Sourcerer’s 11: Questions for Author Alex Hurst

Welcome to the September edition of Sourcerer’s 11, our monthly interview series. I’m chatting today with fantasy, science, and speculative fiction author Alex Hurst. You can find her on WordPress at Alex-Hurst.com and on Twitter @AlexHurstTweets.

Meet Alex. She’s cool.

Welcome, Alex!

Thank you! It’s an honor to be here. I’ve followed your blog for a long time, and was pretty chuffed when you asked to interview me.

Yay, us!  (Alex is the one speaking in boldface, just so you all know. I am speaking from here on out in italics. And I am pretty stoked about the fact that the word “chuffed” has just been used on my blog for the first time ever. Let’s do this thing!) 🙂 Q&A time!

Q.1: Earlier this summer, you released D.N.A., a serial, illustrated novella. As you know, we love illustrated fiction, sci-fi, and superheroes around here, so I’m intrigued. Can you tell us a little bit about D.N.A. and how it came about?

Art by Kevin Nichols. We almost went with the cover image, but thought the better of it and decided to do something special. We have more art from Kevin Nichols today 🙂

D.N.A. came about sometime in the latter part of last year. The fiction writing group I belong to had a call out for superhero-themed fiction, and that being a genre I’d always loved as a kid, I simply had to try to get a story in. D.N.A. was accepted into that anthology (Writers’ Anarchy III: Heroes & Villains), but is re-released now with minor alterations and a handful of illustrations.

I started the story with a concept (Alta’s “power,” but then decided to also use the world that rapidly developed as a vehicle for discussing feminism, LGBT, and social issues. Alta is a woman, a person of color, and a lesbian, and the story and characters all amount to the big question I hope to ponder with the series: What does it mean to be human?

Q2. Do you have another fiction project in the works you’d like to give us an early teaser for?

I have a few projects on the back burner right now, mainly because I don’t have the knowledge to move forward. My current novel-in-progress is a non-European epic fantasy told from the perspective of the villain, but it’s on a stall because I need to do some serious world building in regard to military and poverty functions within the regions.

Q.3 Since you live in Kyoto, I can’t pass up the opportunity to ask you about Japan. I’ve always had a fascination with Japanese culture, but I think we often get an overly-simplistic view of other cultures in the U.S. Can you tell us something interesting about life in Japan that the average North American could never learn from the television and travel literature?

Hm, I’ll have to think about that one for a second. There are a lot of things that many people find shocking or surprising about Japanese culture, but it really depends on how much the person has studied or what kind of person they are in general.

That being said, I think that most of the world would have the impression that Japan wastes very little. Just last week, I saw a NYT article that discussed the philosophy of “mottainai” or “Such a waste!” In theory, this is inline with what we learn about Japan. They recycle, they take care of their things, etc., etc. So, it was very surprising to me to find out, when I came here, that there are a lot of micro-wastes in the culture, like individually wrapping every cracker or cookie in a package, or triple shrink-wrapping electronics. Even books, when you go to the book store, are all shrink-wrapped with paper “obi,” or belts, which are all thrown away, generally.

Likewise, many restaurants don’t offer a doggy bag option for food that you can’t finish at the restaurant. Grocery stores won’t stock food that isn’t absolutely perfect, and tons of food simply gets thrown out every year. What it comes down to is that they are very good at not wasting some things, but not others, and I think that’s true of any country in the world.

Q.4 Let’s talk about blogging for a bit. Your Archetypes series is one of my favorite blog series of all time, and it seems to be generally well-received. How did you come up with that idea? And if you don’t mind sharing, how long do those posts take to produce?

There’s an archetype to be found in this image, or a few. 🙂 Image by Kevin Nichols for D.N.A.

Well, thank you very much! I have a lot of fun writing those posts. I can’t actually remember much how it happened. I think I was looking at critical analyses of fairy tales and came across the terms “anima” and “animus,” and thought it’d make a good blog post. Then, because I was there anyway, I decided to have a look at Jung’s twelve archetypes, because I find them way more flexible than traditional stereotypes used to fill a cast.

