I can SEE the scritch-scratch. The marks on the page! I hear it from out here now and I watch him make the marks.

Each stroke pains him. And scares him. He cannot imagine that I am here, right here, now. He looks for me wild-eyed but cannot see.

Lulu bites her nail again; sighs. “I know. I guess you think it’s stupid. But he’s my dad!”

She stands, gulps down her beer, gives Ballard a little wave.

“Well, bye, Ballard. Here goes nothing!”

She wobbles out on her four-inch wedges.

Been away on holiday and am now back at it—working hard on the 2nd BALLARD book, THE REPUBLIC OF DOGS.

Wanted to take a moment to address two questions which have come in from several different readers of BALLARD motor court:

1) where does the name BALLARD come from? and

2) what is The Tower?

The first one is a bit easier to answer, so I’ll start there. J.G. Ballard was a British novelist and short story writer. Two of his books (Crash and Empire of the Sun) have been made into films (by David Cronenberg, and Steven Spielberg, respectively). He is commonly thought of as a science fiction writer, but, in his own words, ” … I was interested in the real future I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred.” In a preface to The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis wrote: “No one is, or was, remotely like him.”

The Complete Stories blew me away when I began reading it several years ago. Ballard’s methods are both rigorous and wildly imaginative. I began to see J.G. Ballard as a detective of the post-modern soul, a psychic investigator of what it meant to be alive in a century besotted with technology. I was hooked … not least by the dull and yet fateful sonority of the word ‘BALLARD.’ As it’s turned out, the sound of that word BALLARD—whispered & terrible—was a bell-toll that reawakened my need to tell stories, to make sense of what I thought it meant to be alive.

So, that’s why my character is named Ballard and why I refer to these as my BALLARD books. On to The Tower … which is also related to J.G. Ballard.

Years ago, I wrote a short story called “blakk,” about a skyscraper which serves as:

a) a type of cinema for hipster-types who like to gather and get off watching apocalyptic films of alien invasions, and

b) a venue for a wildly alcoholic happy-hour gathering of co-workers that over the course of an evening blossoms into a hallucinogenic search through the corridors of this building for the nature of reality.

Suffice to say, it was not very good. But, years later, as I read “The Concentration City” in Ballard’s Complete Stories (which is about a high-rise of planetary proportions), my little skyscraper from “blakk” came back to me and a new way to approach its themes began to work its way through my brain.

There is a “science” behind my idea of The Tower. (It has to do with Michael Talbot’s conception of The Holographic Universe, for any of you who may be interested.) But, for me, The Tower is about enormity and the uncanny ability for enormous things to stay, ultimately, outside the grasp of our conscious minds: these are things which are so large as to be unknowable, unless we dig a little deeper, go a little further out …

Some quick observations about the world of self e-publishing, now that I’m two weeks into this whirlwind adventure:

1) 45% of sales are from Amazon

2) 40% of sales are from iTunes (my understanding is that this near-even split between Amazon and Apple is atypical; usually the Amazon #’s are significantly higher than the Apple #’s)

3) 10% of sales are from Barnes & Noble

4) 5% of sales are from Smashwords (although, in fairness, Smashwords is #1 so far in terms of free downloads of the sample excerpt)

5) about 15% of my Facebook friends have “liked” the book’s Facebook page so far

6) about 20% of the 500 or so people I sent a broadcast email to have opened and clicked through on that email to check out the book

7) about 5% of my LinkedIn contacts have responded to my announcement of the book there

I have no idea how “typical” any of these numbers are, or what “benchmarks” might be emerging in this new arena.

One non-bullet-pointed anecdotal observation: while it’s been pretty fun logging in every morning to check my sales, I must admit that what’s been even more gratifying are the responses I’ve gotten from readers. I’m not sure how other people do it, but when I write I imagine a sort of “ideal reader,” someone who pays attention, and is passionate, enthusiastic, and honest in his/her appraisal of my work.

Readers like that mean everything to me and I’ve been blessed with many of them so far in these early days of BALLARD motor court.

The great jazz pianist Bill Evans once said that a common error he saw in students who came to him was a tendency to “approximate.” He said that many students insist on trying to get their arms around the entirety of a piece and that in so doing they take certain shortcuts which result in their “approximations.”

This makes their playing less interesting, and less real. His advice to them was always to  focus on a smaller part, if necessary, but to attack that part in a way that was “very clear” and “very real” and “entirely true.” In other words, it’s better to be super-focused on something a bit smaller in scope than it is to be vague on something larger.

I thought about this a lot as I wrote BALLARD; in fact, I think about it a lot, period. Evans’ advice brings to mind some lines from Bob Dylan that I have recently decided will represent the rest of my life’s work:

“And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal // pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul // from me to you // tangled up in blue”

So, how do you be “very clear” and “very real” and make sure that every single one of your words “ring true” and that they glow like “burning coal”?

