Out of the Habit

Some habits are bad (like that mid-afternoon snack of Pringles chips I just had). Some habits are good (such as using a seatbelt or brushing one's teeth). It seems to be easy to fall into a habit if you don't want it, and hard if you do want it. (For example, regular exercise is difficult for me, although I've been working on that lately with more walking.)

I've had habits come and go throughout my life. Some of them are pretty weird: when I take a carrot stick from the refrigerator, I always tap it twice against the rim of the container and then shake it once over the sink to get the excess water off. At bedtime, I start by lying on my left side and then turn over onto my right side when I'm ready to sleep. I'm sure there are others I'm not even aware of.

Could I break these habits if I wanted to? Yes, if I put my mind to it ... but there seem to be more important things to worry about than these little quirks.

However, I find I've lost one habit that I had for a long time: writing. I think I need to clarify that: writing fiction. For years, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to be working on two or three novels at the same time. Short stories also swirled through my brain. I was always scribbling down ideas or daydreaming to bring the ideas into better focus.

Then I got my first novel published. Suddenly I had to concentrate on the details of the novel (fonts, front pages, title, back cover text, etc.). Then I had to worry about book signings, copyright protection, marketing and social media. So I worked feverishly on all of those things.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing. I've done plenty of rewriting (enough for a while!), but the ideas have dried up. I'm pretty sure it's just because I got out of the habit. Unfortunately, this isn't a habit that comes easily, at least not this time. I've been trying, but there aren't any ideas in my head yet. It's going to take some practice. I'll have to get into the habit of putting myself in front of a keyboard and forcing myself to find words to put on the page. (I think that short story I wrote last Halloween was a good beginning.)

I know it will come back sooner or later. There are hints of images or considerations in my head. I just need to tease them out and turn them into something resembling a story. I'll probably write some pretty terrible stuff before I get something good.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad I published my novels. It's been an exciting ride, and I'm not done yet. It's just that I'm ready to get back to creating more of them!

Update on The Other Side: the artist is working to make the cover image a little lighter. I expect to hear from her in the next few days. After that, I'll submit the new version and order a new proof copy. (I'm getting into the habit of patience, not entirely by choice. Ha!) Stay tuned, and thanks for your patience.

Onward

Happy 2016!

I've done some of my year-end tasks: changed the calendars, taken down the Christmas lights, put away the tree ... oh, and run some year-end sales reports.

Whew. That added a solemn note to my day. If you include all formats of my novels (paperback and Kindle), I sold 78 copies in 2013, my first year at this. That was with only one novel out.

In 2014, I had two novels out and I sold 36 copies in all.

In 2015, I had three novels out and I sold 16 copies in all.

Ouch. Sixteen copies all year! That's not the direction I saw things going. It was easy to feel gloomy about that, and I did for a while.

But then I took a step back. When I first released Outsider, I thought I'd probably sell about three copies (mostly to family). I've sold a few more than three, so I think I can be proud of that.

Besides, sales weren't really the point. I started writing Outsider because I thought it was fun. As I went along, I realized I cared about my characters and wanted to explore them some more, so I wrote a few more novels. At some point in the continuous rewriting of Outsider, I decided it was time to stop doing that, so I published it. I really wanted to share my characters with other people. And I've done that. It's pretty amazing to me that Lamont and Reg and Sean can live in other people's heads, not just in mine. They can do that if people share copies of the novel or check them out of a library, which won't show on a sales report.

So I'm going to do what I was doing before I ran the reports: go back to making The Other Side as good as I can make it. I'm going to fix the problem chapters, determine when I think it's ready and then publish it.

That's what I do. I write and rewrite. If I sell some along the way, that's great. I really appreciate all of you who have bought a copy or two! It would be nice if we could make 2016 better than 2015 ... but if not, that's okay. I'll be working on the fifth one!

The Other Side Update

I haven't given you much in the way of updates lately for The Other Side, have I? I am working on it, but things are a little slow in that department. Here's why:

When I started on my novels, I wrote Outsider first (no surprise there) and then I slowly wrote four other novels. In between writing, I would go back and edit/rewrite on previous novels. After a while, I realized that the third novel was too short, so I combined it with the second to create Another Shot. What started as the fourth novel was now the third, and I was having some real trouble with it: I couldn't come up with an ending that worked. I rewrote and rewrote, but it never ended to my satisfaction. Finally, with more than a little regret, I realized that the novel would never work as it was and I discarded it. (Believe me when I say that was not an easy thing to do.) The final novel was now referring to things that had never happened!

