Derek Haines's blog

The Endless War

My very special guest blogger today is Jack Eason. Author of Onet’s Tale. As fellow antipodeans lost in Europe, we share a special out of place experience. So sit back, read and enjoy a little taste of Jack’s wonderful writing.



The Endless War

No one knew the reason why the ritualistic war had begun. Or indeed, who started it, and even more to the point, why it continued. The endless winter months were spent in brutal and bloody battles between the people of Farren and the Tribes of the River in the wide plains of the valley. During the spring, and summer, right through until the harvest was gathered in the late autumn, peace reigned across the land, and then the completely crazy cycle of destruction began once more.
***
Idrell stood on the smooth ice covered rock, protected from the icy winter winds by his warm bearskin cloak, shielding his eyes with his hand from the reflected sunlight coming from the blanket of virgin snow that covered the wide plain. In the distance, he could see the Tribes of the River as they formed up in their straggling ranks, their weapons glinting in the sunlight. He turned to his companion.
“Gar, why do we do this, what purpose does it serve except to keep our numbers down?” he wondered. Gar looked at Idrell with a puzzled expression on his face, “because the Tribes of the River are our enemy,” Gar replied, “what other reason do you need Idrell?”
Idrell shook his head in disbelief at Gar’s reply as he climbed down from the icy rock and mounted his horse. As the two friends rode back to the head of the Farren army, Idrell’s mind filled with endless questions.
***
Idrell and Gar were lifetime friends. Idrell’s father Briam was the king of Farren, and Gar’s father Drevi was his lieutenant. Both men were now too old to participate in the ritualistic war, so their sons acted as leader and lieutenant in the endless bloody winter battles, while the two old friends remained in the old castle keeping warm by the roaring fire in the great stone hall.
***
Idrell drew his sword from its sheath beneath the warm folds of his cloak and reluctantly signalled the advance, leading the way with his horse slowly trudging through the knee-deep snow. Gar rode along and through the ranks of old and young men and boys, eagerly stirring them forward with the flat of his sword. Idrell wasn’t the only one who often wondered about the war, half of his army felt the same way!
As both sides closed the distance between them, they broke ranks to form smaller fighting units. Soon the sounds of sword, battleaxe, and war hammer striking their deadly blows filled the air. Injured men on both sides were trampled by their comrades as the battle reached its bloody climax.
Both the Farren army and the Tribes of the River were locked in the deadly ritualistic battle, neither side giving an inch in the struggle to dominate the blood soaked snow covered battlefield.
***
Idrell looked across the heads of his troops to where his opposite number, Riana, Queen of the Tribes of the River, sat on her horse. They looked at each other for a moment and then both bowed their heads and saluted each other with their swords. Battle horns blasted the air and both sides withdrew to their own lines to lick their wounds.
Hundreds of men and boys lay mortally wounded or dead in a tangled bloody heap. Their warm breath, mixed with the warmth given off by their sweat-covered bodies formed a low misty cloud that gently spiralled into the crisp air of the cloudless sunny winter’s day.
***
Briam looked up and stared at his old friend Drevi. The cold winter winds howled and made the old stone building creak and groan. Both men nodded in agreement.
“Idrell, Gar, wake up boys, it’s time for bed,” Briam said, as the two men looked at their young sons lying at their feet on the warm bearskin rug in front of the roaring fire.
“Who won father?” Idrell asked, as he yawned.
“Neither of you son, it was a draw,” he said, as he picked up the chessboard and put away the pieces...

You can contact Jack by Email
Jack Eason’s Blog
Follow Jack Eason on Twitter


Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

The Indie Book Collective

I wrote and article recently for The Indie Book Collective about my up and down experiences in book marketing. If you are considering publishing your own book, it may give you a few clues as to the do’s and don’t’s on promoting your own book.


The Indie Writer Route

For those writers who are ready for a challenge, ‘Indie’ or self publishing, is a viable alternative to traditional publishing. For one thing, rejection letters are a thing of the past. Secondly, you get you book published much faster. However, be prepared to work like you have never worked before if you decide the ‘Indie’ route is for you. You will be editor, proofreader, designer and your very own general factotum 24/7. …. Click to the full story....




Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

I Like New Times Roman

Think me old fashioned and stubborn, but I happen to like good ol’ New Times Roman. When it comes to readability in a book, I can’t go past it. So I unashamedly use it in the paper versions of my books.

Of course there are 1,000 opinions about font selection for a book. Sans serif, serif, modern, classic, avante garde and just plain silly. Bit for me it always comes back to the tried and true classics. While I don’t use Arial, Helvetica, Gill Sans or Baskerville in print, I do think these are great fonts for web use.

With the advent of e-books I suppose it hardly matters anymore anyway as the reader can choose their own favourite font no matter how much care went into the font selection at the time of publishing.

