Sometime in the coming year I may end up getting back to work on a project I never finished. Tentatively titled Vajra, it was my NaNo project for 2007; it fell short of the needed word count for the month and I ended up shelving it and turning attention to other things. But once it's finished and retitled, it'll be the third book I've written, more or less in a row, that deals with a kind of "Tokyo of mystery" or "enchanted Tokyo".

The first one you already know well: Summerworld. (And if you don't know about it, then by all means educate yourselves.) The second is currently being written: Tokyo Inferno. I hadn't been consciously trying to create a trilogy — past, present, future (sort of) — but that's what came out.

To that end, I'm thinking of bundling all three of them into one volume when they're done — or, at the very least, selling all three together as a single $30 set (perhaps as a convention-only special). The three are linked by many other things other than locale, so it only makes sense. This would be a long way off, of course, but it's something I find myself coming back to as a nice way to wrap up the package with a bow.

Oh, and I'm back from AnimeNext! (Photos here.)

For all of those who came by my table and bought Summerworld and Four-Day Weekend: Thank you. I hope you enjoy both of them immensely. I'll be back next year with more books (like the still-in-progress Tokyo Inferno) ... and a bigger table, to boot.

Tokyo Inferno has a slightly remodeled cover design!

The old design, for reference:

What, more good news!? Yes.

As of right now, thanks to the good graces of the folks at Lulu.com, I now have all of my books currently in print available on Amazon.com. Summerworld, The Four-Day Weekend and the older works Another Worldly Device and Casual Users are all available directly from Amazon.com via the above links!

[Taped applause]

How did this happen? Apparently, Lulu.com periodically offers Amazon.com placement for certain select authors and books. I'm still trying to find out if this means future books from me will also be automatically eligible for Amazon distribution, but I intend to make that possible even if they don't give it to me as an automatic option. (I also plan to fine-tune the prices as best I can to make sure I can offer the Amazon books at costs that are commensurate with the other distribution channels.)

Obviously, I'm thrilled. I now have the chance to connect directly with a massive number of people without having to go through a publisher.

It also means I need your help, dear fans, more than ever.

Here's what you can do.

1. Order some of my books. If you've been going back and forth about picking up a copy, and have only hesitated because you trust Amazon.com more than Lulu (or me), or because you have credit with Amazon that you can't use anywhere else, then go buy one of the books at Amazon and make me happy.

2. If you've already bought my books, write a review. Log onto Amazon.com, go to one of the above listings, and contribute a review so that other people will know that this thing was actually read and (gasp, shock) enjoyed by others.

3. Promote within Amazon. Add the book to your Wish Lists, your So You'd Like To ... guides and your Listmania! lists.

4. Promote outside of Amazon. Link back to my site, link back to my books (use the direct links above, they're the shortest), and just go nuts getting the word out.

Time for a bit of an update on the projects-in-progress front.

• After a little too much time in the "is that wordcount or water torture?" department, Tokyo Inferno is finally back on something laughingly resembling a schedule. I hope to have the bulk of it done by the end of the month, with June and July spent on editing and touching up, and with it off to the printer's by the 2nd week of August. I already have most of the design work done for the outside, so that I could probably do between sneezing fits on a lunchbreak.
• Several new possible projects are on the horizon. One is a collaboration, about which I will only say three things: a) its working title is Down the Drain; b) it is what I hope to be a daring new take on a tired old trope; and c) it is the first collaboration I have seriously entertained in a long time. I couldn't tell you when it would get off the ground, but I'll have more to say about it when things are firmer.
  
• Another possible new project is in gestation. Again, I don't want to ruin too much, but the basic idea is an alternate take on the concept of the pantheon, of many gods as they relate to a human world. One of the major decisions I need to make is whether or not the pantheon / society I use is something I invent or something I simply take from history and society. I'm leaning towards the latter simply because I don't think I could ever invent anything as fascinating as the real thing — and so far I've been hard-pressed to find anyone else who has, either.
  
• Other stuff still in the pipe for "eventually": Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope, the "samurai story" (so named because that's what it is for the most part, although it's more like that plus GoodFellas or any other story about how good it was to be bad), the perennially-unfinished Mapmaker of the Dream (previously Vajra), the follow-up to 4DW, the "new religion" story (something about paganism/Wicca the way 4DW was about otaku-dom), and ....
• ... the hero story. About which I have nothing new to report, as it remains as frustratingly amorphous as ever. It might end up being melded with the "pantheon story" above, but that's not something I can safely say is a winning combination.

Tokyo Inferno is now just south of 40K words. It “feels” about a little less than halfway done, so it’ll probably come in at 100K proper — about the length I’ve been aiming for with most of my work.

A couple of conventions ago when I was sitting in on a panel about writing, someone popped the question: how long should a story be? My own answer to this was something like “Where’s the ‘should’?” Meaning that you always want to look into what’s compelling you to make the thing the length you feel is right. I don’t have a particular ambition to write anything the size of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, if only because I’m pretty sure anything I would have to say would be long exhausted before I ever got to even the 500 page mark, let alone the 900 or 1,085 or however many pages that elephantine thing is.

On the other hand, I have the worst time with short stories. I cannot pull off anything that compressed — or, rather, I haven’t been able to do that since I left high school. Back then I was able to throw down a story a week or so for class, but a) that was high school and b) I was not turning out anything I’d want to unearth and parade around now. What few ideas I feel are worth dwelling on at all typically get turned into long-form pieces because that’s where I feel like I’m getting the most for my effort.

