Expiration Infinium

First, the great news:  Her Demonic Majesty is up on Amazon this very moment, so if you want a copy, go snag her here!  It took some fooling around, but she’s up and live.  If you buy it and like it, please leave a review.  If you buy it and don’t like, please leave a review and I can try to do better next time.

Now, on to the not-so-great . . .

I spend time on Facebook.  Some times I’m there to chat with friends, sometimes to play games, other times just to see what sort of insanity is passing for real life.  It can be a place of bad information, where if you posted as a fact that taping swiss cheese to your genitals for a week would release enzymes into your blood that would help you lose weight, someone would re-post it with a, “Yeah, this could work!” tag line.  It is also a realm of memes, both good and bad, some funny and others not so much.

I happened to check my home wall yesterday and came across a meme, one with a upset looking character in the picture, and the wording explaining everything:  ”I’m still pissed they canceled Firefly.”

Really?  After ten years you’re still pissed?  Please, give it rest and watch your DVDs one more time to relieve whatever angst is gnawing at you, though chances are good you’re still gonna be pissed in 2023.  Maybe you can get together with your friends and hold a “Still Pissed Twenty Years Later!” convention–you know, to remind all the other pissed off people you know that your darkest moment was the day Fox put the ax to your greatest show evar.

Fandom is a strange thing.  I will admit to being a fan of several things, and I will even admit to getting right down to the point where I could recite even the lamest point of trivia for my favorite forms of entertainment.  But when things went away, when they ended on a good or bad note, when things were left hanging because some suit looking over a spread sheet said, “This show is eating up too much revenue can it and put on wrestling in it’s place,” I’ve also sort of went, “Okay, what’s next?” and moved on.

Ah, but there are some people who just can’t let go, who are gonna be upset when something they love ends.  Just last week we heard about how Charlaine Harris, she of the The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels that became True Blood, was receiving death threats from fans upset she is taking their Sookie away.  I remember the forums soon after Farscape was canceled, and Bonnie Hammer got C-worded about a thousand times.  And I’ve suffered through years of the sordid tales of raped childhoods because The Phantom Menace was release–or, worse yet, because Gredo shot first.

As some omnipotent alien once said, “All good things must come to an end,” and these days if it’s a television series, or a movie, the only way that’s gonna happen is if there’s money to be made by doing so.  That’s what happened with Star Trek:  the demographics were underestimated, the the first movie was made, didn’t do what was expected, and someone went, “I got an idea–”, the second move came out, and the rest is history.

That didn’t happen with Serenity.  There was a very loud and boisterous fan base that snapped up DVDs, and the studio thought, “Hey, they want a movie, maybe we can make something off this.”  And the movie was made, and that’s when it was discovered that while the fan base was loud and boisterous, they weren’t as large as was hoped, and that was the reason there wasn’t another movie, and there hasn’t been another series–and likely will never be.

Sometimes you have to let these things go, because they were good in their moment, but when you want to see them again, as they were, a decade later, you’re going to have something that will never live up to the expectations of the fans.  Say Joss doesn’t want to make another billion dollars with super hero movies, and decides to ruin Nathan Fillion’s and Morena Baccarin’s careers (as he said he’d have to do when he was on Reddit).  So everyone comes back ten years later–oh, wait.  Two characters don’t, ’cause they’re dead, and if you know where Joss was going with the story, Morena Baccarin doesn’t have to worry about long term contracts, ’cause she’s going belly up soon.  Simon and Kaylee are probably knockin’ out kids, and do you want those rugrats on a ship, ’cause we all know how well precocious kids and space ships get along.

No, you’re not going to have a continuation of what left the air ten years ago–you’re gonna have a reboot.  Let the childhood raping begin.

It’s never a happy moment when something you love goes away.  But nothing last forever–and if it does, thy name be The Simpsons, which is still on television because it’s a money maker for Fox.  Everything else goes the way of dusty death, and I’ve even planed out the end of some of my stories–

Though it would help if I could get them started first.

Plugging In and On

Saturday was a long day for a number of reasons, which was mostly due to me getting up at five-thirty and not heading off to bed until almost eleven.  Lots of running around, lots of drama, lots of things happening.  It was the sort of day that seems to go on and on, and it just sort of ends with one falling asleep in their chair–which is exactly what I did.

Through all that I had one goal to complete:  getting the Table of Contents created for Her Demonic Majesty.  I created a copy of the novel as a Word document for the Smashwords upload, and started getting all the bookmarks set up, ran thought it looking for errors (of which I found three), and then began linking the chapter headings to the bookmarks.

