Something Different

 And now we interrupt this series of blogs to bring you a commercial break.

I've often wondered what other writers talk about in their blogs, without it seeming like they are constantly pitching their wares. I solved that dilemma for myself by talking about the various research I've done, whether or not that research had anything to do with what novel I am currently writing or editing. I hope my efforts amuse my readers.

But I am an author, and a publisher, and so once in a while, I need to inform the world what I have been doing. Buckle up, this is a speedy re-hash of the past 6-8 months.

De-Evolution by John Lars Shoberg was published (MoonPhaze LLC) in November of 2020. It is a science fiction novel about humans who colonize a planet and cannibalize their ship to help build their colony. Then they find out that what they had thought was an example of native fauna was actually an intelligent species, although their culture had devolved in the past 100 years to that of cavemen. Will the humans be similarly effected? —It is available on Smashwords.com, Amazon, MoonPhaze.com, and possibly at your local book seller. It has been met with some success. You can find a review of it on https://jimsscifi.blogspot.com/, entry dated Saturday, June 19th, 2021.

The Stone Ship (The Stone Builders #2) by John Lars Shoberg was published in May of 2021. Although it is a sequel to The Stone Builders (Available from MoonPhaze.com), it stands on its own pretty well. It is a science fiction adventure. —The military found a large chunk of a spaceship made of stone while exploring a new star system. They assemble a group of scientists to study the artifact, and leave them there to their studies while the military ship goes off to finish exploring the system. Then an unknown ship is noticed approaching the scientists. Is it the Stone Builders, looking for their ship? Or even worse, the unknown species that managed to destroy a ship made of stone? —It is available on Smashwords.com, Amazon, MoonPhaze.com, and possibly at your local book seller. It has had the same amount of success as De-Evolution, in a shorter amount of time, although we haven't found any reviews of it at this time.

Meanwhile, I have written 2 romance novels and a short story. And I'm deep in the middle of getting them published.

Hank's Widow (Small Town Happiness #1) by Linda (NMI) Joy, my pen name for romances, will be published July 20, 2021, if I don't run into too many snags. I've already had a few, but right now I'm waiting for the cover to be finished before turning it over to the printer. —After her husband is killed in a winter traffic accident, Wanda finds in his papers a deed for a house in the middle of Nebraska. Unable to afford their Chicago apartment on her own, she decides to move to that house. In her husband's extended family, she finds 3 cousins who all look remarkably like him. Will she ever finish grieving when her husband's face is around every corner? —It is currently available for pre-order from Smashwords.com and MoonPhaze.com. I expect to get it uploaded to Amazon in the next few days, ready for that July 20th publication date.

"The Game" (Small Town Happiness #0.5) by Linda (NMI) Joy, will also be published July 20, 2021. It is a short prequel for Hank's Widow and my other romance, which is currently being edited. "The Game" is a short story happening about 6 years before Hank's Widow, which shows how the Four Cousins' close relationship fell apart. Because it is so short, (24 pages), it will only be in ebook formats, and will be bundled with Hank's Widow at no additional charge.

Waiting for Glori (Small Town Happiness #2) by Linda (NMI) Joy is hoping to be published in January 2022. I am currently doing a 2nd edit/rewrite, and I typically do 3 or 4 edits. —Gloria has finally escaped from her husband's abuse and neglect. Now she needs to figure out how to stand on her own, for her son's sake. Progress takes time, but she doesn't stop to wonder if her independence will allow her to find love.

And I have an artist working on the cover for And the Meek Shall Inherit, another science fiction novel by John Lars Shoberg. I need to go through it for one last edit, looking for pesky grammar mistakes that have managed to slip my attention before this. We are anticipating a November publication date.

AND I made a goal of publishing 4 books during 2021, so I need to find another... Perhaps one of ours that is no longer in print. There's 3 or 4 to choose from.

Wow. I tired myself out just going through the list and remembering all the stuff I still need to do. And on the other hand, I'm a little amazed at all I've accomplished. I'd like to remind all my readers, that if you've read a book—whether a MoonPhaze book or not—please help the author out by posting a blog. Goodreads is a good place to do it, if you belong, or maybe on your own blog.