I think you have to start small and do the work. It’s drudgery, but you put it together, piece by piece. The pieces that work you keep; the ones that don’t you throw out. You build a foundation. And as the structure grows larger, it gathers momentum … and eventually the entirety WILL come to you and you’ll be ready to attack it, get your arms around it, master something large in a way that is real and true.

With BALLARD motor court, I started with the supernatural event that thwarted the attempt on Ballard’s life in the convenience store. It’s one of the briefest scenes in the entire novella, but it was absolutely critical. I rewrote it dozens of times, but eventually I got it right (I think!) and then the rest of the book began to fall into place, forward and backward.

I’m sure there are LOTS of other ways to work … but this is the way that make sense to me, and seems to offer the surest path to creating things that will make you stop and take notice.

… is another writer with a story, another artist with a vision, another painter with a dream, another musician, another filmmaker, etc., etc., etc.

We’ve got not enough time for the too many of them there already are. If you’ve made something, the chances of anyone outside your immediate circle of friends and family ever giving a damn about what you’ve poured your heart and soul into are slim.

The main reason for this is that your work probably sucks. It’s just not good enough. Some people think that great stuff goes unnoticed because there’s just too much noise, too much clutter, too many other ways for people to divert themselves.

But I don’t believe that. Because I’m playing the long game, you see. I believe that in any given week, or month, or year, or decade, or lifetime, for that matter, great artistry IS undiscovered, ignored, passed over. But, ultimately, if what you’ve done says something that touches or fascinates other people about what it’s like to be alive on this planet, at this time, then your work will be found … it will be heard, watched, read, discussed.

I know it may sound ludicrous, but that’s why I wrote BALLARD motor court. I believe that this story has been to the crossroads and contains truth about the intersection of art and reality.

Of course, it could just suck!

I’ve gotten some questions about this, so here goes. There are lots of ways to prep an e-book for publication. Here’s what I did:

—Wrote original manuscript in MS Word; wrote, revised, walked, thought, wrote, revised, lathered, rinsed, repeated.

—Midway through that composition, began screenplay in Final Draft. Work on the screenplay proceeded in chunks, usually trailing the prose manuscript by a few weeks.

—Wanted to add visual elements like chapter headers/separators and so began to take photographs; at first took pics exclusively of thin objects or patterns which could be laid on their sides horizontally to mimic a divider … like this:

—Finished prose manuscript in Word; completed screenplay in Final Draft. Yay! (Or so I thought.)

—Learned both Pages and iBooks Author, since I knew I needed to output an ePub file (which Pages does quite easily, and which many e-Book retailers use) and an iBooks file (so I could get into the iBookstore and be read on an iPad).

—Bought pack of 10 ISBNs at Bowker for $250. Could’ve bought one ISBN for $125, but I knew I wanted to use 1 for each of the “editions” (Apple, Amazon, B&N), since they are all slightly different books. Plus, this gives me enough to do the second & third BALLARD installments (here’s a preview of the next one). You can self-publish at most places w/o and ISBN; but you have to have one at Apple and that’s why I bought some.

—Set up self-publishing accounts at Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.

—Realized that Pages and iBooks Author allow for larger, more portrait-aligned images (d’oh!) and so took more photos to meet those needs.

—Completed cover, final layout in Pages and iBooks Author.

—Output ePub and iBooks files.

—Uploaded ePub file to Amazon and to Barnes & Noble; accepted at B&N; rejected at Amazon.

—Realized Amazon was just kind of joking around when they said they took ePub files; they really preferred the .mobi file format; good one, Amazon!

—Reverted to MS Word version of ms; saved as RTF; ran that through Calibre to produce a .mobi file; uploaded to Amazon; accepted!

—Set up FB page for BALLARD; set up WordPress blog. Also set up separate Twitter, email, Pinterest, and Tumblr acts for BALLARD; decided not to use any of them. Just sticking with this WordPress blog, the Facebook page, with periodic updates from my personal Twitter and Tumblr accounts.

—Uploaded iBooks file to Apple via iTunesConnect; accepted after a couple of tweaks.

—Set up list of contacts in MailChimp.

—Finalized metadata (keywords, descriptions, genres, etc.) at all 3 spots. You should be able to find BALLARD by searching on any of the following: tarot, gravel, tower, rabbi, golem, comics, or graphic novel. I’m especially fond of the “gravel” keyword and look forward to lots or orders from construction companies worldwide.

—Went live with announcements via LinkedIn, MailChimp, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and Tumblr.

I’m sure there are much more elegant ways to have done this. I could have gone the InDesign to ePub route, or tried to output the entire book via HTML5, but honestly I just wanted to take the path of technical least resistance, at least this first time around.

You need a place to start. When I wrote BALLARD motor court, the first scene I wrote—Lulu walks into the convenience store and confronts Ballard—became the middle of the novella. And then what happened in that convenience store dictated what had to come before and after.