In all, a solid two hours of work, getting the document ready.  But it’s ready.  Finally.

It remains for me to do the Kindle version today, but that won’t take as long because I don’t need to do a review of the manuscript, just create bookmarks on the chapter headings, and set up the links to the bookmarks.  I may do that after I upload the first document into the Smashwords meat grinder–that checker of all epublishing checkers–and wait to see if any errors return.  I don’t believe it’s going to kick me, but you never know.

This is where I stand this morning:  all ready to go, covers and everything.

I’m nervous as hell.

I remember when I uploaded Kuntilanak to Smashwords, and after reading all the warnings about how long the programs may take to check the manuscript and the possibility of errors forcing me to make additional edits to the story before it could become a real ebook, everything turned a bit anticlimactic when the story uploaded in two minutes.  The day and a half I’d spent getting everything in order paid off, and the week or so I’ve spent with Her Demonic Majesty will, I’m certain, pay off in the long run, also.

Still doesn’t keep me from getting all shook up and nervous.

Oh, and I need to get an ISBN number, which is something the Smashwords upload allows.  You just tell them you need a number, and there it is.  At least I think that’s the case:  I need to check . . . yeah, just ask for a Free ISBN and you’ll get it.  I should look into getting a copyright on the novel as well, because it’s really, really mine then.

So much to do, but not really.  It’s the final crossing of the lines to make sure the novel is truly finished.  Then, once it’s up, I can sit back and watch the money roll in.

Ah, yeah.  If only that last part were true.

If nothing else, I’ll have this novel published this year.  There is more I want put up as well, but this is the start.  And it only took two months to go from the point of “I’m starting to work on this,” to ” It’s up and ready for you to buy!”

Once this is out of the way, I guess I can get back to writing.

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 . . .

The Great Gig on the Side

Last night was a time for editing, but never once did I bring up my work.  Say what?

I was chatting last night.  I was chatting with a friend who writes as well, for it seems that I’ve made a lot of writing friends over the last two years–almost three since I restarted everything with a class in the fall of 2010.  I was in the mood to chat after driving for over any hour through a torrential downpour that is still going on this morning.  So the brain wasn’t doing what it was suppose to do, and I was relaxing until it could.

As I chatted with my friend, the discussion turned to a story she’s writing.  She’s been inspired of late, and has pushed her tale into Novelette County, which is only slightly less sleazy than the Country of Novella, where I find myself hanging out a lot.  (If you know your Stephen King, you’ll get the joke.)  After a few minutes of talking about it, the question came:  if I was sent a copy of the first few chapters, would I be interested in looking it over and giving my opinion?

This has been happening to me a lot of late.  In the past month I’ve done a bit of beta reading for some friends, and from time to time I’ve been asked to look a story over and see if it needs some polish.  Now, I’m not an editor by trade.  If anything, I’ve developed my skills, such as they are, over the last couple of years, since it became obvious that if I needed to get my stories polished, I’d learn how to do it myself, or start paying people a considerable amount of money to do it instead.

But I’m a nice person, so I do what I can to help those who want to get ahead.  The people I know aren’t vampires thriving on drama and attention:  they are writers.  Beside, the vampires have all defriended and blocked me, so it make the selection process easier . . . anyway, I looked the story over, and did my little turn on the catwalk, marking up a few things, and leaving a comment or two where needed.

In doing this act I helped my friend a bit, which is always a good thing because we need that karma boost in our lives.  But wait!  There’s more . . .

A week back I was contacted by another writer and asked if I’d do a big favor:  would I help them edit their books.  They’re making a push to get their old stuff cleaned up and their new stuff in similar shape, and asked if I’d join in the band and help them out.  Naturally I said yes, because I’m good.  And I believe I can help get their stories whipped into the shape they desire.

What about your own work, Cassie? I hear you say.  Nothing is going to fall behind there:  Demonic Majesty is coming along, I’ll get back into it tonight, but I will help others where I can.

Who knows–maybe there’s something here I can turn into a worth-while vocation.

It beats slinging code, let me tell ya.

Station to Variable Station

Saturday morning, having my coffee at the local Panera, listening to Station to Station, an album that I enjoyed in my youth, and which continued to set me apart from those friends who were still into Top 40 AM pop.  I know I have some work ahead of me today:  a bit of editing, maybe some article writing, a little beta reading . . . we’ll see.  I also have somewhere I need to be at noon, and that’s going to keep me busy for a couple of hours.