Another stuck in the mud view I have is about page numbers and headers. Unless page numbers are at the bottom of the page, I really think they look like an afterthought. Similarly for the author’s name and chapter title in the header. How obscenely grotesque and a complete waste of page space. Isn’t the name on the cover, spine, back and second page enough?

Then there is the nasty little trick of fattening a book by increasing the page margins. I received a book recently that weighed in at 365 pages, but used page margins the size of the Pacific. Not only did it look ridiculous, it was a waste of paper, shipping costs, carbon emissions and it made me so angry I didn’t bother to read it. If a book only has 25,000 words, making it into a tome will not make it carry anymore weight.

The last book design technique that irks me is the small and sometimes hardly noticeable increase in letter spacing (kerning) and/or line spacing. A 0.1 point increase in both can increase the page count by between 15 - 20%. Not a bad way to make a book look better value?

I think that is enough griping for one day. I must have taken too many grumpy pills for breakfast.

Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

Milo Moon Is Not In My Spare Room

There seems to have been some confusion created by my intrepid little character Milo Moon. In recent weeks I have received a number of messages and emails asking if I am indeed Milo Moon. Where this notion came from is beyond me. I have also had some disturbing questions regarding our relationship.

Just to set the story straight, Milo Moon is indeed an odd little man, but he is now living a happy life in retirement in central Switzerland with his pancake cooking lady companion Mary. The rumours that have been spread about me visiting him every second Sunday are totally untrue as is the maliciously fictitious gossip about him getting drunk over dinner and spending a number of Saturday nights in my spare bedroom.

Milo Moon does communicate with the world on occasions via a proxy connection to my server, but this is as far as our complicity extends. As he has been travelling to all corners of the world in recent weeks, he does need the flexibility of a roaming connection, so I have been happy to oblige.

I did however receive a note from Mary saying she was concerned that his excessive travelling might have a negative effect on his fragile health, and that she had found a way to freeze pancakes. Milo though has not communicated with me directly in recent months, but has instead resorted to using innuendo in some of his remarks hinting that I may indeed be a nasty person.

With this little update I hope that I have made the situation clear. Milo Moon is not me. He has never slept in my spare bedroom. He does have a proxy Twitter connection which I do not control. I am not a nasty person.

Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

The Sequel Temptation

I am in the middle of a dilemma at present. It is this. Do I write a Milo Moon sequel or not?

On one hand I know that I myself enjoy books that are in a series or a sequel or two. Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, the Straun family saga from James Clavell and of course Douglas Adam’s famous five part trilogy of Hitchhiker stories are great enjoyable examples.

But then again I have a sense that some stories are best left to stand by themselves. 1984, Brave New World and Atlas Shrugged screamed out to be left alone and not regurgitated in a new form.

There are also the over exploited themes such as Rocky movies which became only worse and worse as each sequel was released. Even one of my favourite movies, Star Wars, lost its shine with each new movie as did The Blues Brothers sequel.

Maybe I am on the wrong track. Perhaps it is just movie sequels that have the potential to be stinkers where books have a seemingly better chance of maintaining the quality in sequels.

Or perhaps deep down I have had my fill of Milo Moon and would love to have an excuse to write a cooking book with delicious pictures.

Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

Killed Music. Now Let ’s Kill Books.

For anyone who keeps an eye on live concerts, it is quite clear that musicians of all ages, genres, shapes and sizes needs to perform live to make a crust nowadays. In days past our well known and often extremely famous singers and musicians could have retired on their royalties from recordings. But not anymore.

Just in the coming weeks I have a choice of wonderful concerts to choose from. Status Quo, Deep Purple, Phil Collins, Iggy Pop and, need I say more?

I think my point here is clear. Recorded music isn’t worth a cracker anymore, so musicians and singers have to do what musicians and singers do. Perform.

But what if this same pattern of file sharing, cheapening, discounting and give-away marketing happens to books? Which I must say is already underway with the recent advent and popularity of the 0.99 and free e-book market. Will we as consumers do the same with books as we did with music? Collect it like crazy on our hard drives and then proceed to never listen to it or read it?

I have a very bad feeling that the proliferation of electronic e-book readers is going to have an ‘iPod’ effect. That is that the collection of e-books will represent a ratio of about 95% free material and 5% paid.

So what will writers and authors do? They can’t perform ‘live’ like musicians and singers now can they?

Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

The Birth Of A Book

It may be of interest for some to learn that a book can start from the smallest and silliest idea. For me, the following brief and almost non-sensical notes began the process for what has now become my latest book, Milo Moon. From memory, I wrote these notes more than ten years ago, and then found the notes again a little over a year ago.

How they transformed into what is now a finalised book is still a mystery to me. However, you never know what a flower will look like by looking at a seed.

If you have read Milo Moon, good luck in finding the connection.