The germ of the entire story is in that one scene … but I had no idea what the narrative would eventually become as I was writing that first scene. 

Since a crime—of some sort—had been committed, I knew I needed cops. So I brought in a couple I’d been using in a different story. Pamela—who, as some of you may have guessed, is inspired by a character from a TOKYOPOP-published manhwa called TAROT CAFE—came next, and the mythology of the tarot led directly to The Tower and then to the fractured mysticism of Joe the Rabbi and the golem. Those of you who know me best may understand how Lulu worked her way into the story; that’s pain whose shadow is never too far away.

RC, oddly enough, came last. A lot of what I think about how art happens—and what that process does to the artist—is in him, of course. But before he became a conduit for Athena, he was really just a way to poke a bit of fun at the fanboy scene that I have been part of for the past couple of decades.

I made a lot of weird structural decisions with BALLARD motor court. Some of them were conscious; some of them were only “arrived at” in retrospect. I’m not saying this is the correct way to write a book; in fact, most people will tell you things like “outline, outline, outline.” But that’s not what I was after here. I was after something more like a dream. I’m not sure I captured it—you will all decide that, of course.

During the construction of BALLARD motor court (approximately Sept ’11 through Mar ’12), I walked. Everywhere. All the time. 2-3 hours some days. If you were to draw a circle with a diameter of 10 miles with my house in Mar Vista at the center, then I walked most of the streets in that circle at one time or another.

I used the LAPL a lot (Overland, Playa Vista, Venice, and Mar Vista branches, mainly), so oftentimes I’d walk with books in my arms to return to the library, or with books in my arms coming home. Also got deeply into craft beer, and so would plan walks around stops at Wally’s on Westwood Blvd or Beverage Warehouse in Playa del Rey.

Beginning in January of this year, as I could see the book taking shape in my head, I started taking photos with my iPhone while I was out walking. And so the search for the right “locations” began to influence my walking patterns, too. Ballona Creek, the Dockweiler beach area, Culver City underpasses, the VA hospital on Wilshire, a bar on Washington Place – all of these places began to feel like they belonged to and influenced BALLARD.

(I know it probably sounds retarded, but I made a conscious decision to NOT drive to a possible photo location. I began to think that if I did that I would dilute the “purity” of the vision that was forming in my head and on-screen. It would be too easy to just go anywhere; I needed to find these photos on foot, in my “world” at the time, in order for them to work in the book.)

Music I listened to, over an over, while walking during the construction of BALLARD motor court:

Bob Dylan – everything since TIME OUT OF MIND, esp “LOVE AND THEFT,” which became the unofficial soundtrack of the book.

David Bowie – HEATHEN, DIAMOND DOGS, STATION TO STATION

Rolling Stones – OAKLAND SIXTY-NINE, EXILE ON MAIN STREET

Fuck Buttons – TAROT SPORT

Led Zeppelin – PHYSICAL GRAFFITTI

Iggy Pop – THE IDIOT and “Fall in Love With Me” from LUST FOR LIFE

Robert Plant – BAND OF JOY

I knew from the start that I wanted to try to do everything myself. Write the story, take the photographs, format the book for various e-readers, proof files, upload, market, and sell. I wanted to learn how to do all of that.

It never occurred to me to try to get an agent, or to submit the ms to a publisher. I’ve been published in the past (in small-ish magazines, mainly: short stories, movie reviews, feature-length profiles, etc.). But this time, I simply wanted to dig in, figure it all out, and use the internet to see if there might be people in the world who would like what I’d done.

In my opinion, there are two things that any writer who is self-publishing should consider shelling out some dough for: cover design and copy editing. I happen to be married to a wonderful copy editor, so I had that covered. But doing the cover myself is probably a mistake. If this is the sum total of your Photoshop expertise …

open a photo from your camera

go to Image > Adjustments > Black and White

and Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast

and resize according to needs

and then save as a jpg

… then you, like I, should probably not be ‘designing’ a cover for your e-book!

I’d thought a lot along the way about how much or even whether I should charge for my book. There are many arguments on every side (e.g., “give it away, man—nobody knows who you are and you need to build an audience,” “hey, your time is worth something—look at everything you put into this”). I was tempted to give it away to as many people as I could. But I settled on ninety-nine cents. (Unless you want to read BALLARD motor court as a screenplay; I can hook you up with that for free.)

Pricing your e-book at ninety-nine cents gets you a 30% royalty on Amazon (as opposed to a 70% royalty there if you charge a minimum of $2.99). B&N pays you 40% for a ninety-nine cent e-book; they pay you 60% if you charge a minimum of $2.99. Apple doesn’t care what you price your e-book at: you get 70%, regardless.

My goal? I’d like sell enough e-books to recoup the $125 I paid to Bowker for a pack of 10 ISBNs. (You have to have an ISBN to get into the Apple iBookstore.)