Oh, I also have my final cover for Her Demonic Majesty.  Yeah, it’s a good day, even if it is rainy.

While I haven’t figured out my Phantom Pages issue for mobi and epub compiles, Scrivener reveled itself to me while I was trying to figure out why some of my text files wouldn’t page break when I was compiling my novel into a Word document.  After some playing with the document, I went into Scrivener mode . . .

Let me explain.

Within Scrivener, you can examine your story in one of three ways.  There is the Corkboard, which is my favorite.  The visual for this is as you’d expect:  it’s like a corkboard you hang on the wall and tack up note cards.  As you can see on the right, the corkboard is an easy way to lay out your story, tell you where you are as far as what you’re doing with each section, and give you a little metadata so when you look at Chapter Ten, you know that’s the chapter where your characters get together and flog each other with chicken legs they bought an hour before at KFC.

Then there’s the Outline, which gives you a top to bottom review of each section you’ve created, and you can show as little or as much meta data as you’d like.  One of the nice things you can show in Outline mode is the word count for each chapter, as well as target word counts, and your progress towards reaching those counts.  If you have your metadata set up correctly, you can see if your story is progressing as you expect, or if you’re way the hell off the rails.

Lastly, we have Scrivener mode, which lets you see the whole store in one long scrolling document that also shows you where each section starts and end.  If you’ve set your metadata to break for each new text file, then those dashed lines indicate where your story is going to start at the top of another page, just as it would in a novel.  Also, if you show the hidden characters, you’ll see where every space is, and each carriage return, aka your Return/Enter key.

I went into Scrivener mode and started looking for hidden characters that could be causing my “not page breaking” problems in Word.  Didn’t see anything, so I went back into the corkboard and started moving cards around–which are, in reality, my chapters and part titles–and ran off another compile to check.  I didn’t see anything, at least not right away . . . but an idea started to form, because the more I looked at my troublesome sections, the more I saw they were different than my chapters–

I was using two carriage returns to drop the “Part” titles from the top of the page.  I removed those returns, and–ta da!  Problem solved!  Really, it was that simple.  After I figured that out, I went into the compile formatting, told the compile to drop the titles six lines from the top of a page break–and just like that, when I looked at the word document, everything was as I wanted.

With that out of the way, I looked for the “very” word, because it’s a weak word, and it looks stupid when you see it in the story.  Still in Scrivener mode, I set up the Find, located all my verys, then hit the Replace to remove them from the story.  When I was finished I’d removed sixty-eight “very” from the story, either deleting them, or putting another adverb or adjective in its place.  In an eighty-six thousand word novel, finding the word “very” sixty-eight times may not sound like a big deal, but in the year and a half since I wrote Demonic Majesty I’ve learned a bit, and using “very” is one of the things I’ve learned not to do.

Today I’ll look for my “suddenly” words, and superscript those suffixes that require the format, then start on a read through, because I believe the story is formatted well, and all I’m checking for are errors right now.  This may take a couple of weeks, but with everything else in place, there’s no need to hurry.

It’s all coming together faster than I thought.

And you know what they say about a plan coming together . . .

 

Up the Escalator to Madness

A very quick conversation this morning opened a little window into that thing I call “My Life”, such as it is.  I wasn’t saying much, just what I did last night, and what I’ll do today.  Those things I spoke of?  Writing.  So for yesterday I blogged, wrote a couple of theme descriptions for Windows 8, edited some three thousand words, and wrote nine hundred word of an article before going to bed.  What will I do today?  Blog, edit a couple of thousand words, write a couple of Windows 8 theme descriptions, and finish my article.

Sounds like fun, no?

I made the joke, “When am I getting paid for this?” but I know that will come in time–so I hope.  I’m heading in the right direction, and eventually, maybe with this next novel I’ll get noticed, picked up, contacted, rich, buy an abandoned mansion, and become a Bond villainess, because if there’s one thing Bond needs it’s bad girls who screw him.  Got the cover coming, the editing and formatting is coming, and in a month or so the novel will be a reality.

(By the way, a friend turned me on to a rant by the same person who gets into fights with her fictional characters and loses, and said that she can’t self publish because she’s not rich.  Ummm, last time I checked you didn’t need to be rich to self-publish, you just had to be able to write, edit, work with someone who’ll give you honest criticism, maybe get a friend who’ll make you a cover for cheep, and then set up an account, format your book, then upload and wait.  But then, this person is one of those vampires who lives to suck the life out of you, so the moral of the story is laugh at these people, kiddies:  they deserve it all.)

