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Hmm,
Well I will try something different next time, give a lot more heads up as to starting date.
I used the Forum’s mass emailer thing. It’s really poorly written, when you send the email the entire server bogs down, the site becomes inaccessible for like 15 minutes. There were less than 200 people. That should have been no strain and trivial. I’ve designed a lot of websites that can email and notify users, emails are very very low overhead things. It should not have bogged down the system and shouldn’t have taken much more than a minute or two.
My bet is that they all looked like auto-generated emails (which they sort of were) and so got spammed. I will do something different for the emails next time.
Also, I gotta work on the stupid link button that you click and then wait random numbers of hours to let you in a a Beta Demon. That caused lots of confusion.
T-A-G
I thought you had to, I sent out an email at the begining to all users, but might have got spammed.
Once it was live there was a link to click on that gave absolutely no indication of anything and a few hours later you could see the beta forums. Magic is mysterious, I guess. It went on for some time…
About 15% to 20%. Actual launching of book 2 and v.1 Countdown; with advertising campaigns and monitoring/tweaking them etc sort of took me out of the “zone” and working now to get back into the writing zone.
I actually have 3 zones when it comes to “writing” the “plotting zone” the “writing zone” the “review/edit zone” The plotting zone is like a first draft or two of the story that happens in my head. Actually, plotting is probably not the right word. Because plotting of the overall arc in bullet point form was/is mostly done so new “plotting” happens when things take an unexpected twist; and they did that a lot near end of beta; stuff gets moved up, other gets moved back.
For example; storyline and intersections with the “Inter-dimensional rogues” who stole the book and escaped from Oorstemoth on Captain Asmeth’s ship has moved back and the Knights of Chaos has moved up. How exactly this shifted, I am not so sure, but we are probably in book 4 territory for those implications.
Mental writing is implementing the bullet points, and moving them around, changing emphasis filling in the details.
So maybe I should call my 2 zones; “mental writing” and “typing” mental writing I do laying in bed, in the shower, while driving or other odd times; I write the story a couple different ways in my head and then in the next zone I type it up the first time. Then I will go over it a couple times in preparation for next writing zone and maybe rewrite/edit/improve before moving on to typing the newest stuff from the mental zone.
Yeah, that’s a good one, but it was “decided” in that I put it as the last line of the story. As a Postscript.
“The Demons of Astlan will continue in Apostles of Doom”
Thanks!
Yeah, I’ve been guilty of that myself in some books. I admit it was a real problem with Tom stuck in the cave and all the action happening elsewhere, that won’t be a problem going forward, because now rather than sitting on the periphery, Tom has found himself stuck at the center of an active volcano, both literally and figuratively.
There are bound to be all sorts of eruptions!
o:)
Reviews are what they are, reading is such a subjective experience by definition.
And I wrote this book(s) for hardcore SF/Fantasy/Gamer readers and such people, almost by definition, have strong passions. I know the crowd, I am the crowd.
The thing is, when one really gets into a book and then have to wait some time for the next, you can build up all these expectations for how you would have written it. If the author doesn’t do what you expected, or hoped, then you get a big huge letdown.
I hope that some who were disappointed will give it another shot later to read it without all the old expectations.
I knew I’d have some problems because I got responses for people that went in diametrically opposed directions in what they wanted to see. No way to keep everyone happy.
So there was this one guy on Amazon who called himself “The Hater” he read both the first and the second and post these 1 star reviews of both.
Hey as long as he read them…the gold crowns still pile up!
But at least hir lives up (?) to hir name. Hir hates. Went to look at some of hir other reviews. Lots of negative reviews, but a few positive ones which makes me almost curious to read the ones The Hater likes.
I think the criticism “I get” the most is probably the rehashing. I knew I was doing it, but I was trying to capture everyone’s reactions and responses. In hindsight, I should have been more efficient during these scenes so as to not over-retell. But I had a lot of people going “I want to know X person’s reactions!”
The POV switching was done in the first book, but since it took place over 30 days, individual scenes were longer. In the new book it’s 1/3 the time and I had to cover a lot of ground so shorter scenes because it was all happening at once.
I knew I was taking a chance, but I figured if you look at the pacing of modern TV shows (MTV generation++++) compared to older ones, I thought it would work for most.
Ah well.
Book 3 takes place over a longer period of time so POV switching will slow down, maybe back to Book 1 levels.