I wasn't happy with only three novels, so I resolved to write one to go between Another Shot and the final novel. As it turned out, I managed to fit two novels in there, In the Shadows and The Other Side. This means the final novel also neglects to mention big things that happened in those two novels! As you can tell, that last novel is going to need a lot of work.

In the meantime, however, I have to deal with The Other Side. Since it was technically written last (even though it isn't the last novel in the series; how confusing is that?), it has had the least work. Some of the original writing came as late as 2008 or after, so I haven't been through it as many times as the other novels. Since I don't write things perfectly the first time (or even the second or third time), I'm having to do a lot of rewriting. I've also been adding scenes that should have been in there but somehow weren't.

All of this means I'm doing more work on this one than I even did on In the Shadows. (You might remember how much work I did on that late in 2014.) The good news is that I'm doing this work over the summer instead of over the fall, so I've given myself some more time. I'm still aiming for a release date of January, although that isn't set in stone.

Meanwhile, just to make things "interesting" for myself, I'm trying to create a video for In the Shadows. Sometimes it gets confusing and I have to remember which plot line I'm working with, but it means that things don't get boring!

That's the latest update. I appreciate your patience and I thank you for reading my blog (and my novels).

100th Blog and 4th Title

Believe it or not, this is my 100th blog post! I don't think I quite believed I'd get to this point when I first started blogging, almost two years ago, but here I am. And I want to thank those of you who regularly read these little batches of words.

Here are a few of my favorite posts: Late Bloomers  How to Write a Novel  Taking Flight

Here are some little-known facts about my first novel: Part 1  Part 2

Here's my first Closet Spaceship post: CS Part 1

I intend to keep writing this blog, at least until I publish the fifth novel. Sometimes that thought is a little scary because I can't imagine what I'll have to say for that many posts, but that's what I thought after the first post ... and I'm still going. (Put me in a pink suit, hand me some sunglasses and a drum, and turn me loose!)

Now, as your reward for bearing with me while I indulged in a little nostalgia, I'm going to reveal the title of the upcoming fourth novel. Are you ready?
Here it is: The Other Side

I hope that will pique your interest. None of my novels is the same, but this one is going to be a little different than the others, a little more "out there," I guess you could say.
I tried to stretch myself a bit. Time (and my readers) will tell if I did it successfully.

Thanks again for reading!

New Video

This week I mailed off two copies of In the Shadows to the Library of Congress for mandatory deposit. I didn't think they would get there right away because of all the nasty weather on the East Coast, but when I checked this morning, they'd arrived! That means they're in the Library of Congress! That still makes me grin like an idiot, even for the third time.

Here's another thing that makes me kind of happy: I made an actual video! It's on Youtube and everything. (You don't even want to know how long it took me to put this together.) Here it is:



I hope this will help get the word about Outsider to more people. Please be sure to share it with everyone you know! Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VihpR0pKQXE

What do you think? Is it passable for my first video? Should I try to make more? (Feel free to leave a comment below!)

Photography

I took a short photography workshop today. A group of about 15 people met at a nature reserve and got tutored in f-stops, shutter speed, ISO and white balance. I've taken photographs for most of my life, but the vast majority of those were with a film camera and now I have a digital camera, so I need to learn a new mindset.

I don't know how many times that's happened to me in my lifetime but I'm sure the number is high. No matter how much I want things to stay the way that I'm familiar and comfortable with, the more they seem to change.

Not all the changes are bad: I don't have to wind the camera after every shot and I don't have to worry about wasting film. I like that! However, I have to figure out what all of those buttons on the camera are for. The workshop today helped me make a lot of progress on that.

I think my favorite part, though, was when we went outside to try out what we'd learned. The day was overcast and most of the autumn colors are gone, so some people would have despaired. There's nothing worth taking photos of, they would think. Fortunately, I was with a group of people who knew better. If you'd stumbled upon us, you would have seen one person taking a photo of a tree trunk, one of a cluster of red berries against the brown, one of the pattern on the water, one of a rooster who came to check us out. I took a moment to appreciate their attitude: there's plenty to see out there if you actually look for it.

