Rich Griffith's Blog

Huge thank-you goes out to the reviewers and judges of the The Kindle Book Review’s 2013 Best Indie Book Award for choosing Jump/Driveas a winner in the Young Adult category.

I stayed up late Monday night into the morning of October 1st hoping to hear the results. I literally couldn’t sleep from nerves and excitement. This means a lot to me. It’s my first real effort at a novel and it would absolutely not have been the success it was without my beta readers, editors +Nan Allen and +Damian Trasler and since we know people really can sometimes judge a book by the cover I would be remiss if I didn’t thank +Allen Simpson for his excellent photography and work he did on my cover.

I don’t want this to turn too long and rambling but writing a book that deals with sexual abuse wasn’t easy. Writing one where I tried to deal with it gracefully and truthfully and honestly without being prurient wasn’t easy. But it was worth it. It was even worth it before it won an award… but I won’t lie, knowing that the reviewers of TheKindleBookReview.net who read a TON of books each year selected it as one of their best? Yeah. That’s pretty great.

Thank you all. Thank you readers. Thank you reviewers. Thank you to all of you who offered me feedback, suggestions, and help along the way. Thank you for believing in me when it got hard and I wasn’t believing I was up to the task of writing a book anybody would want to read. It really means a lot to me, and so does Jump/Drive.

Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree by S.A. Hunt is, I’m told, a “weird western.” I haven’t gotten very far into it yet. This isn’t a book review of a finished book. It’s thoughts on indie published books.

I’m a self-published author. I wrote Jump/Drive and published it myself. I had it professionally edited because I value my reader’s time and want my book to be as good as I could get it. Editors help turn okay books into better books.

As I was proofing and editing my book I was reading a LOT of self-published books. I wanted to make sure I didn’t make any of the mistakes that the ones that look amateurish do/did. I think I did okay.

Something I’ve noticed as a difference between a self-published book and one that goes through a publishing house is how tight the language is. I’m not sure how else to explain it. It’s beyond just editing though. It’s a tightness of language. The efficiency of the language in a publishing-house book is almost perfect. Self-published, even when edited, seem a little less tight. They wander more.

Mine reads like a self-published book I think. I’m too close to it really to tell. I think it reads self-published. I want my second one to read tighter. Maybe it’s more passes through an editor. Maybe it’s more passes through more editors. Maybe it’s me cutting more. Maybe it’s cutting until every word is absolutely essential. And, maybe mine reads fine and I’m just being self-deprecating. Like I said. I’m too close to it.

Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree doesn’t read like a self-published book to me so far. I’m early yet. It’s possible it’ll get sloppier or looser later in the book. But right now it’s tight and exciting to read. I’ll post a more detailed, meaningful review once I’ve finished it.

Scott Sigler’s Infected: Sci-fi mystery with horror elements. That’s what I expected and it’s what I got, mostly.

Horror to me should involve scary and frightening, not just startle-scary, but a frightening premise. Stephen King’s books are horror to me. Mother-son trapped in a car in the summer by a rabid dog (Cujo). that’s horrible. It’s horrific. Man goes crazy isolated in mountain top hotel with his family. Horrible, horrific. (The Shining) Global Pandemic kills almost everybody and the survivors are in a classic good vs evil battle for the world and their lives. (The Stand)

Aliens infect people and grow within them using their bodies as hosts on which the aliens feed… horrible, horrific. That’s the premise of Scott Sigler’s Infected. It sounds awesome.

But then I read the book… In short bursts because while I liked the idea and the characters a lot, the story itself was disgusting. It was more splatter-gore-porn than horrific. It was horrific to hear about all the various ways one of the Point of View characters self-mutilates himself. Yeah. I get the reason why should have been the horror part… but the blow by blow detailed description of the gore was more than I wanted or could stand.

I listened to it in podcast format, and if I’d been reading it I’d have skipped huge dripping chunks of the book to avoid them. That’s probably good for an audience out there but I’m not that audience. I won’t be putting myself through future books in this series.

I can’t recommend this book because I don’t know anybody who likes self-mutilating torture-porn. The ideas were really good and I was excited to read them but I couldn’t get past all the details that were included in all but the final mutilation. If they’d all happened off-camera as it was I’d have been okay with it. As it was… I just can’t recommend it. I liked the idea and wish he’d spent more time on the ideas and less on the splattering ichor.