There is the fear that I don’t have an idea ready for when all this is done.  The mind seems to have shut down with the ideas while I concentrate on getting stories ready.  I suppose that’s the way thing go; you concentrate on one thing, and the mind files everything down in the back until you need them.

There is the fear, however:  what if the new ideas never come?  What if I’m stuck writing lots of stuff I already have imagined out, and nothing else ever comes to mind.  Not that I don’t have a lot of stories to tell:  you’d have to see some of my time lines to know this.  Still, it does bother me a bit–

Which means I’m driving myself crazy with things I need not drive.  I’m on the up escalator to the crazy house, worried that I’m never gonna have a new idea in my entire life.  I already know this is bull, because my ideas have left me with a whole lot of material, and my other fear is I’ll never write it all before I shuck this mortal coil.

You think this keeps George R. R. Martin up at night?

 

The Kindred Dreamers

If you know movies, you know Roger Corman.  You can’t help but know it, because in many circles of fandom Roger is known as the King of Crap, a guy who has produced or directed at least four hundred movies that can be described in two word:  ”Low Budget”.  These days Roger’s work usually ends up on the Syfy Channel (or as I like to say it, “Siffy”), as the Saturday Night Monster Movie, where we have been entertained with the likes of Piranhaconda, Dinocroc vs. Supergator, and that most marvelous of wonders, Sharktopus.

Corman makes movies.  Good or bad, you can argue that all you like.  He has said that he’s never lost money on a film, because he goes cheap and fast.  It is said that he completed filming of Little Shop of Horrors in two days.  A running joke was that he could negotiate a movie over a pay phone, then shoot the movie in the phone booth with the money found in the change slot.

There’s something else he’d done:  he’s pretty much made modern cinema.

No way, you’re saying.  Way, I tell you.  This guy may be a schlock merchant, and he’s done a lot of things on the cheap; yep, no argument there.  He’s also discovered, or gave early roles to, Jack Nicholson, Charles Bronson, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Diana Ladd, and Sandra Bullock.  He worked early on with screen writer Robert Towne.  And he’s mentored and/or given starts to a few directors you may know:  Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, John Sayles, James Cameron, Joe Dante, and Martin Scorsese.

Roger has always been ready to help people get started, to show them what they need to know to keep making moving and being creative. We have ways of doing that today, though most do not involve making miniature flying piranhas.

I have more than a few friends who are in the creativity business.  The majority of them are writers, like me, but I know a few poets, a couple of artists who love to draw, and one film maker.  I’m all over the place, I am, being plugged into this network of magic makers who, for the most part, struggle to get their creations made so that others may enjoy.

My filmmaker friend is Jo Custer.  Her bill paying job involves driving a cab done New Orleans way, and she’s written about the experience a few times.  She made one short film, Hotcakes, and she’s in the pre-production phase of her second film, Sonuvabitch.  There’s a nice website up for the film, to give you all the information you may need, but there’s something else as well–  See, Jo wants to do things a bit different this time around.  She wants to shoot on locations; she wants better equipment, and she needs more actors, because she has one scene that involves about twenty people in frame.

Jo has put up a Kickstarter to help her meet her budget, because she isn’t exactly getting funding from Universal.  I get involved in Kickstarts now and then, only because I’ll see something come along that gets me interested, and I slide a few bucks their way.  I don’t do it very often, but when I can help out the creative community, I do what I can.

I know what you’re saying:  ”Cassie, are you hyping this woman’s project?”  Yeah, I am.  I usually don’t do things like this–hell, I hardly promote my two stories–but I like Jo.  She has something I didn’t have at her age, and that’s tenacity.  She puts in a lot of long hours in an attempt to reach her dreams, and if I had been more tenacious with my creativity when I was her age, I might be sippin’ on cognac right now, thinking about what i’m going to write next–though if I’m sippin’ on cognac at nine AM, I’m probably working on getting drunk by ten.

We should help the dreamers however we can.  I gave money to a young girl who had been accepted into Space Camp, but who didn’t have the finances to travel there, nor to cover her expenses while there.  I gave her money because when I was a kid I dreamed of going into space, and if I could go to Space Camp today, I’d leave in a second.  If there is one thing I could do before I shuck this mortal coil, it would be to go into space.