And I think it's the same with writing. Every week I sit in front of this computer and think there is no way I can write a blog that day because nothing has happened to me lately and I don't have anything to say. But then I remember: if I'd felt that way about 24 years ago, I would never have written my first novel. I wasn't sure if I had something worth writing, but I tried anyway. (I'd done it before with very awful results. Thank goodness it came out better this time!) The point is that I tried. I looked until I found something.

Keep looking.

Sean

(SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't read Another Shot yet, you might not want to read this post.)

I think I always knew that Sean wouldn't stay with the crew.

How many times have you seen a movie or read a book where the main character gets snatched from his/her surroundings and thrown into a completely foreign situation? After a bunch of adventures, the character decides that this is where he/she belongs, no matter what his/her original plans might have been.

It always troubled me a little. I mean, sometimes the writer goes to great pains to let us know that this character is much better off this way, instead of in the dreary life that was abandoned, but sometimes it's not clear. And I always wondered what that character might have achieved in that original life.

So, being the stubborn person I am, I decided that my main character would not only have a good goal in life (teaching), he would also continue to pursue it, even after meeting Lamont's crew and acknowledging the importance of what they do. Sean didn't really fit in with them anyway, no matter what Hawkins might think, and it wouldn't have made a lot of sense for him to stay.

Some of my readers have expressed surprise at Sean's fading into the background. "Isn't the series about Sean?" they ask.

Well, no, not really. Sean is our introduction to the crew and he's a major character of the first novel, Outsider, that is true ... but he was always just one of the characters. Anybody who's willing to destroy the ship that her first novel was named after is going to be willing to jettison a major character. Call me brave or call me stupid ... it seems more true to the story that way.

Don't worry, though. You haven't seen the last of Sean. He's sure to pop up sometime in the future.

Closet Spaceship Part 9

   I walked down the corridor in search of Nick, who was hiding out in the dining hall.  When I peeked through the doorway, I saw him slouched in a chair, holding a cup of coffee as if it were a pistol pointing in my direction.

   I raised both hands.  “May I come in?”

   He shrugged.

   I walked in and sat across the table from him.

   “You could just shoot me,” I said. “Although not with that.”

   The coffee cup clanked onto the table.

   “What do you want?” he asked.

   “I don’t know,” I said. “To talk to you, I guess.”

   “So talk.”

   “That’s not what I meant. You want me to go on for a few minutes about writing or something like that? No, you don’t.”

   “No, I don’t,” he said. “What do you think I did?”

   I smiled. “I mostly said that to get you to stop. But there is something: you—”

   “Listen,” he interrupted, “I did exactly what I told the captain. It’s not my fault I got so far away from the landing site. S**t, they act like I really was sightseeing. Reg won’t shut up about it.”

   He was referring to an incident in the first novel, when the captain and Hawkins arrived at the ship’s landing site with some angry colonists in pursuit and didn’t find Outsider there as they expected because Nick was busy trying to evade some colony ships that wanted to shoot him down. (If you want more details, read the novel. What else do you expect me to say?)

   “I know what you did there, Nick,” I said. “You had two ships on your tail, so you did what you had to do. Nobody faults you for that.”

   “So what, then?” he asked.

   I chuckled. “Sean told everybody he gave you the slip.”

   “So what? He did.”

   “Not exactly, did he? I believe your exact words were, ‘Get the hell away from me before I put a few holes in you,’ weren’t they? Oh, and something about a dumb kid.”

   Nick looked uncomfortable. “He tell you that?”

   “No, dummy,” I said, “I was there, remember? You can deny it all you want, but I heard what you said. He didn’t give you the slip; you sent him away. Not that he minded. He would have gone anyway, so maybe you should have been a little more patient.”

   Nick scoffed.

   “I know,” I said. “Patient isn’t exactly in your character profile.”

   “S**t,” he said.

   “Listen, Nick,” I said. “I’m not going to tell anybody. I’m not here to get you or anyone in trouble. I’m not going to run to the captain every time somebody ignores an alarm or does something stupid. He probably already knows anyway.  That’s not why I’m here.”

   “So why are you here?” he demanded. “Why don’t you just leave us alone?”

   “Because I’m a writer,” I said, “and because you won’t leave me alone.”

