I’ll be designing The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee for Theatre Charlotte in May, and another show that I can’t talk about yet because it hasn’t been officially announced. But it’s a director that I’ve worked with several times before, and he and I get along famously, so it’s pretty much a done deal. I think I can probably do 3-4 shows a year without burning up too much writing time, and the extra income is always nice. Plus I’m good at it, which certainly doesn’t hurt .

I didn’t write yesterday – I gave myself the day off. I hammered out almost 5,500 words on Saturday across two projects, and I feel pretty confident that the Cindy Slaughter thing will be finished this month. Paint it Black will be done next month, and I need to get a Bubba story knocked out in February as well, so I’ve got plenty to do. I also have some more work to do on Genesis before I move on to Exodus, which is due at the editor’s in May.

Watched most of the second half of the Super Bowl, and was happy to see Eli win another one. I’m far from a Giants fan, but I thought they were the lesser of two evils, so I enjoyed the outcome. And isn’t it about time that people start asking Peyton about his brother, rather than the other way around?

After the game I watched The Voice for the first time and I really enjoyed it. I liked the format, I liked most of the judges, and some of the contestants had good stories. So I’m pretty well hooked on that, which is all I need. Suzy and I have now watched all of the Burn Notice on Netflix, and just started Stargate: SG-1. With ten season of that, it oughta keep us occupied for a good long time. And all I can say is that Amanda Tapping looks downright juvenile with blonde hair. And fifteen years younger. She’s much hotter on Sanctuary.

Except that everyone there was the best actor in his or her high school, and a lot of them had way better high school programs than I had. Some of them had more than one drama class in high school. And some of them did more than one show each year. Some schools even had a teacher for nothing but drama! To say I was behind the curve would be putting it mildly. But I auditioned, and I took classes, and I worked, and I didn’t get cast.

Then I ran into my buddy Clark, and he changed my life with a simple question – “Do you want to run spotlight for this show for me?” Clark was the Technical Director at Winthrop when I started there, and I had come from another audition where I didn’t get cast. Clark and I knew each other from working together on weekends at the museum in Rock Hill, SC. I helped out with the front desk and gift shop, and Clark worked in the planetarium. So when he saw me wandering around the theatre building, he offered me a gig running spotlight for the show.

And that’s where it all started for me. I had fun running the spot, and I felt like I was part of something for a change. At the time I was an English major, which is a fairly solitary endeavor, so the feeling of working together with a bunch of people to get something done was really welcome. The theatre folks welcomed me with open arms, probably because they were (and still are) as weird, awkward and dysfunctional as I was (am). So by the end of that year I had double-majored, gotten some small roles in shows, but more importantly I had discovered a whole new world. A world that over the next twenty years would feed my family, buy my house, my cars, send me all over the country, and eventually turn me into a professional writer.

That year I joined a brotherhood that I’ve strayed away from for while, but always find myself drawn back into it. We’re the ones in black, with tools hanging from out belts, probably with tattoos and piercings, and we might look more like a motorcycle gang than highly skilled professionals in an extremely technical field, but we’re the people you want on your side when it absolutely, positively has to get done right away. We’re rude, crude and obscene. We drink too much, eat too much greasy food, frequently have unreliable relationships with barbers and razors, but we can make sure that the show happens right, and happens on time, and then gets the hell out of our building so we can go drink. We’re technicians.

We’re not “techies.” A “techie” is a high school kid running props for extra credit. A “techie” is an actor who might be able to run the light board if everything is programmed for them. A “techie” is someone who you’ll let help push road cases but you’d never trust them to stack motor boxes in the back of a semi with you. I haven’t been a “techie”for a couple decades now, and I’m pretty damn quick to correct anyone who tosses that term around.

We’re techs, stagehands, crew, technicians, squints, squeals, riggers, truss monkeys, wood butchers, sparkies, board ops, spot ops, deckhands, truck trolls and a thousand other names that we’ve given ourselves. But you might not get to use those. Nicknames are like kid brothers – I can beat the shit out of mine, but you’d better not even look at him funny.

