Closing on the Cover Rag

The last couple of days has been a bit of a drag.  Thursday was Project Runway night, and I almost never get anything done when that show’s on.  Only a few more episodes to go, however, so I can soon get back to having a productive Thursday night.  As for last night . . . I stopped off after work to give blood.  This is something I used to do all the time, but after being laid off, then going to The Undisclosed Location (which many of you have figured out was Indianapolis, Indiana) for a year, it was hard to find a place where I could get a needle stuck in my arm.

I did it yesterday, and while there were a few interesting things that happened, the upshot was by eight-thirty last night I was nodding out.  I think it was a combination of being up about four AM, then a long drive to and from work, that helped put me down.  So today, I have busy writing day–at least I’ll try to stay busy writing.  Who knows what will really happen.

So while I sit here with my coffee, my leg and head bouncing up and down while I listen to the Duke Suite–pretty much the same way Tony Banks did when he played it–I’m getting this blog out of the way.  Then on to some other work, editing Replacements, then maybe start an article . . .

But first, something to show.

As many know, I’m going to self publish Her Demonic Majesty this year, maybe by the end of May, maybe the end of June, but it’s getting done.  One of the requirements is that I have a book cover, and since I am the suckest when it comes to doing covers, I asked someone to do it for me.  I’m even paying them in cash, which is just as good as money–  (That’s a Yogi-ism, if you didn’t know.)

That said, they’ve shown me what they’ve developed, which were five panels to start.  One I discounted right away, because it didn’t speak to me.  Of the remaining four, I like two very strongly, then worked my way to the final one–

Which is here on the right.

I had one of my writing friends tell me that this will be another “eye” cover, since my story Kuntilanak used an eye as well.  What I told them was since I’ll likely go with this cover for Demonic Majesty, that will give me the opportunity to change the cover for my Kunti story and go with my original idea, which is to show a rural Bali scene in a mysterious fashion.

I may do something with the font still; I like it, bu I wonder if I should have it a little bolder?  Probably not.  Don’t over-edit, otherwise I’m spending all my time second guessing myself, and I don’t do that with my writing now, so don’t do it with my cover selections.

So, better or worse, this is going to be the cover, though by the time it hits the Might Amazon servers, Ms. Nom de Plume will be gone, and . . . there is an issue with the author’s name.  I’ve had at least one person tell me to write under a pseudonym, because then I can write different genres and not worry about alienating fans.

But my fans–the few I have–know I’m all over the place, genre-wise, so I don’t mind if people discover I’ve published a story pertaining to mild BDSM, and a horror story–and soon, a strange sort of science fiction/fantasy novel.  About the only time I’ll dive into the pseudonym is when I start writing Centaur Porn with Ms. Penelope Poffer, because I figure I’ll need it then.

It’s coming together, as you can see.  A few more weeks, a couple of months at best, and I’ll have this sucker out for sale.  Then get Replacements done, get it covered, and it’s done.  That’s two of four.  After that–

Who knows?  You’ll know as soon as I, you can bet on that.

 

Mercurial Rearrangements

In a much better place this morning, since the drive in wasn’t nearly as insane as it was yesterday, and I’ve had some munchies that have put me in a happy place.  It shouldn’t have been that way; I should have little depression going, because I had some rather depressing dreams that culminated with me going to place where I believed I’d interviewed once before, and trying to get another interview, and having to deal with some smarmy punk giving me the glad-hand all the way out of the building without telling me if they wanted to interview me or not.

After doing the Walk of Shame through what appeared to be a bombed-out T.J. Max, I took a left turn into another building, and then–darkness.  Lots of darkness.  As I walked onward, it became darker, and then everything was pitched dark.  That’s when I woke up because it almost felt as if I were pushed out of the dream.  Not a good feeling, mind you, and I laid there for a while trying to gather my wits about me before heading into the day.

Last night’s writing was, to say the least, interesting.  I finished the second of the two new chapters for Replacements, then headed in to edit the first of the new chapters.  I finished the edit, looked at the chapter that came before the new Chapter Six–and realized I’d screwed up.  The chapter that was before the new Chapter Six was suppose to come after the new Chapter Seven.

Oi.

