After the Ordeal

Things are almost finished this morning.  My intention yesterday morning was to finish up Fantasies in Harmonie and be ready to move on to something else–that “else” being Camp NaNo.  But there was so much more going on yesterday–

For one, there was a birthday in the family that required some attention on my part.  Between getting things set up on line, and having to deal with someone on a freelance writing site who wanted me to show him a concept I would develop for him before there’d be any exchange of money (hint:  I recognize when someone trying to get something from me for nothing), and a late birthday dinner, there were two other events that needed to be addressed:

First, on the trip home, I encountered an RV burning on the side of the road.  I’m not going to say how said RV came to be burning on the side of the highway, but given the demeanor of the folks who’d bailed out and were standing around looked panicky, and the location of said torched vehicle, I’m going to opine that there was some cooking in progress, the RV came around a couple of sharp corners, there was a spillage of something hot, and–WHAM!  Time to bail!

Since none of the people standing around the RV were bald, I’m guessing the cooking of meth wasn’t involved.

Then I was not in the house more than ten minutes when the power went out.  Not just in the house, but around the entire neighborhood.  Pitch darkness everywhere, or as dark as it gets on a cloudy Sunday at 7:36 PM.  I remarked that the longest the power every stayed out where I live is about two and a half hours, and right around nine-thirty the utilities trucks rolled into the area.  At 10:05 PM the power was restored, showing that when it comes to calling the lengths of power outages, I nail them.

The downside to all this was being unable to start writing until almost ten-thirty.  The power on, the A/C going, the computer finally up because I can only run mine for about forty-five minutes on the battery.  Otherwise I’d have been typing away in the darkness.  I gotta get me a new system

The upside to this is I managed a thousand words before heading off to bed, and I’m about to cap that with another thousand or so words after I finish this post.  Then . . . well, what comes next, you ask?  I know what comes next.

I gotta come up with a title.

That’s the way I start every new story, with a title, as taught by a lot of writers who I grew up reading.  First you have a concept, then you have a title, then you do your research, then you work things out–

And then you start writing.

The countdown clock for Camp NaNo says I have twenty days and change before I have to write.  I’m going to write what should be an opening to a new novel; I’m not going to tackle a novel just yet.  At least I don’t think I will.

But I’ve been wrong before.

Entanglement

The difference in a day or two does wonders for a person.  Because?  Well, sit tight, ’cause I’m going to tell you.

After yesterday’s post my mind was in, what I felt, the right place.  It’s been lovely here in the nether-lands of Chicago, and the windows are open, the sun is shinning, the breeze is lovely, and I got to call the cops on some smart ass kids who think when they tell you, “Go ahead, call the cops,” you won’t act upon their request.  Threat + Internet lookup + mobile phone = cops telling you to drag your crap out of the street, punk.

But that’s beside the point . . . I was writing again yesterday.  Yes, it came slowly, in fifty to one hundred word bursts.  Something I never realized until now, but finding the right words to describe emotions and sensation related to sex is hard work–it’s hard!  It’s one of the things that helps bring my writing to a crawl, because I don’t want to go back over my stuff later and rewrite everything.  I try to get it all right the first time.  Arthur Hailey, the author of Hotel and Airport, used to write five hundred words in an eight hour day, but that was his first, second, final, and polished draft, because he’d go over and over what he wrote until he got it right.  I don’t claim to be him, but I do enjoy getting it as right as possible before I start editing.

I kept at it, though, and by the time I’d reached my just over nine hundred word limit before heading to bed, I had a pretty good scene going.  So good that I’ll finish it up today and make sure I get started on the penultimate section today.  I stopped just short of the border of Novella, so I’ll get my passport ready and head on into the country today.

But something else happened.  Something . . . well, not wonderful, but it made me feel good.

My current Work in Progress, Fantasies in Harmonie, was going to be a Camp NaNo story.  The tale is actually taking place during Camp NaNo July, and I’d taken the idea of writing in virtual cabins into real life, and having a group of lady writers getting together for a week of pajama time fun as only writers can have fun.  Obviously that didn’t happen, because here it is the end of the first week in June, and I’m close to closing this particular cabin.  My intention, therefore, was to pass on the Camp this year.  I’ve never done one, and I figured I’d save my time and energy for the Big One in November.