I know about dreams:  I have them all the time.  Some of them I’m starting to turn into life, and one day, maybe, they will be my life.

Jo’s got a dream.  If you can, help her out.  If nothing else, pass the info along to some friends who might be interested in playing Roger Corman in their own way, ’cause when you make a dream come true, it not only brings you good karma, but it makes the world a better place.

That said, I need to start working on a story treatment I have for a film called Acrocalypse–

I heard Roger might need something for Siffy, and I believe I got a winner here.

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?

Q1 and Done

It’s the end of the month as we know it, and I feel fine, save for the soreness in my legs.  Too much time on my feet, too much time laying on a bed that hurting my calves for some reason.  Or maybe it’s me:  maybe my weight is pressing down on my lower extremities and causing problems.

Last year this time I was lamenting over writers, people who usually make things up for a living, being unable to make up the names of towns and people.  I read this post over last night, and was struck by the fact that most of the people who I’d written about don’t seen to write these days.  When I joined a few writing groups on Facebook back in 2011, it seemed as if there were  hundreds of people posting about what they were going to write, what they were writing–and then, how they couldn’t finish what they started.

Today, those same groups seem to be inhabited by a few dozen hard core members, and a few dozen more people who flit in and out when they decided to pick up their book and get back into The Great and Not So Loving Game.

Writing wears you out.  I managed to edit two chapters of Replacements last night, maybe twenty-seven hundred words total, and when I was finished I wanted to write something new, but couldn’t.  I was starting to nod at the computer, and trying to crank out anything that would have made sense wouldn’t have made sense at all.

In his March 30 blog post, Neil Gaiman offered a few simple words for writers:  ”Write.  Finish Things.  Keep Writing.”  Sure, you’re thinking, “That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Last Cybermen!”, but at one time he was just like everyone else, working hard to get into the biz.  He’s now in the biz, and he still works hard, only now he does it full time, whereas most of us need another job to play the bills.

My biggest problem was always finishing things.  I’d jump into a story with both feet, burn through ten, twenty thousand words, and then–nada.  I’d get disappointed, depressed, defeated:  the story before me had to be crap, so why bother?  It’s not like anyone’s going to read it . . .

I’d say that’s a mindset that it not just unique to me; I’m almost certain there are others out there who end up feeling the same way.  I even get that feeling still, only it starts kicking in about forty-five thousand words into a novel, and it screws with me until I’m about ten to fifteen thousand words from the finish line.

And then I find the strength to make my way to “The End”.

I’ve told people I know that one of the reasons I keep a blog, one of the reasons I write every day whether or not I have anything interesting to say, is that it keeps me thinking, it keeps the mind going, it keeps me writing.  Without it I might not ever bother pulling out a manuscript and doing anything with it, and just become another of those left by the Writing Wayside.  That’s not completely true, but I do feel as if my blog keeps me anchored and focused on my goal of becoming a full-time writer.

Back on December 1 I detailed what I’d written up to that point over the course of a year and change.  At that point, with everything from the end of 2011, and all over 2012, I’d calculated I’d written approximately 568,000 words.  What I should say is that I wrote and finished that much, because I don’t consider the story worthwhile if I haven’t finished it.  During 2012 I started a story for someone, got about five thousand words into it, and then put it away, because what I was writing wasn’t me; the story didn’t feel right.  And to have went on would have meant doing something that I wasn’t going to enjoy, or take from the work any pride.

Since I wrote that last post I’ve written another novel, and blogged every day.  Suggestive Amusements ended up running just over seventy-one thousand words, while the blog has averaged about five hundred fifty words a day for 121 day, or right at sixty-six thousand, five hundred fifty words.  Add all that up, and at the end of Q1 (the First Quarter of the year, as we call it in the business world), I’ve another 137,550 finished words added to my total.

Plug in the numbers from before 1 December, 2012, and we have a new total:  705,550 words.  Ding, ding, ding!  We have a winner!

Yes, there is marketing and editing and getting a great book cover, but the above is the real heart of the issue:  writing and finishing.  You wanna walk that walk, you gotta do diligence.

You gotta write; you gotta finish; you gotta write some more.

Which reminds me–

I got some writing to do.

 

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?

 

Trauma Night Confessions

It’s fuzzy head time, brought about by getting up about two AM and not being able to do anything but drift in and out of something that felt like napping, but wasn’t.  There was a bit of pain in my legs and some churning in my tummy, but mostly what I have is a lack of sleep brought on by too many things going on in my brain.