Good reading!

Author Blogs

The worst part of being an indie author is that you are required to do all of your own marketing and promotion. You always wonder if you are missing something, some way of connecting to your audience. There’s lots of advice out there about having your own blog, so this week, I did some research of what other authors talk about in their blogs.

I was lucky enough to find a list of ‘well-crafted’ author blogs compiled by a well-known site for authors. So I checked out the first dozen or so.

The first thing I noticed was that all of the blogs I was connected to were over a decade old, even though these blogs got points for being ‘frequently updated’. In one or two cases, newer posts were easy to find; but in most of them, I was stuck with the post I landed on, looking for similarities, differences, anything that might tell me what made a successful author’s blog.

Two or three of them were down-right political in nature. I have my political views, of course, but I don’t like cramming my views down other people’s throats, nor do I like having other people’s views crammed down mine. I didn’t spend much time on those sites.

One blog page consisted of boxes with a headline in each box. The headlines did not make much sense to me, perhaps because I wasn’t familiar with that author’s work, and that’s what they pertained to.

One blog page was a guest blog by a friend of the author, who waxed poetic about how much better his life was, now that he had adopted just one of the attitudes suggested is the author’s non-fiction self-help book. Well, that was an interesting possibility... if I wrote non-fiction self-help books.

Several of them talked about their current Work In Progress, which was pretty much what I expected. But even now, I’m not sure how that can be done effectively, given a blog that gets a new post every week, which is the absolute minimum suggested by all the advice given to authors that I’ve seen.

Now, I don’t write 8 hours a day. I am an editor and publisher (and person) as well as an author, and so I spend 8 hours (and more) at my computer, I do not spend 8 hours a days working on my own stories. Not even 8 hours writing, re-writing and editing my own stories. But let’s look at some math:

Suppose an author writes 8,000 words a day ( that’s 1,000 words per hour, and boy, is that fast!) 5 days a week produces 40,000 words. To the best of my knowledge, a typical romance is about 80,000 words, so that’s 2 weeks of work, just for a rough draft. One romance writer complained that she had finished her rough draft, only to have her editor tell her it had problems, problems so bad that she (the author) was going to have to step back and rethink the entire story. And yet, that author still managed to include in her blog post an excerpt from that story.

I’m left wondering, does she include an excerpt with every blog post? Even if all she did was tell her audience about whatever she had written that week, she is basically telling them the story before it ever gets published.

And that’s during the rough draft stage. What does she do during the rewrites? More excerpts? Explanations of what she’s changed?

I don’t really understand, so I guess I’ll have to continue studying blogs by other authors, preferably more than one post by the same author. Do any of you know of an author whose blog you feel would be a good example for me to study?

In the meantime, I’ll return to writing about the science I’ve self-studied.

Closing 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, I’ve been looking back over my daily journals to see what I’ve been doing. Let me explain that a little. I have my daily ‘To Do’ list, where I list all the things I’d like to work on that day. And things I don’t really want to do, but need to, like take my pills and brush my teeth. Fact is, if it isn’t on my list, I probably won’t remember to do it.

At the end of the day, I transfer everything I’ve crossed off to my journal and add some comments. Depending on my mood, those comments might be brief (‘I got some stuff done today’), or they could be long and rambling, touching on all sorts of things that happened during the day and how I feel about them. It’s just a method of proving to myself what I’ve done, a way of reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and how I feel about things.

In looking back over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing, writing, re-writing, editing and writing. Oh, yes, and writing.

What does that mean? I’ve been working on a lot of different writing projects. I write 2 blogs and try to post those weekly. Now, that usually means research for one of them, writing and re-writing for both of them, before I can post them. About an hour a day for each blog serves the purpose for that. Maybe a little less.

I’m also trying to write some shorts in order to produce an anthology of Atlan shorts in 2020. I keep running into walls where I’m not sure exactly how the next section of the scene goes, but I give myself an hour a day to work on that. Sometimes that only produces 500 words, others I’ll get 1000 words done. I haven’t gotten to the re-writing stage on that, because I have 3 or 4 more shorts to rough draft to get the number of words I need for a book.

