Designing the Unseen Imagined

Though the book is up, there are issues–things I should have seen, but didn’t take care of before hitting the “Upload” button.  Never fear; I’ll have everything sorted out this week.  I hope.

In the meantime I’m playing with other things:  concepts, story setups, that sort of thing.  I need to get a Scrivener project set up for my next story, but as one person told me, I should take it easy least I burn out.  Ha!  I laugh at burning out–don’t I?  Already I’m starting to feel like a lazy git because I’m not really working on anything.  That’s a bad habit to get into, because you end up beating yourself up for the silliest things, and before you know it you’re obsessing over every damn thing that comes your way.

Must.not.do.

One of the things I’ve been on about is trying to imagine a school I built for one story–a story that could be called fan fiction of a sort–and how I can bring it over into a new world that it completely mine.  There will be a number of changes to the layout and functionality of the joint, but the one thing I want to keep is a huge, grand building that sits somewhere between small castle and grand edifice.  For now we’ll call it the Grand Hall, and when it was originally conceived, it was part cathedral, part meeting place, part protected school.

It’s really big, is what I want to say.

I’ve always had this image in my head about the building, and the layout.  Entryway; central hall in the middle; Hospital on the second, third, and fourth floors on the left, administration on the right; library to the far end; basements below.  It’s a huge building, though probably not much bigger that most modern buildings.  It’s just that in my mind’s eye, I can see it being a very shadowy place, full of darkness and light beams, and during the evening, enduring silence.  (Not to be confused with The Silence, who may be there anyway.)

As much as I’ve seen this place in my head, I should be able to lay out the floor place, right?  Guess again, Gilbert.

I started a layout last night, starting with the central meeting hall.  That place it meant to be huge, about one hundred fifty feet by fifty. Then I moved outside that point of reference, and . . .

Nothing.

I got as far as laying out where the staircases are–and, now that I think about it, shouldn’t be–and then I looked at the plan on the screen before me and thought, “Shit, man, this place is huge.”  That was as true as anything gets, because it is a big building.  With all sorts of things hidden in its black corners.

And I’ve not even thought of what the basements look like.

Everyone gets those moments when they realize they have hold of something that might be a bit too much for them to control, and this is one of those moments.  It’s not that I won’t figure out the design, it’s just that it’s going to be something that takes a bit of time–just like when I was doing three dimensional designs of spaceships.  Or writing a huge novel.

Don’t rush the scale.  Like a mountain, you climb it slowly.

You’ll get to the summit eventually.

Genrely Me

If you write, you tend to write certain stories.  I don’t, for some reason:  I have a published horror story, as well as one of erotica, and I’m getting ready to publish something that’s science fiction.  But most other writers I know do; they write romance, or science fiction, or paranormal, or young adult.  They get into their groove and go with it–

Assuming they know what that groove actually is.

I had a conversation with a writer friend of mine a few days back, and they were trying to figure out the genre for their story.  Now, lets get this out of the way:  they write science fiction.  But when they were looking at all the sub-genres that are offered for self-publishing, they found there were–well, it ain’t just science fiction, let me tell you:

 

FIC028000 FICTION / Science Fiction / General
FIC028010 FICTION / Science Fiction / Action & Adventure
FIC028070 FICTION / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
FIC028040 FICTION / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies
FIC028020 FICTION / Science Fiction / Hard Science Fiction
FIC028050 FICTION / Science Fiction / Military
FIC028030 FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera
FIC028060 FICTION / Science Fiction / Steampunk
FIC028080 FICTION / Science Fiction / Time Travel

 

Sure, you have “Science Fiction, General,” which could be your “regular” science fiction, but what about the rest?  I think about my Transporting series, and where it would fit in that group.  There is time travel, but it’s not really time travel fiction.  It’s hard, but not what I’d call Hard Science Fiction.  There’s action, but not something that would fall under FIC0218010.