I know there were dreams, but all I remember of them was being in an open area where I had to rate people who looked suspiciously like the Mother of Dragons, only a lot more jail-baity like she is in the novels rather than the more grown woman in the television series.  Why was I rating people like it was a wet tee shirt contest?  I have no idea.  My dreams don’t often tell me what they have in mind; I just roll with the madness.

Perhaps it’s a combination of things.  I have things on my mind that are keeping me . . . not troubled, but worried.  I also finished Chapter Sixteen of my novel last night, and with it ending on a downbeat, that means Chapter Seventeen, the penultimate chapter, is going to start on a downbeat.  The last chapter promises to be better, but this new chapter is going to be somewhat depressing, as well as somewhat confessional.

You bring together the three main character of my story, add in a little something I picked up from Chapter Fifteen, and you have a bit of a mess–one that I created because, hey, it’s how I roll.  Conflict is easy if you remember to follow The Manga Rule, and set up the dynamic of one guy, two women.  Dance them all around a bit, and before you know it something’s going to break . . .

Probably someone’s neck.

So I picked up in a place where the lights are down and there are pools of darkness, and Erin isn’t feeling all that chipper because of something she did.  And that’s where she gets a visit from–lets call her one of the bosses, a top goddess that comes to hold her hand while they work out what’s going on.  It’s this character, the one who is stepping onto the stage for a bit of limelight, that really gave me the idea for this story, because this new character was the subject of an erotica story I wrote for the hell of it maybe ten years ago.  It ended up on a website for a short time, and may still be out there somewhere, because nothing on the Internet ever dies.

There will be talking; there will be sadness.  There won’t be blood, because I can’t see someone getting their brains bashed out with a bowling pin, and I’m not serving milkshakes.  But there will be a bit of hand wringing, because guilt tends to do that to people, even if they are eight thousand years old.

Another six thousand words, maybe more, maybe less.  That’s all that remains for Suggestive Amusements.  Good or bad, it’ll be over, and I’ll move on to the next project.

We’ll see where my muse takes me.

I just hope it isn’t to the place I’m writing about.

 

Leaving the Make Believe Believable

I remember reading something a while back, something that had to do with arguing.  It is true that with some people, it doesn’t matter how well researched and put together your points are, because they will ignore your point of view and keep pushing their stuff at you over and over, whether it’s the topic at hand or not.  When reading about this, there was a quote offered that pretty much summed up the futility one might face trying to deal with someone who isn’t listening, but rather keeps on talking.  The quote was something like, “Don’t take my sudden silence as proof you’ve won.  It only means I can no longer take your bullshit.”

I ran into something similar to that yesterday, when a point I was trying to make was met by a lot of hoary old talking point that had little to do with what I was trying to say.  After the second time the same points came back at me I gave up the ghost on the argument–which didn’t address anything I was saying–because at some point you realize that no matter what you say, it’s gonna come back to rehearing something that could have been taken from a paragraph found in one of the fifty page admonishments of John Galt.

Strangely, I was thinking of this when I was working on Chapter Sixteen of Suggestive Amusements last night.  My characters were using talking point on each other as they walked through the Valley of Fire, but the discussion between them was as such:  Elektra, one of my female characters, was telling her erstwhile boyfriend, Keith, my main male characters, that his in-world logic was bullshit.

Early on in the story it’s established that Keith is a long-time resident of Las Vegas, while Elektra comes from “Scorpionville, New Mexico”, and she couldn’t wait to get out of there.  Keith has decided that he’ll leave Las Vegas one day, after he’s made it “big” as a writer.  Along comes Elektra, who has used a bit of her wanderlust to move west, young girl, and she tells Keith that his mindset is holding him back, that he’ll never be a “big time writer” because he’s stuck in Las Vegas, and maybe he needs to get the hell out of Lost Wages and gather a fresh perspective on life if he wants his stories to soar.

I know this feeling, because I’ve been there myself.  I’ve said a number of times in the last five years that I need to get out of my little corner of Indiana.  At one time I said I’d cut and run the moment I hit it big, but that was like twenty years ago, and I’m still here.  I still want to leave one day, but I wonder if it will really happen . . .

Because most of last year I was working in another city for the first time, and I didn’t handle it well.  There could have been a number of reasons for that, but had it not been for my writing, I might not have made it out . . . in one piece is the best way to describe the situation.

Was I writing about the plight of a fictional character?  Or was I putting too much of myself there?

If so the later, what should I do about it?

I do love the desert, after all.