That was before I ran into someone I know and love–

I was hanging out on Facebook yesterday, and I spied a message from a friend–one who pretty much got me crazy on writing.  She was the one who helped me edit Kuntilanak, she was the one who more or less talked me into doing my first NaNo, which produced Her Demonic Majesty . . . we’re talkin’ Trusty Editor^tm.  And her message:  ”I’m doing Camp NaNo, wish me luck!”

Hold on there.  You’re going to camp and you’re going without . . . me?  I felt great for her, but at the same time my mind is flashing on sitting around in our shorts and take tops tapping away at our computers, and when the night comes we’re going over plot points while doing each other’s nails with mood polish.  (That exists:  I looked.  RESEARCH!)

Since I figured she need to hang out with at least one loser, I went and did it–I signed up for Camp.

What am I going to write?  I have no freakin’ idea.  Maybe I’m polish Couples Dance and get it ready for publication, because camp is looser and you can do that sort of thing.  Or maybe I’ll write something original.  Or maybe I’ll break into the cabin next to ours and do something naughty.

I don’t know.  I’ve never been to camp in my life.

I hear you’re suppose to have a good time . . .

Sound and Vision

It’s early afternoon, and I can’t believe I’m getting to my writing now.  Usually by this time I’ve had my saying of the day saved to the Internets, and I’m kicked back with lunch and/or some other insanity.  Today I’m running late because–why not?  Due to having to get out and pick up a few things?  Because of an annoying  ?  On account of pedantic discussion on Star Trek?  Or maybe . . . bacon?

Only time will tell.  Or not, ’cause timey whimy, you know?

In thousand words leaps Fantasies in Harmonie moves forward.  It was only suppose to be some quickie porn that I’d rip out and post in no time:  instead, it’s become of War and Peace of fetish fiction.  She now sits just short of sixteen thousand words, and in another fifteen hundred I’ll have to get out my passport and entered the Country of Novella, and I hear the greasy chuckle from here.

If you wonder what I’m talking about, read the afterword to Stephen King’s Different Seasons collection, where three of the four included stories have become some of King’s best adapted movie.  One of the lines he uses is, “Now, artistically speaking, there’s nothing at all wrong with the novella.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with circus freaks, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus.”  You get the point.

At the time King wrote those words (1982 or there about), finding a market for novellas was damn near impossible.  There were only a hand full of magazines that would tackle those stories, and by the end of the 1980′s they pretty much went the way of the dinosaur.  Or did they?  Just wait . . .

So rather than eight thousand words of hotness, I’m more like double that pleasure, and it’s likely I’ll start tripping into the twenty thousand lane before everything is over.  Been there, done that:  in fact, some fetish fiction I sold a couple of years back went the same way.  They were fantasy stories that ended up being long novelettes or short novellas, and after four of them I stopped because, at the time, I figured no one was ever going to read them outside of a few people who were into that sort of thing.

Now, about that place to publish . . .

So many publishing outlets dried up in the late Twentieth Century, but fast forward to the end of the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, and one sees self publishing taking off.  I remember people saying, “I ain’t buying one of those new fangled ebooks–only the real thing for me!” and emotions ran pretty high on both sides–but I knew that tech is one of those things that tend to stick around if they’re good, and ebooks were good.  I even bought one, and though I don’t use it much these days–I need a new battery–there are enormous advantages to having one–

Liking being able to take your kid to their soccer meet and sit in the stands reading Daddy’s Little Milk Maid and not worry in the least that you’re going to skev out everyone sitting around you.

It was Penn Jillette who pointed out that all new technology leads to porn.  After the Gutenberg Bible came a printing of the Karma Sutra; after the first movies came Le Coucher de la Mariée, a seven minute movie of a women doing a strip tease in a bathhouse, filmed in 1896, followed by El Sartorio, the first film to show sex acts, filmed in Argentina in 1907.  We have the Internet and . . . you really need to know?

With ebooks came eporn, and big or small, it sells.

Will my fantasy story sell.  Only time will tell.  Or not–

That timey whimy crap, I tell you.