There are some shorter pieces that are probably worth polishing and anthologizing at some point. Two come to mind: “A Review Of The International Anthology of Android Literature, 2nd Edition [Revised]” and “Shunga-Satori”. The former’s a story in the form of a book review (think one of Dale Peck’s self-professed hatchet jobs); the latter’s one of those pieces that wanders around freely between psychological horror and straight fiction and confessional epistolary writing and who knows what else. I’d probably want to pack them together with a third or maybe even a fourth item in one volume and add that to the catalog. No title yet save maybe for Shunga-Satori and Other Stories, or something equally unassuming.

People who can bang out short stories are like the folks who can tie cherry stems in a knot with their tongue. It’s such a little thing, but damn, dude, the fact that you can do it at all is monumental.

After what I can only describe as some horribly tedious rock climbing I managed to get past the rewrite that had been bugging me in Tokyo Inferno. It wasn’t even all that big a section — maybe a thousand words, tops — but how to do it and how to rewrite the character in question were the two big killers. It was the endless stop-and-start nature of the whole thing that was deadly, like trying to pull a car out of an icebank when you have no handy cardboard, cat litter, tire chains, tow trucks or UFOs with tractor beams to get you through.

From here on out it should be slightly smoother sailing, with my projected date for a completed first-draft manuscript sometime around the end of April or so. That’ll give me a good 3-4 months time to clean it up, prep the presentation, and create some promotional material. (In the works: a series of “blurb” postcards with eye-grabbing first sentences from the books they promote, instead of just images. Should be interesting to see how those go down when I spread ‘em around.)

A reminder: I'm going to be at WickedFaire this coming weekend, with books for sale and at least one panel discussion appearance. Everything I have will be available signed at the cover price ($12), as opposed to the $20 I normally charge for Internet sales. If you can make it out there, this is a great way to pick up everything I have in stock, cheap!

My next convention appearance (where I'm actually in a selling capacity) won't be until the end of August, when I turn up at AnimeFest with Tokyo Inferno in tow. There is also the chance I'll be selling at NYAF, but that has not yet been nailed down, and the cost may simply be too prohibitive right now for that. I'm also considering I-CON, although I haven't been there in ages and my experiences with it were, to put it mildly, not positive. I hope things have improved since.

I've made the needed corrections to Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend for their new 5.5 × 8.5 trim size editions. The changes were minor but there were a lot of them, collectively: a misaligned spine image here, some typographical inconsistencies there, and so on. But the resulting product has been really heartening. I love the new publisher-grade paper, and the print quality of the cover is if anything even better than before.

I don't know how many copies of each I'll be bringing with me to WickedFaire this year, but I ought to be able to start soliciting orders for the new editions by the end of this week. Once that happens, the old editions will be phased out and you'll be directed towards the new ones exclusively. Those of you who bought an earlier edition, you now have a collector's item!

Sadly, Lulu doesn't yet offer ISBN distribution for this new trim size, but once that happens I will be making everything available through all the most popular channels (Amazon, etc.). Once that happens, I'll have all the more incentive to start reissuing the older books — Casual Users, Another Worldly Device and maybe one or two other things — in that format.

The single hardest part about this whole thing has been making sure everything is consistent. Having templates and style sheets and the like is a big boon, but after a certain point you have to start tweaking everything manually for each individual product. That's where, I suspect, people with dozens of different books begin to go a little nuts. (Of course, in a more conventional publishing house, they don't have to keep every single one of those things in print at once — that's probably a big boon for them, not having to worry about the way things look across every single title in their library.)

I'm also impressed at how much of this stuff I've been able to do with software that costs nothing. The cover layout and typesetting: Scribus. The vector art: Inkscape. The two big proprietary apps I'm still using are Photoshop and Word, but only because everything I've found to try and replace them hasn't really worked out well for me. OpenOffice isn't bad, but I already bought and paid for a copy of Word 2007, and dang it all, I like Word 2007. Maybe I'll try producing the next book with OpenOffice, but for now Word it is.

My long-term plan has been to produce and offer about one book a year, and at this rate I have enough current and future projects to keep me going for a long time:

• Tokyo Inferno, 2009
• Vajra / The Mapmaker / other as-yet-undetermined title, 2010
• Four-Day Weekend sequel, 2011
• The Destroyed Room, 2012 (oh noez, end of teh worldz!!1)
• Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope, TBD (my stab at horror-comedy, and yes the title is a lift from the Agoraphobic Nosebleed album)
• The as-yet-untitled "hero story", TBD
• Four-Day Weekend pt. 3, TBD (I need to visit Japan before I can even think about beginning this one)

Time for some book news!

New editions of both Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend are on the way. They are in the 5.5 × 8.5 trim size, with publisher-quality paper, and with some minor textual and format corrections here and there. They also sport the spanking new Genji Press logo. (Justin: You'll be getting 4DW as soon as my copies arrive in-house. I haven't forgotten about you!)

I'm looking to have them fully-baked by this time next week or so, since I'll be off at Comic-Con by then and will be trying to get people interested in them whenever possible.

Similar editions of the older books will follow, but right now my efforts are going to be directed towards getting Tokyo Inferno done. I have more research to do than I originally realized, but that'll make for all the better a finished product.

My tentative project for 2010 is to finish Vajra, my incomplete 2007 NaNoWriMo effort — which I suspect will get a name-change first, although I'm still mushing around trying to figure out what a good name for the story would be.

The other 2010 possibility is Dreaming Out Loud, the tentative (very tentative) sequel to 4DW. The rough plan is to have it be for RPGs what 4DW was for convention-going, but I don't have a lot nailed down other than that general concept yet. There also may be a third installment — wherein the gang goes to Japan — but that ain't happening until I go to Japan and can write about it firsthand.