Hello, January; where did you come from?

December went off the rails, obviously. Didn’t get those chapters written.

It went a bit like this:

1. First week: procrastination
2. Second week: planning and prewriting and generally getting things set up for a big productivity push late in the month.
3. Third week: a ghastly bout of gastroenteritis that involved a lot of crying, vomiting, and general misery.
4. Rest of month: sloooooooowly regaining my ability to walk, talk, and concentrate for minutes on end. Oh, and then the holidays happened.

So we’re a bit behind schedule, aren’t we? And thus we come to my brilliant new plan for increased productivity:

Nagging.

Here’s how it works. I’m going to try to get two to three chapters written per week. That’s usually my maximum productivity level, so we’re shooting for the stars here. And to keep me (dis)honest, I’m going to be posting daily photos of my progress on the Masks Facebook page. Notebook pages, photos of my laptop screen, sketches or pictures of paintings-in-progress, some kind of sign that I did something on Masks that day. I’ll try to do the same with Twitter, although I’ve never posted photos to Twitter before, so bear with me on the inevitable technical difficulties. I’m going to be doing a lot of this with an iPad camera, so the photos will be exactly that good … or not, as the case may be.

Your part in all this is to nag me. Go subscribe to the page if you haven’t done so already. I don’t post that much or demand that you buy things; mostly I try to be clever and amusing once a day at most. And if you think it’s been too long without a random progress photo, nag me. Comment on something. Post on the page. I will answer, assuming I haven’t come down with gastroenteritis again (and I threw out the contaminated salad greens that probably caused it, so—fingers crossed!). I am extremely susceptible to guilt, so we’re going to use that as motivation.

The first installment in Operation Nag the Writer is at the top of this blog entry. That’s the prewrite I did for Chapter 11 of Volume 2. It involves three of our heroes going to a bar. Be afraid.

And with luck, I’ll have something worth posting on Pocket Coyote sooner than later …

It's bribery time!

You might have seen a few new images cropping up on the Facebook page—sketches and watercolors by my friend Nicole Le. Well, we’re finally ready to admit what we’re doing.

Masks is getting a new trailer. Specifically, it’s getting two—one from Rae’s perspective, and one from Trevor’s.

This is a product partly of my book-trailer envy, partly of my advancing skills at video-making and partly of the fact that the mixed-media aspect of the previous trailer is just bugging me. Nicole has graciously contributed eleven (!!) watercolor paintings of characters and scenes from Masks, and I’m now in the process of editing them together into something that looks, if not professional, at least intentional. There’s some kickin’ music involved, too. I am pleased.

I’ve decided to post the trailers as a bribe after the Facebook page hits 300 fans. That’s not such a stretch—it’s been hovering around 295 fans for a couple of weeks now, and so if just five of you guys invite at least one other person, well, you get the idea. Heck, if each of Mr. Olson’s minions invited one friend, we’d be at 325, which I think would be worth posting some behind-the-scenes stuff like Nicole’s preliminary sketches (some of which bear very little resemblance, interestingly, to the finished product).

Once again, things are moving interestingly behind the scenes on Masks, and once again I can’t say much about it because a) I don’t want to jinx it and b) I don’t want to get a reputation as a blabbermouth. But having a popular, and populous, Facebook page and blog couldn’t hurt the cause and might well help it. As always, it’s the fans who carry the day on this kind of deal, so thank you once again for all your support. I literally could not do it without you. (Hence the bribery.)

Now get thee to Facebook! Spam away! It’s in a good cause!