Five Hours with Real Paper

I spent five hours yesterday working on a brainstorm.  Five straight hours staring at a sheet of paper drawing bubble after bubble until the whole sheet was filled with bubbles and lines and, most importantly, words inside the bubbles.

I love brainstorming.  I'm a guy who embraced computers at eight years of age, a guy who refused to balance his checkbook until he had a money program for it, who never so much as wrote on a typewriter let alone by hand.  I'm a guy who recharges his books (thank you, Kindle).  I bleed ones and zeroes.

But I love brainstorming.  I have the technology to brainstorm on the computer (complete with a stylus with which I can draw into PhotoShop) but I still prefer putting pen to paper to draw then out...and then scan them into the computer.  Okay, I'm not completely analogue, I do concede that, but it's just poor practice to not have a backup somewhere.

Point is, I have figured out the rest of Highland High, the follow-up to Sleepy P.I., available now at Amazon.com, Budman's Bookstore in Weaverville, CA and All About Books in Redding, CA.  What, you thought I would write a whole entry without plugging my book?  Silly person.

So Highland High is ready to be finished.  I'm about three chapters away from the end and (fingers crossed) I might actually have the first draft done before my first book-signing on the 14th (at the aforementioned All About Books).  I'm frustrated it's taken me this long to write the thing, but I blame unemployment and general laziness.

But mostly unemployment.  And some laziness.

Ward of the Me

Unemployment doesn’t sit well with me. There were days when I was at work – particularly when I had a job that had me at work for two weeks straight – when all I wanted was to be at home all day to work on projects: reading, writing, anything-but-arithmetic. I dreamed of a day when I could wake up, dress in sweats and sit in front of the computer working on a novel or editing video or writing music and just create, create, create until it was time to pass out, because a creator doesn’t go to sleep, he runs out of energy until he has enough again to resume creating. It wasn’t much of a dream, but it was something.

And now I have it. I get money from the government to sit on my ass and write. The money is per the condition I look for a job, and I am: there’s just no job to be found in Nevada, the state with the highest unemployment in the country, as of last August (I am one of 13.4%, in case you were wondering). But that’s okay, as long as those unemployment checks keep coming, dammit. I write. I edit. And I am miserable.

There’s something to be said for earning money. I don’t want it given to me. I don’t want to be a ward of the state. I want to go to work, put in my time and be handed a check for it. Or, more importantly, I want to wake up, put on my sweats and create, and be paid for it. It might be too much to ask for, but I’m not a big fan of asking.

Sleepy P.I.

A print edition of Sleepy P.I. is available now!

Sleepy P.I. - Print Edition

Sleepy P.I. - Kindle Edition

Sandy Mantle used to work as a hitman who couldn't sleep until he made his kill. Now he works as a private investigator...who cannot sleep until he closes his case. And he's about to take a very long case.

Point Insertion is a town with a secret. Myla Campbell is a woman with land someone wants her dead over. Sandy Mantle is a private eye with a receptionist who has a penchant for excessive advertising. There's also a midget. And a plot. And a few jokes along the way.

Aaron Steinmetz makes his writing debut in this comedic murder mystery set along the Northern California coast.

Self-Publishing

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Novelty Press

Okay, so...the plan was to self-publish one hundred copies of Sleepy P.I. (available now as an e-book from Amazon) and sell them from my website, aaronsteinmetz.com to people who aren’t yet willing to embrace digital books (don’t feel singled out: if I didn’t have a Kindle I’d be right there with you).

Well: twenty copies in, the toner cartridge ran dry.  Might seem like a minor setback but, sadly, it’s a serious one.  Toner is ridiculously expensive, and twenty copies per cartridge drives up the cost of each copy too high to make self-publishing financially feasible.

The bad news?  I won’t have complete control of the print publishing process.  The good news?  I won’t be up until five in the morning printing copies of my book.  Print-on-demand will take care of that for me.

Sufficed to say, I will make a print copy of Sleepy P.I. available sometime in the near future.  I have twenty self-printed copies that will be what I am now calling the Author’s Edition of my book.  They will be signed, numbered and available for purchase at a collector’s price once I print the covers and get them bound.

Don’t want to pay a collector’s price?  I don’t blame you.  When the author’s editions are exhausted I will make a more competitively priced edition available from a novelty press of my choice and you are welcome to purchase it from them.  But it won’t be signed.  And it won’t be worth a fortune when I die tragically before my time.

Rest assured, I’m working on that last part.

National Novel Writing Month...is Over

Why do I subject myself to this horror every year? A whole month of stress and misery forcing myself to crank out as many pages as I can to try to make it to 50,000 words, it’s like some ironic punishment division of hell. Sure, I loved writing when I started, but now I’m ready to pump myself full of whatever drugs I can to burn that part of my brain and just stare at walls the rest of my life. Catatonic stupors don’t keep me up ‘til four in the morning.

That said, National Novel Writing Month really is a fantastic event that gives new writers the opportunity to experience the one dreaded thing every writer loves and fears: the deadline. Without them, no novel would ever be finished, and every writer in the world would have intimate knowledge of the fictional lives of the characters of their "stories" in immaculately clean houses, their word processor running on their computer screen displaying a white page for all eternity. The deadline drives us on, it compels us to write when we have no clue what’s going to happen next, and by gum it puts words on the page. Sometimes that’s all it takes to start at the beginning and get to the end.

I managed to get to 50,000 words at the eleventh hour, and all I get for it is not being ridiculed by my friends. That’s good enough for me. My hat goes off to you, NaNoWriMo, and not just because I’m finally going to take a shower. It goes off to you because you give us a reason to write, even if that reason is totally fake. 

Oh, and, uh, buy my book.