Well, my two readers will know, after reading this, that I am visiting friends in St. Louis for the week.  One of them writes Erotica….  um, good stuff….  He is hoping to publish later this year.  I will need a tall cold drink and the AC on.

The promo day for the book went well, I think.  A lot of free copies were downloaded.  And then there is the fun part of editing.  I just finished my sci-fi book, well more modern with a twist, but still.  Now though I get to do the first once over and do all the fun parts.  It’s not that it’s hard, just I like to print out each chapter as I write it (in case all my electronics fail I have a hard copy), but then I edit that paper copy and use it to go back and update.  Not very efficient.

I have also managed to write a bit more in my fantasy book.  I swear I was just going to do the intro for the darn thing to recap book one, but then it got out of control and I just kept going.  This means I have stalled on the Time Travel book……..

The trips are kind of throwing me off as well.  I just got a good routine going, then trip.  I get back home on Sun/Mon, but have to go to North Carolina the week after…..  No rest for the wicked?

Soon I plan on doing a catalog of all the stuff I got going on, writing wise.  Not just to share (I need content here) but also just to see it written down.  I have things scattered in notebooks, on various drives.  I need to consolidate and then figure out a game plan.  All these concepts, ideas, started stories, etc.  It just gets a bit weird deciding what to work on next.

Have fun, and a new short Story I tossed up over on Royal Road as well, link to my page at the top.

Today I thought I would toss out my latest thing.  My Royal Road account is linked at the top of the main page.  I though i would promote a big in this blog, because I am going to start posting more there besides some short stories.  I just put up a chapter for an idea i had.  It was more of a concept piece for something I might do more work on when I am caught up on other projects.  It would be kind of cool though to get feedback and thoughts on something before I go head first into it.

Basically, what if Magic, or something that enabled it to exist in our world was unleashed?  I had been dabbling with the idea for a while and trying to figure out how to make it work.  I decided that a portal to another dimension was opened as the result of an experiment.  No one noticed though.  A foreign particle started to creep into our world.  It didn’t effect anything though.  It did however, enable some people to be able to wield it in a manner that emulates magic.  There is a lot more and feel free to go read it and leave some notes.

On the other fronts, this is for my one avid reader, HI MOM!!!  I am working on a Time Travel book.  I have seen a lot of nostalgia in books and movies, so I decided to take a crack at it.  Now I have a Time Traveling Geek amassing collectibles from when they came out.  There is a lot more to it than that, but it is enough of a teaser to peek interest. That one started good but I stopped at 130 pages.  Trying to figure out where I want to go in history and mess around got kind of hard after that long.  It’s just a matter of research before I get back to that.

I also had a book on the back burner that I hadn’t looked at in over six months.  So long i forgot where I was in it.  I just finished editing what I have so far and am back to work on that.  I was 170 pages, 49k words, into it when I stopped.  My plan is to try and have that one done by the end of the month.   It looks like this one will easily have a sequel, if not two.  Great another trilogy.    This one will be easier though.  It’s science heavy and I had to do some research and then make it palatable for the reader.  A lot harder than one would think.

The point is that it might be a slower read than I wanted.  But the sequel will be much faster paced and exciting.  It had to be done, because between character development and backstory on the science stuff I was pretty far in.  Unless you like books the size of War & Peace I recommend breaking it up.  I like smaller tomes myself.  450 pages is where I like to top out when reading.  I suppose if you are hooked on an E-Reader cool, go big.  But I am a fan of real books.

I do like my kindle, but I have habits I like.  And trying to lie in bed at night holding a book over 400 pages is a bit cumbersome.  So I take my tastes into account when I think length of my tales.  Just think, someday they might be good!

I think I have rambled on enough for today, so go forth and have fun.

Being that my first book will hit next week, I just picked a random date, but it seemed good, I thought it would be a good time to talk about what I expect. In reality I don’t expect much. If I can get a copy or two sold that would be sweet.

I have a Tweeter and Facebook page that has a few likes, I mean you have to start somewhere.  So that should at least get me a little exposure, not in the suggestive way though.  In a perfect world I will move enough copies to cover the editor(s) for the next book.

I think I find that keeping expectations low si a good thing.  I can cross my fingers and imagine a couple thousand copies moving, but the market is a bit saturated.  That is what Self-Publishing brings to the table.  More books, which is good for readers, and for writers that want to get their work out there, but bad for exposure.

There is always hope though, I mean Twilight sold a lot and bad Twilight Fan Fic got three movies.  I don’t know if you have ever read that, but it is utter crap.  How the hell can something like that even get published?  There is bad writing, slow reading, and other things that can make a book bad, but 50 shades does it all and even invents some crap.  So yeah, hope is there.

My stuff isn’t going to win awards but at least it is competent.   So here I am waiting to get it out to the masses and see where it lands.

Had a couple of days away apparently. Traffic and my car don’t really want to cooperate. The one thing I can say though is that when something is on the horizon that you really want to do, then everything seems to be high stress right before it.

Here I am a week before I toss my hat into the writing world and even little things seem to be getting me all stressed out. I spent most of today going over the formatting of the book, making sure all of the number of lines for the first page of each chapter are the same.

Talk about anal retentive. I was also fretting over the back cover blurp, because what else is there to do when you are getting close. I have found myself resubmitting the interior file about once every two days. Are there rewrites? Missing content? Nope. Just the little things, like making sure the page numbers in the table of contents are right. Or adding this web address, or making sure I am plugging the next two books in the series (as if this one is going to be a big hit).

One never knows though, so better safe than sorry. So I find myself going over the darn thing time and time again to make sure that it is fine. I mean I am happy with the actual context of the book, but I had to rearrange a couple of things as well. The data dump at the start was a bit much. I had originally written it as two chapters. That is the problem with a story that takes place in a world the the writer creates.

We have to make sure that you have enough information to know what is going on, but at the same time not bludgeon you to death with exposition. In the case of my story you have to know what is going on, as well as how the culture works. Character is the main thing though. So I have to introduce you to the people, but make sure you have an idea about the stakes. Thus world building is key.

There is world building throughout the story, but I needed to get some of it up front so the reader can know why it is important, there in lies the dilemma. I am hoping I made it a little better. We shall see, shan’t we?

Till next time.