Truth is, my Transporting stories are character driven, and all the sci fi trappings are sort of grist for the mill.  Stuff is just there because in that future, who cares about how a warp drive works, you get in the freakin’ ship and go.  I’d probably file my stories under “General” and be done with it.

The problem we have here is that if you don’t have your book in the right spot, it might not sell.  Sure, your story might be about something happening at the end of the world, but is it “Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic”, or is it “Action & Adventure”?  Or is it something else that’s not there?

A question also came up at the same time:  what is this “New Adult” genre?  I had to look that one up as well, ’cause I had no idea.  Come to find out, it’s for people “From their early twenties until about the age of thirty.”  Are we talkin’ people who have crawled out of the Valley of Young Adult, but whom aren’t ready for Full-on Drama?  Or is this another bullshit grouping so publishing houses and pigeonhole a writer’s work more efficiently?

I remember Stephen King once saying his agent was worried he’d get pegged as “a horror writer”.  I’m certain he wasn’t saying that for very long, however, because that horror kept the money rolling.  These days, however, with self-publishing in full-swing, it’s not so much being pegged, it’s finding the damn peg to hang your story upon.

The writing game is hard enough without having to think about what sort of story someone says you’ve actually written.  As it is, some writers just scatershot their stories into a genre and hope for the best.  Others do their research and select that which they think is best.

Me?

I just write.

You’ll know where to find my work.

 

Harmony is Me

More than a few writers have not only accused of being a plotter, but of sometimes overplotting my work.  I have heard from a few people, who will remain nameless, that I have moments when I get too deep into the story and end up spending a lot of time doing something called “research”.  You know:  that thing you’re suppose to do to make sure you get things right?

I first started hearing this in October, 2011, when I was prepping myself for NaNoWriMo 2011.  I had a few people telling me, “Don’t do that!  This is NaNo:  you just write!”  However, that wasn’t how I worked, and I needed to get a few rules in place prior to getting word into the computer.  Hence, there were a few people who began saying that I was doing it “wrong”, that I wasn’t really following the “rules” of NaNo, and whatever I was going to write probably wouldn’t be that good, anyway.  (Just as a side note:  I heard many of the same things prior to NaNo 2012, with one gentleman even going so far as to say that anyone who did any plotting would end up writing “formulistic crap”.  Well, I never!)

Of course, the nay sayers are still working on their novels from 2011–maybe–and I’m in the last stages of getting mine self published, which means . . . well, it actually means nothing.  It just means I’ve stuck to my plan to not only write, but to publish one way or the other, and that’s what I’m doing.  Maybe what I’m putting out will be crap, but it’s my crap, and it has covers.  You can’t take any of that from me.

Where is this going?  Straight into my next story, trust me . . .

Last night I was, among other things, looking for a place to put my cabin for my next story, given the way-too original title of Cabin Fever.  The idea is for my trio of literary lovely to spend a week in a cabin writing, and then have strange things happen to them, after which–well, you can imagine.  Or not.

In a way I need to know everything before I start writing.  Even something as inconsequential as the location of a cabin might not seem like a big deal, but I have to know where it’s located.  There might no be more than an off-hand remake about where the cabin is, but it’s a touch that I use to ground my story–sort of like how when De Niro played Al Capone in The Untouchables, he had the place that made Capone’s silk boxer shorts make the same for him to wear while filming.  You never saw them, but it was a touch he wanted.

I knew I wanted to have the cabin in Indiana, and I wanted it to be close to water for some reason.  So I looked at sites concerning state parks, trying to figure out which ones had cabin rentals, and then found those places on Google Maps so I could really see the places.  It was a bit of a search, because while some places sounded great, they didn’t look that way.  I needed to have something that fit just right . . .

Then I found it.  One of the state parks that had cabins, and was bordered by a river, and had lots of room–room for a lone cabin, a strange cabin, where three ladies could find their lives changing in very different ways–

And as soon as I had the location, I had the new title:  Fantasies in Harmony.  As I told another writer, you’ll see how that works at different levels.

