About Kaleb

Daily thoughts and writings from the life of Kaleb Nation.

REAL MEN Eat It RAW! [Vlog 10/25/09]

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Real men also sing sheep opera renditions of Bella Notte in the kitchen! It is here that I should thank my mother for teaching me how to cook real food, or else I’d still be stuck eating Lean Cuisine for every dinner 😀

You should subscribe to my random vlogs on YouTube, because then you’ll get them faster before I post them here, and you can yell FIRST! in the comments like all the cool kidz do.

My First Book Signing At Book Expo America 2009 [Video]

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Book Expo America 2009 was a BLAST! It is quite an amazing thing to go into an airplane-hangar-sized conference hall, and be surrounded by others from your own world of writing and publishing. I met countless authors and got a stack of books (including an advance copy of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, a signed copy of the Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, and loads more).

My book signing for The Farfield Curse started at 11:00 AM, and there was already a short line formed. Once the time hit, people began to come from everywhere, and the signing didn’t really stop! There were so many people, we actually ran out of books, so that by the time the signing was over I simply couldn’t sign any more because there were none left to hand out. Hopefully this is a good sign for how it will do in stores 😀

I was interviewed for Borders Media by the one and only Pel from the Twilight Lexicon. It was a bit odd since it was my first film interview, and I had never been in a studio set up like it. There were five cameras, all set up at different angles, and they wired me up with a microphone and had lighting hanging all around. I also had to get film makeup put on — a first for me, and a bit itchy (it had to be explained to me that you actually have to wash it off afterward, ha ha). After BEA we headed over to Books Of Wonder, where I saw Tiger Beat play. Tiger Beat is a rock band entirely made of YA authors, with my editor Daniel Ehrenhaft on lead guitar and Libba Bray doing vocals. YES they were very good.

Even more exciting was the nearly-half-page article about me, TwilightGuy.com and my Twitter/Youtube stuff in Publishers Weekly. As with the opening of pre-orders and the signing of Brandon Dorman, publishers generally tell their authors nothing until after we’ve read about it in the papers: I learned via the article that Bran Hambric will have front-of-store placement at Borders bookstore and a 75,000 copy first printing! There are no extra zeroes in that number. It was easily 4 times what I was expecting!

Here are some photos from the event (special thanks to my friend Becka for taking them!)

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New F.A.Q. Page (Warning: May Contain Penguins)

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Due to popular demand, I have now opened a brand-new F.A.Q. page (click here to visit)! With it, you can:

– Find out what a penguin has to do with Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse

– See how I get rid of writer’s block

– Check out my favorite music for writing

– Find out what camera I use for Youtube

– Find out who this is:

Sewey Wilomas - Pencil

– and loads more!

I’ll be adding to the page as questions come in, and the Bran Hambric section especially after the book is out.

FOR THE COMMENTS: If there are any questions that you think need to be added, please comment on this post.

Help Me Pick My Author Photo

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Whilst wrapping up 11 solid hours of final copyediting today (and I’m still not done!), I received an email from the great and gloriously talented Amy Howe. Amy is a photographer from Dallas, TX, and she did the photo shoot for my author photos last week. After ridiculously strong winds and many laughs (partially thanks to Kallie Matthews of Twilight Series Theories), here are the results:

CLICK TO SEE LARGER. The photos on the right are exactly the same as those on the left, but B&W.

One of these photos will appear in the book as my author photo, and will be used in all promotion for the book. Which photo do you think would work best as an author photo? Tell me in the comments!

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New PO Box Of Awesome

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Due to my sites recently passing 2 million hits (thanks everyone!) and the resulting ad revenue, I have finally saved up enough to justify buying a PO Box. The address can be found here.

There are a few things to note about this new box. It is for mail from my readers only, and any business correspondence from professionals regarding my books should be sent to my agent. Also, since this box resides outside my immediate homeland, it takes me a bit of time to get over there. I got the small size as opposed to the jumbo-maximus drawer size (keeping it realistic here) but if it happens to get stuffed, they will hold it in the back, so no worries if you want to send a pet boulder-in-a-box.

My PO Box Cannot Hold Quite This Amount Of Mail

My PO Box Is Not Quite This Size

Hopefully this will be able to survive long enough until my publishers set up the customary address in their offices for mail (assuming they do). I know that some people have been waiting on this since day one, but I’ve always been hesitant on it, due to stories of other writers receiving hatemail/bat wings/unwanted relatives to their boxes.

I Do Not Want To See This Gathered Outside My PO Box

I Do Not Want To Find This Gathered Outside My PO Box

But mainly, now that I have a box, I can actually ship things out from here without being stalked (the box is actually far enough away from Dallas and has so many numbers you would have to sit in the post office for weeks to catch a glimpse of my figure sweeping through the halls, and those are only on the days I forget my invisibility cloak). So, expect some cool contests coming up here and on my BlogTV (I used to be in radio, and have about 150 CD’s I must give away some time or another, besides all the Twilight stuff). Have fun with it!

