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Elsewhere’s Twin
a novel of sex, doppelgängers, and the Collective Id
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Category: Marketing
Tenpenny Zen – First Chapter Sneak Peek
Tenpenny Zen won’t make its illustrious debut until Monday, March 20. That’s an agonizing 3 days away! We know that you will spend your weekend at home, staring at the clock, desperate for something — anything! — to make the time pass faster.
Don’t fret, faithful reader. Rune Skelley has your back. Here, for the eyes of none but the elite minority of humans known as “Internet Users,” is a sneak preview of Chapter One of Tenpenny Zen. Treat it as the holy relic it is, read it over and over until you have memorized every word, and then, come Monday, you will be primed for the full experience.
Dig in!
Tenpenny Zen
a novel of sex, cults, and an interdimensional henge contraption
Chapter One: Nice Town
Control subject EE may be exhibiting the traits we hoped to see in Group Sigma. Work continues toward establishing a reliable set of tests and measures for subject EE, but several measures are already in place, including surveillance gear in the school and the house.
Project Lullaby archives, 1962
JUNE 1973
Strapped down on her back on a black slab, Ester Elizabeth Finch felt like the dead frog from last year’s biology class. At least this year she’d be taking chemistry. Plus she’d turn 18 in November and her dad could no longer drag her to this asinine research program.
At first today seemed like the same familiar nonsense. Friendly but vaguely creepy men in white coats wanting her to guess what playing cards they held, make the marble roll, tell them what color light was shining on her hand within a box. Hypnotizing her and interviewing her about weird stuff she didn’t know while a lie-detector ran off its record of the answers she made up.
But then they wanted to give her a physical. A complete physical.
They apologized that no female nurses had clearance to examine her. When the doctor left, she couldn’t find her clothes. She was still wearing the stupid hospital gown.
Next they told her they needed a scan. It was a very sensitive machine. Any little movement would mess it up, so they needed to strap her down. They attached electrodes to her temples and forehead. It had now been over 15 minutes since any of them said a word to her. About half a dozen very creepy men in white coats drifted around the chamber, looking at the consoles and conferring excitedly, green-faced in the glow of their data screens. Ester caught isolated fragments of their speech.
“…resolution is awful compared to x-rays, but it images soft tissue…”
“Did you calibrate this scope?”
“…dripping serotonin today?”
“No. The synthetic.”
“…got it on-scale now. Jesus.”
“Hold off on that drip. We’re not…”
“…that can’t be right…”
“But the instruments agree. It must be.”
“Dial back another couple pegs. The synth has quite a kick.”
One of the men pushed an IV stand over to Ester’s left, and dabbed her arm with a cold swab before inserting the needle. He twisted the valve to start the drip, tossed a heartless little grin down at her, and strode off.
All the chatter ceased abruptly as a line of tiny green spiders began streaming down the IV tube and into Ester’s veins. Her chest constricted. She couldn’t scream.
[ Continue Reading ]
Cover Reveal: Tenpenny Zen
Mark your calendars! Tenpenny Zen, the second book in our Divided Man series, will be available on Monday, March 20.
Our books tend to defy categorization. We’re labeling this one as Cyberpunk although it might more accurately be called Shroompunk. For some reason Amazon doesn’t consider our newly invented genre legit. Yet.
And now, may we present to you the gorgeousness that is the cover of Tenpenny Zen:
Tenpenny Zen: a novel of sex, cults, and an interdimensional henge contraption.
Check back next week for a sneak peek at chapter 1!
Are They Ever Really Done?
Something that we knew about in an abstract way, but appreciated more viscerally once we published the first book, is that at some point you need to stop looking for things to fiddle around with. It’s done, move on.
But are they ever really done? (Yes. Yes they are.)
It’s hard letting go. A creative enterprise on the scale of writing a novel requires huge investment, to the point where it becomes an emotional bond with the book itself. You feel responsible for its well-being. There’s also the more rational concern for providing readers with a flawless experience. The paradoxical thing about perfectionism is that it keeps your readers from ever experiencing anything at all. Maybe that’s a kind of flawlessness, but certainly not the kind you should aspire to.
There will be the temptation to go back and do more fine tuning even after you’ve officially published the book. It’s easier than ever to tweak your files and re-upload them. It’s understandable. We’re sympathetic. But here’s the thing: it’s never-ending. There’s literally always going to be one more thing you could tweak, one more edit you can second-guess. Let George Lucas be a cautionary tale.
The best you can do is to do your best. Edit yourself meticulously, and get outside help if editing isn’t your strong suit. As we discussed last time, it can be tough to achieve critical distance and see what’s actually on the page rather than what you know you meant. Even with two of us to watch for them, cringeworthy errors have a way of sneaking in. In one of our manuscripts, we recently discovered “load crack” — a decidedly unsavory sound effect, which we changed to “loud crack” — and this is in a project that’s been read by about ten people, on which we’ve already done multiple editing passes. It’d been there the whole time.
Feel free to use “load crack” in your own work, by the way. We don’t need it.
You let things rest, you do your best, and then you move forward.
A writing partner is invaluable as a second set of eyes on your work, and also as a source of perspective for when to sign off.
Cover Reveal: Miss Brandymoon’s Device
It’s one week until launch day for Miss Brandymoon’s Device, the first volume of our Divided Man trilogy! We’re very excited and proud to reveal the cover design Kent created.
Feast your eyes!
Miss BrandyMoon’s Device: A novel of sex, nanotech, and a sentient lava lamp.