I’m editing John’s next book for a spring release. This is a 2nd edit, so it goes faster, since I’m mostly looking for grammar and punctuation. Hopefully, I found all the places that didn’t quite make sense in the first edit, and John fixed them. On the other hand, I’ve read this book before (during the first edit), and I tend now to start losing my focus after a time, so I only work on it an hour a day.

I’m also writing a novel (a romance). This is a straight rough draft at this point, and I usually give it an hour a day, more or less. If I don’t feel like working on that one, I have 2 other novels (a near-future sf and a paranormal detective) that I can move over and work on for a day or two.

That’s a lot of writing projects. Could I get more done if I concentrated on one? I don’t know. I seem to be able to focus for an hour or slightly more at a time, and then I’m ready to move on to the next project. By splitting up my day in such small chunks, it looks like I’ve accomplished a lot, because I can say I’ve worked on a bunch of projects. And I have ‘naturally occurring’ breaks when I can get up and do other things, like let the dog out or throw supper in the crock pot or even go outside and work on the yard. Except for letting the dog out, those things are on my to do list and can be crossed off.

I don’t know if any other writers work on so many projects at the same time. Yes, it takes time to get anything ‘done’ done. It will be a month or three before I get the romance rough draft done. It could be another week before I get this short rough draft done and can start on the next. But in a year or two, I hope to be churning out books regularly.

Wish me luck! And perseverance.

Cali’s Journey of Discovery

The novel that Alban Lake has accepted for publication is called Cali; A Journey of Discovery.

Cali is an Atlan. But even among this race of unusual women, Cali is... unusual. She could pass for an Outsider.

Cali has brown hair. Unheard of for an Atlan.

Cali has brown eyes. Unheard of for an Atlan.

Cali has all three of her tribes’ birthmarks denoting power. Until her birth, each Atlan only had one.

No one knew what to think. It was reluctantly decided that birthmarks alone did not make her an Atlan, and she would be sent to her father as a child, as if she were male. As that day grew near, an aunt overheard Cali tell her playmates that ‘bad men’ were coming, and turned to find the girl had white hair and blue eyes, which quickly returned to brown.

Further testing revealed that Cali had all 27 Atlan powers, which she could call up by having her hair and eyes change to the correct colors, and tying them to the requisite birthmark. But training her was difficult, because no one else had to choose which power they would use; they only had one. And she was already late starting her training; trying to learn 27 disciplines put her further and further behind.

As a young woman, Cali accompanied two small children on a trip to the Outside. She had not completed her training, but she was both a BlackBird (warrior) and a Watcher, so she was chosen. However, Cali was not always a BlackBird, nor a Watcher. She never spoke of what was done to her, but she brought the children’s mutilated bodies back to her village for burial before she set off to find the men responsible. Blackbirds wanted to go, but the Doves told them she must do this on her own.

Sidek found her in a flooded river, and pulled her to safety. Uncertain she’s ready to continue traveling, he tagged along with her. For some reason, she didn’t object.

During this journey, Cali discovered far more than she ever wanted to know about the Outside world. Sidek discovered far more about the Atlans as a whole than he did about her. But when the trek was finally over, it was Sidek who helped a sick and weary Cali get home.

This story does stand on its own, although I have started the next story, where Cali and Sidek travel again the next year. And there may be a third story after that. We’ll see.

Hanging On

Hanging On

This is why I’ve hung on all those years of (apparently) not making any progress as an author. This is what I dreamed of way back in the fourth grade when I started writing stories. But when push came to shove, when I reached adulthood, I had a family to help support, and ‘author’ just wasn’t reliable enough as an income, so I had to get a ‘real’ job.

I still wrote. My first husband once told me I wrote on a sixth-grade level, and I gave up writing for a year or so. But he was a manipulator, and probably jealous. Eventually, the stories insisted I let them out again. So I did, but I never let him see them again.

