Mission 44

Today, bestselling author Hugh Howey had a chat with fans, readers, authors, and anyone else who cared to ask a question. Hugh is rarely in my area for signings or talks, so I stopped by to see what kind of things he was sharing. He talked about everything from writing to traveling to lobster catching. Having nothing intelligent to contribute, I settled for this exchange: Thankfully, my fellow attendees were better prepared and asked great questions. Hugh provided excellent answers, and the ones that I really got the most from are below. When asked how to get a self-published novel noticed: The best way to get noticed is to write and publish more works. I know that sounds like a dodge, but it's 100% true. Practically every successful self-published author will tell you the same thing. I didn't promote WOOL at all. Didn't even Tweet or FB a link. It was my 7th or 8th published title, and my readership just built gradually over time. I wrote stuff they enjoye...

Below are some sample pages for my upcoming novel, Speed of Light . Throughout the month of February I am presenting it as my first Kickstarter project , and on March 1 it will be published by my imprint, The Word Made Fresh. Please enjoy the sample, and if you have any questions please leave them for me in the comments.  Thanks for looking at my project! To briefly set the stage: Several days have passed since the power went out. Unpreparedness on the part of both government and citizens has led to a complete breakdown of public services-- hospitals, police, and fire departments are either stretched beyond their limits or completely off-line. This makes for a very harsh world when people are used to the comforts of modern society, and a general sense of lawlessness has taken over in the Orlando area and surrounding towns. Rylie is almost completely out of food and water, and it's become clear to her that help is not coming. She does not intend to starve...

Today, I handed my revised manuscript to my beta readers. Then I threw up. Just kidding. But it was very, very close. I didn't expect that I would tense up the way that I did. I imagine that this is what it must be like for a kindergarten parent to send her little one off to school on the bus for the very first time. When I lined up my beta readers I didn't anticipate these kind of emotions. I sent them all emails, they said yes, I was happy about it, and that was that. Until today. After spending a month with this character and listening to her tell me her story, and spending days in November where it seemed like I was living it with her, this novel has become my baby. To hand it off to someone else was terrifying. It didn't start out feeling like that. At first I was really excited. Wow! I thought. Someone is going to be reading my book! I packed up five copies of my manuscript, packaged them into five manila envelopes with some basic instructions/requests ...

During my NaNoWriMo experience I would enter my word count at the end of each day.  This practice kept me accountable to my goal of hitting 50,000 words on time. After recording my daily tally, I would check on my six writing buddies to see how they were holding up.  About ten days into the challenge I noticed that one of my writing buddies had been keeping pace with me, staying ahead only by about a hundred or so words.  I observed her growing word count through the middle of the month and it became clear that we had been on the exact same pace since day one. My suspicion was that my buddy had engaged in a de facto competition between the two of us to see who could get to 50,000 first. Now that I knew about it, though, I decided to make it official. @ButterflyQuills We're on the same pace so far... First one to 50K wins! #NaNoWriMo — Scott Ralph (@RalphSensei) November 20, 2013 I received a response almost immediately: @RalphSensei Deal! So what do I win? H...