Atlantis Rises

So work on Atlantis is going slow (obviously) I’ve got a solid second draft of issue 6 and a good outline for issue 7 but as usual I’m torn about how to handle the releases. I’m thinking of moving to a larger page count format and releasing every 3 months or so, to make my life easier and give me fewer deadlines. The good news however is I seem to have found my muse, something to inspire me to write. I’m completely fragmented on what to concentrate on though, so right now I’m actually working on 3 projects (Atlantis, a sci-fi novel and prepping an outline of yet another story for Script Frenzy). Still I’m writing and this is a good thing.

I’ve decided to start communicating more through this blog (for however long that lasts). Small posts, interesting things I find, you know a regular blog, I’ll tag Atlantis specific pai gow pokerjuegos de poker eroticos,juegos de poker,descargar juegos de poker gratispoker caribe internetjuegos de polli pokerpoker librejuego de poker on linejuega poquerpoker online en españolpoker rulesbwin casinocasino online conjugar baccarat en lineacasinos descargas portales webel mejor casino onlinejugar seguro paginas webpremio pagina webjuego pagina webvegas casino onlinegambling casinocasinos virtuales internetjugar tragamonedas lineajuego instantaneo portalcasino online ruletajuego de la ruleta onlinemaquina tragaperras paginas webjuegos azar pagina webganancias casinos portal internetpremio portalesonline gamespromocion casino internetganar premio portalesjuegos seguros paginas internetcasino bonus no purchase requiredcomo jugar a la ruletaganar dinero real webmaquina tragaperras onlinejuegos pc casinojugar al instante portal webruleta online,juegos online ruleta,jugar online a la ruletacasinos descargas portalpromociones casino pagina webcasino madrid comunidad madridcomo ganar dinero en el casino,ganar dinero en el casino,ganar en el casinodescargar casino on nettrampas casinosjuegos apuestas onlinejugar onlinecasinos virtuales portales webapuesta portalesfree keno posts so those of you who don’t care about my ramblings can get straight to the Atlantis info. I’m thinking about working on some more character bios and possibly including them as an appendix to my next issue, something to catch people up on the story so far. Couple other Atlantis related idea’s on the back burner, but I’ll let that wait to see if anything comes of them.

Anyone who knows me knows I can be pretty emotional, so they won’t find this as a surprise but I’m deeply saddened by the passing of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. During my formative years as a writer and a wannabe writer I started reading Clarkes work. It inspired me to write him as a fan when I was 12 and was just starting my first and very ill-fated novel (the title of which I refuse to mention out of utter embarrassment). I told him I was a fan and of my desire to be a writer. The fact that he responded to me was very influential. Somewhere I still have the autographed picture he sent me. Were it not for that letter I don’t know that the smattering (that’s right I said smattering) of Atlantis that’s been published would have ever seen the light of day. I know that my newest project wouldn’t have survived and the same for my proposed Script Frenzy project. There’s more to this man than writing though.

Arthur C. Clarke was a technological visionary. The man has been credited with many concepts including geosynchronous orbits, which a vast majority of communications and weather satellites use today. It’s safe to say, without Clarke our world would be very different. While Clarke certainly wrote Sci-Fi he was very grounded in the realities of science and where humanity could be by the time his stories took place. Were it not for NASA and the US Government completely flubbing our entire space program we would have been where he predicted in 2001 and beyond (O.K. so maybe no HAL). I owe not only my passion for writing but my passion for exploration and my thirst for knowledge about worlds beyond our own to the man and he will be sorely missed.

A friend said that a part of her had died with Vonnegut last year and I feel the same way about Clarke. I’ve seldom been moved to tears at the passing of a famous person but I find myself even now barely holding them back. Throughout my life I have admired 4 Authors beyond any others, Sir Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony and Sir Arthur C. Clarke. These men have been my heroes and inspiration and only one of them is left. So please (and those of you who know me will know how strange it is for me to ask this) take a moment of silence today in memory of Clarke and his contributions to the world.

It’s been a while since I’ve found time to work on Atlantis, but I’m halfway through issue 6 and planning on publishing it to Fictionwise soon. Turns out I really can’t turn away from the story no matter how crazy things get. I’m shooting for a monthly release scheduel but every other month is more likely.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I write lately. The easy answer is it just seems like what I was meant to do. I have all these ideas just bursting from my imagination and I feel like I’ve simply got to put them on paper. The real question is why am I driven to be a writer? For years I looked to other creative endeavors first. To really explain things I think I should start at the beginning.

