Writing – DreadPennies: The Mind of Graham Bradley

State of the Dread: Jan 22-28

Sup. I drive a Durango. We get after it.

Writing

DONE! The beta draft of HOWLING WILDERNESS is in the wind. Getting feedback already and it’s productive. I’m not touching the draft again until after February. If you want to read the first chapter, it’s up on CrackerStack. Subscribe while you’re there, I’ve moved book reviews to that site.

This week I’m planning/outlining scripts for a new series of videos, the old Tales from the Road series I did on the podcast. It’ll cover the same material but I’m punching it up for fun. Feels like I’ve talked about that before, it’s my actual focus right now.

Also, fun thing: my friend Savannah was passing through Texas and saw this on a shelf at a gift shop, she said it reminded her of me, haha. I laugh because that’s more or less what one of my main characters looks like, from a book she hasn’t read yet.

Reading

I finished a couple of things. GHOSTS OF ZENITH by Larry Correia was great, the review is pending at Upstream. Started reading MAXIMUM BOB by Elmore Leonard, but didn’t care for the content so I punted. THE OLD GODS WAKEN by Manly Wade Wellman was entertaining, the review is on CrackerStack. Ditto for my reread of THE QUICK AND THE DEAD by L’Amour.

I’m currently reading WARLORD by Doc Spears. It’s almost exactly a rewrite of A PRINCESS OF MARS, which has me concerned, but I expect there will be a twist or revelation to justify it. Should finish it Monday, that review will be on Upstream.

Once that’s done, I’m reading THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. If I finish it, I will start my third reading of EMPIRE OF SILENCE by Christopher Ruocchio. Still picking through AMERICAN MUCKRAKER when I have time. Very good book.

Drawing

Still working on the personal project, it’ll be finished this month. I’m having fun.

Video

New one here, and I’m very grateful for the responses. I had an announcement to make.

Also, instead of doing a “what I read this year” video in December, I’m going to do a monthly breakdown. As of right now I’ve finished 11 titles (thanks, audiobooks, haha) so that’ll be more manageable.

Audio

Normal thing, new episode of Radcracker dropped.

Fitness

I’m at 1500 pushups for the year and feeling awesome. The hard part is avoiding the temptation to do more too soon. Every week it gets easier to blast out a set of 20. This is my final week at 20, once Feb 1st rolls around I switch to 25, and keeping count will be more intensive. Big thanks to the bois in the Fat Chat for helping with that.

But once again I missed the second PE session with my kids. I resolve to hit that one this week. So easy to be lazy on a Friday.

State of the Dread: January 15-22

There’s a reason they call it the pectoralis major.

Writing

As promised, I finished draft 2 of HOWLING WILDERNESS. I need to make a final sweep of it just to make sure it’s formatted correctly for the betas. Once that’s finished I’m gonna do some edits on SHERIFF PORTER, that will be my next paperback release. I might not get to it this week though.

Reading

I finished HELL AND BACK, TRESS OF THE EMERALD SEA, AN HONEST PRESIDENT, and THE MAGNIFICENT NINE. That’s a Longmire book, a Sanderson Kickstarter book (which I’ll review on Upstream), a presidential bio I covered over on the CrackerStack, and a Firefly novel which will be up there shortly.

This week I’m rereading LOST PLANET HOMICIDE by Correia, so I can read its sequel GHOSTS OF ZENITH. Both are audio shorts. After that I have THE QUICK AND THE DEAD by L’Amour, and then I’m tackling a Conan collection by Robert E. Howard.

I was reading the ebook edition of a Lady Mechanika book but honestly I’m just done with that series. Vol6 was really lousy and vol7 is not an improvement. Fond memories, time to move on.

I’m still working my way through AMERICAN MUCKRAKER when I have time.

Drawing

Nothing super groundbreaking. Here’s a sketch I did a few weeks ago, which I am now digitizing. It’s just for fun and not from a current project.

Audio

The latest episode of Radcracker is up.

Video

Nothing here. I’m thinking of doing a few videos based on THE LAW OF SUPERHEROES, just for fun.

Fitness

I did another 500 pushups last week to bring me to 1,000 on the year. The goal is 25k but I’m adding 500 every month. Right now, for example, I do 5×20, but in February I’ll start doing 5×25. And so on and so on. By December I’ll be at 75 per set. It’s gonna be brutal.