The posts themselves don’t take long at all to introduce, but I did spend two days before starting the first one building the graphics. I decided ahead of time what sort of look I was going to go for, prebuilt the wheels and made a template for the featured banner. Since the images are done, it’s just a matter of filling in the text once a month. I usually start thinking about who I want to use for each archetype a few days before the post, and find the images on Google…. The actual writing of the posts takes about 4-6 hours, give or take, though the Creator post only took me one hour to churn out. I’m definitely a seat-of-the-pants blogger; shame my fiction writing doesn’t work the same way!

Q.5 Everyone who’s blogged for any length of time has favorite posts, and in my experience, bloggers’ favorite posts are rarely their most popular. In your own opinion, what’s the best post you’ve published so far?

Another hard question. I think my favorite post is another series that hardly got any love, Tackling Poe. I made that series my first year of blogging, though, and didn’t know anything of what I know now. I’m actually going to be repackaging the whole series over the next couple of years, now that I know how to push it properly.

Q.6 Most bloggers make a lot of mistakes in the early going, so those of us who have been at it for awhile usually have a list of things we’d do differently if we could go back to the beginning and start all over again. Do you have any tips to offer bloggers who are just getting started and want to be successful?

If I could do anything again, it would be deciding FIRST if I want a self-hosted domain or WP.com domain, because I switched three months in to self-hosted, and lost so many of the followers I’d struggled to gain in the beginning. 

I would also say participate in a couple, but not too many, weekly memes in order to meet people. However, the most important thing, to me, for any blog, is that your blog have something personal to say. Personal not just in the stories you tell, but in the voice you use to get them out there. Don’t be afraid to offend people, or not be interesting… just be you, and be honest.

Q.7 Since you write both fantasy and sci-fi, I’m curious to know which you prefer as a reader. Which do you read/enjoy more of, and do you have any favorite stories you’d like to share with us?

I’ve gone in and out with the genres I like. I was heavy into fantasy when I was younger, but I ended up finding so many problematic themes (mythical creatures as pets/pedestals, women having no other conflict than to be raped, etc) that I simply stopped reading the genre after 14. I’ve picked up some science fiction novels since then, but I mostly enjoy science fiction in short stories (see: Lightspeed: Women Destroy Science Fiction)

As far as my favorites, those are also variable. I’ve come to really enjoy the idea of Roger Zelazny’s Book of Amber, even if I found the writing ineffective. Right now, my heart is more with speculative fiction, as in Gaiman’s Neverwhere, or with fantasy, Brust’s Jhereg or Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy, though I didn’t like the entirety of the end in the latter!

Q.8 You mention in your WordPress profile that you volunteer as an admin for the online community Fiction Writers Group. Since many of our readers are fiction writers, I think some of them might be interested to know what that community is about. Would you give us a brief run-down?

Sure, I’d be happy to! Fiction Writers Group is a Facebook community of authors from all around the globe. We currently have over 8,500 members, and we produce 2-3 anthologies a year that are only open to those in the group. I admin, I keep up with the website (writersanarchy.com) and do the proofreading and interior design for the anthologies. Definitely check out the website, because there’s way more information there, but my favorite part about the community is how generally helpful everyone is, and the mock publishing process we have for our Writers’ Anarchy series, which boasts no form rejections and the opportunity to resubmit after feedback. I think it really helps people take baby steps to a thicker skin!

One more from Kevin Nichols. If this ain’t good art, I don’t know what good art is.

Q.9 Any advice for writers, artists, and other creative folk who are struggling to break in and find a large audience for their work?

Have an idea for your audience, but don’t write with the intent of reaching a large audience. Write first with the intent to tell a good story, and have that story edited — not just proofread, but truly edited. Indie and self-published does NOT mean do everything yourself! There are a ton of resources out there. 🙂

Once you have your story the best it can be, then think about platform. I think there’s nothing for it but blood, sweat, and tears. Unfortunately the work isn’t over once you type The End. There will be many, many more hours of marketing and reviewer searching ahead of you…. but, don’t give up!

Q10: Give us your best elevator pitch. In four sentences or less, why should we read your stories?

I like to write about the human condition, and what it means to be human in an unhuman world. My works, no matter the genre, are character-driven more than plot -driven, but that doesn’t mean the plots are lacking! I like diversity, not just in skin tones and gender and disability, but also in personality, and the reactions and actions people who aren’t me would take in any given situation. If you’d like a free set of stories to read, check out my works on Out of Print. “Scalawag” and “Passing Over: The Handbook” are, I think, the best stories to read to get an idea as to my range. 

