What's inside 'The Box'?

The Box

A mysterious artifact is uncovered in the desert. It is metallic, perfectly cubical, covered in strange writing... and older than human civilization. Four strangers are brought to a secret laboratory to unlock its secrets, including a codebreaker, a linguist, and a young prodigy physicist. What is the box? What secrets does it contain within? Finding out will send the team on the greatest adventure of their lives... and could mean the end of everything they know.

"The Box" is now available, exclusively on Amazon!  I have to admit that after uploading yesterday, I pretty much checked the status of it compulsively until it went live.  Amazon takes a few hours for ebooks to go on sale once they've been uploaded, and I was being my usual impatient self.  It finally appeared on the site at about 7 pm, and I immediately shared it across all my usual networks (I'm heavily into Facebook and Google+, so be sure to 'like' me on Olympus Mans and circle me on G+).  

Then, of course, I couldn't get to sleep last night.  Too excited.  It's a blast seeing your name on something that's for sale on a huge site like Amazon.  I'm not sure that'll ever become old hat for me.  At least, I hope it doesn't.


Now, about that novel...

Pushing the button

Well, that's that - I uploaded 'The Box' to Amazon today, and enrolled it in their KDP Select program.  As soon as it's live on the site, I'll be posting links and updating the My Books page.  But mostly what I want to say in this post is that it feels good to hit that button.

When you get to the point where you know that continuing to work on something you're just spinning your wheels and overdoing things.  There's that saying that art is never finished, just abandoned - and there is truth to that.  At some point, you just say, 'Alright, it's time to get this out there.'  And that's just what I did today.

And it feels awesome.

Current Soundtrack
"Amaryllis" by Shinedown

A picture worth a thousand words

As an artist and a designer, I like to make my own covers.  I've made DVD covers, I've made posters, and I designed the cover for "Show Me the End of the World." That one came to me fairly easily... I recall my thought process being simply that I wanted an image of the world on fire and the text to have a fairly simple treatment and this is what came out:

Pretty solid, eh?  I mean, I dig it.

Now I'm designing the cover for my short story "The Box" and I'm running into a little bit of a snag.  Initially, I came up with this:

But honestly the more I look at it the more I think it just looks kinda cheesy and dumb.  In my opinion, the cover for "Show Me the End of the World" looks somewhat classier, and I think that's mostly because of my type choices.  I had a couple ideas for "The Box" where the type woud be box-shaped in some fashion to play off on that whole idea.

But then I started thinking more along the lines of the concepts at work in the story and about taking things a bit less literally with the cover.

This one has its own obvious problems.

I like the treatment of the text on this one, but otherwise it seems far too plain.  There obviously needs to be something else of a graphical nature on this version, but I'm a loss as to what.  I thought perhaps some kind of blood spatter, but where should it go and how should it interact with the type?  It's a conundrum alright.

Current Soundtrack
"Superman Returns" by John Ottman

The Editing Phase

So as you may know from previous posts, I've been working on a new story that I'm rewriting from an old one.  It's called "The Box."

Wellllll it's pretty well done.  Clocking in at just under 16,000 words, I'm steadily going through it now making sure all the i's are dotted, all the t's crossed.  I've had a couple people read through it and got some positive feedback on that end, as well.

On that note, I'd like to mention that editing a document in real-time with another person on Google Docs is pretty awesome.

But this story is nearing the finish line.  I can't wait to get it out there.

Current Soundtrack
"Tomorrow Never Dies" by David Arnold

Reviews, reviews, reviews

Well folks, "Show Me the End of the World" has garnered a couple of reviews up on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk!

First up, a five-star review from the US site:

And then a four-star review from the UK:

I am, understandably, quite psyched.

Current Soundtrack:
"The World is Not Enough" by David Arnold

Moving along

Crossed the 12,000 word threshold on "The Box" tonight.  We're almost there, folks.  This one's going to go through some editing and then it'll be available.  It seems to be going a little smoother now than it was a couple days ago.  I actually chopped almost an entire scene that just wasn't working.  It was introducing a new element into the story too late, and I just realized I had no idea where I was going with it.  And remembering what I wrote about being lazy and covering up that laziness with action, I decided to do the harder thing and simply ax the entire scene and go in a different direction.  It feels good having done that; even though I liked that new element, I simply didn't know where to go with it after it was started.  Maybe if this were a different project - a novel instead of a story - I might have been able to get away with it and incorporate it into the larger narrative.

But here, there's simply no room for it.

...Which sounds funny when I think that this "short story" is going to end up being twice the length of most of the stories in "Show Me the End of the World."

Current Soundtrack
"Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" by Cliff Eidelman

Milestones and finish lines

I hit 10,000 words on "The Box", finally.  It's coming along nicely, and I'm gearing up to bring it to its big, Baysplosion-y finale.  This made me think of the issue of pacing.

Generally stories are supposed to build to the climax, which is the big moment or scene where everything kind of hits the high point.  All of your storylines converge, the emotions of your characters reach their tipping point - essentially this is when you get to the entire point of your story.  When the audience is gripping the arm of their chair, riveted by whatever you're showing them.

When it comes to action-adventure stories, this generally means that things are at their most dire for the hero, and the villain is on the cusp of victory and world domination or some such.  Sometimes, it's okay to buck this idea.  In "Raiders of the Lost Ark", for example, the climax of the film is really when Indy and Marion are tied to a post and the Nazis are opening the Ark - although the film's biggest action sequence is arguably the fight on the plane tarmac followed closely by that amazing truck chase (which to this day is one of my favorite action sequences in any movie - ever.)

Or sometimes, even, your biggest action sequence comes at the beginning of the film.  The Battle of Hoth, anyone?  Generally, though, I think I like films that have a slower first-half and then unleash hell in the back.

Writing a short story is a little different.  With "The Box", which has a lot of action adventure elements in it, more so than any of the other stories from "Show Me the End of the World", I've tried to maintain a sort of even pace in the sense of building it steadily.  There's a creature hunting the characters in the story, and each encounter with it gets bigger and longer and more dangerous than the last.  What I'm hoping is that this lends the story a feeling that it's leading to a huge climax, that the finale of the store will be me letting loose with something truly awesome that made reading the rest of the story worthwhile.

Because if your climax fizzles, well... quite simply, as a writer, you've failed.  Don't let the reader come away disappointed in your payoff.  That's a fear that I've had about my writing rather often.  I'm afraid that I have these great ideas that I can't follow through on for whatever reason.  In screenwriting, I often found my way around this by tossing in some kind of action sequence which ultimately, regardless of how much I love the action/adventure genre, is just lazy writing.  If I'm ever going to overcome my own fears regarding my writing, I've got to force myself to sit down and think about what I'm doing and if I can't come up with a way around a problem, then the solution isn't to sidestep it with action but to go back and address why the problem exists.


But I digress.  "The Box" is almost finished.  At this point, I'm proud of it.  But it's not finished, it still needs work.

I still need to unleash it.

Current Soundtrack:

"Captain America: The First Avenger"
 by Alan Silvestri