Another month, another lull

I have nothing particularly witty, useful, or deep to say at this point in time. In fact, I have no doubt that I will end up deleting this post later.

Still with me? Great. Here comes some ramblings.

I'm nowhere near I wanted to be with Rise of the Carrion by the end of August. Which is to say, I'm nowhere near done with the first draft. I'm nearly done with Part 2. That's milestone enough, but I wanted to be done-done. I wanted to do edits in September and have something readable by October. It's not the end of the world that I have to [once again] adjust my timetable, but it is a little discouraging. To be honest, it reminds me of the too-much-time I wasted being unemployed.

Delving into my psyche, I find that I'm as susceptible to the paradox of the artist: I hate routine, but routine is the best way to get things done. It's the old how do you eat an elephant? problem and, to be perfectly frank, nobody eats an elephant artistically. You just have to do it. Effort and time, that's what I always say.

I keep looking toward the future, beyond "Rise." Not only do I still want to write the sequel to The Ninth Avatar, but I have a couple of unrelated Fantasy projects ready to be hatched or already in "first chapter written" stage. I also have a "historical fiction" planned, though it may lean a little in the Fantasy direction style-wise. I want to write these things. I need to write these things. They won't leave me alone.

What's extra disturbing is that I can track my lulls with alacrity. I backup to the cloud. When I finish a writing "session," I send myself an email with my MS file attached and the word count in the subject line. These automatically get stashed into a folder (aka an archived label in my GMail) with, of course, a date stamp of when they were sent. Care to see my "progress?"

Maddening, isn't it? Well, it is to me, knowing how much I can output when I really focus. When I don't really focus, hell, I barely get my MS file open before my attention is off elsewhere.

Then I usually end up with one of these blog posts, promising to recommit, to trying even harder, and returning to the same slugfest that has become my [lack of] writing routine. You'd think this would get easier with each subsequent project but, with the tumult of personal and professional lives intruding on my writing time and willpower, it really just doesn't.

I've read over and over that the key to focusing, when it comes to writing, is being able to close the door to distractions. While I find this to be true, I also think it's nigh on impossible for me. Closing the door, in many cases, just negates any effort on my part to regulate temperature (not a great thing in August). In the old days of 2010, I used to take a day off and spend it at Starbucks to really bump up the word count. While I still have the capability to do this, I don't have the time.

I think, maybe, that I had the balance at one point but I've let it slowly slip away. I'll find it, though. Just as soon as I can actually look for it.



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Irons, Fires... it's all a mess

Being a textbook Type B Personality, I run the constant risk of complacency. Lately I'm getting the sense that the worst feeling I can have is: I'm either really bad at time management or I'm just lazy.

I go through my days with my eyes open. I see other writers and authors doing these amazing things and I wonder how they find the time for them. With the recent website creation, I devoted a huge chunk of my time not only to building the framework but also writing the content, and the latter is still only about 40% done. Getting the trivia up there was probably my last major update for a few weeks, as now I need to focus on everything I've been neglecting to get the website running.

The more time I put into promotion, website stuff, facebook and twitter, the less time I have to write (among other things). There are only 24 hours in a day, and I'm only awake for 18 of them.

So often I feel like I'm playing Missile Command with life. That hectic desperation when you just can't shoot fast enough is the best metaphor, outside of Tetris. Despite my laid-back attitude, I get just as stressed as the next person. I let the impossible fade, try my best to focus on what I can accomplish, but it's incredibly difficult to avoid worrying about what I felt I could do and didn't. This is doubly true when it comes to writing.

I buck really hard when it comes to "writing every day." It's not for any fear of lack of creativity or hand cramps, writer's block, or even outright laziness in this case. I know I have motivation problems and this is one of them: I want to treat writing like it's important. I don't want it to be some routine exercise, putting words on a page because I have to, because my calendar says so. It may seem like semantics to you, between laziness and "making it special," but I'm sure you've avoided doing something you enjoy for this very reason.

I love to write like I love pizza, and that's saying a lot. But I don't eat pizza every day, for myriad reasons (mostly health-related), and neither do I write every day. I think about writing every day, and I certainly worry about when I'm going to finish my current WIP, but only until I realize I have 500 other things to do. I feel just as guilty for neglecting writing as I do about neglecting the gym, especially when the end of my WIP is all outlined out for me, or when I have an event to train for.