We’re brothers and sisters in black, a family forged in the backs of tractor-trailer trucks and in the high steel. We’re the people who make your entertainment happen, and without us, your favorite performer naked on a bare stage in the dark and no one can hear them whine about it. No matter how long I’m out of the business, or just tangentially attached to it, I can walk into a theatre with a black shirt, gloves and a crescent wrench and step right back into that world. I’m not nearly as nimble as I once was scurrying up a rope ladder to focus a front of house rig, but I’m still able to get into the back of a truck and sling a lot of steel.

I was reminded this week of what it means to be part of that brotherhood, because we lost another on of our own here in Charlotte. Ironically,I met Chris Burchett when neither one of us were doing much stagehand work. I was selling him lighting gear as he was the tech director for a local private school. We weren’t friends, really, but buddies. Acquaintances. The guys who shake hands and catch up briefly when you work a gig together every three or four years. But in the sense that he was one of us – the crew, he was my brother. And I’ll miss him. Being a theatre technician in a small community like Charlotte is very much a John Donne kinda thing – each man’s death diminishes me. I’m diminished by Chris’ passing, as is our whole brotherhood. And even though the audiences will never know it, backstage there is a void.

Vaya con Dios, Chris. You are missed.

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Instead we’ll recap some of January. It’s been a very good month for sales, surpassing December’s numbers and putting an end to the slight downward slide overall sales will likely be higher than any point since October, and several of the new titles are performing well. There hasn’t been any kind of bump from KDP Select yet, but I don’t start with any of those freebies until mid-week. I’ll be reporting back on how that all goes.

The new stuff is going well so far. Monsters Beware, the Bubba collection, has sold over 100 copies in the first month, while not really eating into the individual story sales too much. Cat Scratch Fever is having a good debut week, with 24 copies sold so far, and Gone Daddy Gone and Knight (Un)Life are coming out of the gate pretty strong as well. I now have somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty titles available, most of them short works. But as I colelct more of them into full-length volumes, I think I’ll continue to see increased sales.

Everybody says “write the next book” as if it’s the Holy Grail of book marketing, and I’m here to tell you something – they’re right. You’re only as good as your last project, so you’ve got to keep the wheels turning and the ideas churning if you’re going to make it in this business. But it’s been a great January, better than January 2011 by a factor of several thousand dollars! So thanks for all your support, I couldn’t do any of this without you!

But when it comes time for some killin’, I need to amp it up a little. And really, what better for a horror writer to work with than a little Rob Zombie?

I’ve wanted to write a story about a rakshasa for a long time, and January’s bowl games between Clemson and West Virginia (sorry, Clemson fans) and LSU/Alabama gave me plenty of tiger jokes to work into the story. I even went with the orange cover for my poor suffering Clemson fans. In short, there’s a love story, a murder mystery, a bar fight, a magical sword and a bunch of giant cat-people kicking ass all over West Virginia. I think it’s an absolutely ridiculous premise, which makes it pretty much perfect for a Bubba story. It’s currently available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

That’s currently the only Bubba story that is available on Barnes & Noble, because I’m trying a 90-day experiment with KDP Select. This is a way in which self-published authors can make their books exclusive to Amazon for three months, and in exchange they get to be available for borrowing by Amazon Prime members, and they can make their books free for five days out of the 90-day period. I’m trying this with the Bubba stories because I don’t want my main property (Black Knight Chronicles) to vanish from Noon or iTunes for thee months, but I’m interested in seeing what happens with these properties. But as part of KDP select, various Bubba properties will be going free at various times for the next 90 days. Keep up with me on Facebook or Twitter to make sure you know when that happens!

