I am toying around with a writing idea that I’ve thrown out to other people because I like the idea of it, but have frankly been afraid of trying myself solo. With a writing partner, possibly. Solo? It seems well outside my wheelhouse.
As previously mentioned, I think I should overcome these reluctances of mine to go outside my usual writing and just do things that seem hard, but ones that also use my “natural voice”, whatever that might mean.
(more…)It was only a week away from posting new material, although it seemed longer except when it felt shorter. I wrote daily; I didn’t post daily.
So, where is the flood of new material, Michael?
There is nothing I am willing to post here or elsewhere (i.e., discord) at this time, if ever.
So, what was the point?
(more…)What’s with this trend I am seeing of writers who publish Kindle-first books of giving superfluous subtitles to their work?
Or has it always been around at this frequency and I am only now noticing it? I am well aware that the idea of using a superfluous subtitle in of itself is not a new thing, but when this month’s offerings of “free” Kindle books for Prime customers are littered with subtitles that make no sense to add, I have some head scratching going on inside my skull.
“Title: A Novel“
“Title: A Thriller“
“Title: A Historical Romance“
“Title: A Horror Story“
In every case, the subtitle doesn’t add to the title, but arguably subtracts from it. The subtitle describes the book’s genre/subgenre, it doesn’t create an narrative atmosphere in any way.
(more…)My break from posting new content notwithstanding while I do a personal reset, I am not planning at sitting idle, tapping at tabletops with forefinger and repeating “What to do? What to do?” while trying to find a Zen moment streaming Yanni.
As appealing as it might be to listen to Yawni all day, I am honestly trying to disrupt my personal thinking and writing processes.
(more…)I want to thank all of you who have,
Your support, especially in light of my quirks, is absolutely inspiring.
I know, it is odd for someone to not track readers, not track likes and to put all comments into a non-interactive “guestbook” bucket. Plus, because I wanted to make the site more reader-focused than content-focused, I’ve added all other kinds of atypical wonk to the overall experience.
It means a lot to me that you put up my attempts to make a site more reader-friendly than blog-friendly.
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Because, sometimes you just want a snack.
Some people might say I’ve probably bit off more than I can check with the running serial, Vengeance, My Heart, and they might be right in that assessment.
The story currently sits with twenty-six planned episodes (and approximately 4 posts per episode) for the full story arc and my reserving the right to extend it to a second and a third arc. Clocking in currently at ~40k words, I am trending towards about 170 pages (assuming 235 word/page when you account for rapid-fire dialog and end-chapter whitespaces.
That’s about 1/3 of the way for folks reading up through today. An estimated 400-page novel when we are all said and done.
So why the heck am I looking sideways when I have a long haul ahead (and I am running out of content to share post-Ep. 6)?
As I said, sometimes you just want a snack. And that goes for writing. too.
(more…)As the story in Vengeance, My Heart shifts from setting tone and atmosphere to character evolution and development — and quite possibly as a result of changing focus from short, snappy bite sized pieces of the story and shifting over to giving the story more room to breathe — I’ve discovered more tolerance as the writer for longer episode fragments.
My goal up through the end of Episode 5, was to make sure there was a targeted max word count for each fragment/part/sub-episode to finding in Episode 6 that character development doesn’t work so well with those kinds of metrics. I don’t think it is a significant spoiler to say it is about time to move to that tone/color-setting of the early episodes to dig down into the motivations and explain, in drip-feed fashion, the previously unexplained.
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I’ve been steadily jabbing at the keyboard for Vengeance, My Heart, this serial gothic western (/not-western) fantasy bit of writing some of you have been kind enough to read. Thanks go out to you who have. Your readership and comments are much appreciated.
As of last night, I surpassed the wordcount of my recent return to writing serialized fiction, a bit of occult noir that is part of the Vivian Locke world, which I may or may not return to — I haven’t decided yet, as my head is entirely in this world right at the moment. The posts haven’t quite caught up with the written wordcount, but that’s by design. It gives me a chance to go back and fix continuity issues (usually only a sentence, maybe as little as a change in a single word), something I neglected to anticipate when I first started writing serial fiction in 2001, which resulted in an insurmountable hurdle at the time for a truly rotten story.
(more…)I want to thank those of you who have been reading the first episode of a new writing experiment — or rather, it is an old experiment being approached from a completely new angle. It’s great to get the positive feedback you’ve been sending my way and it is encouraging continued effort on the longer experiment.
Next week will bring a new story from the stranger’s world.
A little bit of history and a smidge of road-mapping for those interested in such things…
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Well, Miss Vivian Locke had gone back to her life of not dealing with exorcisms, divorces cases and whatnot. Back down into The Gills with it’s static rain and Cookie’s coffee. Mr. Cross is not what he might seem on the outside, but isn’t that always how it is?
I had fun writing Sunny Day Parasol Co., but I will readily admit that it went off in a direction I hadn’t anticipated when I started writing the story. In fact, I thought it had maybe 10,000 words and was solidly in the short story realm when I started. Turns out I was wrong at more than double that amount (~ 21,500 words, roughly 65 printed pages on A4 — for those who care about such things).
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