Moonage Daydream

The weather has cooled and isn’t as muggy as it was yesterday.  I know that sounds a ridiculous thing to say, given the way weather has lost it’s mind of late–though it’s not something I haven’t seen coming for a while.  But that’s a discussion for another time.  Right now it’s cool outside, and it’s going to say this way for a few days.  Cloudy, cool, rainy.

Perfect weather for writing.

I’m well into novelette territory now with Fantasies in Harmonie.  After watching Iron Man 2 with my daughter last night, I hit the Scrivener bricks about ten PM and wrote for an hour.  A thousand words later I found a good point to leave off until today, stared at the final word count, and proclaimed myself the worst smut writer in the world.

Lets define that, shall we?  I don’t mean “worse” as in I can’t write.  I can.  I write good, as some might say.  What I mean by “worse” is that this story is double the size of other stories I’ve seen, like The Boss, My Slut or Daddy’s Horny Step Daughter.  Then again, I’m not writing those stories:  I’m writing mine.

As one person told me, it’s gonna be a real story, not just get off sex.  Though there’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s strange for me is my sleeping patterns these days.  When I go to bed I’m usually thinking of some story that I want to write, and when I wake up I find myself going over a scene from the current work in progress–usually as I lay there gathering my strength and wits.

That happened this morning.  I started coming awake in the dim light of this cloudy, gray morning, and here I have something bouncing around my head concerning one of my characters.  Now, I don’t know if it’s something that would fit her for this current story, but it’s damn sure something that could work for her in another story.  Yes, I think that way:  I’m always figuring in another story angle for characters even when I’m working on their current story.  (About the only one I haven’t done that with is Couples Dance because, damn . . .)

The images that assault me during that time–oh, my.  It’s an interesting time, since I have these ideas and scenes and feelings that enrapture me while I lay there, eyes half-closed, taking it all in.  Sometimes I feel like this is the best time for me to get my ideas in order, because things are coming at me fast and furiously, and I’ve had some of my best scenes hit me during the waking hours.

They can also be a little overwhelming at times, because my mind is wide open, and just about anything can happen during these moments.  These things wash over me and I lay there and take it in and take it apart.  I see what works and what doesn’t.  I think about what I want to keep and use and what I want to discard–

Sometimes I even get a story idea.

If only my day was this productive.

Wild is the Wind

For a moment I wondered if my computer was coming up this morning.  You start having these fears when your machine is looking at its seventh birthday, and all your friends have gone through three or four machines by this time.  If I’m lucky I’ll hang on this sucker for another year, then maybe get that super-tablet that I’ve had my eye on for years.

But I’m here, I’m up, and I have plans for the day.  Writing, of course:  I need to get back into my story, and there’s something special I want to work on as well.  What is it?  I’m not telling, at least not yet.  Give it a day or two, but you’ll see it.  Maybe you’ll even like it.

Speaking of the story . . . yeah, over the ten thousand mark.  That’s me, Ms. Wordy Smut.  It should just be sex and sex and sex, and kept it short and simple, but no:  I gotta tell a story.  Well, people liked my other long smut, so maybe I can get people to like this smutty smut, too.  They might even want to give me a couple a bucks in the process.

I have a guy watching me because writing and swaying back and forth as I listen to David Bowie Live From the BBC, from back in 2000.  Hope you enjoy the show, sucker, because maybe it gets better.  Enjoy your yogurt and quit staring a hole in me, ‘kay?  People, I swear.

I think I’ve finally reached some sort of point with Fantasies in Harmonie, where I feel like I have to write this now.  I go through the strangest feelings about my works at time, and this has been one of them.  Maybe it’s the writing late at night, maybe it’s finally using Scrivener in full screen mode–which I highly recommend–maybe it’s I’m finally kicking through this depression I’ve been in for the last month.  Whatever it has been, when I’m writing I love writing.  The distractions are becoming fewer, and I’m really getting into the scenes I’m creating.  It could be due to the story finally taking off, so I crank through another ten thousand words, get to the end, and get a cover while I’m editing this sucker.  Push it out, put it up, have it ready for the end of July so people can have a little excitement as they flow into fall.  I aims to please.

