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AmWriting: Three goals for my new blog series

Published: April 16, 2013 / Updated: April 17, 2013 Rob Steiner amwriting, novels, writing

My goal is to write a post each week about my experiences writing my current work-in-progress, the third book in my MUSES OF ROMA sci-fi/alt-history epic.  I’m going to call this series “AmWriting,” after the popular Twitter hashtag of the same name.

What do I hope to accomplish with these posts? Well…

Goal #1: I need content!

Coming up with blog ideas is hard, folks, so I need something to write about each week. I may detail my writing process, provide an interesting gem I learned from my Roman/scientific/etc. research, talk about marketing/social media ideas for authors, or simply whine about how hard writing is, and that I should just give up now, and that I feel like one of those American Idol contestants who don’t know how bad they are–

Whoa. I’ll save that for a future post.

Goal #2: Paying it forward

I’ve been studying the fiction craft for over ten years. I’ve learned a few things here and there. If any of my posts inspire one budding writer to start the first sentence of her first novel, then I’d consider goal #2 accomplished.

Goal #3: Buzzzzz…

I got the idea for this series from the CreateSpace Community blog, which suggested that writing about your experiences while writing a book is a good way to generate buzz about said book before it’s published. Whether I go traditional or indie with my MUSES OF ROMA series, any pre-publication buzz, such as it is, will come in handy.

So. I can’t guarantee every post will be helpful, but I’ll sure try to make it interesting.

Balancing Productivity and Happiness

March 19, 2013 Rob Steiner career, telecommuting

Micah Wedemeyer writes on Lifehacker.com that lost in the debate regarding telecommuting and productivity is personal happiness.

Even if it were true that telecommuters are less productive than office workers (a point he does not concede), so what?

If maximizing productivity for the company is all that matters, then you should never drink alcohol, always get a good night’s sleep but not too much, take an even measure of Adderall and caffeine every day, never have children, and take all sick relatives off life support. Ridiculous, right? That’s because workplace productivity is not the be-all-end-all of our lives. And for me, working from home provides the right balance of productivity and happiness.

It’s that balance that companies should focus on, not whether an employee works in the office or telecommutes. Lean too far to the “happiness” side and business urgency may be lost; lean too far to the “productivity” side and employees will burn out and quit the first chance they get.

Companies that get the balance right will have engaged, motivated employees regardless of where they work.

Book Review: In a Season of Dead Weather by Mark Fuller Dillon

Published: March 18, 2013 / Updated: March 18, 2013 Rob Steiner book reviews, books, short stories, Smashwords

Originally posted at the New Podler Review of Books.

Grab a comfy chair by the fire, a hot drink, and a book of good horror stories.  Those rattling shutters outside?  Just the blowing snow.  Those shadows dancing in the corner?  Fire light, nothing more.  And the whispers behind your chair are your imagination.

Maybe.

That’s the feeling Mark Fuller Dillon conveys throughout his short story collection In a Season of Dead Weather. In most of the stories, it was never quite clear whether the “horror” was in the narrator’s mind or if it was real. The reader was left to interpret at the end.

And that worked for me. Each Lovecraftian tale was expertly crafted, with poetic and visceral language describing characters enduring the loneliness and isolation of a long winter in the country or the city. Dillon is a Quebec native, so he’s no stranger to maddeningly endless winters (I’m a west Michigan native, so I can sympathize).

Most of the stories were quite literary and a little confusing to me, a genre reader. But their narrative styles, descriptions, and situations were so unique that I found myself eager to read on just to hear the language rather than find out what happens to the characters.

In the first story, “Lamia Dance,” a medical student takes a break from his studies – and braves the snow – to attend a film festival where see a film that brings back haunting memories from his childhood. The film’s images of violence and anatomy seemed quite erotic to the narrator. “Lamia Dance” was either a story about being pushed into a profession that the narrator did not choose for himself…or about a budding serial killer.

In “Never Noticed, Never There,” Tom Lighden sees ghastly apparitions in terrible pain on the streets of Ottawa. He is the only one who sees them, as every one else simply walks past them without a second glance. Dillon implies that society has become good at ignoring the pain of others, as we are too busy with our own lives to notice.

If you’ve ever been stuck alone in the woods during winter, you’ll understand the characters’ bleak situations in “Shadows in the Sunrise,” “The Vast Importance of the Night,” and “Who Would Remain?” Blizzards keep the narrators from civilization, they lose time, and see clawing shadows. Is it madness, ghosts, alien abductions? The reader is left to wonder if it’s all real or if winter has claimed the characters’ sanity. While the three stories had similar themes, their unique characters and situations sufficiently differentiated them.

