So, The Story of Gamer Zone as it currently exists is the first draft of a 320 page book.  Actually, the final version will weigh in just a bit higher than that – there were a few things within The Story that I never found a spot for, and after I finished I found where they belong in the framework of The Story.

I’ve exported the whole thing and have begun the edit process.  

The real question in my mind is what form it’s going to take when it ends up in print.  I’ve got two options:  self publish, or traditional publishing.  One day, someone commented that it’s impossible to get a book in print unless you have impressive credentials.  

I love a good challenge, so after I finish with my edits I’ll start shopping around for a traditional publisher.

Some obvious points here – since it started as a blog, it had all the horrible writing of a blog when it started.  It wasn’t until around 20,000 words (of 80,000) that I realized I was actually writing a book.  You can see some differences in writing style as the story goes along.  So I’ll have a huge section of The STory to revise to a more book like format.

Some publishers won’t touch it because it’s got some rough language in it (liberal use of the word “fuck” in some places), and some publishers won’t touch it because it’s an oddball item.  It’s geeky, but not really designed for gamers.  It’s business writing, but not designed for the expert businessman.  It’s a little of both, and a bunch of neither.  So I’ll have an interesting challenge ahead of me getting it published – but I’m not afraid of a little challenge (as The Story shows many times.)  I’m just insane enough to love a challenge.

So how long would it be until there’s a print copy of the book?  No idea.  If I found a publisher today, it could be on shelves as early as two months, or as long as a year.  Even worse – even if I find a publisher, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to run down to your local bookstore and pick up a copy.  Publication is no guarantee of wide distribution.

I’ll be updating this from time to time with more information on publishing the book.  Or, you can follow me on Twitter (MidnightRyder) as I pop up stuff there from time to time about the process too.

Meanwhile, I’ve started two more books.  Yes, I now have a new insanity.  I’ll be writing on those again in my spare time – though I’m not certain if I’ll write online again.  The Story of Gamer Zone will probably be an anomaly  for me, though if I decide that my next things I write are going to be self published, then I’ll probably go ahead and write it online.

Throughout the process I’ve gotten a number of great emails.  Thanks to everyone who dropped a line and used words like “interesting”, “honorable”, “fun”, or “compelling”.   I never really expected that, and it was amazing to get little morale boosts like that.

As for my next two books – no idea on time frame at all.  One is a fiction piece in the super hero vein (with a different twist) and the second is a book on business again.  One will be fun, one will be boring.  One I’m writing for myself, one I’m writing to try and sell.  Surprisingly, the boring one on business is the one I’m writing for myself.  Go fig that one!

Thanks for reading The Story of Gamer Zone, and thanks for the two purchases of Read Ahead accounts – that doesn’t fill the car up with gas, but hell, every little bit helps!

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr

Aka, The Midnight Ryder

December 7, 2008

Wichita, Kansas

Thankfully a friend of mine, Tisha Havens, has stepped up to handled editing duties now.  Which should help considerably with spelling and grammar errors without changing the content.  Woohoo!

I’ve gotten some good feedback – surprisingly, most of it by email.  One of the more interesting emails was someone asking about the effect the business had on my marriage.  He explained his situation, and his deep love for his wife, and seemed to be wondering:  would a failure of the business screw up his marriage? 

Good question.  I have no idea.  Gamer Zone cost me my marriage, but not really because of it’s failure so much as because of my failures.  Obviously for the sake of suspense, I’m not gonna ruin the story by telling the whole thing here, but, it’s interesting to have people emailing you asking about things like that.

Readership isn’t HUGE at the moment.  Somewhere between 20 and 40 people per day read the story.  Kinda cool really, but that doesn’t exactly rank The Story really high on Google.  On the other hand, I haven’t done much of anything to promote the story – I mentioned it on my Garage Games account, and that’s about it.  I’m curious to see if it grows, or just eventually peters out.