After our divorce, I took a deep breath and moved on. To improve my skills, I studied grammar, joined critique groups, attended writer’s workshops. And I wrote. Co-workers became accustomed to seeing me in the lunch room, scribbling onto any size or shape of paper. One told me several times that I just HAD to tell her when I got published. (That reminds me, I have to look her up and let her know.)

And finally, I feel I’ve taken a step forward. An anthology has accepted one of my short stories. A small press has accepted both my novella and my first fantasy novel.

I have arrived!

Well, maybe not actually arrived. But I have completed an important step, one I’ve been seriously trying to take for the past 15 years. I will be published. (Take several deep breaths of satisfaction - try not to hyperventilate.)

I’m not sure when the anthology will come out. It did have an expected launch date of October when I submitted, but the editor got so many great submissions on the subject, it grew from one volume to two, and I haven’t heard if the launch date has been adjusted. The small press is trying to launch both my efforts in July or August.

I’ll tell you more about all these stories in future episodes. But if you’ll excuse me, right now I have more submissions to send out, and more stories to write, edit and polish. An author’s work is never done. Good thing I love doing it!

The Mechanics of Writing

I have the honor of being trusted enough to edit other people's manuscripts from time to time. Occasionally, I find myself giving mini-lessons in the mechanics of writing as I do so. Here are some examples:

In fiction, dialogue does not go on a separate line just because it's dialogue.

When one character is speaking for several paragraphs, do not put end quotes at the end of each paragraph, save them for the very end of that person's dialogue. Do, however, start each paragraph with opening quotes. This is a subtle indication to the reader that the same character is speaking these paragraphs.

Generally, past tense verbs are preferred over present tense verbs. Whichever tense you choose to write in, stick with that tense. Don't flip between present and past tenses.

If you are writing from Character A's point of view, he cannot tell the reader things he does not know. If B & C secretly meet to discuss something, A must overhear them - or be told about the meeting - in order to tell the reader about it.

'I' is for the subject. 'Me' is for the object of the verb. If you lump yourself with another person, and can't decide if you've chosen the correct pronoun for yourself, try reading the sentence without that other person. 'Mother and me went to the park.' = 'Me went to the park.' I don't know about you, but that grates on my brain. It should be 'I went to the park,' therefore, 'Mother and I went to the park.'

The best source I have found for learning some of these mechanics is the book, Elements of Style by Strunk & White. It is a whopping 85 pages long. It is clear and concise, without a lot of fluff to clutter it up. I try to read it every couple of years, just to remind myself of things.

This book, however, is not written with fiction in mind, so sometimes, a punctuation question comes up that is not addressed in its pages. This past month, I have discovered a blog by 'Grammar Gal', which has answered a couple punctuation questions I had. She seems to know her stuff, and explains it clearly. She has joined my 'resource' list as well.

My dad used to say, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right." I have to agree. So if you want to write, brush up on your grammar rules. It makes it much easier on the editor, who can then concentrate on finding any plot holes you might have missed.

Even if you aren't writing books, just emails to friends and family, being aware of the grammar rules will make those emails easier for them to read.

Picking Up the Pace

A couple days ago, I was reading the first episode of a new newsletter when the author said some things that really made me stop and think. She was speaking, at first, of a new author who had made a name for himself by publishing something like 20 books in 3 years, plus one or two more he co-wrote with someone. She went on to say he apparently writes 2,000 words an hour, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. She compared that to the 1,000 words an hour that she writes.

I was stunned.

I'm usually happy if I manage to get 1,000 words written in a DAY.

Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that I am not applying myself hard enough to this endeavor. My days have become chopped up into 15 minute increments as I try to get housework done as well as some writing.

I have spent today (Sunday), trying to figure out how to rearrange my days to let me get more done, and what might be a reasonable goal for any given week. I go through this process once or twice a year, so this is nothing new. Should I write in the morning or early afternoon? I'm not at my best in the mornings, but errands seem to get done in the afternoons. And no matter what time slot I choose for writing, the dog will still want some kind of attention every hour.

I have chosen a goal that will make me pick up the pace, but I think I can do it. Probably not right away, because I'm fighting a sinus infection - again. In a month or, when that goal has become 'normal', I'll set the bar a little higher, make myself kick it up another notch.

