The Colorado Plateau

I spent a good deal of my childhood on the Colorado Plateau, a high, wind-swept desert encompassing much of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. It is some of the most gorgeous terrain on earth, with eight national parks and several more national monuments. The Grand Canyon is on the plateau, together with Zion's and Arches National Parks in Utah and Mesa Verde, which holds the most spectacular concentration of Anasazi cliff dwellings. There are still undiscovered Anasazi ruins among the thousands of canyons of the plateau.

The population of The Colorado Plateau has increased around the perimeters in areas such as Flagsaff, Arizona, but is still only about a million people in an area the size of California. As you penetrate the interior and find yourself in the red rock canyons or places much like the vast, beautiful, but deadly labyrinth of Witch's Warts in The Righteous, you will enter a wilderness unlike anything else in the world. It is a land of hoodoos, domes, goblins, fins, reefs, and natural sandstone arches.Mountains, river canyons thousands of feet deep, dry creek beds and secret thin, ribbon-like gorges.

I can remember camping under the desert sky near Canyonlands National Park as a boy scout, looking up at the stars as the thin air bled away the heat of the day. Through that desert air, the stars were so close that it felt like I was clinging to the skin of the earth. It was impossible to look up at the night sky without thinking about my place in the universe. I woke up in the night to find gray foxes snuffling near my sleeping bag, looking for bits of food the scouts had carelessly let fall. One turned, his face just visible in the dying light of the camp fire. We looked at each other for a long moment and then he disappeared into the night.

It is no surprise that the desert has given rise to so many religious movements over the years. This is where my polygamists take refuge when the world focuses its frowning attention. It also seems like a good place to wait for the end of the world.

The Order I Wrote My Novels

Someone was asking me the order I wrote the books I have for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I'll throw in the year, just for fun.

2004 - The Kingdom of the Bears
2007 - The Righteous
2008 - The Devil's Deep
2008 - State of Siege
2009 - Implant
2009 - Mighty and Strong
2010 - The Red Rooster
2011 - The Wicked
2011 - The Devil's Peak

I also completed novels in 1989, 1991, 1994, 1998, 2001, and 2005. The first two were terrible. I was just a teenager and learning the craft of writing. The books written in 1994 and 2001 were mediocre and will never see the light of day, but the two written in 1998 and 2005 were pretty good and deserve to be published. The problem is that the book I wrote in 1998 is 150,000 words and the first book of a fantasy series. I don't feel I can devote myself to writing another half millions words of fantasy at this time and it isn't fair to readers to release the first book of a series I'm not actively pursuing.

The book I wrote in 2005 is a children's fantasy novel called Moonland and is pretty good, but it needs a fairly significant rewrite. Given that my other children's fantasy, The Kingdom of the Bears, is a book I'm proud of, yet has only sold about 100 copies total in six months, I can't justify spending the time to whip it into shape, to say nothing of paying for editing, a cover, etc.

I was busier in the 90s than it appears, as I wrote over 100 short stories between 1988 and 1998, when I became primarily a novelist. You can also see that in 2007 I got serious and have produced eight books in the last four years.

Steps for a Podiobook Episode

The hardest part of releasing a podiobook is the initial learning curve and the approval process. Now that I have that part down, here are the steps I follow to release an episode.

1. Record an episode. I use a Zoom H1 digital recorder that cost about $120, including accessories.  I find the quietest place in the house for recording, then invariably suffer interruptions of airplanes, loud motorcycles with sound that reaches all the way from the road, and other interruptions. When one happens, I stop, snap my fingers to make a mark in the audio file for editing, then reread the passage.

2. Edit the file. I use Audacity. I listen through, isolating and deleting noise. Once I've got a cleaned up file, I run normalize, then import my outro (the little bit at the end: "Thank you for listening to the Devil's Deep, etc."), then export a wav file.

3. Run the file through Enlevator. This evens out the loud and quiet parts to make it all roughly the same volume.

4. Add the music. I have created a file with background music for the intro and outro. This file took some effort to create, but now that I've got it done, it's just a question of queuing it up in the proper location of the file.

5. Export as mpeg. This is where I tag the file for release, at least partially.

6. Finish tagging in iTunes. This loads up the art and readies it for release.

7. Upload to podiobooks.com. There is a third-party software system that handles this, and there are a few additional fields to fill out, as well as a description of the episode, etc. At this point, I wait for the site owner of podiobooks.com to either approve the episode or point out some deficiency.

Yes, even though I know enough of what I'm doing not to spend all day on this, it still takes a couple of hours of work in order to give away part of my book for free. By the time I'm done releasing the book, I could have written a good chunk of a novel. I'll explain in a future post why I'm going to all the trouble.

A Polygamy Anecdote

My great-great grandfather went on a Mormon mission to Ireland. While in Ireland, he found a second wife. His first wife (born in England), wasn't overly keen to discover this young, attractive, and not particularly deferential new woman arrive in back of the wagon to their house in rural Utah. She made my great-great grandfather build a second house for his second wife and the subsequent children, rather than share a roof. When he wasn't there and people stopped by to ask "Where is Brother H--?" she would answer, "He's spending the night in Ireland."

I won't say that polygamist wives in 19th Century Utah had it easy, but they weren't doormats, either.

Conference Call

I had a conference call with my new publishers yesterday, Thomas and Mercer Amazon). They will be assigning me a dedicated publicist to deal with the release, and I had a chance to hear some of their other thoughts about marketing. More and more I'm glad I went with Amazon, as I can really see how they give me the best chance of casting the widest net for new readers.

I don't yet have a development editor, but hopefully soon. I have some rewrites to do on those first three books and want to tackle that before I dig into the first draft of book #4. Book 4 is due in March and Book 5 in June. Ten months to write two novels. I can do it, but it will require some dedicated time when I'm not worrying about other stuff.

In other news, The Righteous got a mention in The Huffington Post yesterday. That was fun.

Adventures in Audio

Or maybe that should be adventures in podio, since I'll be releasing my audio books on podiobooks.com. The audio release of The Devil's Deep is currently scheduled for August 10, with the first half dozen or so episodes going live and at least one more episode coming online each week until they're all available. Right now, I'm getting a few episodes done per week, so it might only be a couple of weeks until it's all up.

Why am I doing this? The podcasts will be free, so unless people are generous with the tip jar on podiobooks (unlikely), it is unlikely to earn me any money. Of course, it's unlikely to cost me any money, either. I figure every listener is someone who wouldn't have otherwise come into contact with my work. I've also just released the sequel to the book, The Devil's Peak, so maybe a few more people will wander over and pick it up. This is the same reason that I've lowered the ebook price of The Devil's Deep itself to 99 cents.

My goals as a writer remain writing + audience + income. I have no great ambition to be rich and famous (in fact, I think I'll be happier if I'm not), but I'm finally at the point where I have a growing audience and the encouragement to keep writing, and even the earning a living part is within reach. The audiobooks are largely about targeting the audience goal.

Next post I will give some of the details on how I've been producing a podiobook and the learning curve I've been climbing. I won't pretend it hasn't been a lot of work.

New Book and a Contract

I've signed a contract with Amazon's Thomas & Mercer thriller line. You can read all the details here:

Michael Wallace signs five book deal.

My plan is to continue writing new books for my indie line as well. In fact, I just released the sequel to The Devil's Deep on Monday, called The Devil's Peak.