the world.

 Usually I'd tell myself to be disciplined, to see one project through before I start the next. But there's that fizz in my brain... I'm a weak man, sometimes. Long story short, I just started the new (new) WIP, with a man treading on fallen blossoms as he walks through a garden. Time will tell if my instincts are guiding me right, won't it?

 Cheerio.

Onwards and Upwards

 Self-publishing has changed.

 When I published my first book, back in 2013, people mostly put their books out and talked about them a lot - blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. The aim was to try to create awareness. To some extent it worked, and I sold a couple of hundred copies. I thought that was OK for a debut. Onwards and upwards, things will build from there.

 They haven't - in fact, my sales have fallen away. My latest book, Fanged Fish, is the worst seller I've had so far. That's because online self-publishing is different now. It's not enough to talk a lot on social media, you have to advertise on Facebook and Amazon, buy slots on book promotion sites like Bookbub (good luck with that), and generally spend money. Ironically, I could have done that easily in 2013, but now I've got kids I don't have the money to spare.

 So what to do? I've used GoFundMe and similar sites before, to not much benefit. No help there. My family is a) fractured and b) poor, so that's another dry well. It's frustrating. I've learned a lot about publishing, and improved my writing too I think, and I can't make any serious impact because I don't have money to spend.

 I begin to think that online self-publishing has become as hard to break into as traditional publishing, only the gatekeepers are advertising companies instead of editors.

 To add to the problems, I can't write a novel in a month, as many online authors seem to do. They bang out a book every two or three months - sometimes even less. That seems to work for them, especially in YA. But my work takes too much research, an I want to rewrite and edit too many times, so it doesn't work for me.

 I need to think about what I'm doing, and how to make it productive, because right now I'm not sure I know.