Fan X 2016

I will be spending the next two days at FanX in Salt Lake City.  I'm looking forward to meeting more people that are fans of the horror genre there.  Should any of you want to find me and say Hi then come by the Utah Horror Writers booth.  I'll be working blocks through out the day Friday and Saturday.

Also, if you want an e-book copy of the serial A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing then head over to Amazon. It's free for FanX just click the link below.  There should also be an update to the current serial posted tonight.

I look forward to seeing you there.

http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Patchwork-Clothing-History-Book-ebook/dp/B01CHNZ6TM

A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing is here

To anyone who is interested the first serial I did is now available for purchase on the Amazon E-book store.  I also put it together through Createspace so you could buy a print copy.  The link to the appropriate stores are below.  If you enjoyed the story, or missed the first serial, then pickup a copy and support the Author.

E-book:
http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Patchwork-Clothing-History-Book-ebook/dp/B01CHNZ6TM/


Print:
https://www.createspace.com/6014848

Chapter 2 and The End of a Serial

I apologize for the late post but our internet has been flaky all day.  I'm happy that it seemed to even out about an hour ago so that I could get the formatting for Chapter 2 done.  Here is the second chapter and so far I'm hoping that I've begun to build your interest.

In the mean time I've pulled down the first serial as it was time to do so.  I've finally got my proofs back from my final readers so I can make the necessary changes to the file and get it released. So far I'm really quite happy with the way it is turning out and I hope that if you're just joining us that you'll pickup a copy.

Also, as a said note, the files which were posted online for A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing aren't the final versions of the file.  The story didn't change, but minor sections of the writing have gone through edits to clean up the language and punctuation.  There have also been a few minor continuity problems I had to fix.

Look for the announcement later this week about the book going live. I am looking forward to having more stuff out there for everyone to enjoy.

Nurse Summers begins

Hello and welcome to the new serial. This is a character that I created last year for David Wellington's Fear Project, but the story seemed to take on a life of it's own. Before long I found myself deep in vampire lore and making a vampire of my own.  This is the culmination of that work. Should everything work out well (computers not exploding and what not) I should have a new chapter for you each Sunday.

A few questions I would like to address before you get started. I don't feel any of these are spoilers, more questions that came up a few times during the creation process.  Many of them will be addressed in the story, but knowing it shouldn't lessen the impact.

1) This is not Buffy Summers. I had wanted to use a name that was opposite of her grim demeanor in the first chapter. Summer seemed like the perfect opposite and it wasn't until my wife read it that she pointed out the Buffy reference.  Not that it's a bad thing, but these vampires don't dust when you kill them. The amount of blood would more aptly belong in an Evil Dead movie.  If you want to imagine this is a different Buffy for a different world you can, but I won't support it.

2) The setting is very modern times. As much as I'd like to do a throwback, the story doesn't belong there.

3) Vampires only started existing in this world about 20 years ago. Before that time they were the villains of the silver screen and novels alike.

4) These aren't your normal vampires, you'll understand as you get into the story. You will get into the explanations as the story goes on, but know that if you're expecting Bram Stoker you'll be sorely disappointed.

A final note, this is your last week to find "A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing" on the site. It'll be pulled down when I post next week's chapter. You will be able to find it online on Amazon both in print and in Ebook format.

A few days and a delay

Hello everyone. I'm posting this to let you know that I'm currently hard a work on getting things prepped for the new serial and the new release.  Well, the release isn't new if you've followed my site for a while, but it is in book format.

Announcement #1: The first chapter of the Nurse Summers Serial's will begin on Sunday the 14th with the first chapter Triage.  Each week on Sunday another chapter will be posted.  The length of this one is going to be closer to 60,000 words so it will run for a while and I'm hoping that you enjoy it.

Announcement #2: I was originally going to have the e-book and print copies of A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing available on the 14th as well. Yet due to shipping, something I won't overlook next time in the planning, there has been a delay. I'm hurrying through it as fast as I can but it could be delayed until the 21st.  Sorry for anyone who was looking for it in print.