I learned to drive when I was in Germany in 1985. I was a Junior in High School. We didn’t have driver’s ed so the dirty job fell to Mom to teach me how to drive. I had absolutely zero desire to learn to drive. As far as I could tell I didn’t NEED to drive. I had chauffeurs that took me places I needed to go and if they weren’t willing or able then I would stay home and read. I was okay with that. But Mom felt like being able to drive was one of those life skills a person should have. So, she made me learn to drive. It sounds like I’m exaggerating for comedic effect. I wish I were. I really am not.

You know what happens when you walk and do something clumsy or stupid? You fall. People hurt = 1… maybe. You know what happens when you do something clumsy or stupid while driving people can die. I was living in Germany, home of the Autobahn. Do something stupid there and pile ups of dozens of cars can happen hurting or killing gobs of people. I was scared shitless. No kidding. No exaggeration. I was scared of driving because of what might happen. I’ve got a really vivid imagination. I can vividly imagine the last few seconds of my life, or someone else’s due to my carelessness or someone else’s carelessness. I’m looking at YOU Michelle Lizio, driving an old yellow VW bug who ran a stop sign and hit the passenger side quarter-panel of Mom’s car while she and dad were out of town! I can’t remember the names of the last 10 people I hired at work (not all of them, not ANY of them) but I remember her name! That was my only accident ever and it was in 1986, almost thirty years ago.

Now? Now I love to drive. I’ll drive anywhere. Need something taken across the country you cover the gas and the hotels and I’ll cover the food myself just for the chance to drive it. I’d rather drive than be a passenger. City size doesn’t bug me. Interstates don’t but me. Construction doesn’t bug me. Rush hour doesn’t bug me. Having two people tell me directions bugs me but that’s because I normally drive by myself and only have to pay attention to the GPS and it doesn’t talk.

So, went to see Fast & Furious 6 tonight. This franchise has some good ones and some really bad ones. None of them are great cinema and this one was no different. It will start with a race. It will end with a race and a fight. In between there will be lots of races, some fist fights, capers, and long odds. They’re heist movies with fast cars and excellent green-screen drivers. Leaving the movies I want to leap behind the wheel of a performance vehicle and scream through traffic weaving in and out of other cars, hurling my car around corners and clawing through the gears as the engine roars its frustration at not being able to go faster, further, longer. Even the bad movies in the series make me feel like that.

The movies capture that symbol of car as freedom so well. Not freedom like standing on a hilltop while a gentle breeze wafts the smell of distant lilacs to you on a warming updraft as the afternoon sun paints the wildflowers in their multi-hued colors. It captures the freedom of the eagle soaring through the air. It captures freedom of motion, freedom of unrestrained power pouring from the driver and engine and translating into directed movement. They don’t trouble themselves too much with how or why. In the most recent one they were trying to stop some one from stealing a “device” that we didn’t even know what was until 9/10ths of the way through the movie. “This 3oz chip is worth more than…” No clue what it does. Don’t care. They drove fast and they drove furiously. That’s what I go to see them do in these movies and they drove the wheels off their green screen cars and I loved the feeling of it.

Acting? I have no idea. I don’t know if there was any acting. While they were talking I was mostly waiting for them to stop talking and start driving. That’s the glib answer. The honest answer is they aren’t actors. Sure, they have that on their business cards, but all of them play the same roles. They play themselves. They manage to do it woodenly in every movie they “act” in and they did the same here. But again, I don’t go for the acting. I went for the races, not even the cars as they don’t typically survive to be driven more than once. It’s to watch the crazy fake driving. And they drove crazily and fakely. Mission accomplished.

Spring is here in Iowa late this year and while the temperatures say spring the summer storms we, and the country are getting say that summer isn’t far behind.

I’m still on my vacation and enjoying it still. I got a kayak and have enjoyed kayaking on local lakes, creeks, and soon, rivers. (Not super soon, rain = flooding & rivers are deeper than creeks. I’m enjoying myself but I’m not foolhardy!)

But, my vacation needs to wind up soon. I’d told myself I’d take a week of camping before I ended the vacation but the weather hasn’t cooperated in giving me a week of warm without days and days of rain. Last week was warmish but this week is raining, storming. Soon, though I need to get back to the working world. I haven’t missed it yet. I’d wondered if I’d be bored after almost a quarter of vacation. I haven’t been bored. I’ve travelled. I’ve read. I’ve written. I’ve taken up a new hobby and quit a bad habit (smoking, as of right now it’s been over 15 days since I shoved a cigarette in my face.) I’ve been hiking, walking, and exercising in an attempt to minimize the weight gain during my quit and while I’ve gained 5lbs I don’t see it getting to be much more than that. I’ve gotten closer to friends I’ve made recently and re-kindled friendships & familial relationships that had fallen to the wayside over the years as work kept me out of town and away from friends & family. What I haven’t done is become bored.