Q.11: If you could own one magical artifact or piece of out-of-this-world technology, large or small, from the simplest magic wand to a Death Star, what would it be?

I think Jim C. Hines answered this best with his Libriomancer series (imagine, pulling any loved item from any book ever written!), but If I had to choose one, and it couldn’t simply be a magical or supernatural skill, I’d want a wand from Harry Potter… a common answer, but there’s so much you can do with it! (As long as the Ministry of Magic isn’t on my trail, too!)

Tuesday Chatter: Promote Thyself!

No writerly post today, so you’re invited to share a link to your blog, or to a blog you like

arrr, Mateys!

(or both, but no more than one of each) on the thread.

Bonus round: I’ll check in here this evening, look at any links that are shared while I’m working today, and think about featuring one or more of them in the post here on Thursday.

Have a great day!

Blogwanking and Social Media Sunday and Long-Term Strategy, OH MY!

I’ve gotten out of sync with the quarterly stat sharing. I discussed April at the end of A to Z, but I never looked at the entire second quarter, and now we’re through July. I’m discussing the past three months today. Y’all can just deal with the fact that this is 2500 words and has very little art. Read it if you want to up your game. Learn something.

Quarterly Stats

Here’s where we are with Sourcerer.

After the April we had here, I knew we had to come back to earth in May. I would like to have remained above 3,400 total views for the month, but I’ll take 104 average views per day for this blog and be happy with it any month of the year if that’s all I can get. It was an improvement over last May, so good — one of the things I look at with the stats is same-month comparisons from year to year.

Then June hit us, and as you can see, it hit us pretty hard. It was the first month of the year we didn’t see an improvement over 2014. There are reasons for that, and the effect carried into July. I’m hoping we’ll at least be able to do better than we did last year in August, and that’s entirely possible since these screenshots were taken on the 6th and we already had almost 500 views for the month.

The downturn in June was entirely predictable. I’d hoped it wouldn’t be quite that bad, and that we could contain it to a single month. But oh, well. We’re bloggers. We deal. It started in May, really. Once we all had A to Z in the bag, many of the regular contributors here spent some of their blogging time in April and May stockpiling content to get Comparative Geeks through the arrival of Geek Baby. And this emphatically is not a complaint. I volunteered for it, actively encouraged it, and Diana and I pitched in some posts of our own. David and Holly are our friends, if you haven’t realized. We’d be pretty sad around here if CompGeeks went silent.

But this group of content-producers we’ve assembled only looks big from the outside. It’s a small group, and nearly everyone has their own blogs. I made a calculated decision to do as much as I could to ensure CompGeeks didn’t have to go dark for any significant period of time, no matter what it cost Sourcerer. That decision was worth it and I’d do it again, but it meant our planning for late summer suffered, and we all had less to offer Sourcerer in June because we gave a lot of our writing-ahead time to CG in April and May.

All this came to a head at the beginning of the worst single month I’ve had, offline-wise, in years. I relocated my family the first weekend of June and the move turned into a never-ending disaster. There was a car accident that had to be dealt with, and a death in my family the weekend of July 4. This meant I didn’t have the means to cover the blog myself, and I wasn’t good asking contributors to just run the blog while I was basically off the internet for several weeks, because they were in the middle of doing the same for another blog, and they had threads to mind at CompGeeks.

This translated into more missed days in late June and early July than we’ve had since we started. It meant I wasn’t around to chatter and work my WordPress reader to keep the blog on peoples’ radars. It also meant photo features had to be suspended. That is costing us two posts a week, every week. Those still aren’t back. I’m working on it, but they aren’t coming back until I can do them consistently, so, might be awhile yet. Irons in the fire and all that.

The thing about the photo features is this: They’re great for likes and getting into the feeds an extra time. They’re better than nothing, and sometimes good for generating conversations. But I am not actually sure they get us any page views. They are always the first thing I cut when times get tough, and the last thing I bring back when times are good. Afternoon photoblogging here means we’re feeling prosperous.