However, Scrivener is good for fixing screw ups.  What I did was move the note card that is the chapter from the front to the back of the new chapters, then relabeled them, changed the titles inside the chapters, and there you have it:  screw up all taken care of.  Now all I have to do is rewrite part of the new old Chapter Seven, because some of the things I said in that chapter I’d set up in the old new Chapter Five, and I want the follow up chapter to deal with what comes after, well, what comes after the end of this second new chapter I wrote.

I already have in my head how I want to fix that chapter, which I’ll likely do tonight after Project Runway, ’cause first of all, I’m about the fashion.  At this rate I’ll likely finish up the Replacements this weekend, then it’s a combo of finishing up some descriptions for Windows 8 themes, and maybe start an article before getting into the finial edit of Her Demonic Majesty–for which I have seen a set of possible covers.  That means I also have to get back to the designer and tell her what I think . . .

No, I’m not feeling down today.  There’s a lot going on, and it’s making me feel that I have some hope of keeping ahead of all this.  If I can get my cover finalized in the next couple of weeks, no reason why I can have my novel ready for publication by the first of May.

Yeah, a great way to celebrate the second anniversary of this blog, don’t you think?

The Fictional Facts

Back in the 1960′s, when I was growing up and my best friend was the local library, I spent a lot of time reading.  Since I began reading at a fairly early age, a lot of the fare I enjoyed was adult–and most of these books were science fiction.

I admit I’m a Child of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.  At the time I began reading the era was dying out, but some of those writers were still around, and some would remain with me for decades to come, though they would have written their last stories, for the most part, by the 1980′s and 90′s.  It was a glorious era, filed with inhabited planets in the far corners of the galaxy, robots insane and otherwise, huge fleets of spaceships preparing to do battle . . .

Sure, it was all wild as hell, with writers coming up with faster than light drives, and hand weapons that could turn a man into vapor, shields of energy, dark aliens waiting to eat us alive:  if they could dream it, they would write it.  The majority of the writers had little in the way of a scientific background,  but there were authors who knew their math and engineering, and would often bring that knowledge into play when writing a story.

One of the most famous example of this was Edward E. Smith, aka “Doc” Smith of Lensman and Skylark fame.  Smith had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and worked in the food industry before becoming a writer.  Robert Heinlein wrote about how he and his wife once spent three days calculating a orbit change so they could get one one line in a story right.  (When later asked by someone why he simply didn’t use a computer, his reply was, “My dear boy, it was 1948.”)  Issac Asimov had a BS and MA in chemistry, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry.  They weren’t the only ones, but what they knew tended to show up in their work.

With science fiction, it’s important to create your world and set your rules.  E. E. Smith knew that a lot of the stuff he wrote was too incredible to ever be real, but he wanted to create incredible stories, and didn’t care that the science was pure Handwavium.  (Look up the trope “Lensman Arms Race” and you’ll see some of the stuff the Doc pulled out.)

Back in the Golden Age, writers could do just about anything and get away with it.  These days, we know more about the universe around us; we know there are certain kinds of space drives that just won’t work as we’d like (I’m looking at you, Bussard Ramjet); we know how genetics works; we understand evolution better; we have a better knowledge of engineering.  There are some things that we know just won’t work the way we want them to work if we write about them in a story.

Does this take away from a story?  Or does it even prevent us from writing them in the first place?  Has technology and a greater interest in science mean there are stories we can no longer write?

This was true even one hundred years ago.  Certain things that had been accepted as fact in the early 1800′s was known to be bullshit by the 1920′s.  The trick here is not to throw a lot of stuff into your story that is just going to be crap science; the trick is to keep things tight with science that’s a good as it gets when we’re dealing with real things, and for the stuff you gotta handwave, keep the rules constant.  The Mote in God’s Eye was a good example of this:  the world was extremely real, with only a couple of things that were pure fantasy.  But, the rules for those items were kept consistent, and there was no instances where something that couldn’t have happened did.

In my own stories I have things that are pretty much handwavium, that likely can’t ever happen in real life.  But, for those things I keep the rules consistent.  I try not to pull things out of my butt that will violate my universe to the point where it implodes, and, at the same time, concentrate on the characters who are the real stars.

After all, if I wanna make my television the star of my story, I’ll rewrite Videodrome.

Spring Into Power

Yes, it is 1 April, and there will be no jokes, no pranks, no misdirection.  I’m not going to tell you I found a contract in my inbox this morning, offering a six-figure advance for one of my novels, ’cause it’s just too damn good not to publish . . . no, there’s none of that.  If anything, I stay away from those kind of pranks, ’cause what do they get you?  Nothing.