I spend too much time on my stories?

You have no idea.

 

 

Oh, and it’s my birthday.  Happy me, yay . . .

Backwards to the Summit

A year ago, something strange happened.  I wrote this post.

I didn’t there was anything out of the ordinary about that post.  In fact, I dashed it off early in the morning before heading off to The Hole That Was My Job, located at The Undisclosed Location.  I was up early because I was having trouble sleeping, probably because of the cold that was developing that day, and would remain with me the entire month of May and well into June.

I popped it off, went to work, then went to dinner.  When I returned home and fired up the computer, I checked my stats–

The post had seen over two hundred views, and that day ended up becoming the most on-site views I’ve ever received.

I’ve tried hard to figure out what it was that drew all those people to my website.  I don’t think it was the tags, or how it appeared on Google, or even the subject.  The reason for the popularity is puzzling, because I’ve written far better posts than that, and they’ve had to go begging for hits like an out of work bicycle messenger who hocked his single-gear speed buggy for meth and is now hovering above the rocky bottom.

It’s strange how things like that happen.  You can bust your butt over something that you think is going to set the world on fire, and the collective sighs of a tiny group of readers can be overwhelming.  At the opposite end of the spectrum are those things you dash out almost as an afterthought, and your fans lose their shit in rapture-like ecstasy.

Stories are like that.  You put your heart into something that seems to speak to you in special ways, and it seems the indifference is suffocating–then you have some fun with a story that’s not meant to be taken too seriously, and you watch the money roll in.  Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen with my next story, but the way things work in my life, who knows?

I started putting my next story together last night.  Right now the title is about as original as it gets:  Cabin Fever.  As in, “I gotta fever, and the only prescription is hot women having sex!”  It’s the sort of simple title that can catch an eye, though it seems as if there are way too many cabins with fevers on Smashwords, so I’m going to need to rethink my approach.

I have the names of my characters, and a short outline of their lives.  It was while I was playing with this that I discovered something about the Scrivener Name Generator:  once you have your selected names in the “short list” box, you can transfer that list to an existing card or folder, and then play with the contents as you see fit–or even append the name at the end of a line currently being written.  That’s a function that I’d not played with, and now that I know it exists, when I need a quick name, and I throw it in and create a character card for that person at the same time.

This is how I go about getting a story ready:  I develop, I do my research, I lay things out.

And then, when I’m ready . . .

I see to things really get laid.

Blessed Be the Cabin

Blessed Beltane, Happy May Day, Good International Workers Day . . . whatever is getting you in the right frame of mind today, I’m there with you.  At least I’m trying; I spent the better part of a couple of hours writing code with the payoff of getting two items to come out in the correct order on a report.  Can I get a “yay”?  Yay . . .

The 1^st of May is the traditional beginning of summer, regardless what they might say in America, where we make our own holidays to keep from making the Commies happy.  It’s a time of change, a time of transitions, a time to make a new start.  It’s a good time to go around and leave goodies for your friends and neighbors, though I’m tired of the kids around me playing in the street and looking at you like you’re some kind of idiot when they decide they won’t get out of your way.  So no goodies for you . . .

Here I am, however, at the start of summer, and I’ve no project ongoing.  My novel is being reviewed, and the final edit awaits.  I likely won’t see it back in my inbox for at least a week, so I’m in the process of cooling my heels on the writing front.

But I can’t.

Last night I sat around and wondered about what I was going to do.  I pulled up the idea file and started puttering about, thinking about the things before me.  I looked at the story I want to do for Camp NaNo July, my little erotic fantasy that will take its place among the Smashwords elite.  I looked at it and thought, “What can I do?”  And the answer was, “Build a cabin.”

