Took two calendar days, but my two new short stories are now up for sale in Amazon's Kindle Store! Yay! Also, today marks one year since Sci-FU was available in the Kindle Store!
If you're interested in these stories, here are some links:
Both are available for just $1 and I hope you think they are worth it.
I mentioned about two weeks ago that, to mark the first anniversary of Sci-FU being self-published, I was going to try to self-publish two short stories; The Death of Heroes and Professional Witness. Well, I'm better than half way to that goal! The Death of Heroes is ready to be published and I just need to edit Professional Witness, which I think I can do before the end of today. Not sure though, since it comes in at ~25,000 words (The Death of Heroes is only ~15,000) and is a more complicated story, so any continuity fixes may be more complicated to make as well.
Even if I do get them both uploaded to the Kindle Direct Publishing system today (actually, The Death of Heroes already is as a draft) I may still miss the October 17 goal, simply because Amazon takes the time to review at least the formatting of submissions through KDP. I'll still call that a victory though, since I cannot control that.
In the last post I mentioned there was something I wanted to talk about but had to wait. It just got posted so now I can talk about it! Actually, I probably could have talked about it before, but I didn't want to chance it.
In another previous post I mentioned Borderlands 2 and that "I have been playing it, and playing it, and playing it, and I will likely keep playing it, and keep playing it, and keep playing it." Turns out there is more to it than that as I was actually playing it without sleep to try writing a review! (This was completely my idea and choice, by the way. Though it is posted at OverclockersClub.com, where I am a news editor, no one there asked me to do it.)
After I got my copy of the game, I installed it and started playing and only paused playing to use the bathroom, eat, and make some notes. Immediately after finishing the playthrough, I started writing the review, which surprisingly went well. Sure at times I was forgetting the beginning of a sentence before I finished it, but then what would you expect when you've been up for 40 hours (just under 30 hours of which were in the game). There were no egregious errors in my writing, or unrecoverable sentences, so I'm pretty happy about that.
Part of the reason I put myself through this was to see how I would feel about the game after so much time in it. Essentially, I was testing it for burnout, which is not something typically tested for in reviews (I think). I am very happy to say that the very next day I ended up playing the game until 2 AM, because I lost track of time. Yeah, no burnout for me!
Like the title says, it feels like my last post was more than a week ago. Of course, if it wasn't for my mind finding random things to do other than what I should be doing, this post would not be written.
There is actually something I'm waiting to post about and I'm really hoping it will out there soon, but at this stage, I have no control over it. 'It's something fun,' is all I will say.
So in just over two weeks (October 17, to be exact) Sci-FU will be celebrating its first published year! Isn't that awesome! Yes, it is awesome and nothing anyone says will change that. It may not be some crazy success, but it is what I wanted to write and I love it, so there. Oh, by the way, I don't think I'll be making it free on Kindle that day, but I may change my mind. I'm thinking this for two reasons. One is at $3, I think people should be just as willing to buy it as to get it for free. (Seriously, $3 isn't much. That's less than the coffee some people drink!). Two is that the publication date is not as special to me as the starting and ending of the first draft. Publishing obviously is an accomplishment, but it's not the same as writing the thing. I guess an analogy would be birthdays and graduations. You (typically) celebrate birthdays every year, but who celebrates graduating from high school or college a year later?
There was something else I wanted to do that day though, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to pull it off. I was hoping to publish some more things either on the 17th or maybe the 18th but I just don't know if I'm going to be able to get my nose to the grindstone and do it. The Death of Heroes needs to enter form 1.1 I feel, and I've not even completed Professional Witness yet. One issue with not being employed (for me at least) is the complete lack of a daily schedule, so it's a lot harder to get myself to set aside time and actually cherish that time for what I intend to use it for. There is still over two weeks left, so it is possible I will be able to pull it off. After all, I'm pretty good at writing, it's the sitting-down-to-write part that's giving me the problem. Oh, and also do some artwork. (Professional Witness needs a cover and while I know what I want it to be, it is not going to be easy.)
Wish me luck, my imaginary readers! I hope I won't need it.
PS. I actually don't think anyone reads this, or reads it seriously. Probably the latter is a good thing, if the former is not true, but I think the former is true because why would the former be true if the latter is how one should not prove the former?
PPS. On a less confusing note, I have spent at least five minutes trying to come up with something clever to counter the last line. Obviously I have failed at doing so.