Someone said that boring people are the ones who get bored. My lack of boredom so far seem a good indication that I am, perhaps, not a boring people. That’s encouraging to me. I’ve wondered.

One of the things about taking all this time off is a little bit meta in that I’ve been that guy that works at that store for almost 20 years. Finding how who I am without the job has been fun and honestly, I was a little worried I’d have an identity crisis. Perhaps I did a bit and that’s why I haven’t been blogging as much as I sorted out who I am if I’m not my work. Because the job’s gone and I’m still here.

What’s the future hold? I’m not sure. I am sure that if I took a job tomorrow I’d like it to be one in which I am a cog in a much bigger machine. I want to be a little spinning gear and not one of the driving gears. I did my time as the motive force behind something giant and it was good and I was good at it. I want to go somewhere though where I can start at the bottom, or at least lower down, and work my way up. I’m pretty frugal as exhibited by my being able to afford to take this long off work without stressing over money, so I don’t need a lot of money. I learned a long time ago from something I read that there are two ways to be rich either make a lot more than you spend or spend a lot less than you make. I’ve done both and fortunately I learned how to do the second before I had to. There’s a lot of freedom in that.

So, I’m still here. I’m happy. I’m getting ready to start looking at doors to see which ones I want to step through and I’ll keep you posted. I’ll post more frequently now. I took some time away to be me for a while and now that I’ve settled that, as existential as it sounds, I think I’m ready to be me here too. I was worried if I were coming back here too often I’d relapse into old-me. He was a good guy, but he’s gone now. The new me isn’t necessarily new & improved, just new & different. I’ll let you decide if you think he’s improved or not. For myself? I’m happy with me now and I’m happy with the years I put in at the old job. They were good years and I did a good job at it. I don’t regret it.

I’ve been writing a lot this month for Camp NaNoWriMo, it’s the spring version of National Novel Writing Month and it has the same goal. Fifty Thousand Words in a thirty day month.

I’m a little behind where I should be. I need to write um… 17,000 words in 8 days.

That won’t be the end of the book, but it will be the end of the project.

The working title of the book is Hard/Drive and it contains scenes where the characters are telling stories themselves. Think Inception, but without the suitcase.

Here’s one of them, told by John. Those of you who remember John from Jump/Drive will think to yourselves, “There’s no way he came up with that story himself. It’s completely unlike him!” Don’t worry. You’re right. You’ll find out soon after Caleb calls bullshit to that being John’s original story that it was one John’s girlfriend told him. Here you go.

Once upon a time on a trail through the woods two men were running side by side. They wore black running shorts and Vibram five-fingers running shoes, the ones with the toes in them. On either side of the dirt trail tall trees grew forming a leafy canopy overhead. They could hear squirrels chittering at them as they ran, and occasionally they would startle birds out of the bushes. They ran for long minutes, their strides perfectly matched as they ran through the woods together, their breathing matched as perfectly as their pace did.

Ahead they could see the path turning slightly to the right and they turned to find the trail opening into a clearing. They slowed and stopped, standing in the clearing. One side of the clearing was lined with yellow flowering wild roses and the other side was lined with red wild roses. The clearing smelled strongly of the roses. “This wasn’t here last time was it?” Mark asked Matthew.

“No. I’d have remembered this. It looks like it used to be someone’s garden that went wild. But how? It wasn’t here two days ago,” Matthew looked around the field and walked over to the red roses and picked one. The bloom was small, no bigger than a poker chip. He held it to his nose and sniffed it. He could feel his sweat cooling on his skin. The edges of the clearing were cast in shadows while the center of the clearing, covered in a low growing clover was lit in the full light of the noon sun.

Mark walked to the yellow roses and picked on and with a hissed, “Shit!” brought his finger to his mouth where he sucked the blood from his finger. “The thorns on these are a bitch.”

“Weird, the red ones don’t have thorns. Oh.” He looked closer. “There are thorns, but they’re big and soft, they bend but don’t poke. Weird.”

They each smelled their flowers again and dropped them onto the ground, “Let’s keep going. We’ve got another few miles to do,” Matthew said.

He looked around the clearing, “Where did we come in at?”

