I am ten big A4 pages into editing Dystopolis, and it’s struck me not how hard editing is but how time-consuming it can be. When I write, the words tend to tumble (no pun intended) out of me in this huge stream, often getting a couple of pages written in half an hour; by contrast, when I edit, I labour over every line. I cut about as much as I write, which is a lot - there are paragraphs I’ve slashed through on every page, replaced by exposition and better pacing and (especially in this first story) a better understanding of what the fuck is going on.

As I edit this book, I am keeping an eye on the visa timelines of other people in my situation, and learning upsetting things - namely, that someone who received a particular letter at a similar time has their visa interview scheduled, and that it’s in late December. I look at this and wonder how realistic my hopes of getting to America before Christmas really are.

In the last couple of months, I have been the sometimes-close and sometimes-distant witness of a thousand emotional moments. Two of the people I follow on Tumblr have gotten married (to other people) - something that I have been wanting to do for so long, now, with the cold hard hand of the US Government pressed squarely into my chest as it grins humourlessly, simultaneously yelling “WELCOME” as it makes me feel as unwanted as it possibly can.

Today, at work, someone came back from maternity leave - leave that was being covered by my job - and I saw her instantly re-integrate herself just as I’m preparing to grab my things and leave forever. One staff member said that it was as if she had never left. I can’t help but wonder if that sentiment extends to the idea that it’s as if I was never there.

The hardest part lately has been knowing that until I move, no part of my life can really move forward. This isn’t just talking about my relationships with other people - Arden most of all, but also the people I’ll end up meeting in the US. It’s also my career, and finding a place I can call home, and getting financially independent for (really) the first time in my life - something I approach with just as much trepidation as eagerness to get started. All of this is cut off by that same invisible hand, with no real idea when it might beckon me a little closer.

Until I begin to pack my bags - and I hope that’ll be soon, but hope is all I have - I can carry on editing a few pages a day. The illusion of progress. I can immerse myself in the only thing that’s left under my control.

This was probably a downer to read, and usually I’d end with some quip about how things aren’t all bad because hey Masters of Sex is a great new series on Showtime that you should definitely check out but - no. The person I love is 3,156 miles away from me, and that’s normal, and it shouldn’t be. There’s a danger of feeling entitled to this sort of thing, and I’m aware that there are situations far worse than mine, but sometimes envy sets in. I want to be the subject of the next elated emotional moment. Not just another witness.

Progress on Dystopolis has been incremental, but steady. I hit a thousand words today, which doesn’t sound like much, but I’m still warming up - in these clumsy first steps, I’ll throw out a hundred words here, a couple of hundred there, but before long I’m writing a couple of thousand a day. It remains to be seen if any of it’s any good, of course, and I have old fragments that could be reused here and there, but… it’s coming together.

The biggest stumbling block has been building the world - something I’m usually quite good at, but I’m usually using a roughly similar version of this planet as a setting. Dystopolis is a newfound civilisation, with shadowy people pulling the strings, in an idyllic city where happy endings are accepted as the norm for everyone, and deviation from the advised course of your life is extremely rare (and unbelievably dangerous). The society I’m building is one where the beliefs of a strange, apocalyptic cult have metamorphosed over the course of three hundred years into a much deeper cultural understanding.

And the worst part, I want the core kernel - the basic idea that art imitates life, and it’s perfectly ordinary to strive for a life with a beginning, middle and end full of meaning and purpose - to be grossly flawed. I want to take these stories to dark places, and to find happiness in the most unconventional places. I don’t quite want to call Dystopolis a giant middle finger to Aristotle, but that’s part of it.

But there’s so much to build if I want it to appear coherent. I’ve made notes - pages of them, now - on details that’ll never make it to the page, but need to be there so I can write about people who live in the space in between those details.

That said, I’ve advanced. It used to be that knowing this was such a challenge was preventing me from doing anything about it. I stopped writing for at least two years - and possibly three, now that I think about it. I rode off the slight wind generated by Tales From The End for too long. Some of the stories in that book, I wrote in 2007. They’re six years old. That’s intimidating, but also reassuring - I have got better in some respects since then, and the rusty bits that need oiling are slowly getting the proper maintenance.

I’m excited about this year for so many reasons, but the idea that in a few months I might have something approaching a book is really exciting.

Okay, so: soon, you’ll be able to download Dystopolis from a bunch more digital retailers, including Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble and Overdrive (if you successfully persuade your library to stock it).

The reason why it’s taken over a year to actually get to this point is really kind of embarrassing - I use Smashwords to distribute to other ebook retailers, and for a long time I had no idea what was preventing it from entering their premium distribution channel. Turns out, it was a badly-formatted table of contents.

I’ve also updated the interior of the book, too, making a few corrections that never got corrected and changing the design so it’s a little more digital-friendly. These should get pushed to Kindle owners soon, and anyone who bought the book through Smashwords or Gumroad should soon be able to download new versions. Changing the paperback version is a little trickier - I’d need to essentially republish the whole thing, assigning a new ISBN, and I’m not sure it’s worth it (my books sell a lot more through digital channels, by a factor of about 10 to 1, and the ISBN I own is my last one). We’ll see on that front.