As soon as it launches we’ll provide info on all the ways to get your hands on it. Stay tuned!
So Now It’s Fall Already
Progress report time: we’re making progress!
Jen has completed the first nine stubs for Son of Science Novel. Each stub represents a scene, which for us tends to run in the range of three to six pages, although many times they end up longer. It’s not exactly rare for a scene to get cut after we’ve written it, but our process does help us minimize such wasted effort. If it gets stubbed, it’s a pretty sure bet it’ll be in the book.
Kent has completed the first draft of the new short story. He hadn’t done one in quite a while, and it felt damn good. In this case it was also fun to reconnect with characters we haven’t written lately. So now that draft needs to rest for a bit and then we’ll do revisions.
And, we have been devoting a lot of time over the past few weeks to the business side. This is a trend we expect to continue for the foreseeable future. It’s exciting and intimidating at the same time. One thing that’s become clear to us is that the biggest appeal of traditional publishing is the idea of having other people do all this stuff. (Which isn’t necessarily an accurate idea, but it sure is appealing!)
Now, back into it. More worlds to conquer! And winter is, is… due to arrive… just around the corner, er, bound to show up at some point.
The Not-So-Much-Writing Part of Being A Writer
Being in the home stretch toward publication means there’s been a great deal of intense activity in the writing cave, but not much of it feels like writing. This has always been the biggest part of our struggle with the business side. It’s not that rejection hurts too much, which is the received wisdom about writers’ procrastination when it comes to marketing. Rejection isn’t a great sensation, but we’ve never been thin-skinned about it. No, the issue is mostly just the time it takes, that it takes us away from writing.
But if we want to reach an audience, then we must publish the material. Which means we must invest time in the activity of marketing, which is easier to do when we adopt a brighter attitude about it. As part of our reformation, we’re trying to learn as much as possible about how to do it successfully. Because when you don’t know whether to expect your efforts to yield anything, it’s much, much harder to put any real spirit into them. And far easier to rationalize sustaining your familiar routine.
Even with the addition of this post, our Marketing category remains in single digits. That tells us that while we know it’s important (hence, the existence of the category at all) we’ve become very good at ignoring it. And yet, somehow, the books don’t publish themselves. We were so sure that’s how it worked.
Our hope is that, beyond this initial flurry of setup and learning by doing, we’ll be able to keep marketing’s share of our writing time down to a sliver. We really want to focus on our fiction, because that’s what we love. We just need to eke out a little time so it can find more people who will love it, too!
We’re Covered!
Last night, Kent completed the cover designs for all three volumes of the trilogy. We’re very proud of them (they’re gorgeous, in our unimpeachably unbiased opinion) and they bring us one very important step nearer to publishing the books.
We can’t wait to unveil these to the world. Stay tuned for the releases very soon!
The cover design project required about 60 hours, and produced a set of three coordinated designs. But it wasn’t anywhere close to an equal distribution of 20 hours per cover. The early stages of the process took up a disproportionate amount, and most of that went into searching stock photo libraries for the right base images to work from. Sites like Shutterstock have a seemingly infinite inventory, but we found it difficult to narrow things down to the right images. Eventually we decided to stop burning time on image searches and instead burn it on photo manipulation. Kent’s Photoshop kung-fu, accumulated over years of professional design experience, was up to the challenge.
Most authors don’t design their own covers. The publisher typically handles that, but if you’re self publishing then that puts it right back on your plate and you need to budget for art and graphic design services. A strong cover is essential, so this is not a place to wing it. In our case, design skills came along as part of the partnership package so it made sense to capitalize on them and get the covers we really wanted.
Every partnership is unique, and the background of each partner confers knowledge that can be leveraged — whether that’s in the form of subject matter, story structure, process, mechanics, or production.
Time Flies Like An Arrow
Woof.
Everything. Takes. Forever.
Maybe we have unrealistic expectations. Okay, that’s probably it. After all, we’ve done this several times, so of course it’ll just go faster and smoother each time from now on, right?
Jen continues to hammer away at the outlining for Son of Science Novel. It’s taking (spoiler alert!) longer than she budgeted. But it really is coming together, and now she’s nearly done incorporating all the mysterious scratches left by mysterious chickens in our various steno pads, from back when we were brainstorming the story. The process might be going faster, except she finds herself distracted by the art project happening on Kent’s side of the writing cave.
Kent continues to refine the illustration for the cover of our trilogy’s first book. It’s getting very close too, in fact, but there’s always one more tweak, one more font to try, one more configuration of the title and other text in relation to the artwork… Kent claims that he’d be making better time if not for the constant distraction of the outline being crafted on the other side of the writing cave. (Jen rolls her eyes.)
It’s worth giving your projects the time they need in order to create work that you’re proud of. With a partner sharing the load, you’ll get through the slow patches in half the time and have energy left for the fun stuff.
Keeping With Tradition(al Marketing)
The frustrations of sending query letters do sometimes have their compensations, such as when an agent asks for a full. That happened to us this week, which (a) makes us both extremely happy, and (b) feels a little spooky considering that just last week we vented about marketing.
Now we need to generate a properly formatted manuscript of the Science Novel and get it sent!
In related news, we’ve also registered to go to a conference next month. It’s been a while since we attended one, and we’re excited to do a little networking with industry types and our fellow wordsmiths.
Meanwhile, the first draft of Son-of-Music-Novel continues to move along. We’re at 80,000 words and into our fourth batch of stubs, which takes us more than halfway through the outline.