Otherwise, I'm going to be working hard on getting everything going and probably losing more than a little sleep.

In the meantime I wanted to post a couple of other serial link's that are going right now. The first is the serial "Silence in the Willow Field" by a buddy of mine Lee A. Forman.  The second is a serial which is done by David Wellington. He got his first publishing contract through serial publication of his first novel "Monster Island." Here is a link to his newest serial "Grimbly Hall"

Warning! Imminent take-down in the near future!

I know there are a lot of exclamation points in the subject, but it is important for anyone reading this to pay attention.  If you've been waiting to read A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing your time is now limited.  I'm planning on taking it down mid-February and releasing it into the world through Amazon and Createspace.  I know this sounds like I'm a money grubbing author, but there are several reasons I'm doing this.

1. Yes, making some money would be nice to cover some costs and perhaps get me my own domain. I'd like to turn this into something more than a hobby after all.  
2. I'm currently working on the outline for the next serial which I'm really excited for.  The problem I run into is that if I add chapters like I did for my first serial the menu will become unruly.  I don't want things to become unruly. 
3. This is one of the biggest reasons that I want to do it though, I'm a bibliophile.  I love books, love collecting books, and love to have things on my bookshelf to be able to loan out to people.  I want to hold my book in my hand, it is a satisfying feeling that I relish.  
4. The last reason is that I am going to be self-publishing a novel this year called A Patchwork of Graves which is the book I've put the most work into so far in my life. I promised myself that all stories in the Patchwork series I would self publish. A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing is a piece of the past of this story. But it still is part of this group, so I feel that I would be doing myself a dishonor if I didn't hold to my promise to myself. 

If you want to read it there is still time. If you'd rather wait until it's on E-book or in a print format I understand that as well.  Print books are awesome!  But regardless of what happens, I hope you continue to follow me and enjoy the stories I create for you.

Facebook Page

I'm letting people know that I would love to have some more followers on the blog or on Facebook so I've decided that I'll do a little challenge to my readers.  If we can get to 50 Likes on Facebook/followers of the blog I'll post the last chapter and epilogue of "A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing" early. Otherwise it'll be posted sometime on Friday of next week.

It's your choice, but I would love to be able to share the ending...

Also, If I can figure out how to do a generic link to the Facebook page I'll post it here.

Free stuff

Sorry for the delay, I just got back from a vacation and life is being difficult. Nanowrimo planning is taking more time in planning that I thought it would and so my evenings have been surprisingly busy. I guess that is the cost of being an ML.

Sadly that means the story is delayed but to make up for it I'm handing out some free e-books from Thursday 10/15 - Saturday 10/17.  So if you want to read more about Patch get the book and read the story at the end of the collection, The Last Day of School.  The link is below.

http://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Sanity-Travis-Coleman/dp/1507631723/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444886793&sr=8-1&keywords=escaping+Sanity

Please enjoy the stories.

Delay of Game!

Hello to you select few people who read my blog regularly.  First off let me say I appreciate your support and I hope you're inviting others to enjoy the story.  That being said this week has decided to come at me with a chainsaw and I'm currently hiding in a cupboard barely breathing and hoping to go unnoticed.  So, once this week leaves the room I'll get this story finished, (sometime this weekend).  I'll post to Facebook and Twitter when it's available.

That being said, find my page on Facebook and like it, as I try to fill it with awesome stuff!  Follow me on Twitter at @TravColeman and be prepared for updates.  This story is going to get serious and there will be updates every week for October until the end of "A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing."  I hope you are ready for it.

Irons in the Fire

An author friend of mine once commented that he felt the need to keep many irons in the fire. It worked well for him to rotate through stories. When one wasn't speaking to him he'd rotate out and work on another in order to keep himself writing.

I love this analogy. There is a bit of a geek inside me that would love to work a forge, but that aside it speaks of something true. A story and a piece of metalwork have a lot of similar properties. Neither are going to be perfect on the first try. Both need to be tempered, cared for, and worked carefully under a watchful eye. What someone who has just written their first short story sees as beautiful, someone who has put his time in at the forge will say that it needs work and can point out flaws.

