The official website of Seattle sci-fi/fantasy author and geek Michael G. Munz
I saw this while walking down the street today:
So, like, maybe one and a half tacos? Or perhaps, I dunno, five? As my sister pointed out, at least the quotes aren’t around the word “fish.”
Mmmm…”fish.”
I’ve submitted it to the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.
It’s funny the sort of things I’ll do when I get an idea (no matter how weird or geeky it is). A few days ago, I tweeted this:
Possible movie concepts to give us @more_tribbles: RoboTribble Lord of the Tribbles Gone with the Tribbles A Clockwork Tribble World War T
— Michael G. Munz (@TheWriteMunz) July 3, 2013
A few people retweeted it, and I got a lot of comments about “World War T” especially. @treklock mentioned he wanted to see a movie poster for it, and so I decided to try my hand at it. After an hour or so, I had something that amused me enough to show off. So I give you the poster for the sci-fi horror movie where the Earth faces a Tribble apocalypse:
“It’d be hard to get tickets, because they mostly sell out every night. Mostly.”
I recently got into a Twitter conversation with Jessica Mills (@geekyjessica) about the concept of making a Broadway musical out of James Cameron’s Aliens.
Song titles were tossed about between us:
“Game Over”
“She Don’t Like The Cornbread Either”
“They Mostly Come Out At Night”
“Half-Bishop, Full-Knight”
“Love And A Grenade Launcher”
“Two Mouths Means Twice the Kissing”
“Face-Hugger Shuffle”
“Shut Up, Hicks”
West Side Story-inspired lyrics (courtesy of yours truly):
“We’ve landed on LV-four-two-six!
We brought along Hudson and Cor-‘pral Hicks!
Let’s all watch Bishop do his knife trick!
Carter Burke is a co-loss-al dick!”
Plans were made. A kickstarter campaign was proposed. It was thought that we could talk James Cameron into it by saying it would be done in 3D. And then Twitter user Starman Morrison (@GeekyGeekyWays) had to go and nuke us from orbit: someone had already done it…
Ah, well. It would have been glorious.
“Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but I’ve been face-hugged, so kill me, maybe!”
And so, like the butterfly, I emerge from my cocoon after a long period of absence with new wings, and yadda-yadda-yadda, whatever else metaphor you wanna stick in there…
I’ve let this place lapse for quite a while, though in truth I honestly hadn’t realized just how long it had been. While I’ve certainly had things to say, my writing efforts have been focused elsewhere. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
Firstly, I’ll mention a little bit about what’s happened with the manuscript I’d been pitching when last blogged here, Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit. I had some decent nibbles from agents and publishers (queries have resulted in requests for longer samples on numerous occasions, and one publisher requested the entire manuscript), but no good, hard bites yet. The main problem seems to be the book’s length, which is about 50K words longer than most publishers like to see from a new author. (Longer books cost more to print, and while there are plenty of books out there by established authors at 150K words or longer, publishers don’t like to spend the money printing such books if the writer doesn’t have an established base.) I haven’t given up completely–I’m still pitching it occasionally–but for now I’m focused on pitching the (shorter) book I’ve written in the meantime, which I’ll mention in a moment. I still love Murdering Zeus, though. I’m continually tempted to self-publish it and try to make it go viral in geek circles, but I can’t quite bring myself to let go of having it published in more traditional fashion just yet.
But yes, I’ve written a new book! It’s tentatively titled A Memory of Dragons, and the pitching process is (knock on wood) going well–or, at least, encouragingly. In December, an agent responded to a query letter with a request for a sample, and two weeks later asked for the full manuscript. I’m sorry to say the agent ultimately passed, but she did have a few constructive comments which I used to do a few revisions before I started pitching again. Just this past week, I had another agent ask to see my full manuscript! So I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
But hey, I should mention just what it’s about, huh? Put simply, it’s a contemporary fantasy about a man who takes a pilgrimage to Britain to honor his dead girlfriend and encounters a pickpocket who claims to possess her stolen memories. There is, of course, more to it, but that’s all I’ll say about it for now. Unlike Murdering Zeus, it’s not a comedy, though it’s not without humor. Characters in the book visit a number of places across Britain that I’ve been lucky enough to visit myself (Worm’s Head, London, Cardiff, Conwy, and others), and it was fun to revisit those places in my mind as I wrote.
Lastly, there’s also a little bit of news regarding my self-published novel, A Shadow in the Flames, but I’ll get to that in the next entry…
Last month (give or take), I mentioned my decision to, for now, abandon any attempts at getting Legacy of Memory published and instead move on to focus on a new book entirely unrelated to either it or its self-published predecessor, A Shadow in the Flames. I’ll write a little more here about the new novel (Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit, for which I just sent out the first agent query yesterday) in a future entry. For now I want to explain a little more about why Legacy of Memory will sit on the shelf, at least for the foreseeable future.
First, my thanks to those who have written asking when they could read a sequel to A Shadow in the Flames. It’s gratifying to know there are people out there who don’t otherwise know me from Adam’s housecat (whose name is Uriel, by the way) who have read the first book and are interested to know more about Michael, Felix, Gideon, and just what the heck is going to happen next.
