As time goes on….

I haven’t really posted something that was just my thoughts on writing since this whole process of the book actually being publish began a few weeks ago.  At this stage in the game, it seems to be all about promoting my work more than anything else, so I really haven’t talked about what is going on with my writing efforts nowadays (except for short stories that are being released now, or very soon).  So I thought I would take a few moments and actually contemplate where things are at the present moment.

I have given some thought to posting some of the extra “stuff” that I wrote for the three novels that start with Comes The Dark here on my blog.  Stuff that helped me develop the story and give it some background-stories about the characters that didn’t make the final cut.  Since there was so much of that, it might make sense to provide a few blog entries on the story of George and Jason, or Megan, as well as some of the other things that took place ‘behind the scenes’ as it were.  In time, when the book has been out there for a while, I may start doing that, although not on any specific schedule.  I will have to see what comes of things.  What really makes me think that it may be worthwhile to do this is the fact that one of these ‘stories’ has been accepted as a stand alone short story for an anthology called Eye Witness Zombie, being published by May December Publishers, and are  tales of the zombocalypse told from a first person perspective.  I had to do some modifications to make it first person, but after that was done, the story worked well as a stand alone.  It has ties with the second novel in my trilogy, which will be released early next year, but not enough that it actually reveals any (or much) of the plot of my novel.   I remembered originally writing this story in one fevered pitch-I pumped out about 16,000 words in one night, most of which was unintelligible garbage at the time.  It was a total tangent-loosely related to the novel, but off on its own, with a character who appears nowhere else as the central focus.  He had a very vague connection to two characters in the books though and that led me to write it that night.  The unintelligible garbage got reworked and inserted into the novel, then I realized it was a massive amount of words that took the reader on a journey that was off the primary path of the story, even if i felt it was a good story to tell.  So finding it a home after I cut it from the final novel made me extremely happy.  I really believe it is a story worth telling.  Now if only the other ones I have in mind are as well.  They will be more closely related to the novels with main characters at the heart of them, so it will be much more difficult to promote them as stand alone short stories, but giving them a home here on the blog may be the idea place for them.

In other news, as I have been doing since I started this blog, I have been writing a lot of short stories.  I am probably not the most prolific writer, but I do try to hit as many submission calls that my publisher has, as well as some others out there from other houses that look interesting.  I wish I had specific release dates on some of the ones that have been accepted, but whether they are coming out this year or next, I am pretty excited about  all of them (as most writers would be about their babies).   I am currently trying my hand at a bit of erotic horror, which is much like bizarro for me in that I have never written anything in this particular genre before, and doubt it will ever become my forte.  Then again, my bizarro story made the cut in an anthology, so if my erotica tale does as well, who knows?  I don’t know much, but what I have learned so far is not to pigeon hole myself as a writer.  I am keeping all doors open, especially as I help my son write his YA zombie/vampire/werewolf story.  The boy has no boundaries when it comes to ideas, so it is always a trip to hear him talk about it.

As I continue promoting my novel and work on getting the second one ready to go for my publisher (the first round of edits are already complete and I have turned in my revisions, so that process is going great), I also need to start working on my next book, which I have been saying to myself as well as anyone else who will listen, that I have already started on it.  Given that it is outlined and I like the outline a great deal, the time is probably ripe for me to start pounding it out on the keyboard.  Outlines for me are guides that can be adjusted and modified as needed for as many sudden changes that need to take place in a book or story.  Many writers I know find outlines to be restricting and binding to the point that they hate them.  I guess I am not that type of writer, because while I love to have as many sudden inspirations that change everything as much as the next person, I need a skeleton, even a weirdly shaped one, to start pinning stuff to, which is why I outline so much.  So I build a blue print, which for others may be the equivalent of actually starting to write the story, since my outlines often take on a rather deep complexity, with minute details in them that sort of defies the idea of it being only an ‘outline’.  But since I don’t consider it writing until I start putting it into the actual MS word document, the term outline will have to due for whatever it is I have already done for novel number 4.

I guess that is enough rambling for now.  Tomorrow is another day for me to keep attacking this new erotic story and to beat myself up a bit more about the next novel, and to think about all the formatting stuff I need to do for the second novel…and some of the other submission calls and what their due dates are, because I don’t want to miss them.