But I don't see myself ever writing 10 hours a day. That writer had a tread-mill desk. I have a gym membership, which I try very hard to use 3 times a week. It provides a change of scenery as well as some exercise.

My first goal is to aim for 15,000 words a week, by working 3 hours a day, 5 days out of the week. Wish me luck!

Resolutions vs Goals

Have you made New Year's resolutions yet? If you read my blog last week, you know I've got lots of writing to work on in 2014. I didn't frame them as 'resolutions', because - let's face it - my resolutions last about one week.

Nearly all the blogs I've been reading talked about 'plans for the new year'. Those blogs are not calling them 'resolutions'. I think one called them 'hopes', but that seems nebulous and a source of pressure, so I prefer the term I saw more often: goals.

Resolutions tend to be vague; I'm going to diet, exercise, lose weight and get in shape this year! How do you succeed at that? If next Christmas, you have a piece of pecan pie, have you failed to diet? If you really can't find time to consistently work out, have you failed to exercise? If you only lose 40 of the 100 pounds you wanted to lose, have you failed? If on Jan 1, you can hardly walk from the bedroom to the kitchen, but by Dec 31, you can get all the way to the end of the block and back - even though you're still overweight and you still can't run a marathon - have you failed?

Goals need to be specific AND something that you can control. I'm going to get my first book published! is a resolution. I will continue to send my first manuscript to agents and editors this year sounds more like a goal.

With that in mind, I have started to look at my 'plans' for 2014, and turning them into goals:

·      >  I will lose an average of 1 pound a week through diet and exercise.

·       > Each time a manuscript is rejected, I will immediately send it to another market. (If suggestions were made on how it could be improved, I will take a week to go through and consider those suggestions before sending it out.)

·     >   I will compose 1,000 words per day and edit 1,000 words per day an average of 5 days a week.

·       > I will find opportunities to make personal appearances as an author an average of once a month.

Those are all things I have some control over. They are specific, but flexible. (If I have to arrange 12 appearances next December because I've been lazy and haven't done any all year, that averages to one a month, and I've succeeded.)

Believe it or not, I can do the 3rd one. I am currently writing 3 different projects and editing another. This past couple of weeks (yes, even in the confused haziness of impending Christmas), have been aiming at 1,000 words a day on the project with a short deadline, and about 500 words a day for the other two, then editing 1,000 words in the evening. And I try to work 7 days a week, so if I don't have a great day, I can make up for it.

Are you going to make resolutions? Or set goals? Let me know, and - if you don't mind - tell me just one of yours.

Looking Ahead

Okay, last week I looked back at 2013, so this week I'll try to figure out what I'm going to do in 2014 to get me closer to my goal.

The first thing that comes to mind is I've got to overhaul / reinvent the website. (www.MoonPhazePub.wix.com/MoonPhaze) I can't afford to hire anybody, so it's up to me. I've been gathering notes on what makes a good website, and I have people I can consult for their opinion, so maybe it won't be too bad. Still, it's not my favorite activity, so it will be slow-going.

Hubby and I will be attending the World Science Fiction convention in London, and the European Science Fiction convention in Dublin the following weekend. That has been occupying a lot of my time, trying to figure out the travel arrangements and all that. That long a trip will suck up a lot of our resources, so as far as personal appearances, the 'usual' local conventions may be the only ones I can plan to get to. Still, that doesn't mean I can't schedule some appearances at book stores, libraries or corn fields in the region that I can drive to in a day, so I will be trying to organize some of those.

MoonPhaze Publishing has wanted to print its first hard-copy book. We'll be looking at means of doing it that will not require thousands of dollars up front, like going with POD. Of course, if we happen to find a few thousand dollars to go to a regular printer, we'll switch gears again. In any case, having a paper-back book on hand could make those appearances mentioned in the previous paragraph more enjoyable, both for me and for anybody who attends them.

I've signed up for some classes in leatherwork! In at least two of my universes, I have a segment of the population who work with leather, and this will help me 'identify' with them. Besides, I like to learn new things.