Speaking of The Black Knight Chronicles, I’ve gotten more good feedback from my editor and have now written most of the outline for Book 4, plus most of the first chapter. I expect to get a lot of work done on that one this weekend, because I get to be in my house for most of the weekend and not drunk wandering around conventions with amazing best-selling urban fantasy authors and publishers. Full disclosure – I didn’t get drunk with Gail Z. Martin or Allan from Kerlak, but we did have a lovely time talking writing, promotions and business at Chattacon. And I make no claims of anyone else’s intoxication on Saturday night, but I was hammered  by the time I waved the white flag at 2AM. And I honestly believe that Laura Anne’s phone dove into a glass of bourbon of its own accord. Really, I do.

And some people just licked books last weekend.

And speaking even further of my writing, and completely ignoring the fact that Chattacon had free beer in the con suite all weekend, there’s a short story coming! It’s actually already been out for a while as part of Twelve Worlds, a charity anthology I participated in last year, but the exclusivity is almost over and I’ll be publishing it in a variety of formats this spring. It will come out as a stand-alone short story for $.99, then I’ll collect it with Movie Knight, Black Magic Woman and Turkey Day Debacle (only available here on my site currently) and put those out as a small collection for $2.99.

I also have several shot stories that aren’t Bubba stories or Black Knight stories that I’m probably going to put out there in the next couple of months as a collection. They’re mostly sci-fi, a little fantasy, and some other randomness. So that’s coming this spring as well.

The Cindy Slaughter story that I posted the beginning of here a little while ago is moving along. I think it might end up as a novella by the time I’m done. Right now I’m at about 8,000 words and I haven’t gotten into the main plot yet. So it’s going to either be a long novella or a short novel. Either way, that’s coming, too. And someday there will be a sequel to Genesis, I promise.

And I’m in a play. I’m playing Dave in Almost, Maine for Ballantyne Community Theatre next month, so if you’re in the Charlotte area on a February weekend and want to see me make a fool of myself and strip down to my longjohns on stage, come on out. And I still have seven weeks left at the day job. I think a lot of these projects are going to wrap up in March/April, as my writing time increases dramatically. I’m looking forward to that, because I’m feeling pretty motivated right now, and I want to harness that as much as possible.

Isn’t there an old Bon Jovi song about sleeping when I’m dead?

At least that’s what it feels like from here. The more I figure out, the more I realize that I know friggin’ nothing about putting a book together, and I can see how it could get overwhelming if you let it. And if you didn’t have an ego the size of Cleveland, which I do. I’m excited about all these notes, because it really does feel like school again, and I enjoy learning new stuff when I can see the value of it. In this case, the point is to make me a better writer, to make me more marketable, and to sell more books. That was the whole point behind signing with a traditional publisher in the first place – to elevate my craft and make us both money. Then I can take what I learn and move it across to my self-pubbed products and be more profitable everywhere.

So do I think everyone needs to sign with a traditional publisher to learn how to craft a novel? No. Do I think I found a good place for me to hone my craft while making money? Yes. I’m not a flag-waver. I don’t care how you choose to manage your career. For me, the hybrid career seems to be the best plan. I’ll sell some stuff to small press, some stuff self-pubbed, and if I get a NY deal, that’s cool, too. For me, right now, the point is to hone my craft and keep putting food on the table. And the best place for me to be to do that is with Bell Bridge Books. So my advice to new writers is this – check out the small press world. They aren’t going to give you buy a Ferrari advances, but they will give you personal attention and work with you to help develop your career.

Here are a few that I can personally vouch for -

Bell Bridge Books

Kerlak Publishing

Samhain

Apex Book Company

If you’ve worked with, or know of a good small press, feel free to leave it in the comments and I’ll try to update the post.

I’m not going to pitch everything I’ve written in Paint it Black, but I am going to blow up a fair bit of it. As I read my editor’s notes on the synopsis, I realized that there were a couple of things that made this book very different from the others in the series, and not necessarily in a good way. There was practically no supernatural stuff going, I was almost 20,000 words in and we hadn’t had a fight scene yet, and there was no Father Mike. These are problems. I love the character of Father Mike, and he needs to be in every book. The characters are vampires, and they fight supernatural bad guys, so there needs to be a supernatural element. And really, I went nearly a third of a book without a fight scene? God, I was doing some serious navel-gazing.