But I also have a day job. Garbage to take out and other chores. Vehicle maintenance and home upkeep. Dogs to walk. Friends to converse and laugh with. Social and political and relationship issues to understand and deal with. Books and blog posts and forums to read, games to play. You get the idea. I have "life" to do, and wedging time in for one thing inevitably means I must neglect something else.

So, either I'm really bad at time management because I'm not writing as much as I should, or I'm just lazy because I can't fit writing into my busy schedule on a more regular basis. What's really obnoxious is when your own stress stresses you out, and that's the direction things have been going. I resolve, I schedule, I make myself notes, and in the end I have to defer to whatever is the highest priority at the time.

This, more than any other reason, is why it's difficult for me to plan very far into the future. Something may come up and, yes, it may be more important than what I had planned to do. In my experience, that's the way life goes, particularly when you are beholden to others to decide your priorities for you (e.g. your employer). And yet, if I were only able to organize and plan better, my priorities wouldn't clash so much. Poetic justice if I've ever seen it.

I'm impulsive, so a project that takes hundreds of hours of writing is automatically difficult. Novels require so much more of me than I'm able to give on a daily basis, and it's a constant struggle to find balance. Work/life balance, life/writing balance, life/life balance; it's all a mess.

I think, perhaps, I need to pace myself a little better. Cool some of these irons. Prioritize, organize, mobilize. But following through on resolutions was never really my strong suit, either. Maybe it's just a matter of taking more control over how my time is spent, making conscious choices instead of unconscious ones (whether I use a calendar or not), and seeing how that works for a while. Then again, "planning ahead" and "one day at a time" are the opposites of the spectrum.

I'm sure it'll make sense at some point, but now is not that time. Now's the time to try harder, adjust as necessary, and move forward. Like I told someone yesterday, "It's like walking in a dark room. You don't have to see where you're going to get there."



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New Website todd-newton.com Officially Launched

I has website.

Honestly, I still have a lot of work left to do as far as the content, but the framework is there and there is a ton of content that I posted over the weekend (mostly to the The Ninth Avatar area). Have a look and let me know what you think.

Yes, I did view the site in IE -- only problem I saw so far was that the content is anchored to the left (it's supposed to be centered, as in the Chrome screenshot above). The site is best viewed in Firefox, a far superior browser, anyway. When I have time, I'll fix this but for the moment it doesn't keep the content from being legible.

I'll be sure to post updates as more content becomes available, especially the Trivia page (which I'm very excited about). In the meantime, please contact me with any questions you might have.

It's still a little staggering to see what I've created out there, live and viewable. To see the things I created in PHP actually work, I mean, that's just crazy. I realized last night, however, that it's given me another thing to maintain that could-but-hopefully-won't cut into my writing time. Can't worry about that now, though. I have a manuscript to finish.

Rise of the Carrion, here I come.


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More Identity Shenanigans

A while ago, I posted about some issues with my name and how common it is. Well, doing all this website work has made me revisit this issue, and now I get to share that with all of you.

You see, there are a bunch of Todd Newtons around. I believe I'm the only Author one, but there are Famous ones, Dentist ones, Racecar driving ones, Criminal ones, Dead ones, and even Digital Media Entrepreneur ones. It's really this last one (and a bit of the first one) that I get to talk about again today.

Frankly, I've been on the Internet a long time. Since somewhere in 1993-1994, to be as close to exact as I can come. I've had myriad email accounts, signing up with Hotmail when it was new and not-yet-owned by Microsoft (which ruined it, IMO). I cut my teeth learning HTML in free homepage accounts with various providers (anyone ever heard of Angelfire and Geocities and Tripod?). I was both a lethario and a scourge of chat rooms I frequented, gaining all kinds of bad reputation, some of which people were still talking about on Myspace nearly a decade later (wish I could find the link, but it's dead). And all that just in the early years.

Even with all my activity, until now I have never had "my own website" meaning a site on my own domain. I've seen other people do it, and I've known how to do it for a very long time. I mean, I did go to college for this stuff, plus I've worked for various technology companies throughout my career where DNS, web development, and domain hosting were all important. I've just never needed my own website. Then, for a while, I relied on Myspace and Facebook and this blog to be my online presences.

