Three things I love in science fiction: giant robots, punk rock teens, and hostile colony planets. So it’s probably no surprise my SF novelette, ONE LAST SEASON, combines all three.
Maya is a technically gifted kid on the ice planet Javal, the daughter of a punk afficionado and a passionate terraforming activist. When Maya’s dad pawns the one thing her dead mother left her—a battered Fender Stratocaster worth thousands of credits—Maya’s only hope of getting it back is winning first price in Javal’s racing mecha racing circuit.
It should be easy: Maya’s built her own mech out of spare parts and rewritten code, and her best friend Alex is one of the hottest mecha pilots on the planet.
Pity Alex’s kleptocratic family has their own ideas about the races, and their friendship will be tested when they race their own high-end mech in this year’s circuit. Maya and her mech Cee-Bee-Gee-Bee might be good enough to beat any other robot on the planet, but defeating Alex and her state-of-the-art racer Ruby-Go-Go will take something special.
Maya’s got an idea that just might do it, but the price may be more than she’s willing to pay…
ONE LAST SEASON is now live on my Patreon, accessible for patrons at the $1 a month level and upwards. The rest of the world won’t get a chance to read this one for at least three months, so if you’d like to access this and over thirty other speculative fiction short stories (with new stories rolling out every week) hie yourself over to www.petermball.com/Patreon and throw a little spare change my way.
FIVE THINGS ON THE TO DO LIST TODAY
Get at least 500 words done on next week’s Patreon story (Working Title: The Ghost Door)
Layout sample pages for a book design client
Finish entering the proofing notes for Eclectic Projects 002
Clean the flat after a week of being snowed under by work
Finish proofs for the next Brain Jar Press release
Mal and Jill Cooper’s Help! I’m An Author! series. Three books on blurbs, Facebook ads, and launch rhythms, all short enough to be consumed in a day or so.
Two weeks ago, I lost my job, which began an immediate search for what comes next. Obviously, part of the answer is “writing” and “Brain Jar Press”, both of which got short shrift while I was dallying with full-time employment (for the first time) over the last twelve months. Neither writing nor publishing is enough to sustain us on its own, but it’s looking like I can assemble a Frankenstein’s Monster of a solution from various part-time and contract gigs that have come my way over the last few weeks.
More recently, Elon Musk took over Twitter, which seems to have triggered a mass exodus of users and much thinking about what comes next. For all Twitter has been a pretty terrible place for the last few years, far less fun than it was in its heyday, it held traction as the one place where conversation spread in a way other social platforms of its era now refuse to do. It gave you access to a larger, discursive space where folks talked about their interests in your vicinity. I’m not saddened to see Twitter go by the wayside, but I see it as a potential problem point for those of us who relied upon it for outreach. Specifically, this line of thought explored by Michael Damian Thomas about the impact this will have on speculative fiction magazines.
I’ve been doing the occasional consult and course on writing, publishing, and backlist over the last twelve months, and a big part of what I end up talking about is this fundamental problem. Marketing involves putting your work in front of people who don’t know you but may be interested (lead generation), then nurturing that interest until they’re ready to put money towards your project. New writers often build very detailed plans for nurturing, but give lead generation short shrift, relying on one or two tactics rather than a wide spread of ways in (hell, even experienced writers do this, as lead generation takes time and we often have very little of it).
Twitter, like Livejournal before it, worked well for this because starting a conversation actually served as lead generation. The more people who became involved, the more people who stuck around what else you had to say, and soon you were nurturing a new audience members. But the curse of lead generation is this: anything that works well, when you start out, soon works less effectively and costs more to achieve the same reach.
Once upon a time, blogging was the great lead generation system of their era, and I surely discovered a lot of great authors through the discourse that emerged as authors I already loved responded to, recommended, and linked to other writers in their field. But that medium died, by and large, when RSS fell by the wayside and social services (*cough* Facebook *cough*) made it difficult to put links to posts in front of readers and pull them off the Facebook site.
Once upon a time, putting free ebooks into various stores as a loss-leader was also a great way of generating interest, but as organic reach on certain sights (*cough* Amazon *cough*) gave way to pay-for-play placement and advertising, it’s become less effective than it was.
Five or six years ago, before the Trumpocalypse, Facebook Ads could generate leads cheaply through specific targeting of readers. Two years ago, when it was shiny and new and trying to reach a critical mass of users, TikTok offered great, free reach to writers.
Now, Facebook advertising is a more competitive, expensive field and TikTok reach (and particularly viral reach) grows harder and harder to achieve.
It doesn’t make any of these tools ineffective, just less effective than they once were and a potential threat to any writer or publisher who invested deeply in this one approach for generating leads and talking to audiences.
I’m thinking about this a lot today, courtesy of this time of transition. Making the Freelance/Writing/Publishing hustle work relies heavily on generating leads, and one of the tools that’s served me well is less useful than it has been.
CURRENT INBOX: 77
WORKING ON
Setting up a system for booking in mentorship/consulting for writers and small-press publishers
Final proofs on two Brain Jar Press projects and the first issue of Eclectic Projects
Writing so many cover synopsii
Getting set-up with Spectrum Writing as one of their new tutors.
Just finished Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (Recommended) and William Gibson’s The Peripheral (very recommended).
RECENTLY WATCHED
Henry Selick’s Wendell and Wild on Netflix is all the fun you’d expect from the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline, but it’s threaded with punk rock energy (and so much X-Ray Spex in the soundtrack). Go watch it.
CURRENT INBOX: 65 (Officially in drop everything and fix it phase, because anything over 30 usually means I’m ignoring important stuff that will come back to bite me later)
WORKING ON
Layouts and cover designs for a Corella Press project
Writing so many selection criteria
Edits and cover design for January and February releases from Brain Jar (currently behind because of cat drama)
A very secret project I’ll talk more about in November.
Writing a zombie-infested D&D fantasy novella which may or may not be terrible.
Contracts, as always, and edits, as always
THINKING ABOUT
I’m ratcheted way down to the bottom of Masłow’s hierarchy of needs right now, so there’s not a lot of deep thought going on beyond prioritizing urgent jobs.
READING
Luanne G Smith’s The Vine Witch, still, because it hasn’t been a good book for my stressed brain.
Stephen Graham Jones The Only Good Indians, a phenomenal book that blends a melange of influences into a gloriously cohesive whole.
LISTENING TO
I seem to be starting most mornings with The Hive’s Hate To Say I Told You So, or Pulp’s This Is Hardcore.
WATCHING
Reservation Dogs: incredible TV that breaks all sorts of storytelling rules in all sorts of interesting ways. Just…watch it.
Doom Patrol: Just when I thought they’d burned me out on DCs superhero television shows, along comes Doom Patrol which has the right amount of bat shit crazy, deeply weird superhero lore, meta-text, and career-resurgence-of-Brendan-Fraser to utterly capture my attention.
We’re also revisiting the first season of Jodie Whittaker’s run as the Doctor, with the aim of getting to the seasons we haven’t seen yet.
STATUS OF THE ADMIRAL
She’s got a chin full of kibble dust and an interest in the birds outside.