“The Weight of Its Awareness” had a middle-aged man revisiting a seemingly deserted, walled-off home that he originally tried to explore when he was eighteen. Grotesque sculptures now decorate the gardens, and a dark presence spies him from the home’s blackened windows and infects his mind. The story seemed like an extreme version of “curiosity killed the cat.” It was the weakest of the seven stories for me; although “weak” is a relative term since even this story kept me enthralled.

The strongest story for me was “When the Echo Hates the Voice.” Paul Bertrand is a brilliant, handsome young man who’s always the life of any social gathering and constantly seeks any excuse to be around people. The reason is that he cannot stand to be alone, for that is when the voices and faces visit him. Told by a narrator observing Paul, the story suggests a struggle between two personalities: one that seeks companionship and social reward, and one that seeks to keep us isolated from each other.

As I said at the beginning, I’m a genre reader and rarely read stories just for their styles and language. Dillon’s In a Season of Dead Weather is one of those rare works that can make even a genre reader like me want to take a second look at the literary. Highly recommended.

Available on Smashwords.com.

Telecommuter Blues

March 7, 2013 Rob Steiner career

Last week Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer launched a brouhaha regarding telecommuting by mostly banning the practice at Yahoo (turns out that genuine abuse may have prompted the decision).

Now Best Buy has ended its ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) policy for corporate employees for much the same reasons as Yahoo.

I’ve been a full-time telecommuter for six out of the last ten years, so I thought I’d weigh in:

  1. Successful telecommuting requires managers to communicate clear, measurable goals that telecommuters must attain. If those goals are not being met — as with any office employee — then it’s incumbent upon leadership to follow up with the employee to find out what happened. If telecommuting employees consistently do not meet their goals, then fire them just like any office employee.

  2. Employees can “slack off” in an office just as well as from home. I used to work in an office cubicle next to guys who’d spend hours each day talking about their fantasy football line-ups; the ladies on the other side of me grumbled about the latest singer to get booted off American Idol. Working in an office does not stop “slacking.”

    It goes back to expectations and goals — if telecommuters are meeting and/or exceeding their goals, then why should it matter if they spend a five hours a day on Facebook? And if the goals/expectations are too light, then shouldn’t managers adjust them to fill out the employee’s day?

  3. Yahoo says they need “all hands on deck” for face-to-face collaboration. This is the flimsiest of their excuses, especially from an internet company. There are plenty of thriving companies today with remote employees who collaborate just fine. Again, if collaboration is not taking place among telecommuters, then that is a failure of leadership and imaginative use of existing technology, not telecommuting.

  4. However, telecommuting is not for every one or every job. Some people are more productive in an office setting, while others are more productive when they work quietly by themselves. Some jobs require office “face time,” while others can be done at home. It should be up to managers and employees to decide which situation fits the job and the person.

Telecommuting is a valid work option for managers and employees who agree to clear expectations and goals. Banning it for everyone is lazy policy and makes a company look desperate.

ZERVAKAN – Published!

February 14, 2013 Rob Steiner books, e-readers, ebooks, free stuff, Kindle, novels, ZERVAKAN

It’s been a long time coming, but my latest fantasy novel, ZERVAKAN, is now published.  It’s a story about faith versus science: Are they mutually exclusive, or two sides of the same coin?

Here’s the summary:

Reason and science gave the Recindian Compact wonders like steam engines, telegraphs, and gunpowder. The world had order. It made sense.

Until one night two multi-colored bands of light split the sky, spanning the horizons like rings around the planet. Soon after, unnatural storms assaulted the Compact’s cities. Whispers spread of ghoulish creatures haunting Compact forests. And then a message from a legendary race called the Mystics – “ally with us to fight the growing evil, or we all perish.”

The Compact’s desperate leaders turn to disgraced history professor Taran Abraeu. Taran spent years searching in vain for the ancient healing magic of the Mystics to save his dying daughter. His family and colleagues once mocked him. Now his research might save them.

When the Compact asks Taran to accompany a secret delegation to the Mystic homeland, he is swept up in an adventure that forces him to fight a horrifying enemy that only he among all his people can comprehend.

ZERVAKAN is available in print and eBook ($1.99 eBooks for a limited time!).

Paperback | Kindle | Nook | Apple iBooks | Smashwords

Want a free eBook? Go to Smashwords.com, enter the coupon code FV93C, and then download your preferred format. All I ask in return is an honest review on Amazon. Reviews are gold to authors, and even just a few lines helps.

Prefer print? How about a coupon for $6 off the price of the print version? Go to CreateSpace.com and enter the coupon code PCW5M8Y3 upon purchase. Same deal as with the free eBook — just write an honest review on Amazon.

Hope you all enjoy the book.