So, June/July was entirely predictable — partially the result of conscious decisions about where to focus contributors’ content. Partly about me not being able to be present here due to unforseen circumstances. It’s not a concern, and we’re still on track to do better than we did in 2014. If we can end the year north of 100 average daily views, I’ll be happy with our progress in 2015.

Far as referrals go. The quarterly summaries are rolling averages and I didn’t pull them at the end of July. But in general, the traffic’s coming from the same places it always has: Search engines, the WordPress reader, Twitter, and Facebook. In that order. Search engines are by far the largest source — the only source that’s gotten us a four-digit number over the last 90 days. Our referrals from the reader and Twitter are way down, because I’ve not had time to spend on other WordPress blogs, nor to tweet properly, for most of the summer.

Our most popular posts in the last 90 days, aside from two or three Batman and Penny Dreadful posts that account for 85 percent of our search traffic, are the Geek and Greet blog party post; Rebecca Bradley’s Disclaimer review, which got Google traffic on the official release day; one of Hannah’s Ms. Marvel posts; one of Rose’s She-Ra posts; and my recent interview with Gretchen Kelly.

Now take a look at the recently-redesigned and better-than-ever Part Time Monster.

I’m proud of the progress Diana is making with this blog. It just keeps getting better. The decrease from April to May is entirely the post-A to Z effect, I think. June was comparable to last June, and I don’t know what happened over there in July, because I was too busy to be paying attention. But I will say. A lot of people seem to have had down months in July. Since she’s on track to have a good August, I’m not concerned about July and I’m looking at it as an outlier.

If you compare our total page views for the year, you’ll see that PTM is about 4K ahead of Sourcerer. You’ll recall that for most of the time we’ve been doing this, our two blogs have run neck-in-neck. I’ve thought many times that PTM was going to surpass us here for well and good, but we’ve generally stayed within 1K of one another. Those days are over now, I think.

The Monster is in a position to consistently generate at least 500 more views than Sourcerer every month from the #WeekendCoffeeShare linkup alone. Monster Mondays, a feature Diana developed from her A to Z theme, have been well-received, too, and those posts tend to be uber-shareable. Throw in the Top Ten Tuesday traffic, and the Monster’s just better for attracting a consistent number of readers week-in and week-out.

None of this is a complaint, and it’s got nothing to do with the quality of the posts we publish here at Sourcerer. Our contributors are a collection of some of the best bloggers WordPress has to offer. We set this whole thing up with the idea that if these blogs were going to break out, the Monster would be the one to break out first. So, our evil schemes are going as planned, and I’m getting a LOT of satisfaction out of having been the chief architect of the whole thing.

The Monster’s top referrers for the quarter are the same as Sourcerer’s. It’s getting a little less search traffic, but more from the reader, a comparable number from Twitter, and more from Facebook. The Monster’s always gotten more from Facebook. Both blogs are seeing a slight uptick in referrals from other blogs — we’re talking about maybe 25 or 30 per quarter each from a handful of blogs. But the handful is growing, and in January, those 25s and 30s were more like 10s and 15s. That’s a good sign — it’s an indicator that we’ve made the right call by prioritizing network depth and engagement over traffic.

Part Time Monster’s four most popular posts are the Princess Bride and Giving Tree reviews, one of Jeremy’s Tough Ladies posts, and the Evil Queen from A to Z. Aside from a post about sexual violence in television, PTM’s most popular posts list is otherwise dominated by Weekend Coffee Share linkups. Search engines and the linkup are driving Diana’s traffic, because all the most popular posts other than the coffee posts were written weeks or months ago.

What It All Means

First, Diana and I aren’t running a race against each other with these blogs. The very idea of that would just get a “WTF?” from us. We don’t compete, ever. Not even in half-serious ways just to draw a crowd.

We cooperate. We’re trying to help one another find readers and make friends, and we’re trying to get better at this. That’s what the sharing of these stats is about. So, here are a few thoughts on what we might learn from this latest phase of the PTM-Sourcerer blogging enterprise.

First, WordPress is more a social media network than a publishing platform. A post on a wordpress.com blog is basically a longer, prettier status update with outgoing links. This is important to note. Because one rule of social media networking that seems to be ironclad is if you aren’t interacting on a network consistently, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, you aren’t on that network.

