Tag Archives: mucking about for its own sake

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Works-in-Progress Update and Getting Naked

Sci-fi novel Elevator People

First draft still in-progress. Still one to two chapters away from completion. I spend more time thinking about why I can’t finish the story than I do trying to finish the story. Which is a stupid way to spend my time. But there you have it. My theories as to what my problem is:

(a) I don’t want to kill off the character who’s probably gonna die in the last chapter.
(b) I’ve been spending too much time on social media, and it’s rotted my brain.
(c) The antagonist kicks the bucket too soon, and that’s made me lose momentum.
(d) Part of me thinks I should slog through and finish the first draft as-is, then go back and fix the problems.
(e) Part of me thinks I should fix everything I can fix and then finish the story.
(f) I keep wanting to play with sparkly new story ideas for my Legends of the Light-Walkers universe.
(g) I have ennui.
(h) ALL OF THE FREAKING ABOVE.

Dash it all.

Sci-fi short story “The Mercy and the Schadenfreude of the Soulless”

Yes. That is the actual title.

My beta readers have finished the story, and their response has been overwhelmingly, blush-elicitingly positive. Which, of course, makes me panic that these two people, whose opinions and clear views of life I generally trust, are, just in the case of my story, wholly blind to reality and deceived as to the merits of my story. Which makes me an angsty, ego-driven writer, I suppose, but then, what else is new?

Tonight’s blog post is, apparently, brought to you by Courtney’s Penchant for Commas. You’re welcome.

Anyway, edits on TMatSotS are going well, and I plan to have it done and turned in to Tony by the end of the week. BANGERANG.

Advice

Especially in the shower.

Especially in the shower.

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Your Blog Is a Big, Friendly Dog — Redux

Greetings, me lovelies! I just got through reading a great post by Michael Martine: “Why You Should Experiment with Your Blog.” (Edit: Michael’s Remarkablogger is no longer in existence, so I’ve removed the link.)

Darling, most constant readers, does this sound familiar to you? ; )

kablooey

If you’ve read me here for any length of time, you know that I’ve enjoyed romping about with the blog-as-lab(oratory) concept. So when I read Michael’s post, of course I had something to say about it. : ) My comment on his post reads as follows:

Ooh! Ooh! I love the blog-as-laboratory concept! I’ve had several conversations with Judy Dunn of Catseyewriter.com about it. These led to: several concept posts on my own blog; a grand experiment of blogging every day for a month; and a myriad of tiny little blogging experiments that taught me some of what works and some of what doesn’t work on my blog. It’s great fun and an awesome learning experience!

I will admit to plenty of “mucking about for its own sake” ; ) simply because I thought a particular experiment sounded fun at the time. But Michael, I’m thinking that maybe this is where I’m not quite the audience you’re speaking to, since mine is an author blog. Yes, I am “selling the service” of fiction novels, and I do want readers of my blog to convert into readers of my books. But part of what sells the books is for readers to get to know me — and part of getting to know me is getting a glimpse of what interests me. And that’s a lot of things, many of which show up on the blog at random times. So maybe I can get away with bending the “rule” a little. ; )

So there you have it, folks. Another brief reminder of what I’m doing here and why and wherefore and whatnot. Feel free to drop me a line sometime and let me know how you think the experiments are going. I’d love to hear from you.

Here we go again...

Here we go again…