There’s no ETA on any of this - ultimately, it’s up to individual retailers to ping Smashwords, and that can take anywhere from an hour to two weeks. But either way, it’s coming. If you were holding off because you made the mistake of buying a Nook, or whoever it is that sells Kobo devices, or maybe you just want to read it on your iPad - your chance is coming soon.

In the meantime, I’ll, uh. Probably try and write something else.

So hard to articulate everything happening to me at the moment. In a little over a week, I will be married. That’s such an insane and beautiful concept that part of my brain has decided to shut down rather than fully process it. I feel like I’m floating, still.

Starting with the creative front, because that’s easy to talk about: Dystopolis is finished. You can find a synopsis here (along with the lovely opinions of a couple of lovely people) and sign up for release updates here, and I absolutely, definitely recommend that you do. I’ll also apologise in advance, because I intend to plug the hell out of this book. It’s the culmination of nearly three years of work, and I want as many people as possible to read it. On which note, if you’re a person who makes things and has released them into the wild (preferably writing, not industrial machinery, but creative things in general are good), I’m happy to give out review copies for free to anyone who’s willing to volunteer one.

Comments - positive or otherwise - are my bread and butter in terms of promoting this book. I’ve been doing all of this without the backing of an industry - no publishers, no agents, just my own know-how and a core team of wonderful editors - and as such I don’t have the same marketing machine that other books have. Every reblog helps. Or something like that.

Also, a quick note on release schedules - I’m hoping to publish it early in March, in both print and digital formats. It’ll start on Amazon, and spread from there to people who have other devices. You’ll also get a free digital copy if you buy the paperback, because fuck publishers who try to make you pay for the same product twice. (In the interest of exclusivity-related promotions on Amazon, I might wait a little while before openly publishing a multi-platform ebook edition à la this one, but it’ll be available on everything eventually.)

I’m also aiming to record an audiobook version of this one, and that’ll be distributed through Bandcamp; I have no idea what the ETA is on that, though, because it involves recording a 153-page manuscript. That sort of thing takes time. But no doubt I’ll be screaming about it at the time.

This barely touches my life at the moment, though. I’ve been planning a wedding, and that involves so much more than you initially think. Last night, we decided on our entrance music (Interlude - Gymnopedie No. 1 by Anamanaguchi), but there have also been decisions about food (New England clam chowder; butter poached lobster served with biscuits and asparagus tips; turkey pot pies; roasted chicken in a porcini cream sauce with fetuccine, peas and corn; a fucking tier of cupcakes), decorations (purple), flowers (also purple), guests (mostly family and Arden’s friends), playlists (as yet undecided), vows (sentimental), the justice of the peace (a very intuitive lady) and an ever-growing catalogue of things to take care of.

There’s also the fact that in the moments in between, I’ve been trying to settle in this new country; I have a bank account now, but no debit card or means of looking at my balance short of visiting a branch (though I should add that this isn’t a problem; I’m just impatient). I have a state ID, where my pre-haircut head looks twice its usual size. I have a social security number, albeit on a card that has the words VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION stamped above it, because god forbid I actually be considered a viable taxpayer. I even registered with Selective Service, effectively consenting to conscription, even though something like that is meaningless; if the US ever tried to bring in a draft, the first thing I’d do is flee the country. Unless it was a war made entirely of donut bullets. Or the sort of fight where it’s over when you pull a flag out of your opponent’s pants. I’d go for that.

This all sounds overwhelming, and it is, but I’m also wonderfully, ecstatically happy. Being constantly alert to new things, as I have been, brings with it a certain level of stress that I’m unaccustomed to, but it’s all surface-level chatter. At the root, I’m smiling. I feel ready to face anything, and that’s a relief - because I have so much more to face.

First: if you haven’t already bought Dystopolis, you can do so here. It’s currently $8.99 in paperback, and $4.00 as an ebook. Quite a few people seem to like it. What follows is a breakdown of sorts of the first month-and-a-bit of sales, which probably won’t interest anyone who isn’t interested in the publishing side of all of this, but I’m guessing there might be one or two who are. So. Here we are.

In the last five weeks, I’ve sold 44 books. This includes 8 print copies (18%), 13 full price digital copies (30%), and 23 discounted digital copies (52%). When it comes down to royalty breakdown, however, I’ve earned by far the most from full-price digital copies (46%), followed by the copies sold during the recent discount (28%), followed very closely by print copies sold (26%).

The reasons behind this are fairly straightforward, of course - I make the most from digital sales, despite the fact that the retail price of Dystopolis in ebook form is less than half of its print counterpart - ignoring the fact that the Kindle publishing program allows for 70% royalties, it actually costs a substantial amount of money to produce and ship a print book in the first instance. Additionally, Amazon (as a third-party seller, despite owning Createspace, where the book was originally published) takes a decent cut even after the costs of production are taken away. Not that you should be discouraged from buying a paperback if that takes your fancy. It’s nice to hold something in your hand, after all, and I spent quite a lot of time on the typesetting.