Does Cassie sound grumpy?  Probably a bit.  While Friday was something of a pain in the ass, the rest of the weekend was, for the most part, nice.  Weather was great, there were some interesting things to do, The Doctor was new, and I did a lot of writing and reading.  I’m doing a beta read on a story, and the writing . . . lots of editing, a few things I’m doing on the side for a friend, and I set up a Scrivener file for articles I develop.

Oh, and there was editing.  Busy, busy, was I not?

I went through at least three chapters in Replacements over the weekend, getting them clean, getting them better.  I found few errors, but in one chapter I wasn’t happy with the way things sounded.  The structure was clumsy, the words didn’t sound like they should come from my character’s thoughts; it’s not how she’d speak.  So a bit of rewriting was necessary, because if I want the story to sound right, then I gotta make it right.  It’s not like the character is gonna jump out of the computer and redo her own imaginary dialog, is she?

Last night saw the start of a new chapter, however.  In the original story, I went from events in Chapter Five to establishing that things were pretty much hunky dory in Chapter Six, even though it was established that one of the characters was a bit freaked out by her actions in Chapter Five.  After I finished the story I looked at it and said, “Naw, that doesn’t seem right,” and began wondering if there should be something else, something that shows the development of the characters from the actions that occurred at the end of Chapter Five, and how they seemed to have fallen into their roles at the start of Chapter Six.

I’d created a new Chapter Six, and began writing that last night.  One thousand twenty-six words later I finished, established that one of my character had did her research and decided that she’d fallen into something that the other character wanted, and now had–and she was stuck with the aftermath.  Given that, she figured out that if she needed to establish some kind of equilibrium in this relationship, she’d need to set her own ground rules, and thus . . .

I started wondering, after I’d finished my writing for the evening, if I needed to separate the scenes in the new Chapter Six, and create a new Chapter Seven.  Because, the way I lay things out, it makes sense.  And with Scrivener, all things are possible.

Why, it’s as simple as pinning a card to a corkboard and writing, “Chapter Seven” upon it.

Looks like I have some extra work tonight.

Building Towards Excitation

Yesterday was busy; today is likely to be a bit of a madhouse.  Yesterday was taxes and medication, along with a little work that I didn’t want to do, but more or less was pushed into doing; today is going to be getting my car tested and shopping with other people.  The only thing that makes today a little bearable is that Doctor Who starts tonight, giving me something else to watch for the next seven weeks.

Oh, there’ll be writing as well.  What else?

I’ve the clock on me this morning, because I’d like to finished this post in another twenty-eight minutes so I can put my vehicle through some emissions testing.  So much fun, because you feel as if you have less and less of you own time due to these other obligations.  You have so many things throughout the day you wonder if you’ll get to the things you want, to be able to engage in the things that are important to you.

I do my best.

I’ve finished the edit on Chapter Three of Replacements, and things are going smoothly.  Last night was a real good edit, because I was seeing things that shouldn’t have been there, and a couple of clumsy passages that made me cringe a little on the inside.  How the hell did I write that and think it was good?  Well, it was a first draft of things that were written for another site, and at best I gave those chapters a good looking over before posting them online.

Its wasn’t a disaster, however.  I’t wasn’t as if I was embarrassed by what I’d written:  it’s that these days I know how to look at something and know it doesn’t look right.  When other writers say, “Get good at your editing skills,” they know of what they speak, because there is so much more going on in these phases than I’d ever imaged before getting serious about my writing.  There were many times in the past when I believed my first drafts were so good that I didn’t need no stinkin’ editing–how wrong is that?    If anything, I can look at something I wrote five, six, ten years ago, and know it’s a bit defective, and that it needs a good rub down.  (You know, a polish?  What were you thinking?  Naughty people.)

Tonight I’ll polish up Chapter Four, then tomorrow I’ll get into writing a new chapter?  What’s that, you say?  New chapter?  Yep.  Figured the story needed it, and I have an interesting idea that I want to put in that shows the developing relationship between my two main characters.  Shouldn’t be more than a couple of thousand words, then I can let it sit, I can do something else for a while, then go back and give it a major edit.

Mean and clean:  that’s how I like my chapters.

At this rate I’ll finish the edit next weekend.  Do I edit something else?  You know, there are a couple of stories that need a good edit, and I should get into them if I’m serious about getting stuff published this year.

