Category Archives: Blog News

Blog News

The State of the Websites

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Fyi, as of right now www.spiritualtramp.com is down. I’ll be re-registering the domain in a day or two (probably). I haven’t blogged regularly there in months if not years. Part of me wants to keep it up for posterity. There were some good conversations there. Part of me wants to do a re-direct to here. Keeping it live is semi-important since I do get email there. Incidentally I will never not keep the scottroche.com domain updated since it’s my author portal and you should email me at scott at that domain.

Having said that I may need to nuke that site from orbit since there’s STILL a link to malware embedded somewhere in the database, causing it to be blocked by some filters. Thus my presence on this hear wordpress hosted blog. WordPress has always been a phenomenal pain in my ass, so I don’t know what I’ll be doing once I do nuke that site.

So, friends of mine, I am open to your suggestions as to what to do with these sites of mine. Please leave your thoughts in the comments and if you’re a web developer and want to help me make an uber-snazzy solution drop me a line, just not at the spiritualtramp address.

Blog News, fiction, pimpage

Monte and Molly Kickstarter Dreams

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The text for my children’s book project with Ed Delaney is more or less finalized. Everyone that’s read it so far uniformly loves the idea and thinks that I’ve gotten the voice and tone right. I may tweak it a bit (already have from what I sent out), but the hard part for me is done. Now it’s up to Ed to do the drawing and for us to work on layout.

Here’s what I hope to put out:

12 page softcover book (8 x 10)
E-pub/PDF/Mobi
App for iPhone/Android that includes an audio component

In order to get there I’ll need to make sure that Ed gets paid for his hard work. I’ll need to pay the developer for the app. I’ll be paying someone to do the audio for the app. Let’s just ball park and say that I’d need to raise $1500 to make that happen. That’s not out of bounds.

Here’s what I’m thinking about for levels of donation and rewards.

$1 – A heartfelt thanks and a high quality wall paper of the crew!

$5 – Your name in the backer’s section of the book, wallpaper, and an adventurer’s club button

$15 – Your name in the backer’s section, an autographed e-book, and a button.

$25 – An autographed print copy, e-book copy, and all previous rewards.

$50 – The app plus all previous levels.

$100 – Limited edition tee-shirt plus all previous award levels.

$250 – Limited edition 8.5 x 11 print of Monte, Molly, and Cyril plus all previous levels.

Blog News

Legendary Stories – Monetization

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So I’ve had a few thoughts about how I want to get these stories out there and wanted to bounce them off of you, my loyal readers, to see what you thought.

Obviously, I’ll be selling them individually. Given their length I’m thinking $1.49 for each one on Amazon/Smashwords. I wanted to try something new, in addition to that.

$10 – You get all twelve stories, plus the prequel stories, personalized, in e-book format as they come out (possibly even a day or two early). This would save you $10.85 off of the cover price and hey PERSONALIZATION!

$15 – This would get you the above, plus e-book version of the stories I’m writing for the Action Pack. This is a joint project between Mike Plested, JR Murdock, and myself. Mike’s story will be Boy Scouts of the Apocalypse. JR’s will be a western/steampunk mashup. I’ll be writing a story that takes place in the Legend universe. I’m going to give the back story for one of the secondary characters. He’s basically Indiana Jones + Fox Mulder + Rube Goldberg. It’ll detail what REALLY happened at area 51 and events from it will enhance the modern stories I’m telling in the Legend universe. There should be twelve stories in there that I would sell for $.99 individually (and I’m not planning on doing that, only way to get those will be to buy the Action Pack or get this deal) so you’d get 24 stories for $15 that would ordinarily cost you $29.76.

$20 – Same as the $10 level, but you’d also get the further edited and SIGNED paperback version of the first season of Children of Legend when it comes out next year (may have to charge you for S&H when I get that out to you if you’re international). I’m thinking the paperback will run about $20 since it will be around 120-140K words.

$30 – Same as the $15 plus a SIGNED paperback version of my Action Pack short stories done up in a novelized fashion.

Now, this would be a sort of subsciption/pre-order deal. I’m not sure when I’d make this live per se. You might want to see the first few stories and I respect that. I’m also open to suggestions. If you think you’d like to do this leave me a comment with what level you’re interested in. I won’t hold anyone to this informal poll, but it will let me gauge interest. This worked well for Ginnie Dare and let me pay for the cover. I’d also like to get this professionally edited so this would help pay for that as well.

I may do this via Kickstarter or Indiegogo when the time comes so any thoughts on additional swag/levels of support are appreciated.

Blog News, fiction, writing

2012 Projects

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Holy story teller Batman! I’ve got a lot going on this year and will be needing to turn my output up to 12.

Children of Legend – I’ve blogged about this before, but this will be a gritty YA super hero series. I’ll be releasing a story a month from the points of view of four radically different protagonists. I’ll also be making these available as podcasts. Starting next month the prequel short stories will be available. After that I’ll begin putting out the audio versions of the longer ones. They’ll be available in e=pub before they come out in audio.

Action Pack – This is a joint project between Mike Plested, JR Murdock, and myself. Mike’s story will be Boy Scouts of the Apocalypse. JR’s will be a western/steampunk mashup. I’ll be writing a story that takes place in the Legend universe. I’m going to give the back story for one of the secondary characters. He’s basically Indiana Jones + Fox Mulder + Rube Goldberg. It’ll detail what REALLY happened at area 51 and events from it will enhance the modern stories I’m telling in the Legend universe.

The Aethellian Age – This is the universe that Zach Ricks and I are doing together. We’re working on a website. We’ve put together some timeline stuff that’s incredibly exciting. We’ve got ideas for more novellas and a novel. There will be political intrigue, magic, adventure, and all kinds of AWESOME.

Monte and Molly – This has been unofficially back burnered. I plan on getting the text written up in January and sending it out to beta readers. I know that Ed will be providing his awesome art and we’ll be doing a Kickstarter campaign.

Vampire Novel – At some point during all of this I’m going to finish my 2011 NaNoWriMo project. I got 40K words in and life interfered. I love the world and the characters so I will finish this. Let’s say draft one by my birthday and finished novel by end of year.

WHEW.

Blog News

Black Friday Movember Party!

We’re closing in on the end of Movember, an effort to raise money for men’s cancer research. I’m not quite where I’d like to be in my efforts so I wanted to have a virtual event to remind you kind people about what I’m trying to do.

How can you help? Well you can go straight to my Movember page. You can also buy books from here and I will split the proceeds halfsies with Chooch Schubert (his half going to breast cancer research).

You don’t have to do this Friday (or at all) but the deadline is November 31st. Thanks to you who have already kindly donated and the economy being what it is I understand if you can’t contribute at all. One thing you can do that won’t cost you a cent is to let people know about this event and my efforts.

Thanks!