Book Review: Forged in Death by Jim Melvin

December 3, 2012 Rob Steiner book reviews, books, novels

Forged in Death, the first of six books in Jim Melvin’s Death Wizard Chronicles, starts out with a scene from a claustrophobic’s nightmare – Torg, the Death-Knower and king of the Tugars, is imprisoned by the evil wizard Invictus at the bottom of a cold, dark pit bored hundreds of feet into a mountain. He can’t stretch out because the pit is too small, and he can’t lean against the walls, because they’re enchanted with flesh-burning magic. He either has to stand or curl into an uncomfortably tight fetal position.

We’re only in the prologue, and the book is already giving me the willies. And that’s a good thing.

Torg eventually escapes the pit and embarks on an Odyssey-like journey back to his desert home to stop Invictus from enslaving the world of Triken.

Jim Melvin’s world-building was at once fantastic and logical, from the unique human cultures to the strange twists on traditional monsters. It’s obvious Melvin put a lot of thought into the ecosystems that support his world. For example, Torg discovers a race of monkeys that live deep underground. How do they sustain themselves? By carving meat off a gigantic tentacled monster that inhabits the caverns, like microscopic mites on human skin. How does the monster survive? By eating the monkeys. It’s an elegant symbiosis, and Melvin portrays other unique creatures similarly throughout the book.

Forged in Death has a non-traditional magic system – Torg enters a state of temporary death, feeds off the power of the afterlife, and then returns to his body magically recharged (which is why he’s called a “Death-Knower”). The evil wizard Invictus, however, gets his power from the sun. This is a switch from most fantasies, which usually have the good guys feeding off the sun and the villains using death for their evil schemes.

The book also felt like a primer for real-world Theravada Buddhism (something the author acknowledges). The characters, Torg in particular, describe the principles behind meditation, karma, the eternal quest for enlightenment, and reincarnation. As one who’s ignorant of Buddhist scriptures, I now want to read up on the subject to learn more.

I do have some quibbles with an otherwise outstanding novel.

The hero Torg was a likable character and an all-powerful wizard. But at times he seemed too good and too all-powerful. He won every battle unless he chose to lose, like when he allowed his enemies to throw him into the pit. I wanted Torg to fail or make more mistakes, and then watch him overcome those failures to become a different man by the end of the book.

Also, Forged in Death was a cliff-hanger book. I’m not a fan of the style, but it’s a personal nit-pick of mine and not anything Melvin did wrong. Readers who enjoy cliff-hanger endings, however, will see no problem with it.

Forged in Death was beautifully written and a worthy addition to the epic fantasy genre. I hope to see Torg challenged a bit more in future books. I also look forward to learning more about Invictus, whose brief appearances painted him as an “interesting” villain. And the final battle between Torg and Invictus — Triken’s two most powerful wizards — promises to be truly world-shaking.

Forged in Death is available on Amazon.

Cross-posted at The New Podler Review of Books.

Cover Story

October 15, 2012 Rob Steiner books, UMBRA CORPS, writing, ZERVAKAN

A great book cover inspires readers to ask the question the book seeks to answer. Since my design skills scream “amateur” (to put it kindly), I hired professionals to design great covers for two books I will publish in 2013. I think both designers did a fantastic job conveying the question of each book, and it was a pleasure to work with them both.

ZERVAKAN

ZERVAKAN is a fantasy novel set in a world with 19th century technology — steam engines, guns, telegraphs — where two magical bands of light suddenly appear in the sky one night, spanning the horizons like rings around the planet. A scientist and a priest must discover the mystery behind the rings before their world is consumed by an evil they’re not ready to fight.

Given the setting, I wanted a cover with a 19th century feel, but one that said “fantasy” and not “historical.”

TJ Lomas brought my vision to life. He found an old photograph and added two bands of magical light on the horizons. He added color to the bands so they stood out. It’s simple, but elegant. It grabs your attention and makes you ask, “What’s with those two bands of light?”

ZERVAKAN will be released in January 2013, but you can read the “pre-published” version on on this site.

UMBRA CORPS

UMBRA CORPS (a working title) is an alternate history/sci-fi novel about a Roman Republic that survives its true-life fall and reaches the stars. A star ship crew of rogues must help the 12-year-old Consular Heir escape Rome with the terrifying secret behind the Republic’s god-like technology.

For this cover, I worked with professional illustrator Stone Perales. My idea was to combine something iconically Roman with an anachronism that told readers it was alternate history.

The result: Mark Antony holding a musket while looking down on his Legions as they sack Rome.

Stone did a wonderful job capturing the ethereal look on Antony’s face and the subtle detailing of his armor. My hope is that readers will see the cover and think, “Why is that ancient Roman soldier holding a musket? I’ve got to read this book to find out!”

UMBRA CORPS will be released in 2013.

Cross-posted at New Podler Review of Books.