When I was young I hated reading and I had horrible penmanship. By the time I was 8 the school district had decided I had a learning problem and put me in a program called chapter one. Shortly there-after they discovered I wasn’t slow, just bored. What really sparked my interest in reading was a novel by Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov called The Norby Chronicles. It was a novel targeted at kids and it was awesome, thus began my love of Sci-Fi. I followed The Norby Chronicles with the Foundation series, which was some very heavy reading for a 10 year old. While I didn’t understand everything in the Foundation series the things I learned from it gave me a desire to read everything I could. When I was 11 my dad gave me two series of books, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and The Lord of the Rings (including The Hobbit). At the same time I found 2061 by Arthur C. Clarke. That novel inspired me so much I actually wrote Clarke and his response inspired my desire to write. The same year I started writing my first novel.

The books I had read to that point made me want to create my own worlds. Even as a child I always had ideas in my head and with writing I found a way to get them out. Over the next few years I would labor on and off on my fantasy epic, typing it all out on Commodore 64. Work only really stopped on it when I hit the 64k limit of that little computer (which came 1 letter and 1 period before the end of the first chapter). My freshman year of high school I took a drama class and our final project was to write a play. Well I knew immediately what my group would be doing for my play and I began adapting the first chapter of that novel into a script. Anyone who knows me knows I think big, so it should come as no surprise that I decided to do a film instead of a play. I borrowed a video camera from our band director and in one day shot a 10 minute movie. Now I had access to editing equipment at the school (we had a very cool Amiga setup) but I had no idea of that at the time. We ended up editing as we went, the only thing that stayed on film was the final version. With that film I moved on from novels.

Over the next decade I would get my creative urges out in many ways, first as a game designer. Somewhere I still have the source code for what was to be my multiplayer RPG/Action game, written in Pascal for (and I cringe to admit this) the Mac. Then I found release for several years being a game master for several roleplaying games (mostly the excellent Palladium game Rifts). Then in my mid twenties I went back to writing scripts and started playing around with ideas for novels again. I really wanted to do both. A few years later I met Jeff and we spent several months working on several comicbook ideas (I’d moved on from novels and writing in general for a couple years, during those years I suffered from some serious depression which all started when my dad died, but that’s another story). Once Jeff and I realized that we just couldn’t produce a comicbook on any kind of time table (and that there was no way we could pull off the level of art work we really wanted on any sort of regular basis) Jeff suggested moving back to prose. I had returned to writing prose again and I finally started to understand why. I want to inspire people the way Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Stephen R. Donaldson and J.R.R. Tolkien inspired me.

To put it simply I write for two reasons, first of all because I have this vast need to create something and second because I want to inspire people.

With all this in mind I’ll be starting NaNoWriMo on Wednesday, Jeff and I will be racing to our 50,000 words and I’m getting really excited. I’m doing a project I’ve been wanting to do for over a year now but I’ve been too scared to even start it. Wish me luck.

I’ve been absent from the blog (and writing in general) for a little while. Some personal problems got in the way of things, but I’m back in full swing again. Atlantis #5 should be up on Fictionwise Monday and I’m putting the finishing touches on Atlantis #6.

Jeff and I have both given the way we’re publishing some thought. While we love the interaction that’s possible with a monthly publishing schedule we’ve found that no one is taking us up on it. In light of that we’ve decided to fall back to a quarterly schedule, which still allows us interaction if people ever decide to takes us up on it. Quarterly also means more money for us (Fictionwise charges the same conversion fee no matter how long the book) and longer issues for you. The plan is to triple the size of the issues and charge between $1 and $2 an issue (the price is still up in the air, wherever it falls you’ll save money over buying monthly issues). Finally quarterly gives us more time to work on and polish issues, I really think this is a winner no matter how we slice it. The final thing this does is gives us some time to work on other projects and take a break from our main series without missing release dates. For me the quarterly publishing will start with issue 7. So look for somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 words (not to mention a ton of action and some major revelations about Terry and his crew).

I’ve been struggling to get back into the flow of writing Atlantis. I’m starting to feel the pressure of living up to what I’ve already written and keeping these characters on the right path. I know I can handle it, but staring at the last paragraph I wrote and trying to go from there has been a bit of a challenge. In the end I just started with a blank sheet and did some rewriting, it’s starting to flow now. So, since I’m finally writing and making progress I came up with another project. Yes these things are usually used as a distraction from writing, but in this case it ties quite nicely into writing Atlantis and this blog. I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, what I will say is it’s something you’ve not seen from me before. If it works out like I think it will, it’ll be a nice bridge between this blog and the issues.