Only if it’s ready to go is it ready to go.

Seven thirty to seven fifty-two:

Looks like I can check off blogging for the day.

Beyond the Farthest Handwavium

Thursday night is Relaxation Night due to a combination of things happening early in the evening, then Project Runway coming on and remaining on my television until nine-thirty PM.  There are only two or three more episodes of that show remaining, so I’ll soon be back to working on Thursday nights–and by working, I mean writing.

The way things work our, I’m looking at a lot of editing and formatting throughout April, with an occasional article here and there posted just to keep my hand in.  I’ve looked at my Idea File (I do have one), and I’ve not seen too much that is blowing a draft up my skirt, at least not yet.  Yes, they are my ideas, but what seemed like a good idea one moment doesn’t always translate into, “I gotta write this now!”  As I’ve found, you gotta let an idea stew a bit before you jump into it, otherwise it’s going to die stillborn.

But what do I want to write next?  I’ve been into the horror and the fantasy the last two novels, so I need something different.  But what?  Science Fiction?  Erotica?  Maybe Science Fiction Erotica, where In Space, No One Can Hear You Orgasm Unless You’re Really Loud.

I have been thinking of trying to write some science fiction that’s more in line with what’s considered “hard”, which means there’s no energy weapons that vaporize people, no gravity fields that make your space ship layout look more like the Queen Marry 2 than any tall skyscraper you can bring to mind, no super-duper space drive that will get you from Point A to Point B in a matter of hours.

There’s a term for that in the community:  Handwavium.  We’re talking a complete disregard for any of the laws of physics, where we can travel faster than the speed of light, or we can use an electromagnetic field to deflect light, or we don’t worry about heat when we’re using weapons that can take out stars.  Most of the science fiction from the Golden Age was like this, mostly because there were a lot of things we simply didn’t know at the time, but these days most writers have a better understanding of the universe, and they know what can and can’t be done . . .

Yeah, but we still like stories about getting from one star to another, and doing it in a way that doesn’t make us wait forever for our characters to make the trip.  Star Trek wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if it took an entire season of fifteen shows (actually twenty-two back in the day, but that was back in the day) to travel from Earth to Vulcan, which in terms of the scale of the galaxy is like me walking to the end of the driveway to get the mail.  The Dominion War becomes a lot less worrisome if it takes the Jem’Hadar six months to travel from the Bajor Wormhole to DS9–and Starfleet won’t show up for eight months after that.

There is something intriguing about staging a story in a world where most of what happens in a world is more or less real.  Sure, you can stretch science and engineering a bit to make the world a little move interesting:  you see that happen now and then where the space habitats are little too nice, the ships a little too fast, the terraforming a little too quick.  And yet, the reality is just enough that it feels like a world that isn’t too out there, that’s it’s just real enough to be a place that could happen.

Now all I have to do is come up with that world–

And write it out.

Fast Lane to the Hinterland

There nothing like driving into Chicago at six-thirty in the morning with a cloudless sky above you, a lot of tall building before you, traffic filled with crazy people around you, and an old Japanese anime soundtrack blasting from your stereo.  It puts you in a certain frame of mine–unfortunately, for me, it was sort of the, “Why the hell am I doing this shit?” frame, and please don’t tell me it’s to pay the bills.

Still, there was a certain feeling while I was on the road.  I do love driving, if for no other reason that I can be alone with my thoughts, even if I’m accompanied by loud music.  When I used to make the weekly trek from and to The Undisclosed Location, I had two and a half hours to drive at 80 MPH, yell at drivers that wouldn’t get out of my way, and think out plot lines, scenes, and character development.

I thought a little about what I’m working on right now, which is editing and formatting Replacements so I can publish the work.  I’m getting this out of the way so when my covers arrive–that’s right, I was told I’m getting three covers for the low price of $200, and I can keep them or do some swapping, maybe using one of Smashwords and another on Amazon–I can then see about getting a cover for Replacements while I do a final edit and format on Her Demonic Majesty so I can get it online where it can take its place next to werewolf porn and a series about an eighteen year-old virgin who gets laid in about thirty stories–which means she must have regenerative abilities.