Mark looked around the clearing and he couldn’t see the path coming into the clearing either. “I don’t know. I thought it was…” His voice trailed off as he turned slowly looking for where the roses change from red to yellow but the gap that had been where the change was at was gone now. Instead of two walls of roses, red on one side, yellow on the other the roses were mixed now with yellow petals with red hearts. The inside of the petal was red and only the outsides were yellow.

Matthew tried to push through the roses and pulled back a scratched and bleeding arm, “Ow! Dammit! It’s too thick. I can’t get through them.”

“This is stupid. There has to be a way out. We came in through…” Mark looked around, “Over there?”

A breeze stirred the trees overhead and swirled the rose leaves and petals. The smell went from heady, to too sweet, to cloying, and finally to literally intoxicating and the two runners found themselves in the center of the clearing sitting in amongst the clover dizzy and dozing.

When they woke up the sun was gone and the sky overhead was dark but for stars and the path of the Milky Way, a smear of stars across the sky. The moon wasn’t out but the light of the stars lit the clearing enough to see the dark edges of the wood and make out each other against the darker black of the forest around them. The air was warm and the smell of the roses still hung in the air but not as heavy as before.

A light flickered in the wood, a pale blue light. Matthew clapped Mark on his shoulder and pointed. Mark nodded that he had already seen the light and they watched as it approached. The light grew closer and brighter as it entered the clearing, it lit the rose bushes as it passed over them and they saw that the roses had closed in the night so there was no sign of the flowers. In the center of the light a lady dressed all in blue, with long black hair that fell down her back, at least passed her shoulders where they could see it coalesced out of the light and the light seemed to contract around her as she formed leaving just her and a flickering nimbus of blue flames that danced and flickered around her.

They watched in stunned silence as she extended her hands to her sides and the roses on either side of her, and of the clearing began to glow, red on the left, and yellow on the right. They parted then and the light moved along the rose bushes to outline the shape of two younger women, one in a red dress with brilliant blond hair and the other in a yellow dress with fiery red hair that tumbled in tight curls to frame her face. Green eyes, the color of the clover they sat among looked at them interestedly from both beautiful faces.

“My daughter Miranda,” the lady in the blue dress said indicating the blond haired lady in the red dress, “Will love you and be devoted to you all of your life but you will never be able to love her as much. You will only ever feel a friendship for her, nothing more.” The red-dressed lady looked at both of them and smiled. “My other daughter, Sarah, will be your loyal friend until the end of your days but you, should you choose her, will love her and only her forever. Which of them would you choose to guide you from this place and be with you as friend or unrequited love?”

Matthew looked at Mark and said, “Neither?”

“You can have a loyal friend to stand by you for all time, or someone who loves you more than they love themselves. Would you not want one of these? Are they not beautiful? Does not every man want a loyal friend or a person to love him always?” The lady in blue asked raising an eyebrow at Matthew.

“Can we learn to love her?” Mark asked looking at the blond in the red dress.

“If you choose her she will love you always and none other. You, however, will love others and never her,” The lady in blue said.

“That sounds pretty miserable for her.”

“To love someone is never miserable is it? Love conquers all. It gives hope. It adds zest to life. Would you deny my daughter that?”

“But… wouldn’t she be unhappy to see me,” he pointed at Matthew, “or Matthew love someone else?”

“What has happiness to do with love? Do not all mean yearn to be loved? With all their flaws and shortcomings? To be taken as they are and still accepted and loved completely by someone?”

“No. I don’t think so,” Matthew said.

“What of my other daughter whom you will love and desire completely for all your life?”

“That sounds worse!” Mark said, “To be friend-zoned forever? Without hope of getting out of there?”

“With love there is always hope. Perhaps you will believe you can prove your love to her and change her mind or that you can perform enough favors or deeds to earn her love from her. Would not the challenge to be loved back as completely as you love her be a challenge worth taking?”

“But you said it would never work, that we would never be loved back as completely as we love her.”

“That is true.”

“Then… it would be for nothing.”

“Love is never for nothing,” The lady in blue said. Her voice sounding sad.

“This sounds like a terrible choice. Isn’t there another choice?”

“Perhaps a companion that you neither loved nor cared about but to whom you were inextricably linked?” She asked.

“I was thinking more like someone with whom we could be friends and also love,” Mark said.

“Ah, there is one such as you ask for. You ask for too much to be just given as a gift though. Such a one as you ask for must be sought after yourself.”

“Unless they are here in this clearing though we probably won’t find such a one. The roses won’t let us pass. We are trapped here,” Matthew said. “Can you cause them to release us?”