There remains what comes next.  It’s always about what comes next these days.  Get into the wind and go with it, and don’t stop flying just because you found a place where you can relax for a bit and enjoy the sights.  Somewhere down the jet stream you’re going to find something new and exciting, so finish up your thing and get wild with the wind, because if you’re good, if you’re right, you can keep flying the wind forever.  Or at least until you get too old to fly.

Then what do you do?

Screw it.  You keep flying.  And tell the stories of when you touch down.

 

Frolic Through the Fantasic

This morning I realized something:  at times I have trouble remembering my dreams because I don’t know if I was dreaming, or if my ideas were intruding and becoming manifest.

Let me explain:

Yesterday was an all around good day to dream.  I started about laying out a new plan for a school grounds that would, should, could end up in a story, and it was a bit o’ work, because I’m working off an area that’s real, and I needed to try and get my measurements correct.  I’m nutty that way, needing to see what’s available in the real world, and then going to work so I can get the fantasy as real as possible.

Some people call it too much work; I call it part of the job.

I know there are adjustments in one of the buildings I created.  for one, the space is far too large, and I need to scale it down just a bit.  I’ll do that this morning, after I finish this post.  Maybe I’ll add a few buildings.  Maybe I’ll start giving them names, and start in on instructors . . .

Then it was off to Fantasies in Harmonie.  I didn’t get into the story until around nine-forty PM, which is late by anyone’s measure, but I was so enthralled by my grounds work that I didn’t notice the passage of time.  When you get into your groove and you’re overtaken by the world you’re creating, you can find yourself getting lost easily.

There was writing, though, and it went smoothly.  It was time to describe the various transformations, and though I’d done one and went part ways through another, there was room to discuss what had happened to my characters, and for one person, that involved a lot of self-discovery which, in turn, required a bit of wordage to show what she was doing.

I once again found myself in my groove, because I’d finish a paragraph, then think, “Keep going; you need to finish what she’s feeling.”  It’s late, I’m tired, my eyes are starting to hurt–but I needed to finish.  That’s a feeling I haven’t had in a while when it comes to my writing.  You take a couple of months off to edit your work, to get your stories ready for publishing, and you get out of that mood of writing because you need to get something said.

By the time I finished with the line that I’d been waiting to write for a while–lets just say it’s something Ariel should have said after she washed up on shore–I’d put eleven hundred words behind me, and I’d done that in one hour.  I was even impressed, because I haven’t cranked out something like that in a while.  But the fantasy was there, and it demanded I give it my energy–and I did.

I had to write.

This is why I have trouble remembering my dreams some mornings:  I don’t always know what’s a dream and what’s left over from my imagination.  They are both one and the same–and it’s my job to get them out for others to see.

 

Never Small and Simple

I fool myself a lot, I really do.  I do what I can, I work hard, and I strive to get ahead.  I set goals for myself that some say are ambitious, others says may be a little foolish, but they are my goals, and I do my best to get them done.

There are some thing, though, I just can’t do.  I’m not talking about being able to read minds:  I do believe I’ll get that talent licked one of these days.  No, I’m talking about something else–

I’m talking about being able to write a short story.

When I set out doing Fantasies in Harmonie, I told people, a few people, a number of people, that I was going to “keep it short”.  It’s fantasy erotica, and if you want people to be interested, you gotta get right to the sex.  Most of the stuff out there–by which I mean, “The tentacle sex stories on Smashwords“–seem to be between five thousand and eight thousand words, so if you’re doing it sexy, you’re doing it short.

I’ve mentioned that writing short can sometimes be a problem for me.  The shortest thing I’ve published is just short of ten thousand words–the maximum for what most people consider a short story–and the longest . . . well, it was so long I decided to cut it into three novels.  As my ex would say of Stephen King, “He’s too wordy,” and I seem to have the same problem.  Not that I consider it a problem, but there are some who have told me I’m a good writer if I can’t do a short story. (To which I had a rather choice reply, but that’s another story . . .)

Therefor, when writing Fantasies in Harmonie, I knew I was going to keep it short, keep it simple, make it all about the smut and put a fake name on the sucker–

Yeah, right.

I finished my eight hundred words last night–I was feeling down, didn’t really feel like writing, but I got it in–and I looked at where I am in the tale.  I’m eight hundred and twenty-three words into the current scene–which happens to be the second scene of the second part, which is–lemme see . . . sixty-two hundred words into the story.

