Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Kindled, then extinguished
Got an email from KDP recently letting me know that they were discontinuing the Kindle Vella program, due to it not taking off the way Amazon expected since it began in December 2021. Frankly, the response to the two stories I'd started on the platform was a bit underwhelming, as you can see by the graph here depicting every time someone read at least one chapter. Most folks appeared to pop in, read one or two chapters, then leave. Two ambitious folks read both stories in their entirety, but despite including my email at the end of virtually every chapter and damn-near begging people to drop me a line if they liked it, I never got any feedback save for getting some thumbs-up marks on the chapters (which I honestly didn't even notice until today). Since they're shutting down the whole dang program, I imagine this was typical for most of the writers who tried it out.
On the upside, I made nearly twenty bucks thanks to KDP sending participants bonuses for contributing to the program. It's a damn sight better than the royalties those two stories earned, which amounted to about forty cents over those three years. Not exactly a hidden goldmine, right?
So, what now? The stories will be finished eventually, so if you're one of the few who read them, physical copies will one day exist, but I wanna get the published version of my Jonah Hex history project done first, not to mention the second Swords & Sixguns novel. Low response means low priority, unless y'all want to convince me otherwise.
And if you never read them at all, then you've got until February 2025 to read them on your Kindle. You can find the first four chapters of Godheart here, and the first seven chapters of Forgotten Be Thy Name over here....and if you like them, for goodness sakes, tell me!
Friday, November 1, 2024
An EXPANDED History of Jonah Hex!
In celebration of this feat, the first two Hex history posts on this here blog have been expanded with all-new material, making them 2-3 times longer than the originals! I've added a couple of new images as well, though I've decided to remove the hyperlinks since I no longer use Photobucket, as well as me doing my level best to get all the info "on the page" this time around since that's how it'll be in book form.
Okay, that's enough chatter. If you want to read the updated chapters, you'll find the new Chapter 1 here and the new Chapter 2 over here. Hope you enjoy them, and don't forget to wish Jonah Hex a happy 186th birthday!
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Hex history update AND MORE!
Progress on the book version of "An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex" is still proceeding at a slow pace, but it has gotten far enough along that, this November 1st, I will be updating the first 2 chapters on this blog with BRAND NEW MATERIAL! That's right, y'all will be getting a sneak preview of what the book version will look like! I haven't decided yet if I'll update every single chapter, but the first chapter alone is now double its original length, so it didn't seem fair to hide all that new info in the book alone.
In related news, my work has once again been cited in another article! Nathan Cabaniss of Screenrant contacted me a month or so ago after coming across my blog, as he was looking for some info about a 1980s write-in campaign to get Clint Eastwood to make a Jonah Hex movie. I informed him that the Eastwood/Hex connection went MUCH deeper than he expected, which soon led to a full-fledged article with quotes from Yours Truly! You can read all about it right here on Screenrant...and yes, this story will be covered in a much briefer form in Chapter 1!
Okay, I gotta get back to work. Two weeks to go until the update drops!
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Your plastic pal who's fun to be with
Sunday, September 1, 2024
Refugee from the Round File
I put up a post recently on the Swords & Sixguns Facebook page that contained a quote from actor/composer Paul Williams, wherein he said, "Be careful about throwing something in the round file as garbage" because what you view as a failure might lead to something spectacular down the line. I admitted in my repost that I had thrown out tons of stuff over the years, though I try to do so less often these days. I have a box in my office labeled as an "archive" that contains various drafts of the book, along with flyers and convention lanyards and such. I also keep on my desk the original black looseleaf binder that held all of my work from the moment I first sat down to write my novel exactly 30 years ago today. It still holds drawings and notes and other little things going all the way back to those early days. I could put it in the box, but it sat on my desk for so long, it doesn't seem right to tuck it away.
This sentimentality is a huge change from how I treated my work 30+ years ago. I have no idea how many pieces of paper I ripped up and tossed way back then, but it was a lot. Not just writing, mind you, but art pieces as well. I would get into "I suck so bad" moods and just chuck things that I hated at that moment. This is why I tell people that the 400-page first draft that I wrote longhand was my "final" first draft: all the drafts before it were never finished, they'd just get destroyed or cannibalized for the next iteration that would also get destroyed and cannibalized for the iteration after that, and so on and so on. If my husband hadn't challenged me to "Just keep writing" and crank out 100 pages before the year 2000, I'd likely still be in that same destructive cycle here in 2024.
But there are bits of those earliest drafts that remain intact in the black binder I mentioned. Things that never made it into the published version, yet can't be inserted into a hypothetical "expanded edition" because there's no place to plug them in. So, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of me taking a week off of my paying job to start writing this crazy idea I had in my head, here's eight pages written by early-20s me, with commentary by 50-year-old me interspersed.
Our last page, and our last repurposed scene. You'll recognize the gist of it from the end of Chapter 9, but the impetus and attitude is totally different. In the earliest draft here, Richard just gives up his guns to put J'nath at ease...and looking back at it, this doesn't really fit with who he is at this point in the story. It's the first sign that he can change his outlaw ways, but it's not earned yet, it just happens. In the published version, this happens after he's screwed up multiple times and been tossed in jail by Lermekt H'landa for a while, leading up to him realizing that he's going to ruin this new life as badly as the old one if he doesn't get his shit together. Now the change is earned, now voluntarily giving up his guns means something, and I'm much happier with how it plays out.
I don't recall exactly what I'd written after these pages, but knowing how awful I usually felt about my work just days or weeks after writing it, I likely didn't get much further before the tearing of pages began. There are other bits of scenes I still have tucked away in that binder, so if you like what you read here, let me know and maybe I'll do another stroll down memory lane around this time next year.
Monday, March 25, 2024
I hate [most] Westerns, Part 2 (guest post)
*NOTE: All the posts this month will be written my by husband, Jamin Hillwig, as I do my darnedest to make headway on the published version of my Hex history project. Enjoy!