Traveller's Tales

The one day I go to work without my laptop is the day I get bludgeoned by ideas. I learned something cool though; not only can I type passing well on my phone’s keypad, and not only is the predictive text functionality fairly good, but gmail on my phone is a decent way to save text if I’m stuck without any other way of working. Maybe not great, but good enough.

So yeah, I finally got a really, really important scene of The Grey Lord written. Lord ventures a bit deeper into certain themes, and one scene in particular requires some fairly horrific imagery. I’m happy to say that I’m extremely pleased with the scenework, but I’m really starting to wonder how sane poor Erik is going to be by the end of Lord. He’s starting to slip nicely into the role, though, and assuming he’s able to retain his sanity (and, hopefully, a shred or two of essential humanity), he’ll continue to be a great study well through the end of the last of this first series.

Naturally, my inspiration wasn’t constrained to Lord; some wicked ideas popped into my head for The Grey Lady as well. Fortunately, they were a bit simpler and easier to communicate, so I’ve already incorporated them into the puzzle design of Lady. I’d explain more, but I’d be giving away a key element of a new cipher for the game and I can’t imagine that’d be much fun! Just… trust me, it’s evil and diabolical, and I’ve got it all wrapped up.

In order to get my thoughts together for the guerilla marketing effort, I’ve been investing my time in a short story that pulls the events, settings and characters of the story together. Code-named ‘The Grey Lady,’ it’s already thrown some fascinating wrenches at me, in terms of story and character development. There’s at least one character there, I realize now, who I’ll have to incorporate into the larger saga, and I’m learning to think in a female voice — something I used to be far too uncomfortable with to attempt.

But the coolest part so far is just watching the new character emerge. The short story is told as journal entries from her perspective, and she begins very young and very shallow (yeah, it’s a she — didn’t the post title give it away?). She doesn’t have much time to learn about herself or her world before it all starts collapsing around her, and watching her cope with this new information, watching her attempts at shedding her outer skin to tap into her own inner strength is really eye-opening. Her journey takes her from jaded consumerist to fiercely loyal companion at a breakneck pace, and watching her make the decisions that lead her to the end of the story is — well, I’ll let people judge for themselves when they see it, but I’m impressed.

Apparently, I still have a lot of faith in humanity, and this Grey Lady is the proof of it. She’s going to turn my stories a bit topsy and somewhat turvy, but stuff like this is one of the most best parts of writing.

Some days, creativity’s a trickle, condensation running down a cold rock. Some days it’s more of a stream, flowing past rocks, squeaking around obstacles and making my feet cool. Occasionally, it’s actually riverlike, shoving those same rocks and annoyances aside in its strong current and taking me along with it.

On extremely rare occasions, it’s violent, and it blows your mind.

I’ve been working on my mongrel media marketing campaign for the last few days, and it wasn’t long before I made an uncomfortable realization: one of the characters from the marketing has insisted on joining the story.

At first I resisted, even knowing that these sort of out-of-nowhere developments tend to lead to the best stories. There’s no place for her in the saga, I griped. She complicates things, I whined. She dilutes the message, I grumped. (Grump, grump, grump.)

And then I relented, and the stars aligned.

It’s perfect, I now realize; it’s the ultimate fusion of my “real-world” stories and my other-world stories. Characters that have always threatened to straddle worlds now do without apology. I don’t have to worry about where the lines start and end; they’re all part of a cohesive whole now, part of a much, much larger story.

Freed by this revelation, the story for the campaign surged. I’ve done more story development in the last couple of hours than I’ve done during entire weeks where I thought I was focused on the campaign. It was always intended to be story first, marketing second, but it’s mutated beautifully into full-on story first, marketing as a distant second, and I’m really enjoying how it’s taking shape.

And, as often happens when the stars truly align, there are other fascinating forces in play to aid and abet this story, from all sorts of unexpected directions. I don’t know how it’ll all turn out yet, and I really can’t say anything specific, but the possibilities are incredibly exciting.

Watch out. This is the year.

Well, it can be anyway. I don’t mean the traditional PR type stuff, the cheesy book posters you see on the subway or generic book signings, but the really weird stuff that marketers have started doing the last couple years.

See, in my day job, I work for one of those ad firms, so I’m continuously exposed to all of the weird new-age marketing hype. Not only do I see the cutting-edge stuff that they end up doing, but I see the bleeding-edge stuff that they end up shelving because it’s too risky, or too niche, or too inaccessible, or too client-unfriendly. And that’s cool, because some of those out-there ideas are the ones I like the best — and since nobody else is gonna do it… well, it’d be a shame to let them go to waste, right? Right? Right.

So, with that as a given, obviously, I’m marketing my book. Obviously, the reason people buy a book is because they want a good story. The inevitable, logical conclusion, then, is: in order to successfully market a book, one should provide a significant taste of what your target audience is looking for — which is to say, story.

I’m not giving away what precisely I’m doing just yet, but I’ll say this: it involves a substantial story, one that will be available to everyone for absolutely free. If someone never reads the books, they’ll probably still enjoy it. If they do read the books, it will give them some cool background information on a significant event in the book, and some insight into where the series as a whole is going.

Why am I doing this? Well, I dislike and distrust the motivations of marketing and marketers in general (funny I should end up as one, eh?), in that they take and rarely give (they take your time and force you to watch ads, whether you’ve bought the product, hate the product, or have no use for the product). That’s backwards to me. Any artist is hoping to establish a real, lasting bond with a reader, or a viewer, or a listener, not a quick sale — and to cheapen that potential relationship with nothing more than a sales pitch just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So while yes, I do want to market my stories — of course I want people to find them, to love them and to tell their friends about them — I want to make how that happens different. I want to make it something people will want, not something they want to avoid. I want to give something entertaining and useful to everyone that stands on its own. Something that’s not just a taste of a story, like a sample chapter on a website — but something to really grab you, pull you in and give you a feel for it all.

So while I poke around looking for artistic representation, that’s what I’m mainly doing: creating this bizarre marketing campaign for the series. I have the linear sequence of events, but it’s not a linear format, so the story path is going to take some work to suss yet — but it’s shaping up nicely already, and I’m lucky enough to have some very talented people interested in helping out.

Well, that and writing the sequel, of course — but that goes without saying!