One of my favourite writers, Peter Watts, has been afflicted by flesh-eating disease. Sounds like’s going to be all right, but wow.

Hit the 175-page mark today. Researched prosthetic limbs — which led into an accidental detour into prosthetic tentacles. Yeah, we’re a freak species. Also making an appearance in the book:

– subprime ghost neighbourhoods

– Ronald Reagan

– a shootout with pepper spray.

I also took  the time to shoot a background video for my story “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away.”

Plus, you know: Valentine’s Day.

All right, back to the bodies.

So it took me one night to write an 8,700-word short story. Then it took me two days to cut 2,000 words from it to make it a publishable length. Now it’s taken me two days to cut 200 words to bring it in at 6,500 words (a number that has meaning only to me).

I don’t even want to think about how long it’s going to take me to come up with a title.

About 44,000 words in now. And many more bodies since the last update. Maybe I should call this book The Apocalypse Corpses.

I’m thinking about doing short video intros for each of my stories and books. Here’s one I recorded yesterday for my latest story, “we continue to pray for something to end our prayers,” which was recently published by This magazine.

we continue to pray from peterdarbyshire on Vimeo.

UPDATE: The article was viewed a couple of thousand times in the two days since it’s been up, so I guess there’s some interest in the subject.

Book Madam has just posted an article about self-publishing on Kindle and the future of the publishing industry. Please is one of the featured books. It’s getting a lot of hits, so go check it out.

Back when The Warhol Gang first came out, I gave away copies of a new story, “We continue to pray for something to end our prayers,” to people who reviewed the book favourably. It was my way of saying thank you for taking the time to engage with the book. Now This magazine has been kind enough to publish the story, after a bit of sharp editing by Stuart Ross. And it has fresh art! Check it out here.

With a short story!

I’ve written a couple of supernatural western stories — it’s a genre fetish of mine — and I’ve been itching to write another one. It must be some sort of infection. Anyway, the idea came to me yesterday morning — it’s High Plains Drifter meets… well, I’m not going to tell you quite yet.

I couldn’t put off writing it. I knew I’d be able to jump back into The Apocalypse Corpse with no problem, but I worried if I left this new idea too long I’d forget about it, or work it out too much in my mind and get bored with it. So I figured I’d put the novel aside for a few days and write the story. But I managed to write the whole thing in one feverish sitting, accompanied with much maniacal cackling — that was my son playing downstairs. I write in silence. Seven thousand words later, I had a decent first draft at midnight.

I’ll let it sit for a while, because I always let stories settle for a bit before I return to them. In the meantime, I went back into The Apocalypse Corpse today and got in another seven pages. I don’t think the novel even knows I cheated on it.

Now what the hell am I going to do with a supernatural western…?

I hit the 130-page mark in The Apocalypse Corpse today, and I’ve only been seriously working on it since Jan. 1. Pretty happy about that.

One of the things that’s allowed me to make such progress is by skipping certain parts of the book and leaving them for later. It’s a trick I picked up when writing The Warhol Gang. In that book, when I ran into some plot roadblocks, I just detoured around those scenes and wrote what I knew came next. Often doing that allowed me to see what I needed to fill in those scenes I couldn’t figure out.

I’ve been doing the same thing with The Apocalypse Corpse when it comes to flashbacks. My narrator has amnesia of sorts — it’s complicated — and is trying to piece together parts of his life through flashbacks. I wasn’t happy with the flashbacks I’d been coming up with, so I stopped writing them and just concentrated on the present-day plot. Then last night when I driving through the Downtown Eastside — just commuting, I swear — it suddenly came to me what the flashbacks meant. It was like one of those card-shuffling machines — everything just snapped into place instantly. And it was all because of one of the other characters I’ve been developing. He’s grown in a way I wasn’t expecting when I sketched the plot outline, and I saw a way that he related to the flashbacks and changed everything.

So now I have the flashback sequences ready to be inserted, although I’ll probably wait to do that until I take a natural pause in writing the present-day stuff. They’re perfect, and fit into the action more smoothly now, but I couldn’t have written that into the outline. It only came to me from writing 130 pages worth of story.

So I guess the lesson is develop an outline that’s clear enough to let you jump to any part of it if you run into problems. And the rest of the book will fill itself in as you go. Like magic!

All right, now I’m off to edit some pages in one of my other new books.

Since I posted about publishing the author’s cut of my first book, Please, on Kindle, I’ve had quite a few messages asking me how I did it. Seems there are a lot of other writers interested in the same thing. So here’s a quick guide for you. I’ll post things in greater detail if there’s interest. If you have any questions, just ask them in the comments.

1) First, make sure you own the e-rights to the book or story or whatever. The rights for Please reverted back to me a little while ago, and I didn’t do anything with them because I was thinking about finding another print publisher in the future. But then I stumbled across a few blogs detailing people’s experiences with self-pubbing on Kindle, and I thought I’d give it a try. But you can’t do it if you’ve sold the rights to your publisher. Hopefully, they’re already publishing it for you on Kindle if they’ve got the rights.

2) Make sure you have an Amazon account. You’ll need this to access the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard. If you buy books online, you probably have an Amazon account already.

3) Find a cover image. I assumed that when I got back the rights for Please that rights to the cover art weren’t included. So I bought the cover photo for the Kindle edition from istockphoto, a Canadian company. The image was one of their more expensive ones — I think it cost me around $80 — but I felt it was perfect for the book. You’ll want a simple, strong image. The Kindle covers are almost always viewed as thumbnails, so you want something clear and bold. I added the title and author name in Pages, then exported the whole thing as a JPG. Simple. I probably could have done something fancier with the text, but I like the simplicity of it. This process should work just as well in Word.

4) Get an ISBN for the ebook. You can do this for free in Canada through the Canadian ISBN Service System. You cannot use your print edition ISBN for the ebook.

5) Now go to the Kindle Direct Publishing page for everything else you need to know:

In short, what you need to do is strip your document of all but the most basic formatting — take out the tabs and indents, make the doc single spaced, things like that. The reason is it’s going to get converted into an HMTL file. The simpler your file, the smoother this will go. You can get as fancy as you like in HTML, but the Kindle has its own style settings, so there’s not much point.

If you’re not comfortable doing this, there are services you can use for reasonable fees, or there’s a pretty easy walk-through guide at the free service Smashwords. But it’s not that hard, although there’s an inevitable trial-and-error period.

Once you’ve done the reformatting and conversion to HTML, you’ll either use Mobipocket Creator to convert it to a Kindle file if you’re a Windows user or Calibre if you’re a Mac user. Both are free downloads.

Then download the Kindle previewer to test it out. This is important. I didn’t know there was a downloadable previewer at first, so I was using the previewer on the KDP website, which is fine for a short story but not a great way to proof a book over a few days.

6) When you have a file that works, upload it to Kindle, set your world rights and your price, enter your ISBN, and your descriptive copy, and hit Publish. Wait a day or two for the file to become live, and then start compulsively checking your sales.

Note that the writers making serious money at this tend to be in the mystery, paranormal or fantasy genres. There’s not a lot of “literary fiction” writers getting rich or even sci-fi ones from what I can tell. So why don’t you be the first?