This morning I spoke with a friend about a story I’d submitted to a publishing house last May, and have heard nothing in return after they requested, and received, the full manuscript.  I’d mentioned that I’d sent two follow ups to the publishing house requesting an update on my novel, with none forthcoming from their end.  My friend’s comment was short and to the point:  ”Fuck ‘em, publish it yourself.”  This has pretty much been my attitude as well, since I’m getting antsy to find out what’s going on with that particular story.  If you want it, fine:  if you don’t want it, fine as well.  Just let me know, ‘kay?

This seems to be a common occurrence these days, where people send things out and sometimes never hear a thing back.  Or maybe it’s jut me:  maybe I’m stuck on this one with a lost in the aether and constantly waiting for it to return from the hinterlands.  Though I’m coming up on a year with it being out, so it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what I’m going to do with the story–

I’ll fix it up and I’ll publish it.

There’s no guaranty I’ll make any sales if I do this, but then there was no guaranty I’d make any sales by selling it, either.  Just as once I pay a couple of hundred scoots for a book cover there’s no guaranty I’ll get any sales from Her Demonic Majesty.  I do know this, however:

It will be out–and, with the right cover, it will be noticed.

The question then becomes:  by whom?

Roll Away the Dragon’s Gold

After a long day, after a blog post and a nearly three thousand word article with pictures, I started on the last chapter of Suggestive Amusements.  Yes, we’re on that final stretch of a few thousand words that will wrap up the story and then pack up the manuscript–or, in my case, save it off to both my external hard drives–and move onto the next project, which is getting Her Demonic Majesty ready for epublishing.

I have my plan laid out, I really do.

So laid out, in fact, that I just updated my idea file with something that came to me this morning, another early morning, where I had a song in my head that refused to retreat to a neutral corner, and the idea that came to me for a story that I’ve played with for some time, but could never really get the hook in to keep me interested.  That happens some times; you get a feeling for something, but it never really comes to fruition, it only sort of lingers there and feels like it doesn’t want to play.

Today I will attempt to finish the current work in progress.  It’s time.  It’s the 24^th of March, and I’ve been on this for almost ninety days–okay, if I finish today, it’s eighty-five, close enough.  For seventy thousand words, and change, it’s a long time to be writing, and I need to do other things.  Makes me wonder what I’m going to do after getting Demonic Majesty and Replacements up to the great ebook market–

I know one thing I won’t do . . .

Today, maybe an hour ago, I saw a comment in one of my writer’s groups.  The commented indicated that they were thinking of taking a setting and characters from another writer’s published story and writing a novel based upon those with the intention of commercial gain, and they wanted to know how people felt about that.  Gotta hand it to him, at least he came right out and said he was stealing–

I can think of two instances where I’ve tried my hand at fan fiction.  Once, a long time back when I was in a writer’s group, I developed a story that revolved around a role playing game setting.  While I used the game world, the characters were my own.  I did the same thing a few years ago with some Star Trek fanfic I did that was, once again, based around a game I was in at the time.  (A very bad game, but that’s a story for another time.)

I enjoyed working on both stories–up to a point, that is.  The point came when I realized that I had great characters, but I was using them in a world that wasn’t mine, and it didn’t feel right.  While I still feel connected to the characters, I feel as if I can’t reenter those stories simply because of where they take place.

It feels like I got lazy and decided to take the easy way out.

I’ve always said that if my stories ever got to the point where other thought my characters were worth stealing for their own stories, I’d probably want to shut down any and all fan fics as quickly as possible.  Most writers work hard to bring believable worlds and place believable characters into those worlds, and it feels like you’re getting bent over when you find that someone has taken one or the other, or both, and turned them into their own personal amusement.

I could also sorta look at it from the point of view offered by a writer friend this morning when I mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey: ”I’ma more terrified someone loved her characters to make fan fiction outta them.”  ’Cause when you get right to it, there’s some creepy fanfic shit out there, and you gotta wonder what motivation lay behind putting a couple of ripped-off character in bed with a wolverine and a steel-spiked strap-on.  Not that I would ever think like that . . .

So there’s only one thing to do–

Get famous so I can go after people who steal my characters.

A worthy goal, don’t you think?

 

Uptown Saturday Write

We come to this place in the sun, there local that I call “Breakfast”, and I express my thoughts for some to read.  Today I tell you that I’m on the last chapter of my work in progress, Suggestive Amusements, and if I’m exceptionally lucky, I’ll finish the story tomorrow.  If not, I’ll finish it Monday night, but in the next three days, rain or shine, hot or cold, the first draft is complete.