So I now have a totally new direction for the book, and I’m pretty excited about it. There will be supernatural stuff going on – fairies, trolls, vampires, and new monsters. There will be Father Mike. And there will be fighting. Oh yes, there will be fighting.

So that’s my lesson for the week for self-pubbed authors. If you don’t have someone you trust to bounce ideas off of, then go find that person. I chose a traditional publisher to fill that role, but it can be a critique partner, a friend, whatever. It’s usually not a great idea of it’s a spouse but your mileage may vary.

I’ll leave you with a scene from Chattacon, where I spent the weekend chatting with some awesome authors and publisher types, got to watch one urban fantasy bestseller’s phone leap unprovoked to its death in a vat of bourbon, and realized that writers drink even more than theatre folk. I gotta step up my game! And I got hammered on chocolate wine by mute writer with an iPad and an evil, evil soul! Lando says “Playa, please!”

I was freezing. My feet were numb and the only thing keeping my hands from going the same way were the chemical handwarmers I had tucked inside my mittens. My breath would have been billowing steam around me if not for the black balaclava I had wrapped around my head. Only my eyes were exposed, and even those were starting to freeze shut. The steady drizzle had long since made my black ski coat into a sodden, heavy mass of cold pinning me to the rooftop where I’d setup my surveillance. Finally the light in the bedroom I’d been watching for the past three hours clicked off, and the foyer lights on the house clicked on. A few seconds later, my target stepped out the front door, and it was showtime.
I set down the binoculars I’d been watching through and blinked a couple of times to clear the ice off my eyelashes. Cursing my thick dark eyelashes for not the first time in my life, I settled my cheek alongside the stock of my Remington 700 SPS tactical rifle and slipped my hands out of my mittens. I took careful aim as the target kissed his mistress, closed the door and turned to go down the steps to the Lexus sedan parked half a block away in a feeble attempt at discretion. He stopped, checked his watch, and looked up and down the sidewalk before taking his first step. I exhaled as he lifted his foot, and squeezed the trigger. The .223 Remington round spat out of the barrel, dropping slightly due to wind and the drizzle, and struck the target solidly just above his right eye. His head snapped back and his feet went out from under him, dropping him solidly on his butt on the porch. I slid to the edge of the roof and zoomed in on his corpse with my Canon T3i digital SLR camera. The 75-300mm zoom lens made it a snap to focus on his face from fifty yards away, and I took several pictures as he lay there in the porch light. The small round left a neat hole in his forehead, with no exit wound to leave a mess on his girlfriend’s door.
Evidence collected, I broke down the rifle into the soft-sided guitar case I used to carry my rifles, and put the camera into the extra space. I slung the whole mess onto my back and started for the stairs. I had just pulled the heavy door shut behind me when my cell buzzed in my pocket. “Crap,” I muttered as I pulled a mitten off with my teeth and dug around in my sopping jeans for my phone. I swiped a thumb across the screen and peered down at the text glowing up at me.
“Where u at, gurl?” My best friend Tina asked in her pseudo-streetwise lingo, even though she lives in Back Bay with her mom and stepdad. He’s some kind of neurologist or psychologist or some doctor that messes around in your head. Her mom’s pretty with big boobs. That’s her job, and she works hard at it. Pilates, yoga, tennis, manicures, pedicures, massages – if it tightens, stretches or tones, Tina’s mom is all over it. Tina kinda hates her mom, she thinks she’s a gold-digger. She’s right, but it’s not really that bad.
“Just getting off work, u?” I texted back. Tina thought I worked at a used bookstore in Jamaica Plain. Since she never read anything in her life that wasn’t in Cliff Notes format, that kept her from asking too many questions about my work. Which was a good thing, since bookstore clerks are seldom called upon to shoot state senators in the head from fifty yards away.