It’s like this:  the story takes place in the middle of nowhere, with three writer friends deciding a great way to spend Camp NaNo July is to go out and actually rent a cabin, and spend the weekend writing.  At some point during this endeavor, something magical happens–literally–and the writing degenerates into . . . well, I know what happens, you’ll have to buy the story once it’s published.

I found an open source floor plan designer and started in on my house, because if there’s one thing my precious Annie taught me, it’s that you sometimes need to see a design before you can imagine the stories there.  I designed the cabin, put in doors and windows, added a kitchen, put in the furniture, added the sofas and the beds–

The scene is built.  Now what?

Now I write, that’s what.

I have that bug where when I get these ideas I have to act upon them.  With nothing to do right now I feel a bit lost, and not in an Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 way.  I feel like I should do something, because when I’m home at night I feel like I’m without purpose.

I feel I should write, because that’s what writers do.

So the hell with Camp NaNo July, I gotta write this sucker now.  I’ll get my thoughts together, give my characters names, determine my locations, and crank out the story.  Oh, and I need a sexy writer’s name, ’cause I’m thinking it might not be a good idea to put this out under my name.

Then again, why not?  This story could be like a milkshake–

It could bring the fans to my front yard.

 

Cake or History

When you have little to do, your nights get a lot longer.  I ran into that last night, while I looked for something to occupy my time while I had . . . nothing to . . . write.  *sigh*

There was some good news, however:  the woman looking at the full manuscript for Her Demonic Majesty told me she found one typo per page for the first few pages, then didn’t see anything for like a full chapter.  After all the freaking out about how I was a total failure at getting my editing done, this made me feel a hell of a lot better.  At this point I just wait for her to finish her reading, and her markings, and do what is needed when the manuscript comes back.

So I played around.  One half of my mind was trying to figure out how to import images into Scrivener, and the other was working on an idea for a story.  It helped that I was in my Story Ideas project, where I jot down ideas when they come to me, and try to flesh them out little by little when the mood strikes.  So I was in the right place to mull over two ideas . . .

One of the ideas has to do with a . . . lets call it “fantasy smut” story I wanted to write for Camp NaNo July.  It all came about during a discussion with another writer, where we were making fun of some of the stories that show up on Smashwords–you know, stories about incestuous stepkids, werewolf breeding, and horny unicorns looking for wimmin.  It was during one of those discussions that I went, “Screw these losers:  I can write something like this, only it’ll be Better!” and then my mind started working.

I used to write strange, fetishy fiction, so coming up with something that would involve sex and fantasy shouldn’t be a problem.  I have the characters in my mind–borrowing liberally from friends I know, and who have already been told they’ll be in a story–I have the location set, I have the sex ready to roll.  I do need a title, though, and a set up, which is what I was thinking about last night.  And a little bit this morning when birds woke me at four AM.

I’m considering just “doing it” and writing the story the month of May.  It shouldn’t take much to do, and shouldn’t be that long.  Actually, I’m going to keep it short, or as short as possible.  It’s going to be all about Teh Sexy, so character development is out.  Okay, maybe a little development, because I don’t write smut.

The other thing I was working on was a time line for another story idea.  I posted it on my Facebook wall last night, because I do things like that.  What I was plotting out was a “What If?” sort of alternate history of space from the 1960′s through the 1970′s.  I didn’t include everything in the time line; I was mostly adding missions that never flew but could have, so that I could establish a different history for those who grew up in that time–namely, the characters in my possible story.

I love doing alternate history, and while it might not be something that a few people would consider realistic–hey, it’s my universe!  Get your own alternate space history!

Don’t you just love having an imagination?

The Consequences of Truth

Well-made plans have a way of crashing around you when it’s least expected.  We’ve all had things we planed on doing, only to have life come up and smack us straight on in the face, leaving one a semi-bloody mess.

The measure of your personality is how you deal with the situation.

I didn’t deal with mine very well.

Allow me to explain.

I started out in a good mood.  I was writing, I was blogging, I was looking forward to the end of my novel.  I was looking forward to having a good time today, to maybe finishing an article and getting that out.  The path was clear, the way ahead was sunny.