I look at the text card in Scrivener that’s going to be Chapter Eighteen, and I know what’s going in there; I’ve seen it for a few months, and I’ve been waiting to get to this point for many weeks now.  I know, with Scrivener I can just write when I feel like it, I don’t have to do everything in sequence.  Scrivener makes the writing experience like making a movie:  as you film all your particular scenes when you are on the right set or location, you can write your scenes as the need arises.  Need to write the last chapter now?  Do it.  Need to add a scene that makes sense?  Do it.  Scrivener liberates you to do that–

If you so want.  I don’t.  I’m too old school, in that I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I do them in that order.  Which is not a bad thing  to do for a first draft, because there were things I did in the last few chapters that have minutely changed events in the last chapter.

If I didn’t want until the end to write the end, I’d have to rewrite.  I hate rewrites.  Best to write it correctly the first time.

Chapter Eighteen is on tap for this weekend.  Three thousand words, put it a little over the seventy thousand word line, and finalize it with the big finish.  But . . . that’s not all.

I’ve decided to write an article today.  I’ve passed off a couple of my old game reviews for a friend who runs another site, and he’s posted one, and will likely post the other in a few days.  A long time back I promised him an article, so today is a good day to write said article, and it’ll be a far better usage of my time than playing Facebook games when I’m not word slinging.

I don’t know if this article-writing thing is going to be something I want to get into all the time.   My friend was asking about the possibility of doing a few articles on spacecraft propulsion systems, both real an imaginary, and I was like, “Well, yeah, I could do one of those . . .”, but the brain often says what the fingers can’t deliver.

However, I’m going to be in a lull for a bit.  I’ll be waiting on a book cover, and I’ll find myself mostly editing throughout April.  With that in mind, writing a few articles to keep the brain sharp might not be a bad idea.

If nothing else I might just entertain someone with what I have to say.  Or piss them off.

Isn’t that sometimes the same thing?

In the Glen of Semi-active Awareness

Oh, such is the aftermath of sleeping with the Luna Moth.  I make it through the night without waking at some ridiculous time of the morning, but the next day forces you to deal with the hangover for many, many hours.  It’s never fun; in fact, it can be a dangerous thing when you’re out on the highway surrounded by idiots–as I’ll be this afternoon.

At the moment I’m trying to analyze business intelligence software–always a fun thing–and write this.  I’m sort of failing at both ends, because my body is revolting against me, saying, “No, you can’t make your fingers move that way, because it feels funny to us.”  Also, these companies don’t want to give me a quote on their software:  the want me to try it first.  I don’t want to try it, I just want to know how much of my money you’re going to take.  There is no “try”, there is only, “How much, Bunky?”

Since I didn’t write anything last night–I was on Skype with my therapist, and by the time that was through I was inching into ten PM territory–I did polish up an old game review and sent it off to the guy who’d asked me about them the other night.  Yes, I found some errors; yes, I did rewrite part of it because it felt very clumsy in some areas.  Mostly I rewrote things because I know how now to tell the same tell better, and I want to see things looking nice and shiny before I send them out into the Interwebs again.

One of the things I’ve seen over the years is how good some of the stuff I wrote three, four, five years back is today.  It’s not perfect, but it’s readable in a good way.  I still get ideas across; I still manage to make the right points; I still manage to let what passes for “my humor” present itself upon the page.

What I’m saying it the writing was good, and it was something of which I am proud.

In fact, I was just looking over another review I did in 2011, and while there are a few issues here and there, I have no problems with it.  Sure, a clean up is in order, and I might have to correct something were I to republish it because a few things have changed since the original publication, but it’s not as if I need to perform massive triage to get it presentable.  It is . . . good.

If the two reviews I sent in are deemed worthy, them I’m probably going to send a few of these other things that I penned.  I’m also looking and publishing some–wait for it–new articles, because I’d once made the promise to do so, and I should follow through, should I not?  I was even looking at some research material because that’s what I do, even if I don’t want to write.  But since I likely will, the reading came in handy.

The plan is to finish Suggestive Amusements this weekend or early next week–but that doesn’t mean I won’t write something else in the meantime.

After, every little bit helps.

Nights of Sorrow and Confession

One of the themes I tend to follow in my stories that is no one is perfect.  It doesn’t matter if you’re human, non-human, or something a little special:  every now and then you’re gonna screw up.  If you’re human and you mess up, you might be out of some time and a few hundred bucks.  If you something non-human, your screw up might cost someone their life.