The thing that maybe surprised me the most was the surge in interest over the last week, helped mostly by the fact that the book was being sold for a fraction of its original price (99 cents for two days, followed by $1.99 for another two, and so on) and possibly also helped by the fact that I was pushing it fairly aggressively.

Promotion has to be factored into all of this, actually. Most of the original batch of sales came from the few who know me well enough to trust this blog, and then a small sampling of the large number of people who follow Arden’s online presence. With the recent sale, I have no doubt that quite a few sales came from Ashton Raze, the lead writer of Starbound, retweeting this fairly desperate plea to over 3,500 people. The flip-side of this, of course, is that even ignoring the various other fronts on which people were highlighting the promotion, that creates a ratio of one sale for every 163 people.

I suspect the message of this is that only so much comes from exposure; initially, you need to nurture an audience. Which I sort of do - of all of the people I interact with on the interact with on the internet, I think most of them have bought my book (and if you haven’t, shame on you), but at the same time don’t. There’s an element of dialogue in the way I interact with computers, but it isn’t quite as two-way as it could be; this whole medium, for me, is still fairly one-way.

There are no grand conclusions, here. This is more of a data-dump, and I’ll need some time to figure out what it all means. But it’s interesting. And gratifying. Holy hell. The final point of all of this is that forty-four people have bought Dystopolis, and that’s pretty damn lovely. I hope you’re enjoying it.

I finished the third draft of Dystopolis on Friday. It’s a little over 41,000 words, which seems short when I state it like that, but I’m hoping that it’s satisfying to read. I’ve retitled all but one story. A couple of character names and traits have changed. Everything is now as consistent as I think it’ll get without extra oversight, which is why a couple of people have agreed to give the whole book a few extra passes before it’s released out into the world.

Giving something like this up is intensely nerve-wracking. I haven’t shared my writing with anyone for a very long time, and I’m scared of disappointing others; this is quite unlike the stuff I’ve done before. It’s a little less weird, and attemps to stab at something resembling profundity, and when you stop using bizarre events as a crutch it can expose you.

So. This is all longhand for “I’ll be hiding in bed for the next couple of months”. I hope that’s okay.

I’m changing a little. I didn’t notice it at first, but I’m becoming more pragmatic, a little more stressed, a little more comfortable with smiling first and thinking about it later. My surface-level social skills - the things that buoy you along until you figure out whether you actually like someone or not - are developing a little more. I’m not as quiet as I used to be.

So I moved, and I started the new job, and I’m starting to build a life. I have an ache between my shoulderblades now that doesn’t ever really go away - it just fades in and out, depending on how much I’m ignoring my posture at work. I’ve also become more organized, because nothing makes you prioritize your time like being away from home 50 hours a week.

I’ve spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, because maintaining independence on all fronts (psychological, fiscal, organizational) is a) new, b) hard and c) emotionally confusing, but sometimes I stop and think about how lucky I actually am. I have a really nice apartment that’s fifteen minutes away from the beach. I live just down the road from a single-screen cinema that doesn’t rip off customers. I can walk to the train station, Salem is a four minute ride away, and Boston is just over half an hour. There’s a really great taqueria down the road from our apartment.

And I still have access to a catalog of movies, and TV shows, and video games that feels almost limitless. I’m still in love. That alone feels big - Arden and I have weathered some heavy stuff over the last two years, and we’re stronger for it when other relationships might have crumbled. I know that no-one wants to hear about a relationship that’s working, but: it’s working. I’ve heard so many people tell me that the ball-and-chain myth is anything but, that I’ll become just as jaded as them, and I just want to turn around and ask them what happened that meant they ended up feeling that way. How you can love someone and turn up your nose at the sound of their name in the same breath. It doesn’t make sense to me. I hope it never does.

I don’t feel the impulse to write this blog anymore. I wouldn’t say I’m writing this out of a sense of obligation - maybe I’m just writing it because I want my brain to drown out the kids sitting in front of me on the train who are screaming their idiot heads off - but I used to feel guilty when I left this for more than a week.

I still flirt with the idea of writing in general, though. I stopped, essentially. I wrote a few drafts of stories and lost interest. Part of it is purely physical - I’ve been designing the new Bright Wall/Dark Room website more or less constantly, and working at a computer all day, so sometimes the last thing I want to do when I get home is sit at a desk - but also I’m probably too happy, and living a life too uncomplicated, to really delve into dystopian fiction. I don’t have a wealth of unhappy relationships to mine. I can’t write about a dysfunctional white family’s self-destruction, because as strained as things are with my family sometimes, we do still get along. The only thing I’m sometimes drawn to is weird fiction, the kind that often has no real message but assaults your senses and leaves you reeling - writers like China Mieville, and Carlton Mellick, and Jeff VanderMeer. Even then, though, it hasn’t been enough to make me sit down and start scribbling.

But never say never, and one day this website relaunch will be done, and I’ll have a better work/life balance, and the long tail of moving into a new place will finally run out. There are building blocks still slowly grinding into place, and right now I’m content just to see what’s being built.