I posted an excerpt from Chapter Six of Her Demonic Majesty, and was getting into my editing.  It was going to be a wonderful day–

Then Trusty Editor^tm came along.

They were reading the excerpt, going through it with the trained eye they have.  And just like that, I’m getting PMs on Facebook.  ”You have this wrong . . . this should be . . . I think you meant–”.  It wasn’t much, and my Trusty Editor^tm was only helping me as they have done in the past.

But it killed me, because this was what I feared all along:  that no matter how much work I put into getting my manuscript clean, it would never be clean enough.

I lost it.  I logged off from Facebook and just shook for a few minutes.  I cried.  I doubted my own abilities to do anything right.  I’ve spent so much time on this story that it really felt like a kick in the gut, and with everything that has happened to me this week, I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore.

I actually reached the point where I was ready to say, “Fuck it, I can’t take this anymore,” and just wander away from the scene for . . .well, who knows?  I feel alone, I feel that I get very little support, I feel like I’m working in a constant vacuum located inside a singularity of indifference.

So I stepped away from the story for most of the day, simply because I couldn’t stand to look at the manuscript any more.

I finally finished editing the chapter I was on when I had my meltdown, then I headed out for the night, something I haven’t done in over a month and a half.  I wasn’t in much of a mood to talk, though, but I manged to get though the night without being too much of a Debbie Downer.

It was only while I was driving home with the late night light drizzle falling around me that I found my center.  See, long ago, Trusty Editor^tm was going over another manuscript that was my then Work in Progress.  And they had issues with a few things in the first couple of paragraphs.  I freaked out, because I thought what I’d written was pretty good.

Their comment to me, after I’d expressed my fears, was, “You need to get your ego in check.  Do you want this to be good?  Or do you want this to be the best?”

That’s an easy one:

I’ve never wanted to put out shit.  I can’t stand the idea that I’ll put out a story that’s crappy, with things that will give haters reason to go, “Yo, you used an and not a, loozer! ”  If I can’t put it out right, I’m not going to bother putting it out, period.

After buying a pretty cover I don’t have the means of paying someone to edit a couple of hundred pages, but I did have a friend offer to look over the manuscript for errors.  I have a bit of fear here, because they told me they didn’t like the title, but beyond that I think they’ll find errors and not much else.  I hope.  And if all goes well I’ll be back on the original path I’d set, which is to have Her Demonic Majesty published at the end of May.

It’s okay to freak out.  It’s okay to think you are worthless, that you are alone, that you even suck.  It’s happen to the best writers, sometimes to the point where they decided to end it all because they were told their novel sucked.

But you need to listen to people and know when they are helping.

Because it’s never okay to kill your dream.

Never.

Firmly Upon the Upward Path

Here we are, the penultimate weekend.  As of last night I had only ten thousand words remaining in my edit of Her Demonic Majesty, and given that I have a whole lot of nothing ahead of me today, that means that by the time I return her tomorrow, I’ll have but one chapter remaining, or I’ll awaken feeling bright and shiny, and there will be nothing left but to compile the story into a Word document and created the Table of Contents.

Either way, I finish the edit and format within the next thirty-six hours.

That means next week is filled with fun and frivolity.  I know I’m going to be interviewed, but it’s going to be an interview the likes of which many of you have never seen.  I’m thinking up a book giveaway, But I want it to be something different–which means I’m not sure how I’ll do it, but I’m investigating means.  I had considered asking people to guess what color I look best wearing, but one person would walk away with everything then . . .