And no sex at all.  Hell, I just now got to the fantasy transformations!

Issac Asimov once said that short stories were probably the hardest thing to write.  Yeah, I know:  he wrote like two hundred of them, so how hard can it be?  If you look at that another way, he knew how hard it was, because he’d taught himself to become good in that form, and that took a lot of work to develop that talent.  There are a lot of reasons why shorts are not that prevalent today, number one of which seems to be a lack of markets for writers to peddle their wares.

Back in the day of the Golden Age of Science Fiction there were hundreds of markets for shorts, and not only could one sell a three thousand word story for a penny a word, but actually live on that, writers went for that gold.  Today, you want to do a short story, you’ll probably post it to an internet board and not see a dime for you effort–you’ll be lucky to get one comment.

This isn’t about markets with me, however:  this is about what I do.  And I do novelettes, novellas, and novels.  I don’t have a problem with that–

I do hope people like my long form erotica, though.

I’m telling you, it’s gonna be hot.

Straight On Into the Magic

In a world where people like me are slaves to their imagination, I had some good moments yesterday.  Yes, the day wasn’t the best, and it was cold enough that I came very close to catching a cold, but when the time came to deal with Fantasies, I was back into my normal writing form.

While there have been plenty of distractions for me this week, once I’m writing, I’m back to writing.  I’ve been averaging around eight hundred a night–not a lot, not for me–but it’s been a fast eight hundred.  But last night, I started writing in the early evening, and I found myself knocking off eight hundred and fifty words to end the scene I was in.

Was I finished for the evening?  Well . . .

I said yesterday I was in a bit of a strange mind set, and part of that has been brought on by the contents of the story.  There’s normalcy at the start, then a set up, then comes the magic, then will come the sex–oh, didn’t I mention that before? Yeah, sex.  Lots of sex.  Remember, this whole idea came about as something to take its place next to the unicorn porn that gets self published now and then–though I’m not disappointed to find there is Minotaur breeding now.

I’ve run into this feeling before, where you start to feel as if maybe you’re working on something that’s just a wee bit too silly, and you should be working on something a bit more–serious.  Yeah, if you’re writing, you know this feeling.  It’s different from that other feeling you have, the one that says, “You suck, don’t you know?” but you try not to listen to that one.  This other one–you hear it, because it’s mocking you even more than the other feeling.

I see where the story is going, however, and I’m not concerned.  I like the feel so far, and the fact that there’s going to be some strange things going on is beside the point.  I want to get into the magic now, I want to show what’s going to happen when you get some strange fantasies going, and the become even more real than when we put them on the page for others to see.

Something else pushed me today:  a meme I saw on Facebook.  It’s very simple in what it says–

 

Peter Dinklage:  Gives speech about masturbating.  Wins Emmy!

 

Damn right he did.  Why?  Well, he’s a hell of an actor, for one.  And two:  he had great words written for him.  Someone–more than likely George R. R. Martin–had the character Tyrion go on about the art of self pleasuring, and those word eventually made their way to HBO, along with lots of breasts and deaths.

Why feel silly about what you write when it’s what you want to write?  Yes, I’m probably not going to write about mastu–oops, too late.  Did it in one story already, and I’m probably going to do it again at some point soon.  I’ve passed that point, so why not keep on going?

Bring the magic, girly.  Stop thinking the world is going to chop to you pieces for writing good erotica.

The Rising Idea

This has started off as a very strange week, and after today I have to say that can’t imagine it getting any stranger–unless someone picked up a contract for my book.  Then my day would be made.  Maybe tomorrow it’ll happen.  One can only hope.

I’ve been working on my story, but it’s been sort of give and take.  Not that I’m not getting in any writing, but as I told someone today my mind seems to be in a strange place when I write.  When I’m working, the words come, they flow like mad.  I can get scenes and conversations down quickly, and there doesn’t seem to be any hesitation at all in getting things worked out.

It’s just getting into the story . . . because it seems like my mind is cluttered with distractions galore.  My mind is wandering like mad, and I can’t seem to get focused on the work in progress because of–well, therein lies a good question.  After all the work I spent getting Suggestive Amusements finished, and Her Demonic Majesty edited and published, my mind is once again wondering, “Is this all worth it?  Am I doing something that, in the end, will pay off?  Or am I just fooling myself?”

