Kickstarter Ideas, TWW Update, TVTropes Pages
How fans can help fund future projects and spread the good word online. And another Atlanta comic show today and a new podcast
Work on The Walking Worm, the sequel to The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion, continues apace. I didn’t get much done January through March due to convention appearances, but late March and April I set aside to write. Over Spring Break, I completed Ch. 7-8 for my writing group to go over in late April and soon afterward I completed Ch. 9-10 to go over Sunday afternoon.
At the moment, this leaves me with a current word count of just over 51,000 with Ch. 1-10 finished and big chunks throughout the rest. At this point it’s just a matter of filling in gaps and altering the later material as needed. There’s also an 1,800 word epilogue from the POV of MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton (the older man on the cover below) I’ve already cut that I’ll probably share with premium subscribers after TWW premieres. Thing was about 56,000 words and TAI was just over 60,000; I want to keep TWW in that range. I don’t want each book getting longer and longer like the Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire novels. Some suggested Ch. 7-8 edits from fellow group member Chris Riker helped — cutting “qualifiers” like “almost” or “a bit” cut several hundred words. Remember, every little bit helps.
Also, I intend to pay as many of the production costs up front with Kickstarter (the most established crowd-funding system that comes with its own reader base), so here are the tentative rewards. For those of you not up on the lingo, “Tuckerization” refers to naming or basing a character on someone else. Here’s a more elaborate definition and some examples.
$3-Pledge without reward
$5-Acknowledgement in the back of the book. Reward level: UNCLASSIFIED
$10-Acknowledgement in the back of the book and The Walking Worm e-book. Reward level: SENSITIVE
$15-Acknowledgement in the back of the book, crossword puzzle, and The Walking Worm e-book. Reward Level: NEED TO KNOW
$25-Acknowledgement in the back of the book, crossword puzzle, and e-books for The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion as well as for TWW. Reward Level: CLASSIFIED
$40-Acknowledgement in the back of the book, crossword, TWW e-book and print book. Reward Level: TOP SECRET
$75-Acknowledgement in the back of the book, crossword, e-books and print books for all three books. Reward Level: ABOVE TOP SECRET
$100-Tuckerization (limited number). Reward Level: PRESIDENT ONLY. At the moment, there are fourteen or fifteen characters whose names and descriptions can be easily changed.
The crossword puzzle would be created using one of the online crossword-puzzle makers I’ve used as a teacher and would be based on the previous two books in the series. It would be electronic and you would print it to fill out. I might also offer e-book and print versions of my collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire as part of reward packages, but I haven’t made the final decision on that.
Do these rewards appeal to you? Let me know. Since this will be my first campaign I’m trying to keep it simple with mostly digital rewards that can be fulfilled right away, only one or two physical rewards (the print books), and making the physical rewards at least limited to the United States. The goal is to run the Kickstarter over the summer once the first draft is done and edited and have The Walking Worm available in late summer or fall.
Behold My TVTropes Pages (And Help Me Update Them)
Once upon a time, to the detriment of my productivity, I discovered TVTropes. The website catalogues tropes — sometimes but not always clichés — from various media. Here’s an article that goes into more detail about what a trope is. Obi-Wan telling Darth Vader in Star Wars: A New Hope if he strikes him down, he will become more powerful than Vader can possibly imagine would qualify as a Badass Boast, for example, while Spock’s death in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan would qualify as a Heroic Sacrifice and the shark-hunter Quint is Eaten Alive by the shark in Jaws.
Back when I wrote Kindle Worlds licensed fiction for Lindsay Buroker’s independent Fallen Empire science fiction series, I set up a TVTropes page for it. Not a lot of people have read the series, which has since fallen by the wayside, but it was a good experiment. Now I’ve got the independent Long War and Battle for the Wastelands series and the edgy, attention-attracting novella “Little People, Big Guns.” I’ve created TVTropes pages for all three, which you can see below:
Matthew W. Quinn's The Long War-Since “Long War” and “The Long War” were claimed, I borrowed from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Can someone insert an apostrophe?
I’ve also created a TVTropes page for me personally, in the vein of the creator pages for Stephen King, S.M. Stirling, and Dean Koontz. That’s the place where general information and content pertaining to works not listed in the above series goes. In that one I reference my alternate-history content, like the Harry Potter fan-fics “The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince” and “Lord of the Werewolves” I wrote in my twenties and the Afrikaner-verse that appears in my collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire and (the previous “November War” story I sent out in the newsletter).
Would anybody who’s got a TVTropes account be interested in adding tropes of their own and helping link the different individual trope pages to the series pages? I’ve done a little of it already, but you all might have seen things I haven’t.
Charlie’s Comic Con Today and a Last-Minute Podcast Announcement
From 10 AM to 6 PM today I’ll be selling books at Charlie’s Collectibles Show Comic Con and Free Comic Book Day at Stone Mountain. If you’re convenient to Atlanta, come on by. Admission and parking are free, and there’ll be free comics while supplies last.
(Also, Friday night a new episode of the film podcast Myopia Movies featuring me came out. It’s on the early 1990s dieselpunk film The Rocketeer, which I saw in theaters as a child. I remembered it fondly and really pushed for us to do an episode.)