Five Things

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Starting Monday, I hit the notebooks, staying at the local Pub That Is Not A Pub from morning until near closing time, editing and revising The Farfield Curse. I managed to walk in and get my usual, favorite spot that is one table away from the corner, so that I don’t appear to be hiding in the shadows, my laptop cable will reach the building’s only plug, The Writer Is Workingand I can still occasionally get a glimpse of the sun (which is very quickly becoming a faraway memory: the sun? What sun? Where? Surely you jest). I’m almost beginning to feel like an old, reclusive witch <—-

Things have thankfully been going smoothly. I am doing things in an order, first working on a bit of cutting in the length department, so it’s easier later when I need to add certain things that were missing. This is where the writing of the book turns into a labor of love: editing those words is really, really hard, but entirely worth it for the end result.

I have a goal of cutting a certain number of pages. To do this, I must take a fine-toothed comb to every line, trying to cut any odd words and condensing paragraphs in order to save one or two lines. One or two lines do add up. So far, just by combing the first 120 pages, I was able to cut 20 out in the first few days. It was all vicious (and slightly wicked) glee search-and-destroying those superfluous words. I spent almost an hour trying to condense two lines out of one chapter, so that I could cut the last page of it, which only had two puny lines dangling there.

The best part is that it’s like trimming back a big ugly tree into an Edward Scissorhands-esque plant sculpture. By the time we’re through, this book will be loads ahead of where we started out.

While taking a much-needed break, I decided to answer a question put to me recently: what will you do if you become a really famous author? It sounds thrilling, odd, scary and wonderful at the same time. So, I decided to make a video in response, which includes Lemony Snicket’s head, a phone call to J.K.Rowling, the Electric Light Orchestra, my bookshelf and more. Also, sunburn.

Hope you like it 😀

Contracts, Advances and a Stack of Paper

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There is something special in a writer’s first advance check. Many of you probably have an idea what that is: when a publisher makes a deal with an author, they lay down what is called an advance. This is money paid in advance to the author, in the hopes that his or her book will earn it back; following publication, the royalties an author earns off book sales slowly repays it. The original concept of an advance was probably so the author of old, being intrinsically penniless, might at least avert starvation long enough to finish the book.

Though I signed the contract a while back, and sent it in, there is such a long process on the publisher’s end that it usually takes a few months to get it back with their signature, as well as the on-signing advance. By getting those back in the mail, all has been signed and sealed, and now all that’s left is to prepare the book for publication! Some photos:

Me, signing the back of my first advance check. The Unwritten Manual of Authorly Proceedings & Conduct dictates (Section 2, Article C) that an author should always use a unique pen to sign their checks and contracts, as here seen in the pen-made-of-awesome my agent gave me:

Signing the first advance

While I was writing, I read dozens of writer blogs, and I always wanted to know what exactly a full manuscript looked like, before all the edits. Never finding one, I told myself I’d put one up for anyone else out there like me (by the time I’m through editing, picture about 2/3 this size):

The Manuscript

There is one line in this book deal that represents 6 years of work, a box of notes, a dozen notebooks, two drawers in a filing cabinet, and countless days and nights spent with characters and ideas. That line is this:

AGREEMENT made by and between Kaleb Nation…hereinafter referred to as “author”

Contract and advance

The signed contract, with the check hiding in the back.

Writer Junk

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You wouldn’t believe all the junk we writers keep around. It’s not that we particularly have more things than most people, it’s just that writers always seem to have more pressing things to do than keep their humble abodes clean, such as getting an overdue manuscript in, scratching out 4,000 words on some draft, rewriting a scene where everyone has green hair, etc. The unimportant things in life such as eating, sleeping, and keeping our living conditions up to par with health and safety inspections just fall to the floor.

Junk

I decided it was high time, whilst awaiting the revisions from my editor, to give my room a good solid cleaning. After all, I’ve lived here for six months and as you can see, there’s still loads of things in boxes. The reason for this is that the moment I got here I immediately hopped on Youtube and haven’t pulled myself from it since. Oh, and there was that book deal thing. And the college thing. But after I went to my Big Junk Drawer and couldn’t find my box of favorite pens, I realized that I was living as messy as Ernie, and something had to be done about it.

Ernie and his Rubber Ducky

Anyhow, I got set on cleaning stuff out. Writers have a thing with pens, paper and notebooks. I have boxes and filing cabinets filled with them. I can understand that, but what I don’t understand is why I need 43 sales receipts from various stores stuffed in my dresser drawers. It’s not like I don’t have stacks of free note pads lying around from college salesmen (college salesmen are those folks that come around campus trying to get you to pay more fees for learning overseas, special classes, new computers, etc, and love handing free stuff out). My junk drawer in particular had grown out of hand:

Egads! Look at all that writer junk

Yes, that is a cassette tape. No, I didn’t throw it away.