As far as writing, I've got 4 contests/anthologies to submit to during the first 2 months of 2014. It's time for my second novel (romance) to start looking for a home. My third novel needs some rewriting & polishing, the roughs of 2 other novels need to be finished, and I've started a sf novel rough. If I keep finding more contests and anthologies, I should be plenty busy!

Maybe I should get an early start on some of that, don't you think?

The Proper Tool for the Job

My old computer was so ancient, I joked that every time I turned it on, I could hear the squirrel climb into the wheel to supply the power. I'm not sure how I got any work done, with all the squeaking that thing made. And every time I asked it to save or download or even refresh produced a chance to nap, the computer worked at such a snail's pace.

At long last, I got a new computer this weekend. Of course, being new, it came with Windows 8. I now have to learn how to navigate my way around, something I need to do every time I get a new computer, seems like.

It's important to have the proper tool for whatever job you are doing. A painter needs paint and brushes, a writer needs words and the proper receptacle for them. You don't wash dishes by throwing them in the oven.

One can 'make do' when one has to. In one of my stories, I have a man trying to identify something he finds in an exhaust tube of his spaceship. His first inclination is to simply reach in to scoop some up with his finger. Fortunately, he can't quite reach it, because his next thought is that he doesn't know how it might react to the fabric of his glove. That same thought makes him unwilling to subject any of his wrenches or other tools to contact with the unknown substance. When his (several times) Great-Grandmother shakes a bent knitting needle in his face, complaining about 'defective equipment', he uses that knitting needle to scoop up a tiny bit of the gunk so that he can analyze it.

Before I had a computer to work with, I wrote my stories in longhand. I didn't much care what type of paper I wrote on; notebook paper, typing paper, paper sacks, paper towels, napkins, kleenex and yes, even toilet paper. It can be done.

But it works so much better when you have the proper tools. And hopefully, as soon as I can find my way around these confusing tiles and suddenly appearing menus, I can pick up my pace with my writing.

More of Trudy's Universes

Last week, I listed 3 of my ‘uiverses’, the ones where I seem to spend most of my time these days. I thought I would introduce more of my universes today, some I hope to explore more fully … ‘someday’. Here are a few more of the ‘universe names’ that occupy my main ‘writing’ file on my computer.

D&D is for – no, not our Saturday night adventures written up as a story. This folder is for stories of a fantasy nature, set in a place that might resemble a D&D land, or a Tolkein-like setting. Probably this will be a home for shorts, because if I write an entire novel using a set of characters, I tend to give those characters their own universe, as shown in the next universe:

FG is for Fantasy Gumshoe. I’m still in the planning stages with this one. I see a world rather similar to Glen Cook’s Garrett series, perhaps with a splash of Jim Butcher’s Dresden for a little different flavor. There are no stories in this folder, yet, just some maps, character thoughts, possible history.

D is for Dohio. The Dohio are similar to the Atlans; a matriarchal society that does not think much of men. The differences are that the Dohio live on Earth after some holocaustic social & technological breakdown, and they do not have the mental abilities or Powers of the Atlans. As the holocaust hovered on the horizon, a collection of men in the Ohio Valley sent their wives and children to live in the caves that riddle the valley, along with all the supplies they could gather, including some livestock. The husbands were supposed to join the families, but they didn’t, and by the time the Dohio dare to venture out of the underground, the world is far different than the legends described.

Well, that’s another 3 of my universes. We aren’t quite half done yet. See you next week!

Stuck in Rewrite

There are several steps to writing, but one of the first steps (not necessarily THE first step) is to scratch out a rough draft. It can be great fun, to let my imaginary imagination wings take flight and show me a new world filled with new people. Occasionally, the rough draft can also be a real headache, as words simply refuse to come to describe what my mind sees, or – even worse – my mind isn’t focused and therefore doesn’t see anything.

But the fun outweighs the headache (or I wouldn’t continue writing). It’s easy to see your progress with a rough draft, because your word count goes UP. Even if you have a bad day, by the end of a week, your word count will most likely be greater than what you started the week with. You feel like you’ve accomplished something.