The problem lies in A Shadow in the Flames being self-published. Yes, the publish-on-demand (POD) publisher I went through does screen books in order to elevate their offerings above other POD publishers, but self-publishing a fiction book still often carries about as much weight in the industry as a dead mule. I don’t necessarily think that’s unfair, either. (That said, I’ve received enough independent praise about ASITF to believe it’s a decent effort. I wish I’d known more when I made the decision to go POD with it and at least tried going directly to some small publishers who take unagented fiction rather than going for agents or nothing, but no matter.) The point is, I don’t want to self-publish again, and the chances of selling a second book in a series when the first book is so obscure are slim to none. My efforts are, unfortunately, better directed elsewhere.
Let me go back and say that I don’t entirely regret self-publishing ASITF. I had a great need to get the story “out there” and read by at least some segment of the public. Part of that need translated into continuing the story into a second (and then planned third) book. There was a danger of my contracting “sequelitis” (see an explanation of that term in this blog by Nathan Bransford (an agent for Curtis Brown, Ltd. with a very helpful publishing blog) and continuing to write further books that had little to no chance of being published in a more traditional fashion. Self-publishing gave me at least some feeling of closure, allowing me to set the story and characters from ASITF and LOM so that I could move on and write my third manuscript.
This is not to say I relish abandoning those earlier books. (Nor is “abandoning” completely final in this case, either. Perhaps in the future I can return to the series, though my thoughts on that are probably another blog entry waiting to be written.) It pains me to think that LOM, by my estimation a much better book than ASITF, will remain read by only a few folks for a while. Yet of some comfort is the fact that I know that I learned quite a bit in writing those first two manuscripts. My craft has improved. I’m quite proud of my latest work (and I confess I cringe a bit when I go back and look at those first two novels) and I would not have been able to do the job on manuscript three without having written one and two. I only wish I didn’t have to lose Michael, Felix, Caitlin, Marc, Marette, and Diomedes to a learning experience. …Wow, my characters have names that start with M a lot, don’t they? What’s up with that?
So, for the moment, Legacy of Memory remains on the shelf. Three people have read the entire thing (besides myself), and it may continue to be so for a while. I may release it electronically somehow, someday. I may hang onto it and find some way to polish it up a little more. (I looked at it again a short while ago. The beginning needs more work than I recognized previously.) Time will tell.
They say a writer’s first novel is a learning experience only, unlikely to see the light of day. That’s not something one likes to hear when while spending so much effort to create it. Two manuscripts down the line, though, I think it’s something I can accept.
And Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit is a damned good novel. Okay, so I’m slightly biased. I’m also quite proud of it. More about that soon…
That title needs work. I considered “Blog Attempt 2: The Bloggening,” but decided I’m bad at titles.
It’s been a long while since I’ve written here. I’ve been away (at least mentally), with little inclination to write in this space. Much better, I decided, to focus on writing my current novel in order to get it finished as rapidly as possible. It’s also a lot more fun to write fiction than blogs, as it turns out.
Okay, so I already knew that, but it bears repeating.
Yet now that the book is complete (something of a contemporary fantasy adventure-comedy), I’ve got less to do while I wait for an editor to polish the manuscript a bit so that I can send it out to agents. While I wait for that to be done, I’ve been spending my time working on the synopsis and query letter, which, again, isn’t nearly as fun as actually writing the book, even if it does need to be done.
This is part of why I’m back. I can’t have my blog showing up in web searches not having been updated in years, can I? Writing here also gives me an excuse to do something other than work on my query–a stressful little part of selling a book, which no writer (and I feel comfortable saying this is NOT hyperbole) would ever wish to do if it were not absolutely necessary. Er, talking about queries, here, not book-selling.
This post has very little point, I’m realizing, other than to say that I’m back. On the other hand, if things on the Internet needed a point, we’d lose about 95% of all content [needs citation], wouldn’t we?
So yes, I’m back, and I shall do my best to begin to write once again on topics both writing- and geek-related.
And turnips. Everyone loves turnips.
(More on the book later, though I will say it’s very similar to a story I wrote called “Playing with Hubris,” which is actually due to be re-published in NexGen Pulp Magazine’s “best of” collection.)
Another writing update for my as-yet-unnamed 3rd novel (which, again, is an entirely different animal than the first two)…
So far it seems that my attempt at writing this one a lot faster than the previous two is suffering a few setbacks. For the moment I’m choosing to blame this on a busy holiday season and the difficulty in starting a new book (establishing characters, not overdoing exposition, and so forth). I’ve rewritten the second chapter three or four times now, just trying to get it right, and it’s still not to my liking.
On the plus side, I THINK that once I get over this particular hurdle, I’ll have gotten over the initial creative energy hump. Then I can better continue forward with the proper momentum.
I realize I’m being terribly vague about all of this, but oh well. Right now Seattle’s being hit by a rather nasty blizzard (by our standards, anyway), and my brain is iced. Here’s hoping the power holds out…
Michael G. Munz
www.michaelgmunz.com