One problem I’m having right now is I only do 1 PE session in my shop per week, and I need to do two. So I’m committing to that here. I’m also going to get up early on my days off and exercise out there.

Onward and upward.

State of the Dread: January 8-14

Writing

It pleases me to announce that I will finish draft 2 of HOWLING WILDERNESS this week. Once it is done I will contact beta readers for feedback, and I won’t touch it for six weeks.

While it is down, I will publish at least one paperback edition of an old project.

Reading

Last week I read GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, HOGS IN THE SAND, and INTO THE LIGHT. There is a review pending on that last one at UpstreamReviews.com.

This week I have HELL AND BACK, TRESS OF THE EMERALD SEA, and AN HONEST PRESIDENT on deck. If I blast them all out, MAGNIFICENT NINE will probably happen too.

That’s a Longmire book, a Sanderson KickstarterX4 book, a bio of Grover Cleveland, and a Firefly novel.

Drawing

Audio

The GI Joe thing is fun and cool, but I think there is still something weird going on with Radcracker. My most recent episode hit 5100 plays in 3 days. Then it stopped. The episode right before that was just about as fast. I’m entering a beta phase with Anchor on ads, so I’m not making any money off the listens. I’ll have to find another way to earn money off it.

Video

Channel link here. Didn’t do one last week. I’d like to this week, I just don’t know what about. Then again it’s about as simple as grabbing a book off my shelf, sitting down in the shop, and flapping my lips about it. Y’all know I can do that for a solid twenty minutes.

Fitness

I did 500 pushups at work, which is less than it sounds because it was 100 per day, in sets of 20. It was cool though. Follow on Twitter, hashtag #PectoCracker

This week I want to do a few more iso sessions in Fortress Fatphobia. I only did one, I’m aiming for three now.

State of the Dread: January 1-7, 2023

My wife knitted this scarf for me a couple of years ago, and since the Pottermore quiz sorted me into Ravenclaw, she added the patch. It is a lovely gift and I love whipping it out at Christmas.

Writing

I owe a Round Robin chapter to my friend Nate, so I need to get on that. Once it’s done, I’ll finish a draft of HOWLING WILDERNESS and set it aside.

I started a Substack. It’s called the CrackerStack. It replaces my Patreon, because you can do a paid subscription there and I’ll put some paywalled posts every month. Otherwise it’ll be for book and movie reviews.

State of the Dread will now be a weekly accountability segment. I’ll still share other things here.

As always, hit up Upstream Reviews for fiction reviews.

Reading

Gonna blast the absolute daylights out of a lot of books. This week I will finish GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, HOGS IN THE SAND, and INTO THE LIGHT on audio. If I have time, I’ll read AN HONEST PRESIDENT.

I’ve also got a new Lady Mechanika graphic novel to read from the library. Used to own those in print, but I sold them all after volume 6. Long story. I’ll post about it on the CrackerStack.

My ongoing reads in print are AMERICAN MUCKRAKER and SAVING FAITH.

Drawing

I sketched this at Church this morning.

Video

My latest on the channel, which you should sub to here:

Audio

Always sub to the Radcracker Podcast. I record those in the car on the way home. Slice-of-life, what’s on my mind, that sort of thing. It’s funny and insightful and I love doing it.

Fitness

I’m in a fatchat with some gordo bros who are looking to lose weight. Very exclusive, you can’t get in, don’t ask. This week I’m doing 100 push ups per day, counting my calories, and working on stretching my useless arm so that it’s better.

Video proof of the push-ups will be in my Instagram stories every day.

GODFREY ISAACS: REVOLUTIONARY REVENANT

Farting around on FamilySearch with that whole “where are you from” percentage breakdown. Fascinating stuff. (I did not know that I am 14% Danish.)

However the real gem is this tidbit about my 6x great grandfather, Godfrey Isaacs, who apparently was an unstoppable killing machine in the fight for FREEDOM, charged by George Washington himself to study the arcane arts and hunt down supernatural Royalist infiltration demons in Appalachia.