Spinning disks. Colourful. Falling from the sky. Floating, yet spinning. Coming closer. Full of children. One slamming into a roller door of a suburban garage at a racetrack located in the back yard of my grandmother’s house. Children killed.

Retiring to the garden at the side of my grandmother’s house. Watching our handbags being used as sprinklers. Deciding to walk home. Upset at the tragedy. Walking miles. To the house I lived in as a child. Two doors away from my grandmother’s house.

An old friend who I had never met (yet!) was already at home watching TV. Waiting for us. I approached the door with my wife, and entered the house of my childhood. Also with my other wife, who I had never met, but knew she was going to be my wife.

Three parallel universes. In the same place and time. Created to increase the economic output of Earth, as it was not meeting galactic quotas. Developed and implemented by the Central Galactic Economic Advisory Committee to accelerate the technological and economic output of Earth, so it could join the Western Orion economic zone, 7 million years ahead of schedule.

Life forces were in limited supply. Stories of souls by monks and priests were not far from the truth, but were used to explain and pacify ‘crossovers’. Heaven was used to explain re-bodying of life forces. Three parallel universes of Earth made better use of life forces as bodies were easy to produce but life forces were governed by a strict galactic quota.

Earth humans were way behind the rest of the universe. Third world like. The oligarchy were in charge of the plan. A ‘get rich quick scheme’ with many tax incentives.

Three way division of life forces had drawbacks. Only one third of each personality could be used in each universe. So each individual was incomplete. Hence no one was completely balanced as elsewhere in the universe. Leading to a breakdown in society values and behaviour. Needing new strictures and supervision. Police, military, government, churches. To control the inevitable lack of discipline one third of a human psyche could attain. There was no need for these controls in a single universe. It was hoped that three universes could be merged back into one in three or four million years once economic performance and technological evolution had been attained.

Dreams were crossover points. Ones that were impossible to eliminate because of the strength of a single life force. But were explained away as just dreaming. Occasionally a life force would wander too far from this dream state and realise the reality of the situation. In a three way split state, all dreams, fantasies, odd thoughts and déjà vu feelings were just consequences of the reality. Simple crossovers. The results of not being able to completely split a life force into three.

I was being briefed by Nimrod Kwic on a small hill overlooking Jerusalem. Why here? And why me? And why now?

Like him, I was a rare revert. The merging of my three split forces had been gaining pace in recent years. This was monitored by the authorities and any such occurrences were sent here. And where is here?

The fourth dimension. A holding reality. Where life forces exist on hold until the eventual merging back of the three spilt universes (Earths). Only a few million years to wait. But we had no actual reality. No bodies. We are complete and balanced, as there is no such thing as an imperfect life force. But because life forces are in limited supply, we are not to be wasted. Just kept on ice per se.


Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

I Can ’t Do Sex

One of my abysmal failings as a writer has to be the fact that I just don’t do sex at all well. Every time I get to a situation that could well call for a little steam, I tend to get it over and done with as quickly as possible and move on with the story. Now I know that for some of my readers this can sometimes prove a little frustrating. A bit of a tease with no climax as such.

Well, the fact of the matter is that I do write steamy scenes. I couldn’t tell you how many I have written. But then I seem to always tear them up, or if they do survive in the first draft, they get the chop in the first edit. I always seem to feel that they are a little too graphic and then become a distraction from the main story line. Or perhaps I lack that sensual touch. (I lie in fact. One of my books does get into it. But I won’t tell you which one as my children might be reading this.)

The same seems to happen when gratuitous blood is called for. Juicy murders with hours of bleeding, suffering and agony just seem to be beyond me. Tools of torture and hideously cruel pages of suffering get chopped and replaced with a swift kick to the groin. Yes, I know. I should be ashamed.

But then again, I think I do a great job of describing trees, people’s eyes and cats with incredibly clever adjectives. Can’t do everything well I suppose.

Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

The Indie Hypocrites

We all know that the book publishing industry is in turmoil at present. Major publishers are confronted with serious challenges to their market dominance and it is clear they are still undecided as how to handle the growing e-book market.

At the same time, the rapid growth in self-publishing or ‘indie’ authoring has meant that a book buyer is now not guaranteed a quality product just because a book is ‘published’ per se. Thank goodness for the advent of preview reading in this respect. In the end though, is it that a good book in either form will always sell? Far from it. As with any product, it is marketing that sells, not talent.

As far as marketing goes, there is still a dominant advantage for major publishers as they dominate physical street front book stores. Very, very few book stores stock POD (print on demand) books. They can order books for customers, but who wants to wait? So ‘indies’ have had to go it alone promoting their books via online book stores. If you are an author, or involved in publishing you know all this.

The question I would like to pose is this. What books do ‘indie’ authors buy?