Whilst cleaning, I realized that when I come in, I always drop all my change into the drawer and forget about it. Imagine my surprise when I pulled all the junk out to find this at the bottom:

Shekels!

I felt like Ali Baba stumbling upon the treasury of the forty thieves. Then, I found something else stuck between the lid of a box:

!!!

I can’t imagine how it could have gotten lost in the drawer. Maybe I should start cleaning things out a little more often…

The Lasagna Burglar

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I failed to mention the break-in of my apartment a week or so ago. It was probably the oddest crime I’ve seen before, as the only things taken were boxed, frozen lasagnas and pizzas in my freezer. While taking nearly $80 worth of food, The Lasagna Burglar completely overlooked the stereo on the floor, and also decided to leave behind my frozen salmon and Reese’s ice cream. So if anyone spots a starving Italian who abhors music and hangs around college campuses, please let me know.

The Lasagna Burglar

The reason I recall this story is because when I returned from my week in Alaska, I came to my door and found a note that said my locks had been changed. After the break-in, the police came and the locks were changed back then, so this is the second time in a week. This meant that the key to my home did not work. Also, it was Memorial Day, which meant the offices were closed, and I had to sit outside my own house for nearly 2 hours waiting for someone to break me in. Obviously, the burglar had an easier time getting in my home than me. The exhaustion brought on by all the flying had me seriously considering a brief career change (<—).

Coincidentally, I discovered the magic way to make these apartment maintenance crews move. In the third call to them, I simply made my voice sound upset, at which point they began recording the line (you know they are doing it when you hear a low beep every five seconds). I then said, in an exhausted tone, that if I am not in my home in ten minutes, I am calling the campus police to break me into the apartment for which I pay rent every month, at the manager’s expense. The crew was there in five minutes to let me in.

This is the sort of thing that happens to us writers and ends up somewhere in a book. Strangely enough, my book is filled with burglars, though I hadn’t previously run into one before — so I suppose I could just think of this as gaining experience in the field.

But somewhere out there, this fellow is still loose, munching away on my food. Beware, all frozen dinner enthusiasts. No freezer is safe whilst The Lasagna Burglar runs free.

Photos From Alaska

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After surviving the flight up, and discovering the quickest way to wake up an exhausted mind is a very fast takeoff, I spent a week in Alaska– including, as the locals proclaimed, a rare 3 days of wonderful, sunny weather. The mountains were magnificant, especially when the sun reflected off the snow, and I got to see some glaciers and seals and plenty of tourists.

While there, we managed to get to the theater to see Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones– both of which were awesome films. They’re actually more like required viewing, just like everybody just has to see the latest Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings — it’s just one of those requirements set up by Them. Except the upcoming Star Wars Clone Wars, which appears as if it will be abysmal, and will require some intense saving to renew my faith in that franchise after that last set of abominations (shudder).

Anyhow, I also managed to watch Batman Begins, Conspiracy Theory, Man Of The House, Night At The Museum, I Spy, Live Free Or Die Hard, and perhaps more that have slipped my mind. I was there for my friend’s graduation, and it is a tradition to stuff ourselves with movie watching every hour of the possible evening until we drop into an exhausted stupor. This worked wonderfully until the night before I had to fly out, when we didn’t finish Conspiracy Theory until 1:30 AM. Not bad, until you remember I had to be up at 5AM the next day to fly out. That’s where those little airplane pillows come in handy.

One of the primary goals of this trip besides my friend’s graduation was for me to get some much-needed input on elements in the sequel that needed some smoothing out– mainly, the type of house that a certain character lives in and where said house is located. You wouldn’t believe all the things someone’s house tells about them, and this character’s in particular is extremely important.

Last year, when I first started on the sequel in small bits of plotting, I had an original idea for where he lived, but then later tossed it out in favor of a different one. Now months later, after hopping around from idea to idea, I just zipped right back to the way it originally came out and found that it was the right way all along. I work interestingly that way, and on some things in The Farfield Curse spent years debating back and forth only to find that my original idea was better than all the others I had later invented.

Anyhow, I am falling into bed in an exhausted stupor and my posts here and on TwilightGuy.com will be scattered this week. But hopefully those photos will suffice for a bit (I can see some people already packing their bags to go see those wondrous things in the pictures).

While waiting at the airport in Seattle, I also bought two books. One was Tunnels by Gordon and Williams, and the other, coincidentally, was the famous John Green novel Looking For Alaska. It seemed fitting enough as a souvenir.