His charge? Maintain an ongoing network of clandestine operations against the forces of darkness, forces that would nip this nascent nation’s bud and cast it into the flames of tyranny. Nothing is off the table. Holy water. Liberty grenades. Pepperbox artillery of independence. Whatever. Just get the job done, soldier.

Washington told him to fake his own death if he had to. Grandpa Godfrey would play this card in 1787. He did go underground…but not in the way that the King’s demons would believe. He became a ghost, a shadow, a whisper in the backwoods. The creak under your floorboards? That was just him keeping you safe.

Potions were involved, we know that much. And portals. Always the portals. There were silver pistols and obsidian blades. His legend grew as fast as his body count. Soon the things that went bump in the night were looking under their beds for Grandpa Godfrey, the Winchester Wraith. The Brits distracted him in the War of 1812, but even though they burned D.C., he saved us from an even greater threat elsewhere, and we’ll never know it.

He only ever made one mistake, one tiny slip-up: in 1820, while on assignment in Kentucky, had to use an alias on an official document at the Post Office. Legend has it that while he was signing, his granddaughter walked outside the building, and she was the spitting image of his late wife. Distracted, Godfrey signed with his real name, and never noticed.

An enterprising genealogist found a copy of this document and uploaded it to FamilySearch. This is the only hardcore piece of evidence we have that he’s still out there, polishing his guns, sharpening his knives, and getting ready to bump back in the night…

Projects for 2023

Guys, I’m planning an end-of-year bash on the channel (subscribe!) where I will announce what I’m going to publish/produce/accomplish next year. Here are the categories

Reading: Fewer books, but longer ones. Average one per week or so. This will include the current four Stormlight Archive volumes, biographies on Jefferson Davis and Robert Rogers, and a huge lineup of artbooks that I’m behind on reading.

Writing: I will publish ENGINES OF MERYKA: HOWLING WILDERNESS, as well as the print/illustrated editions of SHERIFF PORTER and ANSWERABLE COURAGE.

Drawing: I’ll have my hands full doing illustrations for three books. One way to make that manageable will be to limit the amount of art I put in each one. I’m thinking eight total for the shorter books (not including the cover art) and no more than fifteen for HOWLING WILDERNESS. I’ll have to be very strict with my schedule.

Video: Production on video content will be regularlized. There will be at least one weekly video on my channel, reviewing a book or weighing in on something generally.

Audio: The Radcracker Podcast will continue, with new art and a more rigid format, so that the content is (frankly) better.

2023 is going to be a big year for me. I’m done moving, my schedule is consistent, and with my time consumption being predictable, I can dial in my meaningful creations with greater speed. I reserve the right to change any of this stuff as needed. Stay tuned.

Howling Wilderness Update

The speed of the writing comes in spurts, so I’m employing a lot of Clint Eastwood Ninja Turtle in this draft. If you’ve forgotten what that is, he’s just a mechanism I use when a scene isn’t working. A meme version of “fix it in post.”

I just write him into the story, and he escorts the characters to the next part.

Get it written, so you can get it fixed.

I crossed 26k words recently. That tells me that it’s overwritten. I wanted the whole thing to be 50k, and it’s looking more like 25k at this point. Sometimes this happens, especially when I’m too busy to write regularly.

This book won’t be out in 2022, but it will be out for 2023. Gonna get it done right. I did already get a publication out for this year (Sheriff Porter) so my streak remains alive. Next year if I have to write something short I have a project in mind. Onward and upward.

“Scrub the serial numbers.”

Have you ever read a book that was REALLY similar to another book, or seen a movie that was a flagrant re-skin of another movie, but was just different enough not to be suable?

There can be a lot of reasons for this (cash-grab, marketing piggyback, etc). Among my fellow creatives it’s frequently a matter of “I wrote a fanfic and it’s actually good but I don’t own the IP so I’ve got to switch some things around to sell the book.”

At this point you introduce a practice called “filing off the serial numbers,” i.e., removing the elements that are protected from someone else’s intellectual property, and doing enough to make it your own.

I can’t put an exact number on it, I’ve heard “twenty-five-percent-different” tossed around here and there, but basically if it’s similar to an existing thing, it has to be distinct enough so as to be clearly your own.

