Monthly Metapost: “What’s this, then?”

My goal is to write novels for a living. Specifically, comedic novels with an occasional science fiction bent. This blog exists primarily for me to share my writing in a fairly shameless act of self-promotion. But hopefully you’ll enjoy the writing, so it will really be a symbiotic thing. Fair enough?

I also perform improv comedy, write and perform in theater and on video, and write music*, so the blog will also contain samples and promotion in those fields, as well as occasional thoughts on the various crafts.

Like what you see? Wonderful! Like what you see and want to help me out? You can: subscribe to the blog (the RSS feed is at the end of the right-hand sidebar) or my Twitter feed (twitter.com/greglandgraf), which right now is pretty much filling the same function. You can also comment, and link to the site, and tell friends who might enjoy my work.

Hate what you see and want to tell me what an idiot I am? Don’t bother. I have a job where I have the joyous opportunity for that any time I want and then some. You don’t want to be redundant, do you?

* “Write music” is perhaps a strong term. I’m an award-winning lyricist (it’s not quite as impressive as it sounds) but pretty much inept at the creating-the-music part. I do plan a heavy push to work on that early in 2010, so perhaps this asterisk will go away in future metaposts.

Can I Call It A Book Yet?

Well, no, not really. But I can call it something, because today I finished the first draft of the novel.

Is it good? Of course not.

That’s not even a self-dig. When I started the book (in March, if you count the very first words I wrote on it, or about six weeks ago, if you count when I started working on it in earnest) I had absolutely nothing planned. So the fact that this first draft has a bunch of things that change names, and a number of places where I’m just treading water figuring out what to write next, and a bunch of cool stuff that’s seeded but which never truly develops into anything, isn’t really a problem. The purpose of the draft was to get it out so that I can see what’s there and start shaping it in the next draft.

There are solid accomplishments in this draft beyond simply completing it, too. I’m pretty much satisfied with the overall plot, and there are a number of sections that just work. (Most recently, a survey on the effectiveness of a community policing effort.)

I’m calling it Exile Issues for now, which is getting closer to the right title, although I don’t think it’s right yet.

And enough of that for now. I’m going to spend some time (roughly a month) not thinking about the book before starting on the second draft. During that time, I’ll be working on Tales from Aathenaar, a sketch comedy show. I can tell you that that one will be set in a fantasy realm, where not nearly enough sketch comedy is set, and it’s going to have some decidedly militaristic unicorns, which also don’t show up nearly enough. (The unicorns may use the Meow Mix theme as their battle cry, but I’m not sure if that will work out.)

Romance and Finance

Astute observers will notice that the name of this blog has changed. (In fact, it’s very unlikely that anyone will. I haven’t even told my friends and family about this, so the only ones who see it are people who hit it by random web searches.)

I’ve declared myself to be a Future Famous Author. This is intended to be Roguish Charm, rather than an actual goal. Fame is not a particular goal. My goal is to be able to support myself as an author of comedy novels (and perhaps other things) rather than, well, whatever it is I do now.

And yet, the goal of this blog is self-promotion: the development of fame. A horrible contradiction.

The reason: I don’t want fame, per se, but I would like to be known/popular/whatever enough that I’m able to sell enough books to be able to make enough money to live on. I have enough experience with producing theater to realize that that doesn’t simply happen. Thus, self-promotion efforts like this blog.

The title of this post comes from something that the head of accounting at my place of work says: “Without finance, there can be no romance.” In other words, you don’t have to care about money in and of itself, but you do need to take care of it in order to be able to do what you do care about.

What does it mean for the blog? Pretty much nothing, really. I promise to work to be entertaining or intriguing or interesting or at least something along those lines. I hope you enjoy.

And, of course, that when I start publishing books, that you purchase them. Possibly many copies.

In other blog news, you can see now see what I’m working on in the right sidebar. The book is right about half done, which feels like a real thing now, even though it still seems a bit pretentious to say that I’m writing a book.