   He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

   “You don’t get it,” I said. “If you want me to stop coming, get a boring job and be boring yourself. Then we can leave each other alone. Until then, we’re stuck with each other.”

   It’s true: I’ve tried a few times to leave the crew behind, but it didn’t work. Someday I might stop writing about them, but they’ll never leave me completely.

   “Go on,” I said. “I know there’s a poker game upstairs.”

   When Nick left, he was walking, not running, so I suppose that’s progress.  We’ll see.

Little-Known Facts about Another Shot

As you've probably noticed, Another Shot is a little longer than Outsider. That's partially because Another Shot started out as two novels. As you're reading it, see if you can tell where the original break was.

The first of the two novels wasn't bad, but the second one was too short and I didn't want to do some major padding, so that meant only one thing: major cutting. I must have cut almost 100 pages from them, which wasn't easy, believe me! It's seriously hard to cut a scene you love with your whole heart. I had a conversation between Booth and Hawkins that I still miss, but it just didn't work—so out it went.

I found the name of the series totally by accident. I was flipping through a dictionary when I stumbled upon a line drawing of the sun, Earth and the moon. There were intersecting lines drawn between the edges of the sun and Earth, and on the far side of Earth there were three shadows: one dark triangle in the middle with two lighter gray triangles on either side. These lighter triangles were labeled the penumbra, the area between the darkest shadow and the light. The area between the dark and the light!! That perfectly sums up one of the big images of my novels, where Lamont is trying to guide his crew closer to the light and farther from the darkness that threatens to engulf them. I still can't believe how lucky I was to discover that just by turning some pages of a rather large book.

I've partially recreated the image below, with color and without the moon. During a lunar eclipse, the moon would orbit around Earth and pass through the first penumbra, then the umbra, then the second penumbra before emerging into the light.

A version of this drawing is what I used to create my Penumbra Series logo, which you can see on my Facebook page. It will probably pop up in other places, too.

Unfortunately, I've discovered there's a Penumbra Series horror adventure game that gives you some pretty scary images if you Google "Penumbra," so beware of that. I am in no way associated with that game, just to be clear, and I named my novel series before I knew about it.

Please spread the word about Outsider and Another Shot. There's a button at the bottom of the page that should let you Like or Share this blog if you're on Facebook. Otherwise, word of mouth is very good, too!  Thanks for your support.



 

Little-Known Facts about Outsider Part 2

Various parts of the United States can really tell it's winter, can't they? I hope you're staying warm and safe this weekend and throughout the month.

Here are a few more bits of trivia about Outsider:
The original working title was "Whatever," because I really didn't know if it would go anywhere when I started it.
Sean's last name used to be Collins (for "colony"), but I had too many C names then.
Mark's last name was originally Cooper, but I had too many C names then.
Jack's last name used to be Shaw, but that didn't work when he interacted with Sean.
Ben's first name comes from a character in a United Airlines commercial.
Bartucci comes from Brat (I stole that from Bart Simpson). You'll get to know Nick better in Another Shot.
Hawkins comes from hawk-eyed because he can read people so well. (You already know where the name Reggie came from.)
Dr. Graham's name comes from a character in the movie Field of Dreams (also a doctor).
The bad guys' colony is Beta-Ten ... B-Ten. Get it? (Sad, I know.)

That's all I can think of right now. I had a small setback in proofreading when I had to work all day yesterday (my job involves ... you guessed it, proofing). I'm giving my eyes a short break, but I promise to keep up with it this week. (CreateSpace keeps sending me e-mail reminders that I need to approve my novel. I guess they can keep sending them a little longer. Sorry, CS.)

Please keep spreading the word about Outsider! Now you can fascinate people with stupid facts about it that they don't want or need to know!  Ha, ha.

Have a great week.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my site! I'm new to blogging so please bear with me while I figure out what I'm doing. (I already managed to delete my first post, which tells me I have a long way to go.)

My name is Diane McCallum and my first novel, Outsider, was published this year. It's available on amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle formats (you can find a link to buy it to the right). This blog will try to keep you updated on the progress of the subsequent novels, all part of the Penumbra series, and give you some insights into a few of the characters.  I plan to update it once a week, usually on the weekend, so I hope you'll come back to see how things are going (especially to see if this first post survives this time).