I go through this every few months.  You bust your ass to do these things, to move into a realm where you would love to be working, and it seems a constant struggle to get anywhere.  I’ve had friends tell me to take it easy and keep doing what I’m doing, because I’m on the right track.

At the same time, I want to move faster.  I want to get where I’m going now.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I’m just not good enough.”  If you know anything about Dunning-Kruger effect, you know it’s not unusual for those who have the talent think everything they do isn’t worth a damn, while the Ed Woods of the world think they are the god’s all might shit when it comes to being the best.  It would be nice if the overtly incompetent would just once say, “I totally suck, and I should let someone else do this.”  But, no:  that almost never happens.  They continue churning out shit, and the rest of us bang our heads against the wall wondering what it is we’re doing wrong.

I have ideas coming to me all the time.  I’m working out a story on my computer, and a world in my head, and at the same time I’m having images of a story coming to me as I go through the day–a story that I sort of mentioned in passing as a strange dream I had a few days back.  It’s how it goes:  these things happen to us to prod us onward to sit before the computer, or your writing medium of choice, and get this stuff out of our heads.

Once you’ve been bitten by this affliction, you can’t lose it.  It will never let you go.  One could give up writing tomorrow, and the ideas will continue to rise, reminding you that something wants your attention–

And it won’t stop until you give it due diligence.

Extended Tea Time

I am suffering from a rather dramatic drug hangover today.  I took some sleep aids to knock me out and give me a good night’s rest, and what time do I wake up?  The normal time, what else?  I swear, I’d give just about anything to sleep to about eight AM, and not crawl out of bed before six.

So the drugs are lingering with me, and it’s not a good feeling.  I sort of feel dizzy all the time, and if you’ve ever had vertigo, it’s not a pleasant feeling.  The mind feels like it should shut down and rest a while, but the body is like, “No, dude; we got things to do.”

And I’m stuck in the middle with these clowns.  This is where I wish I could download my mind into another body and just get on with the day.  Screw flying cars:  give me the Black Widow clone body, stat!

I only managed to get in seven hundred words on Fantasies in Harmonie last night, due in part to discussing matters of an article with someone last night.  By the time they vacated the Internet it was past nine my time, and I was starting to have a sleepy.  Still seven hundred words was pretty good, especially when I spent about fifteen minutes considering how I was going to get my lady writers together for a week in the woods.

The thing that’s coming out from this is that I’m getting wordy again.  I’m already twenty-two hundred words into the first part, and I’ve not even gotten to the magic.  Most of the stories like this have people stripping to their knickers at this point, and I’m rambling on about month-long writing camps and word counts.  This is why I’m not as good at erotica as, say, someone doing werewolf porn:  I gotta do the set up and make my characters look like read people in unreal situations.  The people writing the werewolf porn have psudo-wolves banging away by the fifteen hundredth word.

This is how I want to do it, though–it’s how I have to do it.  I try to do more than write characters who vanish when they turn sideways.  I’m sure I could write porn and, as one of my friends says, have them “bang at a thousand (words),” but if I did that, then one would never feel a connection to the girl who feels herself changing all over . . .

Naw, not gonna tell you.  You just have to wait for the story to show up on Amazon.

This made me think about the dream I wrote about yesterday.  After one friend read the post they said, “Sounds like a story there.”  Oh, does it now?  Actually, I’d sort of thought of the same thing, that maybe there’s a story in them there REM waves.  A sexy story?  Sure.  A kinky story?  You betcha.

The question becomes, do I write it?  And what is it about besides latex clad women with multiple limbs getting their freak on?

Wait–do I really need more than that?

All Hail the Spider Queen

Well, isn’t this an interesting start to the week?  Actually that happened last night when I was working on Fantasies in Harmonie, and I started working things out in the initial scene . . . then again, maybe it started with the dreams last night, which were very bizarre.

Lets get this in order, shall we?

First off, I didn’t think I was going to write a lot last night.  I thought, “Yeah, did five hundred words last night, maybe do the same tonight.”  Right.  So I started writing after I got some information out of my ideas file and put into the current project.  I looked at the layout of the cabin, and started in with a question asked and answered.