This isn’t the same as parody, which is protected under a different set of laws. Something like Amazon’s THE BOYS would work as a parody, since there are characters that clearly match up with Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Aquaman, Flash, and so forth.

I’m thinking more along the lines of Nick Cole and Jason Anspach’s GALAXY’S EDGE series, which they had in print before Disney branded their Star Wars park with the same name. Cole and Anspach specifically advertise their books as “Star Wars Not Star Wars.” The first book is told from a not-stormtrooper’s POV.

You get a setting that’s similar to the original, but different enough to not be a copy or a rebrand.

I’ve done my own version of this thing a few times, namely with GUILD and KILL THE BEAST. Lately I’ve been trying to analyze my works and make them more original than they’ve been in the past. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself as “the guy who writes things that are tweaked versions of more popular things.”

Certainly there’s fun to be had in doing it. I just don’t want it to be my only thing, or even my main thing.

But right now I find myself boxed up with my character Graveheart, from HOWLING WILDERNESS. No spoilers, but he’s got magic, and he uses it in a way that is…very similar to a superhero that I like. I had a couple of different ideas for his origin in the Engines world that I came to organically, and when those ideas all came together, I started to draw him up…and then I realized what I was doing.

It was incredibly frustrating because he’s SUCH A COOL CHARACTER. And he has a huge role to play in the Engines timeline and the DreadVerse at large. I just need to write up a list of details and rules for him so that he’s not just a flagrant copy of two other characters that I really enjoy.

Once I get this book finished and I write up the Afterword, I think it will all make sense. I just have to be thorough in scrubbing off the serial numbers. It’s frustrating because again, his origin is very organic and true to the world of Engines, it just ended up making a roadmap that takes him right up alongside an existing character in someone else’s IP.

Shoot…two characters, now that I think of it.

You’ll see. Back to work.

THE HERO NEXT DOOR Update

Some of you bought print copies of HND from me recently, and I’m just getting them out in the mail this week. Thanks for your patience.

If you still want one, I have three copies left at $10. That’s cheaper than Amazon, and I’ll draw something in the front for you. Send me a message at dreadpennies [at] g mail dot com.

Man…I really wish I was a full-time writer. So many books I want to get to, including the eventual THE HERO UPSTAIRS.

Nick’s gonna have a pretty wild ride in college.

Production Schedule Update

The more books that I cover for www.UpstreamReviews.com, the more I realize I still need to have some skin in the eBook game. Despite that fact that I neither read nor enjoy eBooks.

Plenty of other people do, and I need to cater to them. I need their money. I need to make it my money, so that I don’t have to keep taking truck money.

So I’ve got to make some eBooks of the DreadPennies Adventure Hour titles.

In order to keep my sanity, I’ve got to track which projects I’m working on, and more importantly, which projects I’m delaying until the former category is done.

While I format some of the Adventure Hour stories for eBooks, I’ll draw things for each story and share them on Insta, just to boost the signal for them. But the books themselves won’t be illustrated, not at first.

CURRENT PROJECT: Howling Wilderness, a new tale in the Engines of Liberty universe.

PENDING PROJECTS: Once HW is finished, I will get eBook versions going on the following titles:

—The Guild of Eldritch Adventurers. I’ll add some extra chapters to this one, mainly by breaking up the existing ones, since it’s 40k words but only six chapters. The flow is important. It will get a newer, better cover.

—Fool’s Silver. The chapter flow on this one is fine, the cover art will get better too.

—Sheriff Porter. Better cover art. I really want to illustrate this one, but I’ll save that for a crowdfunded limited edition or something.

—Homeworld. Improved cover art here, but this one also kind of requires illustrations because it’s a “dossier” kind of story. There are visual aids that go with a lot of the stuff inside it. So it’ll be farther down the line.

—Answerable Courage. (Currently unpublished from Adventure Hour.) I’ve really struggled with this story ever since I got deeper into the actual history of the Pilgrims. The truth is better than anything I could make up. That being the case, I’m going to lean hard into the changes I’ve made to the history, and just put in an afterword telling people to read that stuff.

Ridley Scott did it with Gladiator, Scott Westerfeld did it with his Leviathan trilogy, and they both made great stuff. I think the revamped version of this story will probably tie into the Engines universe somehow, because that’s how I roll.