“Home. Bored. Duh. Wanna come over?” The last thing I wanted to do was go over to Tina’s and watch another chick flick movie while her mom drank red wine until she passed out. I was cold, wet and still had homework. But there was one thing I had to check on first.
“Where’s Jason?” Jason was Tina’s older brother. He was eighteen and on the swim team. He had dark, curly hair and pale blue eyes that made his tanned skin look even darker. In a word, yum.
“I wouldn’t have bothered asking if he wasn’t home. Now get yr ass over here! LOL”
“Be there soon.”
I slid my phone back in my jeans and continued down the stairs. At the third floor I pushed through the door and into the hallway, pausing long enough to remove the duct tape I’d used to hold the door open when I went up to the roof earlier. I passed under the security camera, wire dangling from where I’d cut the wire a week before and made my way down the hall to my apartment. There was nothing in there except an air mattress, a duffel bag, a backpack bulging with my schoolbooks and a roll of toilet paper. I quickly stripped off all my wet clothes and draped them over the moderately functional radiator. I dug a pair of panties, bra, towel and washcloth out of the duffel and stepped into the bathroom. I grabbed a travel size soap and shampoo from my bag and set them on the edge of the bathtub, then set a Walther P22 pistol on the back of the toilet. I had a 22Sparrow suppressor screwed onto the barrel of the Walther, so if anyone disturbed my shower there shouldn’t be any more noise than a loud handclap. I wasn’t expecting visitors, but it’s always better to be safe than dead.
I stood under the hot spray for a long time, washing the smell of gunfire out of my hair and the chill out of my bones. I personally thought that the tangy, slightly salty smoky smell of firearms was a little sexy, but I doubted Tina’s brother would think so. He’d probably think I burned dinner or something. I got out of the shower, dried off and padded into the apartment in my underwear. My clothes were still soaked, so I dug around in my duffel for the spare jeans, Harvard sweatshirt and socks I had with me. I finished dressing, pulled on tennis shoes and a light raincoat, and grabbed my camera out of the guitar bag. All my wet clothes went into the duffel, the backpack onto my shoulders, and the guitar case in one hand. I grabbed the duffel with the other hand and did a quick idiot check of the room before I left.
“Idiot, indeed.” I muttered at myself as I went back into the bathroom, grabbed my Walther and slipped it into the guitar case. The shampoo container and soap wrapper went into the duffel, and out the door I went. I left the door open a crack behind me, figuring it wouldn’t take long for one of the junkies on the floor to take me up on my unspoken offer of a place to crash. I still had three months paid up on the place, somebody might as well use it.
The street was awash with red and blue lights when I stepped out the front door, just another little redheaded girl in a city full of Irish. I stepped up to a cop working the yellow tape and asked “What happened?” in my best innocent little girl voice.
He looked down at me and smiled a little. “You shouldn’t see stuff like this kid, head on home.”
“Okay.” I said, and turned to walk away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a big man in a suit eyeballing the crowd suspiciously. A detective, wondering if the killer had revisited the scene to check on the investigation. Yup, I had. And they had no idea. They just saw another skinny, clean and maybe cute someday little girl going home from a guitar lesson.
I walked a couple of blocks over, then tossed the duffel into an alley where I knew a homeless family with a daughter about my size had taken up residence. I’d cased the neighborhood well before I decided on my attack strategy. I knew every person that lived in a four-block radius of my strike zone, and knew that the cops in this neighborhood only had a 35% close rate on homicides. The precinct where the target lived, make that had lived, reported a 77% close rate on murders. Didn’t take a math whiz to figure out which neighborhood was better to shoot someone in. Of course, I am a math whiz. Come to think of it, I’m pretty bright in general. I’m Cindy Slaughter, teenage assassin. Pleased to meet you, too.

Here’s another one – Wil Wheaton

Please, write your congressman/woman/person/puppet and tell them why they should be unemployed if they support this bill. Because a lot of us who create content certainly will be.