So Ghostwriter is up and available now in a variety of eyeball-friendly digital formats at Smashwords. The book has also been approved for the site’s Premium Catalog, which means it will be distributed through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and (hopefully) Apple’s new iBooks storefront in a few weeks as well. Then we’ll fire up the publicity machine and set it to HIGH for the next six months or so.

Smashwords basically did all that for me; all I had to do was pay careful attention to the formatting of the original document and provide some good artwork (which came, once again, courtesy of HeathenLife). And I’d just like to thank them and encourage passionate readers and writers alike to check out the site and community. They provide tools and support for DIY authors at a level of quality I really hadn’t found anywhere else online, and they made creating multiple, well-crafted versions of Ghostwriter … not easy, exactly, but a lot easier than it would’ve been had I elected to try to format everything myself. They also made me pay closer attention to my own work as I went through it with a technical eye, so I caught things that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. So, thanks to everybody behind the site, and please give them a look sometime.

The best things about being an indie fiction writer are getting to collaborate with your friends on stuff like artwork and design, and not having to worry about arbitrary deadlines or the opinions of those who really don’t have a perfect grasp on exactly what it is you’re trying to do.

The worst thing about being an indie fiction writer is simply this: It’s not your job. It’s not your friends’ job. You’re all trying to earn a paycheck, and find the time to do the thing you really want to do for a paycheck in between paying gigs, along with the other folks cool enough to support your creativity when their own time permits. It’s why low-budget movies used to take several years to get made, back when the economic universe allowed for such things as low-budget movies. (And when the space-time continuum allowed for such things as taking several years to make a movie.) It’s alternately frustrating and satisfying, and by the time a couple of the pieces fall into place, you want to revise this or take another look at that or a certain song isn’t relevant anymore or somebody’s died, so let’s take a look at the whole thing again while we let a few of the currently in-place elements slip out of place as our attention is focused elsewhere.

The best thing is the freedom. The worst thing is whatever it is that’s the evil, ironic Twilight Zone analogue of freedom, that thing that perverts time until a project turns to taffy and you can see it stretching out endlessly before you as you put one piece into place and watch two others drift further away.

I’m beginning to understand why big publishing houses take a year and a half to put a book out. But isn’t that why we’re DIY? To cut those corners, that bullshit? Well, we totally could … if we weren’t working other jobs that paid.

Ghostwriter is coming right soon in digital form, along with killer art and a cool new web design courtesy of friends without whom I couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, tilt at this particular windmill.

I finished Ghostwriter tonight. Doing a long-form story isn’t like doing a short story or a bit or a funny idea. It’s … hard. Exhausting, really, particularly when it’s done in fits and spurts and late nights between paying gigs. I imagine it gets easier; this is only my second completed manuscript of this length. I’m unbelievably stoked, though, and cannot wait to, erm, go through it four or five more times before making it available somewhere. Yay, writing! Also, screw that one teacher who thought I was wasting my potential. I finished two books. My potential is in the process of being realized. Your class was just boring. (Not you, Mr. Hayes–you, you tough-loving bastard, were instrumental in igniting a lifelong passion for the written word, and my gratitude defies transcription. Also, thanks for not ratting me out to that convenience store clerk when you walked in to buy gas and found me trying to buy beer at 17 without a fake ID.)

So I’m reverse-engineering the screenplay I wrote a couple of years ago into a novel. It’s definitely an interesting process; a lot of the stuff that you sometimes put into fiction that you find yourself stripping out on the third or fourth read-through is already gone, or, I guess, was never there in the first place. It’s leaner and meaner than my usual writing style, depending more on the dialogue to get the characters’ personalities and the exposition across. I’m really digging it as of right now, between one-third and halfway done with the process, I think it has a more modern, even noir-ish vibe, at least for me.

Anyway, check out a chapter here, if you’d like.