The interesting thing I find is that I’m overly excited.  Worried, yeah; I’m always worried that something will show up wrong in the story, that it’s not going to sell, that it’ll be rejected after all my hard work.  But that happens, you know.  My friend Jo Custer said yesterday that she was told that the movie she’s trying to Kickstart into existence is “filthy”.  Many jokes were made of this comment, not the least was that someone should tell Lars Von Trier there’s a new bitch in town.  Though if you want to get into Lars Von Trier territory, you need a leading lady to come up and spit on you every morning and tell you what a horrible person you are, because she knows she’ll be spending the afternoon her standing naked in a mountain stream masturbating while being yelled at to “Look natural!”

We creative times, we do our own thing.  We love praise, but be usually get criticized to hell and gone.  As I’ve said many times, the non-creative out there don’t get us.  Yes, they want to be entertained by us, but they don’t get what we do, and why.  If you’re like some of the people I know, their notion usually boils down to, “You wanna make money.”  Well, yes, dude:  I would like to make money.  I’d like to make enough money to do this full time.  There isn’t a one of us who wouldn’t love to spend their days crafting stories or making movies or producing pretty pictures.  And I’m not talking talking making mad J. K. Rollinbucks cash here, either.  If I was making fifty thousand a year writing, I’d be home all the time writing.

Why do we suffer the pangs of criticism,  though?  I think part of it comes from the un-creative being unable to build their own works, but damned if they don’t know what a good work should look like.  There are things out there that are broken, that is true, and creative works that are totally Teh Suk.  But the hate does seem to come at everyone and everything, and it’s almost impossible to avoid.

The trick comes from deciding if the criticism is of the good kind . . . and if you can learn from it.

As for the other kind . . .

Write your own stories, then get back to me.

The Outside Looking In

I am a fan of Zen Pencils.

I’d never heard of it before last September, just as I was in the final stages of preparing for NaNo 2012.  I don’t remember who posted this strip, the first that I saw, but I remembered it vividly, so much so that I went back to read it many times.

Why did it touch me?  It may have had something to do with NaNo, with some of the people revolving around NaNo, or some of the people revolving around my life.  I was posting excerpts from my project, showing my chapter layouts and my time lines, and there were more than a few snipping remarks about how I was doing NaNo “wrong”, that I needed to “just write”, and that all this prep meant I was incapable of writing anything “imaginative”.  There were a couple of people who objected to the title of my work, and, of course, a few who were like, “Why are you even bothering?”

The “Why are you even bothering?” crowd are always easy to figure out, by the way:  they’re the ones who feel since you’re never going to make big money off your work, why don’t you do something else–you know, like clean the house, or pay the bills, or something?  These are usually the sort whose most imaginative thought of the day is wondering if they should change their underwear, and if so, what should they wear.

In other words, they got no idea what makes a person like me tick.

Since that first encounter with The Zen, I’ve not only visited the site often, but I’ve showed it to others.  Some have ignored it, some have loved it.

This last one brought back way too many memories.

I have written many times throughout my life.  I’ve tried a lot of things, actually:  I’ve always loved art, loved reading, loved music, loved writing.  I was never content to do things that were–shall we say, easy?  I was never a good artist, but on a couple of occasions I let my imagination go, and the end result was to get some intense praise from the instructor.  I didn’t just read, I was off into advanced stories and concepts long before high school.  I didn’t just listen to music:  I found things that made me think and wonder, and devoured the sources.  And my writing?  I was doing nutty stuff even in the mid-1970′s.

However . . .

There were always people around me who thought my art was “strange”.  By the very fact I read I was considered a “weirdo”, and I even had one person who’d been a friend for years stop talking to me because he thought I was “nuts”.  I was always being told I listened to “freak music”, and that I should stick to stuff more popular.

And no one gave a shit about my writing.

I finally took up writing in a serious way in the late 1980′s, and kept at it for a while.  I once brought my spouse to a writer’s group I was in–more a collection of friends than anything else–and I read what I was working on at the time.  On the way home I asked my spouse what they thought, and they comment was, “It was crap.  I hate when you write stuff like that.  The only good story you ever wrote was your first.”