I think the part of the analogy that I like best though, is both can produce a thing of beauty. The finish product can be beautiful, terrible, useful, or elegant. But once they're forged you can have them until they sell to someone who will love and care for them.

I bring this up because I've got a lot of pieces of work out right now that I'm waiting to hear back on.  Nothing novel length, only short and flash fiction pieces that I've enjoyed writing.  I know that my odds of success and my odds of failure are pretty much the same.  But if I get rejected I can always comb over it again and try for another sale.

The hardest thing you can do is to keep producing though when nothing is selling.  To keep practicing when success hasn't been around in a while.  Eventually though, it's bound to turn up, I can only hope that I have what it's looking to buy when it does.

Also, check out the new chapter of "A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing" which was posted tonight.  Plus, if you'd like to read more by me check out the self-published short story collection "Escaping Sanity" on Amazon.  There are many irons in there that taught me something about writing.

Thoughts on Writing

I was recently loaned a copy of "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card.  As someone who enjoys writing and has read many of his novels I figured I would love to read what he had to say. I've enjoyed Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" and found David Farland's "Million Dollar Outlines" to be a great learning tool.  Going into this new book I secretly wanted to read more about Ender's Game.

I can honestly say that I haven't been disappointed and have learned something early on about the series I love.  The idea for the battle came to him in the mid-late sixties yet he didn't write it until the mid-seventies.  How many of us can't remember where we put our keys? How often do we misplace something we were just using? Yet to remember and develop an idea for over almost ten years is amazing.

I've had a few ideas which have stuck with me and developed for a while. The idea for the villain of my serial "A Wolf in Patchwork Clothing" came to me while I was driving to Oregon almost six years ago.  The villain, which started off as a truck driver/serial killer, felt stagnant.  It was an observation which came to me about the Twilight movies which gave the idea roots.  It was a complaint that I had due to the lack of variety in some of the classic horror movie monsters.

At that time the major horror bad guys seemed to be zombies, vampires (twilight being an exception to the horror part), and ghosts. As an avid D&D player I know that there are many different types of undead.  Ghouls, wights, liches, and other spectral menaces. This seemed to work well with the traveling serial killer, someone who was afraid to stay in one place for fear of being discovered.  A creature moving among us that none of us would like to meet in a dark alley. I was struck at how well his own ideas seemed to mirror my own, the idea needing time to get its own legs and develop before becoming a story.

Another thing which he said, and something that I can really agree with, is that you have to define the rules of your world. If there is something which can kill your villain, then you need to know it.  If there is a fantastic element whether it be magic, super science, or some perpetually reappearing monster, you need an explanation of how it works.  If you don't pay attention to these details the story won't hold water or carry the readers attention.

I have a novel which is currently unfinished with the working title Legacy.  In Legacy, there is a fantastic element that I was developing as I was writing.  I never sat down and defined it, I said it was a "trickster spirit" or a "creature of chaos" and left it at that.  Now I'm at a fulcrum point into the story where I will be building into the final climax of the book but it's stalled.  The problem is, these spirits were still fuzzy to me. It is hard to write what you don't understand.

It wasn't until I was reading this section of his book that I realized this was the problem. It has been two or three months where I've been unable to work on that and I couldn't figure out why.  But my writers block is due to my own negligence. Had I put my ducks in a row at the beginning of the story, then I wouldn't have suffered this now so close to the end.

The overall point that I was going for in this blog is a lesson I seem to need to learn again and again.  Sometimes we need to read something we normally wouldn't.  I consider myself a horror writer, so reading a book about Science Fiction and Fantasy didn't seem like a fit.  Yet by reading a book that a friend handed me I was able to solve a problem. It doesn't hurt to get out of your comfort zone, to take advice that you didn't know for certain if you'll need. I think I'll take this advice and look for other words of wisdom from other sources.  Perhaps read some non-fiction, or a cook book, or perhaps even some classic literature.  Something new to add to take me out of my comfort zone, who knows what I'll learn. Hopefully it will be something I can apply to make myself a better writer.