Aside from the missed days and lack of photo features, the biggest reason Sourcerer suffered in June and July is because I’ve not been liking and commenting on other WordPress blogs for weeks, and I’m the one whose likes/comments point to this blog. In fact, I suspect my lack of engagement has hurt us more than the missed posts. Whatever else I do, long-term planning wise, I’ve got to prioritize engagement on WordPress to get the activity level back up here.

Second, Part Time Monster’s gearing up to be more successful than Sourcerer in the short term because Diana has advantages with her blog we don’t have here. We have advantages, too, but they’re different — the entire styles of these blogs and the way they’re run are different. They’re designed to compliment one another, assuredly and intentionally. But they are not cast from the same mold.

I don’t consider Part Time Monster to be a niche blog, but it has a more specific content focus than Sourcerer. PTM is about “books, girls, and monsters.” Our motto around here is “all pop culture, all the time,” with a little social media thrown in and as much smartassery as we think our readers will put up with. That’s a much broader focus, which means it’s more difficult to know what to expect from Sourcerer. This blog will surprise you on occasion, but aside from a Wednesday comics post and occasional Social Media Sundays, you just never know what you’re gonna get here — especially during periods where most of our contributors are wrapping up runs and either planning the next one or working on their own projects.

Another advantage the Monster has is the regular content tends to be more consistent. Because Sourcerer runs on contributions, and bloggers have to be able to come and go as they please, we tend to do short-ish runs and one-off posts: Movie reviews, tv series blogthroughs, things like that. Those are fun to write and do well when we have them, but they don’t provide much long-term stability or focus.

Then there’s the fact that Part Time Monster is set up as a personal blog that accepts contributions. Sourcerer, whatever it is, isn’t a personal blog. It’s set up for one purpose, and one purpose only: to publish contributed content as a way of encouraging a community to form around our blogs and help bloggers form lasting relationships. I provide as much as I can, but fundamentally, Sourcerer will live or die based on my ability to maintain a contributor base and keep other bloggers interested in publishing here. Not on my ability to produce five or six posts per week myself. If I ever reach the point that maintaining active contributors is untenable, I’ll shut it down, give all my content to PTM, CompGeeks, and a handful of friends, and point my WordPress account to the Monster to give Diana the benefit of my WordPress engagement.

Sourcerer’s advantage in all this is that we have more latitude to experiment here, the potential to attract a larger number of contributors, and the ability to generate impressive traffic spikes on occasion. But it sets us up for boom/bust cycles with content (and therefore with readers) until we attract a a few more bloggers to join the crew. There just aren’t quite enough of us here yet.

I’m nowhere near ready to call it a day at this point. We’re doing well. We’ll get through the year and have another awesome spring if things keep going the way they are. So no worries. Slow and steady wins the race.

What’s Next For Sourcerer?

I’ve already written one post that specifically outlines where I’d like to take this blog over the next year, and given the length of this one already, I’m not going to rehash it all here. But basically, we need a few regular things — things people can count on seeing at specific times of the week or month, and we need to do that in a way that allows room for contributors to join in when they feel like it.

I think moving the #WeekendCoffeeShare posts here will help. I’m also liking the Sci-Fi Saturdays. Those started as Star Wars Saturdays, but I think I like “Sci-Fi” better, because it allows us to write about more than one franchise on Saturdays. Other than that, I want to keep the interviews going and eventually do more than one a month, and I want to do more collabroative posting like Hannah’s and Melissa’s Age of Ultron review.

Aside from those things, I’ve got to bring the photos back, engage more with other bloggers on their blogs, and get back to Twitter. I’ve somewhat prioritized Facebook since last fall, and that’s paid off, but it’s come at the cost of WordPress and Twitter growth. I’ve done what I can on Facebook by spending large amounts of time there. I’m friends with enough bloggers now to be happy where I am, and I’m content with slow-and-steady progress driven by genuine interaction.

So, once we move into the fall, you’ll see less of me over there, but more of me in the blogosphere and on Twitter. Once I get back where I need to be with those two networks, my next big project — probably my big social media project for 2016, has to be cracking either Reddit or StumbleUpon. We’ve proven we can do engagement, and what we need at this point is big traffic. We’re getting all we can get by working for views in ones and twos. We need to figure out how to attract readers by the hundred through a single link, and one of those two networks is likely the shortest route to that.

