Nate On The Net

I’ve been making slow progress at various projects, primarily trying to fix some bugs in my Brainsucking Mutants game and contemplating a paper doll system (pixel art) for it. I’m not sure if I’ll manage, but I have a few random (not very good, as you’ll see) pixel art doodles to prove that I haven’t been wasting all of my spare time playing Civilization… >_>

Well, September isn’t over, but my experiment with pricing my biopunk novel, Fourwar, on Amazon Kindle at $0.99 is. I reduced the price at the beginning of September, made the requisite announcements on Twitter and my other social networks, and pressed on with my (admittedly light) marketing efforts. Net result? Zero sales, no change from August.

To further my experiment, I’ve decided to go the other way and try a month priced at $4.99 instead. I suspect the price doesn’t really matter if you’re an “unknown” author. I also suspect that, like Robert Sawyer hints on his blog, self publishing is hard in SF generally – whether you take that as “speculative fiction” or “science fiction,” it seems like this stuff is just not going to fly off “virtual” shelves in the same way that a titillating romance novel or a traditional whodunit would. So, more work on marketing for me.:) Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to spam the fuck out of every blog and forum in existence, so trying to find more organic ways of advertising has been challenging.

In terms of measuring general interest and exposure, I get somewhat confusing results comparing awstats reports to Google Analytics reports on my blog, and the latter can’t track certain things. What I do know is that my own website stats claim that, in September to date, the free PDF version of Fourwar was downloaded 19 times, and my first novel, Alice [free PDF], 10 times. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, Amazon doesn’t show Kindle page traffic to authors, so you’re out of luck trying to figure out if you’re even being noticed on Amazon if you aren’t actively making sales.

Anyway, the experiment will press on. My third novel, a sort of urban sci-fantasy tale, is sitting at about 50,000 unedited words now, so small progress! I’m hoping to have a finished draft by the end of the year (but I know I said that before). I’m also working on yet-another-edit of Alice, which I’ll then place on the Amazon Kindle store as well as leaving it available under a CC license here.

I’ll close with a couple of very rough-draft thumbnails of images I’m working on – more things that I hope to finish by the end of the year.:)

In case you ever wondered about why I have a sort of strange dragon (maybe a sea-dragon or sea serpent?) as my “avatar” here and there, a few years ago I stumbled over this Strong Bad email (flash video with sound, SFW) and decided I could handle drawing an S with a more bigger S.;) One day I found myself a bit bored and had scrap paper and a pencil lying around, so I sketched it out.

Click below to see the original sketch, in all of its messy glory. But definitely watch the video first!

I’ve added a new gallery plugin to WordPress and migrated all of my artwork into it, so you can now see thumbnail views of just about everything I’ve done in the last few years. A lot of new stuff – hope you find some of it interesting.:)

More playing around with my tablet. This one is just intended to portray some sort of night-elementals, both the figure and the caged lantern-creature. Somebody suggested the latter is a bit like the жар-птица (firebird) from Slavic lore, which is amusing, since I was initially going for something like caged glowing birds, maybe phoenix-like, or a bird-firefly hybrid. I think it ended up being as much flora as fauna. I was initially going for “spooky,” but I never manage to pull that off.:P Anyway, just done for fun. Enjoy.:)

Night Spirits

I’m always searching for new stuff to listen to, both for inspiration and variety, and lately my favorite bands have been female-fronted metal bands along the lines of Lacuna Coil and Tracktor Bowling, and some of the more progressive punk/post-punk groups like The Receiving End of Sirens. I don’t seem to have been able to find many female vocalists doing the latter style, although I’m not really sure why. I don’t see anything fundamentally “male” about it.

This week I’ve come across two new bands that are making my playlist for the next few months, probably.

First, we have Head Phones President, a crazy Japanese project featuring Anza, a singer/actress/model who apparently did a long stint as the first Sailor Moon and has a disco-esque side project (Vitamin-Q).

The vocals remind me a bit of a cross between Cristina Scabbia (Lacuna Coil) and Björk. There’s a definite “experimental” quality to the band, and the lyrics are nonsensical for the most part (and when they aren’t, the vocalist’s accent is too strong to make sense of them anyway). I like the energy, and the way the sounds cross from melodic to heavy and back again.

Secondly, a Korean find -- 49 Morphines. This one is basically screamo, I think, with a definite progressive streak. It reminds me a bit of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, if GBYE had screamo vocalists and more of a metal edge.

The song takes a while to develop, and while I’m not a fan of screamed lyrics beyond the random word or line by a female vocalist, these guys somehow manage to do it grating on my nerves. I have no idea what the lyrics are about, since I don’t speak Korean, and even if I did, the screaming makes them practically indecipherable, but the music is great.

Just a quick note to mention that I finally posted my second novel (finished right at the end of 2005!) on this website under my writing section. FourWar is a bit (okay, a lot!) less fantastic than Alice, trading off the dreamlike qualities for something best described as a sort of sociological cyberpunk scifi blend, but I’ll let my readers tell me exactly what it is.;)

Additionally, I’ve posted a reformatted version of Alice, which should be somewhat more readable than the first version (single-spaced now, Verdana instead of Courier, etc.).

Enjoy!

I’ve decided to go ahead and make all of my completed (and one mostly-complete) tracks available here under a CC-BY-SA License. There are 13 tracks so far, all trance-influenced electronica, some with female vocals by Naomi. Any and all feedback is appreciated, but mostly — enjoy!

On a related note, I’m making decent headway on a new track which I’ll hopefully release before the end of the year if I manage to get enough breathing room around my upcoming web-based game project which is now running a private alpha. I’ll convert that project to public alpha shortly, so keep an eye out for a post announcing this!

I finally got around to finishing up a new track with Naomi. We both have vocals on this one – “Waking Alone” – so if you’re at all into trance or synthpop or some strange fusion of the two, check it out!

Yes, as you can see, I’ve been reading both the highbrow and the low. A little of everything for the win!

To start: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is a pretty fun read. A large mix of history, science, the occult, and Pynchon’s very odd brain, this one took me a bit longer to read through than usual due to its near-800 page length. An interesting jaunt through Europe and elsewhere set largely in the culmination and aftermath of WW2, laced with original songs, intricate descriptions, silly stories, myriad external references, and obscenity to rival Team America, it’s easily one of the best books I’ve ever read. Recommended, but only if you have a strong stomach and aren’t easily offended.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is an interesting dystopian story that seems a bit like the anti-Anthem (Ayn Rand) to me. Lauren Olamina is a girl gifted with quite a bit of foresight, paranoia, and a special talent which is also an Achilles’ heel of sorts, and she copes with the destruction of her family and everything she’s known. In the course, she comes up with something of a new philosophy/religion aimed at a more communal and earth-friendly existence. Interesting read, pretty violent at points. I’d read other novels by this author, to be sure.

And finally, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and its sequels are fun reads aimed at kids. They read a bit like tame versions of ground trodden by Jim Butcher and Laurell K. Hamilton (less sex and violence), with more science fiction thrown in. Still amusing if you can get past the technological implausibilities (tracing an MPEG through analysis of radioactive properties??) and focus on the characters. I won’t read them again, but it wasn’t an utter waste of time. Evil child geniuses with a touch of conscience are fun!