This has been a week of NO NEW FICTION WRITING. I have been on the LEARNING CURVE instead, and it’s been painful.
Not as painful as some have had to go through–the benefit of being only a post-semi-early adopter–but still.
At any rate, I have two new stories up from Wonderland Press.
One (Bunny Attack!) is a kids’ story that I wrote for Ray a few months ago, a pulp-fiction thing about an evil pet rabbit who enacts revenge for not being fed…which reminds me [checks rabbit]. Okay, we’re still safe.
The other (Haunted Empire) is what happened when I tried to write a steampunk story. It’s not a steampunk story. It’s a space opera set in a universe where an alien race has taken over humanity, then apparently disappeared, leaving the Irish in charge. I wrote the whole thing by talking out loud to myself in a cheesy Irish accent. After all the work I did on the story yesterday to get it posted, I dreamed that I was talking in a cheesy Irish accent to someone and had to apologize, in my dream, for doing so. I really like the characters.
I still need to do some research on putting something together for the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference–I heard this truly clever idea from Dean Wesley Smith last week at the marketing workshop, but I don’t know if there will be time to do it right before the conference. I hope so. I think it’ll work well if we can talk some of the local bookstores into running with it. I’ll talk about it later, I guess.
I’m looking forward to Lee getting home this afternoon. I’ll probably take a day off tomorrow (finally!), get my short story done on Sunday (another kids’ story, this time about a boy who befriends a zombie only to find out that it’s a GIRL), and start the rewrite of Death by Chocolate on Monday.
I finally cracked the story open yesterday; it’s been years since the last time I looked at it (it was still in .wps). I wrote it in 2000, after we first moved to Colorado Springs, at the Briargate Borders. I was working a weird shift, 10-6, and I wasn’t used to the traffic (pre-extra lane in some spots, so even at 6 p.m. it was 45 minutes of stop and go down the interstate), so I stopped at the bookstore and wrote. It took me about a month to write…and it was only 8,000 words. I was so disappointed when I saw the length yesterday! I need it to be about 20-25K if it’s going to be a short novel, so I’m going to redraft it and see what I get. All the post-modern stuff I did with it bugs me now, too, and I won’t be sad to see that go. But the dialogue was good. Even the description was good. I was kind of surprised.
Here’s to all having a good, relaxing weekend!