My first story that they knew was a quick, fast, first person horror story that was filled with so many clichés that H. P. Lovecraft would have killed it with fire.  But, to my spouse, it was the best thing I ever wrote, and they were of the opinion that I should go back to writing stuff like that.

Between a life time of hearing stuff like that, and having to deal with my other problems, I gave up on writing for a long time.  You start believing that everything you do is crap, that you’re never getting ahead.

You become a willing participant in killing your dreams.

These days, I write in a vacuum most of the time.  I know there are few people around me who care about this work, but screw them:  I do this for me.  I have a daughter who wants to be an artist.  I encourage her to draw, and to draw as much as she can.  She posts some of her work on her Tumblr, and has gotten great feedback.

I don’t have to tell her to do anything differently than is being told here.

When I am down, when I feel I am wasting my time, when I feel that all that I do will be for naught, I think about what has come before, and what could be next.

And then I use my time.

The First Ember of Regret

Last night I reached a point that I didn’t think I’d ever reach in my writing.  Was it perfection?  Hardly.  I’ll never be a perfect writer, no matter how many millions of words I string together over the next twenty-five years.  Was it a feeling of ineptitude?  Nope.  I’m not an inept writer; I’m learning the craft every day, understanding what can and can’t be done.  Was it hopelessness?  Naw.  I start feeling hopeless enough on things that aren’t writer related that I don’t need it for my writing life.

No, what I felt was regret–over a character I had to kill.

It’s like this:  there is a chapter in Part Three where Jeannette–she who has been chased all over the city so that someone can mount her head on a pike and laugh about it–has finally gotten the upper hand, and has decided the only way to keep people from screwing with her is to lay down her own Hammer of the Goddess.  With that she figures out a way to find the people who’ve been making her life hell–a word only she uses–she goes after them . . .

With no let up, and no mercy.

This means turning her forces loose, and engaging in the magical version of The Chicago Way:  ”They bring a wand, you bring a gargoyle.  They blow off one of your arms, you consume them all in black fire and smile as they die screaming.”  She knows it’s the only way to make the best of a bad situation, and she knows there comes a point where she has to get her own hands dirty in order to make a point.

In the end she decides to take out this guy–

Only . . . he’s not that bad.

Yes, he’s on the wrong side of the line here.  Yes, he’s giving counsel to the bad witch, but for the most part he’s seen a someone standing on the sideline, marginalized by one too many egos in his group.  So in terms of being a bad guy, he’s not that bad.

Still, he’s on the other side of that line, so when the time came for him to die, I smoked him.  I at least gave him a clean death, a warrior’s death, and not the “Imma Cat and I’m gonna make you die horribly” death I gave another character.  But dead is dead, and the dude went down for the count pretty fast.

Right after I edited the scene, that was when the feeling hit:  where I go, “You know, I really feel bad killing this guy.”  The character even admits he escaped death once before, so he knew how not to pee in the wrong pool.  Still . . . it was part of the plan to have him die, and he did.

Case close, even if I did feel a little bad about it.

Maybe I’d have felt better if I’d had a dragon burn his face off.  At least then I could say it wasn’t my fault, blame the dragon–

Naw.  That’s been done.

Though dragons in the story would be cool . . .

Imagination Chainsaw

Some people may say I’m crazy, but that’s just talk.  Do I get a bit obsessive?  Not that much, but it does happen?  Do I worry?  As much as anyone else–okay, maybe a little more in some places.

Is the fear starting to hit me over this novel release?  You betcha.

I’m into the final set of chapters, and by the end of the week I’ll find myself with two or three left to edit and format.  This means that by Sunday Her Demonic Majesty will be ready for the ebook meat grinder, and by May 4^th there should be a new entry in my bibliography.  But the end isn’t here yet, and as I go through the story, I’m seeing sentences here and there that . . . well, they don’t set well with me.