While my anecdotal evidence is just that, anecdotal, I have been looking at what ‘indie’ authors say about the books they buy and read, and how they go about marketing their own books. Social media is a great resource for this. In the last few months, I have come to some unpleasant conclusions.

(1) ‘Indie’ authors always think their own book is just fantastic. Naturally. And want people to buy it. Of course. But at the same time have no instinct to support fellow authors by buying another author’s ‘indie’ book. Dan Brown, Stephen King and MacMillan publishing are still their preferred book purchases.

(2) As far as marketing goes, ‘Check out my book on Bookbuzzr’, or ‘My book preview was read 2 times yesterday‘ sent by spam like automated tweets is about as far as many go in promoting their hard work.

This is in no way a negative reflection on Bookbuzzr, Smashwords and like sites as they provide excellent free tools for authors to promote themselves. It is simply that authors seem to be generally quite hopeless at using these tools or reading the instructions. (I would however like these book promotion sites to change their default tweeting services to eliminate this spam like material as it has a very negative impact.)

If you need proof, go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in the phrase ‘Check out my book’. You will see what I mean about hopeless and repetitive spam like marketing.

(3) Any stigma associated with POD books is for others and hypocritically not associated with an ‘indie’ author’s own book. This is an odd point, because I don’t see that readers see a stigma attached to a book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble that has the publisher listed as CresteSpace or Lulu. The stigma is perhaps perpetuated by authors with a lack of self belief in self-publishing.

(4) Self publishing could become a self fulfilling prophecy of doom if self interest, hypocrisy, and spam like marketing stay as the norm. The real question is this.

Do ‘indie’ authors yet believe in their own market, and will they take a positive and responsible attitude to marketing and promoting the self-publishing industry as a whole?



As an addendum to this post, I asked Bookbuzzr for their reaction to my comments above. They were kind enough to make the following comments:


Thank you so much for giving us a heads-up about your upcoming article.

While it mildly criticizes the book-tweeting service built into BookBuzzr, overall, it does provide positive coverage for BookBuzzr. Thank you for this.

I do want to clarify just two points:

1. The Book Tweeting service is intended to provide an additional layer of promotion for authors on twitter that are already providing significant value to their followers. In other words, if you are an author on Twitter and are already engaging in a conversation with others on Twitter, and if the Book Tweeting service sends a tweet once every few days, then it's likely to not be considered spam. However, if an author does nothing else but set up their book-tweeting service to send out tweets, then that author will be having a serious problem and will lose followers.

2. Also, the book tweeting service is something that can be turned on or off by authors. In fact there are three separate settings inside the Book Tweeting service of BookBuzzr from which the author can choose. Most technology (such as email auto-responders, mass SMS sending services, fax, cellphones, Facebook etc.) can be used for good or can be misused. Many of our authors appear to be using the service correctly (in effect, the vast majority of them send out a number of informative or entertaining tweets interspersed with automated tweets from BookBuzzr.) A few others need to be educated about how to use twitter in general and the BookBuzzr Book Tweeting service in particular. We will spend some time in creating guidelines to educate authors and also think about how we can spam-proof the technology.

Again, we appreciate you involving us in this article.

Ranga
Author Success Manager
www.BookBuzzr.com
World's # 1 Free, Online Book-Marketing Technology for Authors




Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page

The Author Publisher

Perhaps I should have titled this ‘The Publishing Author’, but then that is probably just me being pedantic about using a compound noun or a gerund adjective. However, this silly playfulness with words is exactly what I don’t need to be doing right now. What I should be doing is flogging books.

When writing, an author is lost in words, ideas, dreams, goals, plots, sub-plots and coffee. Then comes the reality. Who is going to read this magnificent collection of eighty thousand words that have been crafted together with passion and cleverness? If you are exceedingly lucky your spouse may. At sometime, but probably not as soon as you would like. You could try giving it to a friend. In this regard my experience has been that they are still meaning to read it some months or years later and when they finally do read it they say it was ‘nice’. Not much help.

So what do you do? The answer is remarkably simple. Believe in yourself and stop being an author immediately your manuscript is ready, and start selling the damn thing. Why? Because readers who buy your book will read it. More than that, if you have good communication with your readers, you will get honest and reliable feedback that will be worth more than any paid service you might have considered.

I am starting to dislike the words ‘Indie’, ‘Self Published’ and ‘POD’. I now only use two words to describe my occupation. Author and Publisher. Because that is what I am. So what if my publishing house consists of five books and four CDs. That’s more than enough to keep me occupied. Once I get my author off his backside, my catalogue will jump to six books. A growing business.

Books are a totally new business now. Forget all the old rules, literary agents, rejection, double spaced foolscap and waiting forever for yet another rejection. Use you time far more productively and promote your books and yourself and sell your wonderful books.

Derek's Vandal Blog
www.derekhaines.ch
Derek on Twitter
Derek's Author Page