Wow, what a day already…. 
A year or so ago, I got off on a little project, that lead me to another little project… you know how that goes. This one ended up with me mailing a trade paperback proof of “The Gamers: Dorkness Rising (The Novel)” to screenplay writer Matt Vancil. (Don’t ask – you don’t really want to know… just trust that this was the natural ending to that paragraph and roll with it…)
Matt read the book on the plane to GenCon. Christian Doyle (“Gary”) and Scott C. Brown (“Leo”) both noticed this (I know because SCB has commented on it on FB recently, and Matt explained that when he was done he had to give the book to CD, because he wanted to read it). Matt stopped to say a quick hello to me at GenCon, as we waited for the doors to open on the premier of Gamers 3.
It took us a couple of months, but we did finally arrange a post-GenCon lunch to talk over his impressions of the book. I walked away with mixed feelings, to be honest. Matt was positive and encouraging about the book itself – had only one criticism which may have been very legit – or may just be the difference between the pacing of screen and novels. The reader reviews will answer that in the end I suppose.
But he also declined every option I offered up that would have lead me to be able to publish the novel as a physical book. Lots of possible reasons for this – from the reason he gave me (“ZOE/DG doesn’t do books, and besides, print is dead”) to “just really didn’t like your writing and don’t want to be associated with it, but don’t want to hurt the feelings of a fan.” And, of course, a hundred things in between. But it did put me off the project for a bit.
Then things got busy. And then I got back to the book and finished what I felt was the final draft – and then things got busy again. In this past couple of weeks, as I have recovered from my first-ever concussion, I realized that I was not being busy – so I dragged out the book and got moving on the eBook formatting. (It’s not tough work but there is a lot of grunt work to it, IMHO – time consuming and painstaking).
Earlier this week, I submitted it to Smashwords, and the meatgrinder (their ebook converter) kept spitting it out. I ended up nuking all the formatting and starting over. In the end, either I managed to make the meatgrinder happy (even though I didnt actually change anything) or whatever was giving it indigestion passed, because it finally spit it out the other end in eBook formats.
Yay! It’s a book! Well, it’s an eBook – yay!
I put up a couple of comments on the ZOE, DG, and movie’s facebook pages and went to bed about midnight-thirty. When I woke up this morning, the always-wonderful Ben Dobyns of ZOE/DG had reposted it on their pages as an update from Dead Gentlemen. Andy Dopieralski had shared it out and declared its existence a Total Waffle (see the film!). Scott C Brown was commenting that he had seen Mat reading it on the plane to GenCon last summer. And when I posted a thank you on the DG page (“A dead gentleman linked my book? Total waffle!”), they answered me back! (“Someone wrote a novel of our movie? Total waffle back atcha!!”).
I can’t resist – every time I pass by I refresh the page to see how it is going – and every time, the number of people who have downloaded it has risen. They say an unknown author is doing well if they sell 200 copies of their book (OK ‘sell’ is strong, since this is free – but still). In about 18 hours, this one is over 100 downloads and 150+ FB likes.
Total Waffle.
I guess the real test comes when people start reviewing, rating, or commenting – but right now – I finished it. I released it. The folks who made the original have drawn attention to it and given it their gold star. And people are going out to get it.
Today is a good day.
Feel free to check it out yourself – and to rate, review, and let me and the world know what you think.