There’s also another Atlantis related project Jeff and I are working on. It was suggested that we do our serials as “podiobooks”. Now Jeff and I discussed this from the very beginning and I gotta say, it’s something we really want to do. Now if we can just find some time to do some test runs, if it works out I’ll keep you guys informed. Even with these projects going you can expect to see Atlantis 5 up at Fictionwise next week. A month later I’ll publish Atlantis 6, things are on track for now and I gotta say it’s good to be back.

In my last post I talked a lot about business models. I also talked about them in a post on my other blog PA Developers Blog. Always on the look out for how other types of entertainment are handling new business models I decided to take a look at Amazon’s new Unboxed service. Basically this is a competitor for the upcoming iTunes movie download service. You can also download TV shows through Unboxed, which is something iTunes already offered. I think it’s important to point out that the reason iTunes is so successful is not the iPod, it’s not the Apple name, it’s the interface. Apple has always put a premium on the user interface, it’s won apple many fans over the years, but never as many as it did with iTunes. The interface for iTunes is simple and found all in one place. This is one place Amazon Unboxed differs from iTunes.

Amazon decided not to look to apple for inspiration, they decided to build on their current model and simply add a player. You purchase Unboxed videos through Amazon just like you always did before. Then you can go and control where you download your videos to. Then you go to the Unboxed player and wait for the video to download. The system isn’t half as smooth as it could be and there’s not even an integrated browser in Unboxed to allow you to purchase items directly from the software. The quality of the video is pretty good and the selection is very nice. The execution is wishy washy at best.

The other big difference is in pricing. Apple wants to offer only a couple of price points, where as Amazon allows studio’s to set the prices. This has caused many studio’s to sign on with Amazon and we know of very few which have signed up for iTunes. This gives Amazon an advantage in the shortterm, but longterm the interface will make or break them. People don’t need to own movies digitally, they can go out and buy the DVD (often for the same price as the Amazon downloads). The ability to customize pricing through Amazon made them far more attractive to movie studios, if sales are stagnant that may not last.

There is something Amazon seems to have done right. It’s very easy to download your videos to another system. No fighting with DRM, it’s transparent (except you have to visit Amazon’s site to do it, there’s no way to do it directly from the software). If Amazon fixes the interface hiccups they could have a real competitor for iTunes.

What’s all this got to dowith writing? Mostly it has to do with getting things right, for now Fictionwise works and it’s as painless as I can make things. Until I’ve got a good solid alternative I won’t be changing how I do things. Any time your trying to get people interested in your product it’s about the customer, and the customers experience should be as painless as possible, that was one of the problems with SerialFiction.net, a mistake I don’t plan on repeating.

I’ve been playing around with different publishing models in my head the last week or so. Don’t worry, I’m not changing anything for the foreseeable future, or at the very least if I do change something I’ll still be publishing through FW. The more I work on Atlantis the more I realize it’s not about making money on it, it’s a story I want to tell and I want to get it out there. I want to know what other people think of it. I want feedback, I want suggestions. I really want to make the readers part of the story and the writing process. That’s what this blog is about. I’m beginning to wonder if publishing through Fictionwise is the best way to get the story out there. I realize it’s got visibility, like I said I’m not planning on dropping FW anytime soon. Really what I’m looking for is a way to make it more accessible.

The model I’ve been looking at most lately is the webcomic. The key things I like about the model are that it’s free and that it’s easy to checkout new issues. The downside is I could never produce enough weekly content to make it worthwhile. I think to make that kind of model work you really need something every week and I’m just not sure I can adapt Atlantis to that kind of story telling. The other thing is we all know how good I am with deadlines. So I guess what I’m looking for is feedback on whether my readers think a monthly version of the webcomic model would work. The key thing to remember are, I wouldn’t be offering it for download (at least not at first) you’d have to come to the website to read it. The other question is, if I found a way to pull it off, would 1,000 words or so a week be a worthwhile read? At this point Atlantis issues are running over 4,000 words, which I could probably break down into 4 sub issues, I just don’t want to commit to that until I KNOW I can do it.

This is one time I really want feedback, hopefully there are more then one or two of you out there reading this. So let me know what you think, either in the comments section or by email at Josh@AtlantisRises.net

Atlantis #4 is available at Fictionwise. So hop on over and check it out. I’m still on track with issues 5 and 6, if all goes well I’ll be starting issue 7 at a month or so before I publish issue 6, so we should have a good roll of on time Atlantis issues. As always I encourage discussion of Atlantis, so consider this the official place for comments and questions on the issue, just leave a comment on this post and I’ll take a look at it.