“I could. But I won’t. When you find the one you say you want, then the thorns of the rose will present no barrier to you. Until then stay a while here in the safety of my garden.” The two daughters turned and walked into the roses and faded from sight as they entered the dark shadows of the trees. The lady in blue, whose name they never did learn faded and vanished from their sight leaving the two of them there. Soon they fell asleep again and didn’t wake up again until morning. The sound of birds chirping in the trees woke them and they sat up to see the clearing was gone and had been replaced with a slight widening of the trail they had been running on. The stood and looked around and started slowly back down the way they had come when Matthew stopped and stooped to pick up something from the ground. He handed Mark the flower that Mark had picked, the yellow one, and he kept the red one he had picked. They both smelled the roses one more time, put them in the pocket of their shorts and jogged back the way they had come without looking back or talking about the strange night they had just had.

I’m on vacation and visiting family in Alabama. One of the great things about being in Alabama over Iowa right now is that it’s much warmer. I had to get that out of the way first.

I’ve started writing book 2 of my /Drive series, trilogy, whatever and while it’s not going as fast as I’d have liked it’s going well. My word counts are okay, my characters are familiar and good to see again. I’ve missed them since I last read/edited/wrote Jump/Drive.

I’d be going along better if I had a better idea of  how to get where I’m going. I know how I wanted to start and I know what’s coming up but the bit right in between… I’m not sure what to do with that part. I’m toying with the idea of just skipping it and talking about it in the later bits. I didn’t have any real-time gaps in the first one so it’ll be different stylistically than the first one if I do that but I think I’m okay with that. Knowing minute by minute what every character is doing isn’t necessarily exciting… it’s why I haven’t seen The Hobbit. I really didn’t want to watch them walk. I think I should learn from that in this book and not show the walking but cut to the bits where something interesting happens.

I just got a call. Evidently everybody’s up now. While the voice mail didn’t actually say I should go join them it did tell me where they were so perhaps that was implied.

Google announced that they were removing Google Reader because either not enough people were using it or they weren’t making money off it or it was too many resources… if nobody was using it how can it use too many resources? It’s not making money because unlike GMail & Google+ it was never monetized. They didn’t TRY to make money off it.

So, I’ve exported my blogger blog from blogger, which is owned by Google onto this one which is owned by me. I very much doubt Google is going to close blogger any time soon, or ever really, so don’t anybody think they’re even considering it. I don’t believe they are. But, that being said… I did want a back-up somewhere and it seemed like having it here where all my other words are made sense.

So, pardon the mess. It’ll settle down soon. I imagine if you read my blog through Google Reader I just blew your stuff up.

Now, what do I do about using feedburner to serve my RSS?

I got a review of Jump/Drive over the phone where I was asked if my next book was going to be as preachy as my first book. And while I hadn’t thought of it as preachy I get that it was described that way. Maybe I should have left the Author’s Note out of it?

Do I want Hard/Drive, the second book, to be the same way? I thought the story… let me start over… I think the story should trump the author’s note.

If the Author’s Note is leaving a preachy-taste in the reader’s mouth is that a good thing? I mean it’s a thing, obviously. But is it something I’m going for?

I enjoy the Author’s Notes in Stephen King’s books and in the past I really liked them in Piers Anthony’s stuff as well. I haven’t read any of his in years but I really feel like I get to know the author from the notes in a way that I don’t get to know them just reading their book. Honestly, I was trying to go for that in my Author’s Note but it came out as preachy. At least to one person.

That’s really bugging me. Do I want to be that guy? Does anybody buy books after being preached to in the first one? Am I hurting myself & my sales? Is the Author’s Note stopping people from recommending my book to other people?

I’m in the planning stage of book 2, Hard/Drive, and am doing interviews of people for research and I’m getting ready to write it starting in April. My original idea for the story had two parts, and the more I think about it the A & the B story lines don’t fit well together and they’re both kind of big. I think I’m going to have to break my idea(s) into two books which is cool.

It means I’ll have a working idea that I’ve done some thinking about and research on for book 3 that I can foreshadow in Hard/Drive. I like that idea. I’m finding seeds of Hard/Drive as I read Jump/Drive again to get things about the characters down in my notebook so I don’t contradict myself in book 2. I’m not a fan of continuity errors in TV shows and don’t imagine I’d like it any better in one of my books.

Who knew I’d have to re-read my book to know what happened or what color someone’s hair is? I wrote the thing! How would I forget? Surprisingly, to me at least, I did.