I had no real idea about what was going to be in the scene, what was going to happen, and yet, the moment I started writing I didn’t feel as if I was going to need to search for words.  I knew what would happen, and I didn’t need to go into a lot of discussions about the why of being in the cabin–that’s probably left for tonight–but rather I wanted to show the ladies together as a group.  It doesn’t get simpler than that.

So I have the set up, the witty banter, the insinuation that one of the women is into My Little Pony fan porn (we’ll call it “Fifty Shades of Flutershy”), the unsaid feeling that something isn’t right with one of the characters–it’s all there.  It’s getting things set up for the big bangs to come–no pun intended.

I know tonight the words might not come out as easily as they did last night, but it felt good to be creating again.  It’s a silly little story, but so what?  It’s my story, and I feel for my characters.  Maybe you’ll feel them, too, when you read this.

As for the dream–hey, lets spend some time with this madness now . . .

Of late my dreams haven’t been that important.  They’ve been there, but nothing that has stood out, nothing that made me wake up and think, “What the hell was that all about?”  That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my semi-waking moments, but it’s been nothing like the dreams I had last year.

This time, though–let me tell you.  First I was out shopping, and no big deal there.  I was in a modest skirt, sandals, tee shirt, the sort of thing one wears on a warm, sunny day.

That somehow transitioned to ending up in an adult clothing store, and I was trying on this black latex mini dress and boots combo, and the girl who was waiting on me was pretty much drooling as she watched me in the mirror.  She kept calling me “Spider Queen” for no reason that was then apparent–

Then I was back home, and I was with someone I know, and she was having trouble containing herself.  At one point she says, “Take me, Spider Queen,” and before you can say “Metebelis III,” I’ve got six arms and I’m doing some rather strange and kinky things to my friend, who is more or less mumbling “I love you” between moments of ecstasy.

I mean, what the hell?  Me, the latex clad Spider Queen?

Maybe there’s a story in there–

Camping on the Story

I hit my goals yesterday; yes, I did.  I blogged, I wrote an article that took up much of my afternoon, and then, after Doctor Who was over and done, I got down to working on my story, because these stories just sort of languish and do nothing on their own.  It’s like you have to write all the words for them.

The first part is sort of strange, because I was free forming as I went along.  I have a feeling that when I go back over this story, I’m going to end up rewriting a lot of this part.  But it’s a good set up; it gave me the feeling that something is different about this place in the woods, so when things happen, the reader shouldn’t be taken by surprise.

There was one big change that I had to do before heading off to bed, though.  I was looking something up–research, you know–and I just happened to take a closer look at the name of the place where my story takes place.  And that was when I discovered (let me say this in my Hermione voice), it’s not Harmony, it’s Harmonie.  Oops.

Hey, even the best research can be wonky when you’re looking at Google Maps at ten at night after being up for seventeen hours.

A was a bit bummed out, but not so much that I went into a mental tailspin from which I couldn’t recover.  No, I was level headed about the matter, since all I had to do was change the name of the story and rename the project.  Ergo, the story is now known as Fantasies in Harmonie, which gives it an even nicer ring than what had gone before, don’t you think?

there wasn’t a whole lot of writing last night; when I was finished with the scene I’d only written around five hundred words. I wasn’t looking to do a lot of writing last night because I was doing a set up and I knew it was going to take a little finagling to get the words right.

Also, I’m a bit more careful when I write these days.  I found myself writing then stopping so I could look over what I’d written.  If it looked good, I went on.  If I didn’t, I read the lines until I knew what I wanted to write, and then wrote that.  It’s sort of editing on the way, which slows you up, but ultimately helps me keep the text as clean as possible.

I checked my timelines, because if there’s one thing I am, it’s attentive to the time it takes to do anything.  From the time I finished Suggestive Amusements to the time I published Her Demonic Majesty, about seven weeks went by.  That time was spent in edits, getting covers made, and setting up my accounts on Smashwords and Amazon.  As I told a friend the other day, writing is work, and publishing things correctly takes even more work.

So the more I get right up front, the less I have to react to in order to finish my work correctly.

Slowing down now so I don’t have to rush latter is a great idea.  Just like finding a good cabin in the woods, you gotta take your time.