About a month ago, however, I decided I wanted my own website. A place where people, readers or otherwise, could find me and my writing. A blog does work for this, but a blog is just one tool among various options. It doesn't offer enough flexibility for what I need to do, but I'd never get rid of it. I see authors who only have blogs, rather than a "full" website with information on their books, relying on Goodreads or Amazon to essentially host that portion for them by proxy, and it signals to me that these authors don't want to interact with me. They want to broadcast, which is fine, but I think the Internet facilitates much more than the posting of opinions and information.

Thus began my adventure to build my own website, which will officially launch Monday the 15th.

There are two parts to owning a website. First, you must register a domain name, then you must host content somewhere that domain name points to. Companies like GoDaddy make it simple, as they offer both services bundled together, but there are a ton of registrars and hosting companies out there. The Internet is a big place. All that to say that you need to choose a domain first, then you can decide where it gets hosted.

Naturally, I wanted www.toddnewton.com. It makes the most sense, is the easiest to say and the easiest to type. Unfortunately, when I went to do a WHOIS search, I found it was already owned by Entrepreneur Todd. Worse than that, he wasn't even doing anything with it. You see, with domains, you can just have them point to other domains (like if you go to google.net it will automagically re-route you to google.com). This is a relatively cheap and easy solution for companies who have a lot of names, products, etc. because they just point everything to one hosted site. Entrepreneur Todd wasn't even doing that. He just owns the domain and if you try to browse to it you get a big nothing.

So I offered to buy it from him. Sadly, the guy didn't respond, which makes me wonder how he conducts any type of online business. Undeterred, I decided to try something else.

The problem is that there are so many other damn Todd Newtons, and one of them is famous. I assumed that any of the "good" domains with my name in them were probably already taken. Not to mention the fact that when you make a domain name longer, people become more reluctant to type it in (or, frankly, remember it). I was actually pretty shocked when I opened Moses Siregar III's The Black God's War to find his website was www.ScienceFictionFantasyBooks.net.

Not only is this a mouthful, totally nonspecific, and a .net besides, but he also owns the domain that matches his name and (currently) isn't doing anything with it. Perhaps that's a work in progress. It just sort of irks me since, unlike me, his name is quite distinct and rather than use that to his advantage he chose a long, bland domain name that would better-serve a review site or news aggregator. Maybe it's an SEO thing.

Then again, you don't want to get too specific. Registering your author website on yourbooktitle.com will start to become a pain in the ass once you have a second, third, fourth book out. You've confined your identity to that first book which, in many cases, isn't indicative of the quality of your body of work.

Anyway, all that to say that toddnewtononline.com was already taken. I considered other domains, some of which were already taken like the ill-fated tdnewton.com (ill-fated since I dropped that authornym some time ago). Other options, like toddnewtonwrites.com, again just make it longer and harder to say, type, and remember. After a few days of searching and weighing options, I discovered that todd-newton.com was available.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that using hyphens is not always advisable, since quite a few spam/scam/knock-off sites have them in the domain name. This is how they get similar domains to what they're mimicking. Then again, it's also how some movie titles have their own sites (they just add -movie.com to a phrase that might be common enough that someone owns it).

I settled on todd-newton.com, registered it, and signed up for a hosting account. Life has been pretty intense with layout building, browser testing, and content generation ever since. There are a LOT of easy ways to build your website, and I didn't use any of them. What can I say? I wanted it to be my website, not just a website with my name on it. And I wasn't satisfied just having a blog with a "branded" domain name.

I want to interact with my readers. I want them to come to the website curious about the worlds I've created and be able to read up on them, look at the map again, check out the glossary of terms, play some trivia, maybe shoot me an email or tell me they've done up some artwork of one of my characters. I can't do that without a place for the content to be hosted, and I can't do that without my own domain. And, as it happens, I can't do that without a hyphen.

Some other time I will post about my design and content struggles so you can see how much fun I really had building this website. Till then, good luck if you're entering the website world. Check back for the official announcement of my new site on Monday.


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New Website Coming

You may notice, now, in the address bar that this blog is on its own domain. MY domain. Don't panic, everything will still work as usual. I have spent hours making certain that's the case. I do all the work around here.