Such as it is with my muse, Erin.  She did something bad, and now her charge is paying for that screw up.  At least she feels bad about what happened.

The novel is moving into some dark territory before it climbs out into the light.  It’s night time, Erin is upset, and she’s got a senior goddess breathing down her neck.  Are there senior goddesses?  Of course there are:  someone’s gotta run those people.  You even find out that Erin has a boss, and it’s probably not who you think it is, because these guys don’t hang out with their own mythological neighbors.  No, these people have the run of whatever world they run, and they don’t give a shit about the ethic lines that worshiped them.

Unlike the last few chapters, where I struggled to get my feeling out on the page, time time I’m kinda zoomin’ the chapter.  I’ve written nearly twenty-five hundred words in the last two days, and were it not for an important Skype meeting tonight, I might have actually finished the chapter.  I’ll still get in some words tonight, but it looks as if the finishing of the chapter comes tomorrow–and the finishing of the story may happen on Sunday.  Maybe Monday, Tuesday at the outside.  But I see the end coming, it’s just around the bend.

Maybe this chapter is going so well because I’m feeling the sorrow these days, just like Erin.  Things are happening around me, a little to me, a little to people I know, and it’s weighing on my mind.  That’s probably why I was up at four AM again today, with my brain playing its little games of, “Hey, listen!” and keeping me up when I should be catching the snooze instead.  It has done this to me for the better part of a week now, and the early morning chicanery is getting old.  I need sleep, and I need it soon, because the drive home is killing me.

It also doesn’t help with the creative process.  The ideas seem slow these days, as if all the befuddlement I’m feeling from getting up so early every day is whacking my imaginative juices.  I will say this about hanging at The Undisclosed Location:  I always seemed to have something bouncing about in my brain.  These days, I seem to have . . . emptiness.  Or, at the least, a bit of fogginess, because things never seem as clear as they once were.

It’s time to get past these blocks.  Perhaps after I do my next edit the brain will open up.  Or maybe that’ll happen after I get some sleep.  Though I ended up not getting a lot of sleep last year–

And writing wise, that didn’t turn out all that bad.

Options of Light and Darkness

The end is approaching.  Not that we should be sad about that, because the end I mention is the end of my current work in progress.  The penultimate chapter has started, and people are talking about what had happened up to this point.

This is the chapter I’ve been thinking about for a while, so it came easy to setting up the meeting between Erin and–lets call her one of her bosses, a member of the upper Goddess echelon that has come to sit with Erin and find out just what in the hell is going on.  I’ve imagined the conversation for some times, and when I was writing last night the idea was coming out on to the page well.

We’ll see where it goes tonight when I continue Goddess Chat.

There was something else going on while I was writing, however, because if nothing else, I multitask like mad.  I was chatting with someone I know, someone who I’ve written things for in the past, and whom has enjoyed my writing.  As I was working through my chapter I was also working through a discussion of some articles I’d written some time back, and the comments that came my way were sort of like, “Hey, you ever going to write any more of these?”

There was a time when I was writing a lot of different things.  For a while I was doing game reviews on another website, and writing a few articles for another site, all of which occurred while I was blogging and working on my first completed novel.  It was a lot of fun, and it helped me develop my talent as a writing, and even more as a researcher and editor.

But all good things come to an end, as it is said.  I was doing all this writing when I was “between jobs”, as the saying goes, and I had a lot of time to put pen to computer.  Then I found a job, I had to move, I had to find time to write while I had spare time, and with spare time at a premium, I found that if I wanted to work on my stuff, I had to cut other things out of my life.

Ergo, no more articles.

But there is another saying:  nothing that dies ever stays dead.  True, they might only say that in the Marvel Universes, but there is some precedence for that in the real world as well.  When I started thinking about the stuff I’d written once, it made me realize that, hey, that stuff was pretty good, and it was a lot of fun to write.  And I was reminded that, at one time, I did tell this person that I’d write them another article . . .

Today I pulled out something I’d written nearly two years ago, a game review that I’d put up and sort of left.  I read it, edited it, and sent it off to the person I was speaking with last night, ’cause I told him that reviewing Science Fiction type role playing games is a good thing to do–and there are probably people out there who’ll want to read them.

Does this mean I’m back into doing articles and reviews for other people?  Hard to say.  After all, Jean Grey hasn’t popped up from the dead again–

Yet.