Definitely going to try to be careful and efficient on reaction scenes.
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks!
There will be more Tom in book 3.
As I mentioned in the Amazon forums today, the reason there was so little Tom in the first half of book 2 was because he was sitting in his cave waiting for Talarius to regenerate, Reggie to acclimate and most importantly, figure out something to do!
Remember in Book 1, he spent a lot of time sitting bored in his cave making furniture. But because that was on a longer slower timescale, I could just skip in time.
However, in book 2, a lot of important stuff was happening in the aftermath of the book 1 battle, people were doing stuff, stuff that will have a direct effect on Tom in the future.
Therefore, those people who were doing stuff in that time frame got longer sections because in that “time period” they were actively doing stuff to advance the story, whereas Tom and friends were sitting around in a cave.
You note that Tizzy spent his time in the cave (the first half of the book) writing in this forum. If you go back and look at some older posts of his you’ll see him talk about being stuck in Tom’s cave, and he then got in a long discussion with Rosver and others about ruined buildings and such in the Courts…which Tom & Antefalken alude to when they meet up with Damien. His cavemates thought he was talking to himself, but he was actually writing/dictating in this forum he’s got like a magical “Dragon Naturally Speaking” spell or something.
Anyway, book 3 goes back to a larger time scale and now Tom has something, in fact an awful lot, to do. So his story time will get bumped up.
Oooh!!!!!
I seriously like that, I like that a lot!!!
So, should that turn out to be the case, you will get an extra shoutout in the “Thank you” front matter!
I really like that a lot! =d>
[quote](86.6) “It was definitely was embarrassing for the poor incubus…” Remove one of the ‘was’, it seems to work either way.[/quote]
[quote](102.3) “I have to get back to open gate for the next hunting party…” Open a gate.[/quote]
Are two from this post that you caught and she missed.
Thanks
Will do! Or try. Not sure I can unvote the Children of doom on the “poll” but given the few responses in this topic, I will do it mentally. and we have this written record.
Tentatively going with Apostles of Doom since that has the most votes. It is, however close with Legacy of Doom. Since None of the one None of the Above was before Legacy of Doom and LoD was what I came up with later.
I am Apostles of Doom for the first galley and kindle format testing. I can still change it up until maybe Thursday (unless I sacrifice presale) if people would like something else.
PM doesn’t work in the beta forum? Hmm, never really tried it.
Will update credits, will investigate PM’s.
It may take an iteration on the Kindle version. Turns out their presale window was 10 days not 7, so I had to put in a “final” version to get October 1. However, since on a normal Kindle book that’s on sale I can update content and have it through in about 12 hours; not sure what that means….will see once the presale goes live. In theory, I should be able to update content on the normal time scale, all of which is before any is released. However, pre-orders are a new thing for me.
Dead Tree no problems.
Interesting, the link thing should default to something like amazon.com if your country doesn’t have a store, as Austria doesn’t.
Although, you do bring up an interesting point Korwin. I would think that coming down out of the Alps, off those really tall mountains, which are apparently alive with the sound of music, the bouncing kangaroos would build up so much momentum they would have trouble stopping and end up in Italy, Hungary or Slovenia. Yet, I googled and neither Italy, Hungary nor Slovenia have kangaroos. Just Austria.
:-”
iblees: I agree, that would be so useful. It would save authors a lot of effort in getting the word out.
Thanks for the feedback!
For me the point of Doom is that individuals can be very powerful, but they really can’t be omnipresent…at some point to extend yourself to meet the challenges you face you have to start working with other people. Networking/team building. It’s the next logical step in personal growth.
In the real world:
Bill Gates needed a lot of workers to take over the world, Steve Jobs need a ton of workers to take it back from the Heirs of Gates. Linus Torvolds (Linux) need an insanely HUGE army of open source ant-people to create something that that could rival Gates (and become a stepping stone for Jobs–technically OSX is BSD an open source alternative to Linux but Torvolds spurred that as well)Tom’s challenges are a couple of different pantheons and the Courts of Chaos, the current “Establishment” over all. No one person, no matter how powerful can do it all. Which is why the gods band together in pantheons after all.
So the plan is that as Tom grows, so will his challenges and needs. Or more precisely, his opposition will come into focus/out of the woodwork.
Pretty much exactly what you are saying so cool…