For me, the 2^nd draft is where I add in every piece of description, explanation, background and all the modifiers I can think of, just to make sure everything is understandable to the reader. My word count can double from rough and 2^nd drafts, so obviously, I’m doing something.

Then come the further rewrites. I generally do a 3^rd and 4^th rewrite, and then a polish. Occasionally, I do a few more rewrites. I have one story in its 9^th or 10^th rewrite, and I’m still not happy with it.

Rewrite is not as much fun as roughing, but it seldom drags badly, either. It’s during these rewrites that I check for redundancies, passive verbs, -ing verbs, adverbs and that my pronouns refer to the correct antecedents. I might lengthen or shorten sentences, rearrange paragraphs. I might delete words, phrases, sentences, or change a 6-word phrase to a 2-word phrase.

It’s harder to keep track of your progress when your word count is going down. If you try to judge your progress by the difference in word count, it might take you days to cut a thousand words. That always made me feel stuck. So I started counting the number of words in the section I rewrote that day. I probably went through a section of 1200 words or more to wind up with 1000 words by the end, but each one of those words were carefully considered, so I have done a bit of work.

As you can see, 1 rough draft needs several rewrites. Most of my time as a writer is spent re-writing. I try to balance this out by working on 3 projects at a time; 1 short story rewrite, 1 novel rewrite, and 1 rough draft. Somehow, this past week, I have found myself doing 3 re-write projects, with no time left in my day for the rough draft. I suppose it was bound to happen, but it still leaves me feeling kind of ‘stuck’. Re-writing doesn’t set my imagination completely free. But it does still use it, so I do get some pleasure from re-writing. And since my short stories generally range around 5000 words, I should soon be done with that project, and can then return to that rough I was working on.

I won’t be ‘stuck’ in re-write much longer.

Science Fiction Soap Opera Serial

I’ve been getting encouragement to serialize one of my stories on the internet. This is a use of the internet that I’ve been watching with interest, but uncertain if I should try my hand at it. With the encouragement I mentioned, I have decided to dive in.

In the last few years, I’ve heard of authors who wrote each installment of their serial moments before they were due to post that installment. That was part of what scared me about this process; I know perfectly well my first draft is NOT ready to be read by anybody. I expect At Least 3 rewrites before it might be suitable to be seen.

Once I realized that, I looked through what stories I had, either ‘done’ or nearly done, to decide which one I would serialize: No, those are all shorts; that’s a long short, but not long enough; this one is long enough, and done, but is currently out looking for a home. Hmmmm.

It’s surprising how few novel length works I have finished (1). I have 2 or 3 others ‘in the works’, meaning about half of the rough draft is done. And then I remembered Mac.

I have said I would probably never publish Mac. I have also said that when I work on Mac’s story, I get sucked in so deeply, I can’t get any work done on anything else. But the truth is that “Mac, Book 1” is mostly done, except for a few highly emotional scenes at the end that I simply didn’t feel capable of writing a decade ago when I last worked on it. Since then, I have roughed the first 100 pages of “Mac, Book 2” and the first 25 pages of “Mac, Book 3”. So, I know where Mac is headed, and apparently, I don’t HAVE to spend months and months at a time enmeshed in Mac’s problems.

For the last couple weeks, I have been working on preparing the story into ‘bite-sized’ sections. I have also continued to rewrite some shorts and work on another novel. It seems Mac has learned to share my attention.

So, “Mac, Book 1” will start being serialized on Tuesday, 1January2013. I am setting it up on Blogspot, and will make a Grand Announcement on New Year’s Day, so watch for it. I am trying for installments of about 1,000 to 1,200 words, and I will post one each Tuesday. If people get engrossed in Mac’s antics and don’t want to wait an entire week for the next section, I will post a price for the next section to be posted early, probably about $10. I am not proposing that 1 person must send me the full amount; the readers could use the comments section to alert each other to how much they are chipping in. As soon as I receive the payment, I will post the next section.

I think you’ll like Mac. She’s a lot of fun. Or a constant irritant. And sometimes both.