Yes, I know what’s going on:  my mind is in Issac Asimov mode, where I’m editing the story, and I see a different way of doing things, and so while I’m here I’m going to change things just a little bit, and when this is over everything will be hunky dory.  Or so it should, but the Dear Doctor had a problem when it came to editing–namely, he had trouble finding a point at which to stop with some of work.  It has been said that John Campbell once took a story from him, telling Asimov it was fine, and that writers have trouble when it comes to deciding when their stories are “perfect’.

I know the story isn’t perfect, and this is why I’m doing an edit and formatting, and not a simple formatting.  I’m not altering plot, or cutting the hell out of chapters–in fact, I ended up adding about one hundred words to a chapter the other night, because something was in need of a bit of elaboration.

What I really need to do is take a chainsaw to my imagination, and stop seeing problems where they don’t exist.

Sure, there are things that need a bit of polish.  As a writer you should see that, and fix it where it’s needed.  But this morning, as I was on the Trek to the Paycheck, I started wondering if a line at the end of the chapter I was editing last night should exist, or if it should be excised.  This is where I get into trouble:  I see a problem, only it isn’t a problem, it’s a phantom that’s come to shake it’s bootie at me, and giggle the whole while, ’cause it’s only gonna tease, it ain’t ever going to give me a hug and tell me everything is great . . .

I’m close on this.  The novel publication is only a couple of weeks away, and as much as I want to get it right, I don’t want to fall into an obsessive hole where I’m constantly thinking that the novel isn’t perfect, and I’m setting myself up for a big fall.

No problems.  I know what must be done, and I’m doing it.

If I only looked as good as Juliet Starling, though . . .

Going For the Fun

Today starts the moment when I get serious about Her Demonic Majesty.  I want to get as much of Part Two finished this weekend, so by this time next week I can say everything’s ready for the various meat grinders, and all I have to do is write the various dedications, upload, and watch the money roll in.

About that last part . . .

Yesterday I was speaking with a friend, as I am want to do, and they asked me what I was doing to promote myself.  I mean, I have a novel coming out, I have access to Facebook and Twitter, so how am I getting the news out to my fans that I’ll have a novel published in a couple of weeks?

Good, legitimate questions.  I didn’t have an answer.  I should because I’ve been here before:  I have two published stories, and I’ve sort of done the promotion thing by visiting other blogs and giving an interview or two.  I know the game.

I just don’t play it well.

The writing part is easy; you sit, you think, you type, you edit.  There you have it:  a story.  It might be shit, but it’s you’re story, and you own it.  What happens after you get the stuff up, though?  That’s the hard part.  It’ hard because I haven’t actually had to get into that part that much.

My friend started giving me hints of things to do, things to try.  I listened, I took to heart.  And I’ve started the wheels rolling . . .

First off, I revamped my author’s page.  It looks nice and bright, with the new covers up, and there I’ll start sending out information about the project of the novel, and when it’ll see the light of publishing day.  I have my Twitter, and I should get to revamping it as well:  change the background picture, get the names changed to protect the innocent, so forth and so on.

One of the things writers could do for NaNo was post excerpts from their stories, and that’s another thing that’s coming.  Every day I can pull out a few hundred words from each chapter, and maybe get people interested in wanting to read the whole thing once they get their taste.  Not to mention, if there’s an error, someone can point it out.

I will do an interview, and it’s going to be done a little differently than some interviews, in that . . . wait, why tell you now?  Just wait until next week.  Then you’ll see.

There will be the obligatory giveaway of books.  Haven’t decided on how I’m going to do that yet, but I will.  And with two covers from which to choose, winners can decide which cover they like better.  Now if I could only get a third cover, I could have a trifecta!

What I want the most–besides sales–is to have fun.  I’ve done the blog hops; I’ve done the interview; I’ve sort of done everything short of putting begging people to buy my stories.  I want to do thing differently this time.  I want people to find and enjoy, and help build the base.  And if they buy this, then they’ll maybe buy the stories I wrote under that other name, too.

It’s the time to shine–

Lets burn bright.