At last someone noticed Pete.

 Thank you, Amazon customer!

Readers' characters come alive

While it may look like I've been inattentive and neglecting my Omni duties, just the opposite has been going on beneath the surface. In order for us to launch the behemoth that is Omni, I need to complete the first draft of all novels in Pete Drake's 7-novel series. That's in excess of 1.1 million words of writing—that's the length of nearly 14 standard novels when all is said and done. The good news is, I've only got an estimated 250K words to go, so the home stretch is nearly in sight.

What this post highlights is the collaborative nature of the Omni project. A couple years back, a darling gal named Genevieve (part of the Fiddleheads Unite core team on Facebook) submitted a character for inclusion in the primary novel series. Tallulah Marin, or Tali as Genevieve calls her, is a naiad, a mythological fresh water nymph who featured prominently in book #2. Now in book #6 Tali returns!

Including the characters created both those in the Omni circle is incredibly rewarding, not to mention fun. Better yet, when I informed Genevieve that Tali was coming back, it inspired her to get back to her own writing, and she's going to pen a short story that goes with the novel scene I told her about.

If you'd like a character of your creating to be included in the final novel, drop me a line. Omni's all about inclusion, in the most magical and whimsical of ways. See you all soon. I have 4K more words to get down on paper today xo

Badcon

25-28 May 2018

In October 2017, A friend of a friend on Facebook caught wind of Pete's revamped story, entitled Mind the Portal, and very kindly invited me to be a panelist and presenter at Baycon - a science fiction and fantasy convention in the Bay area then in its 30somethingth year. I was bowled over, humbled, grateful, and determined to make a big splash for all things Omni. I dove into the project with gusto, completing more collateral materials and making more goodies than imaginable for the four-day Memorial weekend extravaganza.

The whole affair ended up being a mammoth bust for me. Zero book sales. I mean zero. Meanwhile, other writers with far less experience and far simpler booth setups sold out of their stock, and they brought plenty! To say I was disheartened would be a mega understatement. I spent thousands on the event and was prepared to the last annoying detail.

I came home feeling more defeated than I could say, especially after so many seeming failures over the last few years. I couldn't understand it. I used to be "successful" when I took on a new project. But in recent years, everything I put my hand to tanked! I did some soul searching, and one idea after another came as to how to go about the Omni project differently. Had Pete's story taken off during that convention, I would not have been able to do what I am now doing.

In short, I've been writing all 7 books (the most recent, book #5, is 192K in length) with the idea of getting the first draft of the entire series done before publishing (in this case, re-publishing) any of it so I can insert foreshadowing into the earlier parts of the story. That's something I wouldn't be able to do if I wrote and published each of the seven books one at a time.

Additionally, a million new ideas have surfaced that relate to how to repurpose the unfulfilled (yet somehow all affiliated) projects written about in previous posts on this blog. I realized none of them were truly a bust. They were all just waiting for the right time and conditions. I am going the route of Thomas Edison who was famously quoted as saying, "I haven't failed -- I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work" and “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

That said, I'm not giving up. In fact, I'm just getting started. The Omni machine is now fully in gear and on track. If you're brave enough to see all it will entail, click here to go to the page that shows the Omni product rollouts.

Mind the pothole

30 July 2017 - I embellished Pete's story and decided to go with the 7-book series. Since I was unable to fully erase all vestiges of Peter Swift from Dimension Q from the internet, I changed a few of the names in the story, and gave Pete a last name that better fit his character.

I then began querying agents who by and large wrote sent back an identical email, encouraging me to make the story "darker and edgier like the Hunger Games or Divergent." This was disheartening. Not only would that style of writing not be authentic on my part, but if I were to rewrite all 120K pages, then resubmit to agents, and if amazingly someone wanted to represent it and starting approaching publishers, that process could realistically take another 2- 3 years. By then, chances were the style of writing requested would be hackneyed and readers would be on to something new.

Foolishly, I self-published the darn thing; it really was not ready for prime time. Given that about seventy percent of the work I do for others is done pro bono, I no longer have expendable funds to devote to hiring editors, cover designers et al. There is a reason I don't think of myself as an author, and this book is a good example of why. Although it was better than the first iteration, it still needed a lot of work.

Challenge accepted

I had a ball cranking out Pete Swift's 100K-word story in a month, then spent a month self-editing, and followed it up with a party shortly thereafter to celebrate the achievement of cranking out the story in a month. I really didn't plan to become an author (and still don't view myself as one), and merely wanted to celebrate what I viewed as an accomplishment -- something akin to when one runs their first 10K. The 2016 story was nearly as bad as the original one written back in 2001, the addition of elements notwithstanding.

I went back to my "regular life" and thought nothing more about the Omni stuff ... at first. A few kind and supportive people suggested the world of the academy was worth exploring further. I scoffed, fully aware how poorly written Pete's story was. Yet, I also agreed with those kind folks. I gave it a good think, and decided Pete's story deserved better.

I pulled Peter Swift from Dimension Q off the internet sales shelves -- at least as best as possible. It's hard to remove all traces from the web. I then set to doing the story right. Unfortunately, the third time was not the charm, as subsequent posts will reveal.