The good news is that, now that I have my own domain, I will soon have my own website. With content. It's a staggering development, I know, but very exciting.

I'll make all the usual announcements when the time comes. Until then, please bear with me. Content creation is no simple, overnight thing. And, again, thanks for reading -- this blog would be nothing without my subscribers.


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The Ninth Avatar: Starka, as a Character

Today, I'd like to do a bit of character study. This might contain some spoilers so, if you haven't read The Ninth Avatar and plan to, you might want to skip this (and return to it later).


If I were giving out awards to the parts played in this novel, Starka probably wouldn't win Best Character. Rather, I think she'd win Most Improved Character. My "Best" vote would probably go to DaVille, Cairos, or Wan Du, but it's all subjective. The character's perspective you enjoy most will dictate what you get out of the story.

That being said, it's become apparent to me that some readers are completely put off by Starka.

Here's one perspective:

...the main character Starka annoyed me so much that it was difficult to read about her. I think she must be the sister of Bella from Twilight. She was always doing stupid things, asking stupid questions, had a 14 year old’s sexual maturity, and was always needing to be rescued by a man.

And another:

...thoughts of her dear brother quickly fall off the radar and Starka's character begins to unravel. She is shown to have no firm ideas and no ability to defend herself. However, she consistently puts herself in harms way, where she is both no help and a liability; with those that know better doing little to dissuade her. This is forced drama and adds nothing. I could have appreciated her more if she had at least shown some common sense or intelligence, but she does neither.

At first, I was shocked and horrified by this. Then I was just confused. Were we talking about the same character?

As I was writing the book, Starka was hands-down my favorite. The book is about her, after all: her prophecy, her journey, and her transcendence of circumstance to become something more than she was before. She goes through a process of development, and by virtue of that she has to start a bit "lesser" than she ends. She is there as events unfold, and not only gets to participate in the story but also benefit from it.

After giving the matter a lot of thought, I came to partially agree with the above viewpoints. At the beginning of the novel, Starka is not only distraught but was raised in a society of rose-colored glasses. Her bigoted nation seems a utopia to those who live inside it, and she's lived her entire life with that single goal in mind. She has no idea what the real world is like except for what she's told by her authority figures, and that is simply that the outside world is an evil place. Even after being thrust into it and finding her usual defense mechanisms inadequate, she has no idea what to do.

In short, she's not prepared for the adventure she's about to have. Starka hides behind her faith much of the time because it's all she knows. Her only support mechanisms, her brother and her church, have both abandoned her for reasons she can't grasp. She's weak, afraid, and not the right person for the job--and yet she must go on this adventure. She's the only person who can.

Of course, I don't want to defend Starka as some headless moron who blindly stumbles through the story. Neither would it make sense for her character to pick up an axe and start beheading the nearest Carrion soldier she could find. No one would see her as a traditional "hero." She's what writers refer to as simply a protagonist.

I know some readers enjoy her, they just may not be as vocal about it in their reviews.

She's neither wizard nor warrior, and in a harsh world a person with no way to fight back or defend themselves must rely on others to do it for them. This isn't ideal for her, since Starka believes the rest of the world to be untrustworthy, but she has no choice in the matter.

By the end of the story, she has come face to face with the largest obstacles of her life and fought beyond them. She's gained confidence enough to believe in herself, which encourages others to believe in her. That comes in handy as the new leader of her people, and the voice of a nation entering into a new age.

It's a tough balance to strike, I think. On the one hand, you have a completely helpless character who, by virtue of their lack of participation, probably shouldn't have been a character at all. Alternatively, you have a character who drives the story forward by making decisions and proactively affecting their circumstances. The character I attempted to portray began the story as the former and ends up the latter. It's the portion where she can't stand up for herself that I believe turns some folks off.

Then again, I hear from others who enjoy Starka's perspective. Her naivety allows for a strict education on the world of The Ninth Avatar and how it functions. As she explores, the reader also explores, and those who can really jump on board with the course of Starka's "education" are rewarded when she triumphs in the end. This was what I tried to accomplish.

So, now I open the floor up to you. If you've read the novel, did you feel like you related to Starka? If not, have you ever read a book where you felt like you completely misunderstood the protagonist?



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