This is quite enough for today. I hope at least a few of you find this helpful.

Weekend Coffee Share: In Which I Transfer My Flag (Again)

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you it’s odd to be publishing a #WeekendCoffeeShare post here after working so hard to keep the personal-ish stuff off my pop culture blog for most of a year. I think I’ve only posted one truly personal post here since January, and I am not sure how these are going to play.

I’d tell you the Sci-Fi/Star Wars Saturdays aren’t going away — that’s a feature I’m interested in doing consistently, but we aren’t quite there yet. Most weeks, my coffee posts will run on Sundays here, but given that I’m making such big changes with my blogging, I thought it wise to publish this one today and get it into the linkup early.

And I’d tell you it’s good to be back to Sourcerer. You may have noticed that I’ve upped the frequency of my personally-written content here. That’s partly because we have fewer contributors during this part of the year than we do in the spring and early summer. It’s partly because this blog works better when I’m posting and chattering on the threads here, even though most of our contributors draw more readers than I do. You’ll see what i mean by that when I share my stats from the last few months here tomorrow.

I think of Sourcerer as “the little blog that could.” It should not have worked as well as it has. It started out as a blog where I mostly shared music videos and published incomprehensible posts about my plans and my struggle to understand social media. I’ve come within a hair of pulling the plug and moving on several times. But every time I’ve reached that point, people have stepped up and given me the support I needed to continue.

In January of last year, several offline friends, and people I met through offline friends, helped me put together a short run of everyday blogging and that allowed us to reach the point where I, along with Diana, Jeremy, Will, and a few others, were able to get through the spring and summer while Diana and I did the A to Z Challenge at two other blogs.

David came in at some point to blog music — I don’t remember when. But when we reached the point that Jeremy was almost done with Batman and I was desperate for quality comics posts, David stepped up and jumped right into Marvel. Once that Batman run hit the six-month mark, it became clear that this blog can’t survive long without mid-week comics.

Luther came in for The Walking Dead at just the right moment. At the point he did, I was beginning to feel like maintaining this blog along with everything else I was doing was requiring me to ask too much of David and Diana. Luther’s participation — though we never talked about this — convinced me we were far enough along to go out for contributors. So I did.

Now, on any given week, you might see posts from any of the bloggers I’ve mentioned already. You also might see Melissa, Hannah, Rose, or Natacha publishing here. We’ve established easy channels of communication so I don’t have to put planning stuff into public posts and ask everyone to read them just to see who’s interested. Nor contact a dozen people privately when I need to talk about the blog. We’ve developed a way of doing collaborative posts that read like three-minute podcasts and we’ve set up an interview feature that has real potential, based on its popularity so far.

This isn’t the whole crew — it’s just the ones I can easily cram into a 30-minute coffee post off the top of my head. Despite the modesty of our success here, this blog is the most promising thing I’ve ever done on the Internet. It’s more important than my personal blog.

I honestly don’t know why most of these other bloggers are so willing to publish here. It’s a genuine puzzle to me. But the level of support and trust I’ve received from other content producers over the last two years is not something I’ve seen many small-time bloggers start out from nothing and achieve. It’s not something I take lightly, and I’m grateful for it every single day.

So I’m analyzing the stats from the summer and putting most of my own content here until I’m able to return completely to form. I’m finishing my Tolkien series at Part Time Monster as soon as I can manage that. I’m carving out some social media time to spend liking and commenting on blogs every single week from here on out. When October rolls around, I’m looking to add two to four new bloggers to the crew for 2016 and do what we’ve done here all over again next year.

You’ll see these coffee posts here on either Saturdays or Sundays from here on out. Pop culture content always takes priority on Saturday when we have it, so often, this will be a Sunday thing. Sometimes they will be straight-up personal coffee posts; sometimes they’ll read like “From the Instigator-in-Chief” posts; sometimes I’ll roll the Social Media Sundays into them. It depends on how I’m feeling and what I have to talk about on any given week.

Don’t forget to add your coffee share post to the linkup at Part Time Monster, and to share it with #WeekendCoffeeShare on Twitter.

Done.