So far (not including this post) I’ve written 12,205 words of The Story of Gamer Zone.  I’m guessing that means The Story is going to end up in the novella range – probably weighing in at 40,00 – 60,000 words.  A bit shy of a full blown novel (though that does end up being a book that somewhere between 160 and 240 pages.)  I won’t bother padding it to try and reach “Novel” status – there’s no real point.  While it’s possible (and highly probable) that I’ll end up putting out a printed version someday when it’s all done just for the hell of it (mainly so I have a copy of The Story on my bookshelf more than anything – it’s an ego thing.)  

The hard part isn’t finding something to write about for The Story, it’s figuring out what to write NEXT.  Often I have to ponder on the next bit of content – there’s so much stuff to talk about, and I haven’t even gotten into the really funny stuff yet.  Many things, IMO, end up being better off grouped together in a category, even if all of those items aren’t within the same time period.  I did give myself some leeway there when I mentioned some stories are fictionalized

The Plumber and I chat about the story every so often, and it pulls yet another bit of fun stuff to add to The Story.  He pointed out something:  I named all the original Gamer Zone employees with “Geek” names.  But named myself The Storyteller.  That’s not quite accurate – I just never named myself.  The Storyteller is more of a title than a name.  Since it’s a first person narrative for the most part (I can imagine a couple of future sections written third person about other people), I never named myself.  It’s just Me, I, or even just Davis (since I’m not hiding my identity, I’m protecting the identities of others.)  

I may consider in the future opening it up to other people having a shot at giving me a GeekName.  Who knows.  Of course, if I do, The Plumber will submit roughly 1,000 names, most of them being variants of CockSuckerGeek, DipshitGeek, and others along that vein.

Oh, and the Read Ahead concept?  Highly successful.  So far I’ve made (drumroll please) $0.  Heh.  Oh well, I consider that to be an interesting experiment, and not the motivation for writing The Story of Gamer Zone so I don’t feel so bad about not making anything off of it.  But I’m considering writing future tales (one non-fiction and two fiction) and using a similar serialized online publishing model with Read Ahead.  I may reconsider that, and just put up ads or something for those stories when I start publishing them.

Back to work on The Story – enjoy!

Davis

The first quick comment is why it’s taken so long to put this down on a website.  I couldn’t decide how I wanted to deliver the story.  I considered doing a webcomic for a long time – the problem is for me to make a passable panel would take forever.  It’s not that I can’t do artwork – just organic artwork like people takes me FOREVER to do.  

The web comic also wouldn’t have given me a chance to explain certain principles I’ve learned along the way.  You’d have panels and panels of just text at times – not really very artsy.

I also had considered doing it as a script.  One of my things I’ve been working on for quite a while is development of some reoccurring video content.  Basically online TV shows.  I’ve got one slated to go just as soon as we have the space – which has been an huge issue.  But doing the Story of Gamer Zone would have required a HUGE space, lots of computers for props, and a HUGE cast to be told the way I want to.  Hrm.  Not an option.

But when it comes to typing, I’m fast.  Really fast. And I’m able to brain dump onto the keyboard very nicely (if anyone who had seen the Xanga blog for Gamer Zone back in the day is reading, you know exactly what I mean – I write huge detailed updates on things that express most of my thoughts on the subject quite quickly.)

I blog A LOT.  I was looking through my blog posts for Gamer Zone, my game development stuff, and my personal life.  On the average, for the last 6 years, I’ve written a blog entry every 6.7 days.  As it stands now, I’m probably going to bring that average down to one every 4 days here in the near future.  I’ve got my personal blog, this story (which is somewhere between blog and normal story telling), the Farm Blog (I am a helper out at a Taillefer Farms), and my business blog (where I make fun of business and society – it’s being used as a traffic builder for my business, but, it’s also lots of fun

Which means I’ve actually got written records of some of the goings on from the Gamer Zone era of my life.  The Xanga blog was the source of some info, but I had plenty of other places I was recording things