Edit's underway and Writing Lovecraft

I've finally committed to a few things which i'm hoping will lead to more for you to read.  I'm setting a date to have my first novel ready for Beta-reading by mid-April.  That's a little over a month away and I have to go through it at least once.  Also there are some things I need to rewrite as this was something first written over two years ago.

I know, two years is a long time to sit around without being worked but I haven't felt the fire under me until recently.  I think part of it has to do with the lesson's I'm learning from the Fear Project.  Having a weekly deadline and only a few days to turn around a finished product is tough.  Though I feel my editing and proofreading skills have really started to blossom.

Another thing I've learned from this challenge is that a deadline isn't always a bad thing.  There are days when I can procrastinate like the best of them.  I can find excuses and distractions to keep me busy for weeks.  But alas, that's one thing I love about National Novel Writing Month.  There is a goal, there is a time frame, there is a deadline.

Since I mentioned the Fear Project above I may as well continue to that now.  During this weeks challenge the rules changed.  We received an e-mail earlier in the week warning us that things would be changing this week.  The ideas which were thrown out were vague but all we knew is that everything was about to get more interesting.  

This week we have a guest judge who asked us to write a story where our main character is wet, cold, and in the dark.  Then, to top it all off, he would really like it if we went with the Lovecraft style.  That is something that I struggle with.  It is something that try as I might in the past I've never been able to pull off.  I've tried for the weird, tried for the darkness, tried for his settings.  Yet somehow it has all escaped me.

Now I love H.P.Lovecraft and his style is amazing in my opinion.  He makes wonderful use of the first person.  His work is the stuff of dreams, nightmares, or even just the weird.  I feel like I did well but this week is still young and we have yet to see which of us the judge likes best.

But that is the way that of life sometimes.  All we can really do is hurry up and wait.

Overloaded

So... I completely forgot about last weeks blog post and it is shameful. What's worse, I didn't take the time to let people know that I was too busy and forgot about this until Sunday afternoon.  So for anyone who was missing my update I'd like to take a moment to say, "I'm sorry."

Well, let's take a moment and talk about projects that I have going right now.  Currently I'm working on an edit and rewrite going for the novel, "A Patchwork of Graves." For anyone following me on David Wellington's Fear Project you were introduced to Patch during week three in the story "To Mend A Broken Heart".  Many people showed interest which makes me happy to have created such a bad guy.

There is also the Fear Project which occupies most of my weekends.  From the time the prompt posts at midnight EST Friday until I send in the submission in, all of my free time is occupied by thoughts of my story.  They might be short in length, probably the length of what I've already written, but the wording is so important.  I can honestly say that in the last four weeks of creating these stories I've learned about the importance of word choice.  It has also helped me in analyzing what I need to cut or change in my own stories to focus on the key elements.

This week I posted a story about Nurse Summers who works in a psychiatric ward. When vampires show up trying to turn her patients into a buffet, she steps up to set things right.  I have to admit that I unwittingly have fallen in love with this character. I never thought that I would want to write  a vampire story.  In fact one of the things that inspired Patch was the lack of a good undead alternative.  But it isn't the vampires that make this story unique, this character seems to have a story behind her behavior that makes me want to explore it.

To answer a question which was posted on my comments the last name is a pop culture reference.  The nurse originally didn't have a name, yet I felt having her nameless was cheating.  When I was thinking of a good name for a woman who is a duty bound slayer of vampires I couldn't resist using the last name.  Just think of this as an Easter Egg and move on, the character isn't Buffy and if I decide to write more with her then you'll see just that.

What has been discussed is just about a third of what my project list has on it.  Needless to say I'll be busy for sometime into the future working on getting all of these done.  But on the bright side, at least I won't be a writer who finds himself without an idea after writing one novel.  I will have to say that I've been blessed with a mind full of fun new ideas.